The Superfluous Class

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For a republic founded by proponents of meritocracy, dedicated to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it seems we stray from our mission a little. European style inherited royalty and persistent aristocracy represent the antithesis of our founders' ideals: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Those founders supposed happiness and prosperity would accrue to those who earned it, not those who belonged to the right church, club, political party, or corporate board (race and sex were omitted from that list).

Now, reversion from the meritocratic ideal infects our culture. Few take offense at the cultivation of a crass ruling-class in our midst. With obscene piles of cash, our self-appointed aristocracy insulate themselves from the endemic sickness, poverty, and inadequate opportunity to learn and earn that plague the vast majority of us. Few objected while those who profited most over the last three decades decreed they should contribute the least. Toward that goal, the rich mastered a strategy to retain wealth; that is, to minimize their taxes. Equally insidious, they elevated their social status and esteem via the media outlets they own: movies, television shows, and magazine articles that celebrate riches but ignore the method of acquiring those riches. Not only do they extract wealth from us -- the vast un-wealthy majority -- but they extract our praise and admiration, too. They seize their pound of flesh, and expect us to applaud as they lop it off.

Our praise and admiration yields more than icing on the cake. Praise serves an essential purpose. Our collective fawning over the rich erects in our minds psychological barriers to the creation of laws that would impede retention of filthy lucre. We want so much to be like them we defy egalitarian attempts to inhibit unjust concentration of wealth. We fear friction on the upward flow of wealth will prevent our own acquisition of fabulous excess. In addition, our universal admiration of wealth grants the overfed an unassailable bully pulpit.

Of course, the rich do not risk climbing the towering pulpit themselves, their loyal designees do: politicians. Politicians financed by the wealthy eagerly and often reel off the virtues of their benefactors. And, like artists blessed with a devoted patron, the art tends to fit the taste of the sponsor. Bought politicians remind us, falsely: the rich create jobs for the rest of us. That sounds logical. It sounds inevitable. But it is not true. The vast majority of the rich are not business operators, but passive investors. They do not hire anyone. They seek maximum gain on investment. They are part of the constituency corporate CEO's and boards swear their allegiance to: investing shareholders (mutual and pension fund managers form the remaining bulk of that constituency).

Maximizing returns for shareholders does not require facilitating prosperity for domestic wage earners. On the contrary, with laws passed over the last thirty years by presidents and legislatures beholden to the rich, most corporations find it easier to exploit "free" trade rules and create wealth overseas. Overseas labor comes cheap. Overseas workplaces profitably omit modern standards for worker safety, health, and pensions, not to mention environmental protection. If free markets existed, this would not be the case. Impoverishing, poisoning and maiming your employees and rendering your environment toxic imposes costs. In a free market, violators would logically pay the assessed cost of worker and environmental abuse. Consumers would reject purely on a price basis products from companies that incur the highest overhead for worker injuries, workplace induced ill-health, and environmental degradation.

Besides pure cost consideration, would you buy a product from someone you knew poisoned your wife and then fired her, or lopped off the hand of your cousin and then fired him, or spilled mercury in your drinking water and ignored your plea for cleanup? Not likely. Not if you had a choice. A free, fully transparent market reveals such realities.

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But our markets usually fail to assess the cost of transgressions against workers and our environment. Big-business lobbies hard against worker and environmental protection both here and abroad. In fact, society often subsidizes businesses that destroy the environment with ridiculously low lease rates for mining land, tax abatements for toxic factories, and tax deductions for job exporting. And society subsidizes businesses that do not protect the health and safety of workers when the absence of a better alternative compels society to pick up the tab for emergency room visits, or citizens rendered unable to work and dependent on the state. If you knew a company poisoned your drinking water, yet paid nothing to rectify the situation, you would be angry, right? Or, if they dumped sickened and injured workers on the street for taxpayers to tend to, you would demand compensation, right?

But when companies find a way to keep such offenses secret, or find compliant and credible defenders to deny offenses on their behalf, everything changes. The market no longer operates transparently; it is no longer free. Yet, if paid defenders insist otherwise; if they incessantly cite phony evidence of transparency, and phony evidence of myriad benefits bestowed on us by the "free" market, then most -- or enough -- continue to believe free markets exist.

These days, the voice of the rich, those behind the bully pulpit, hail mostly from the Republican Party. Once, the Republican Party stood for fiscal restraint and social moderation. Republicans resisted destructive political and economic practices like imperialism, war-profiteering, and vicious exploitation of labor. Republicans led the charge to free the slaves based on moral imperative, or so they insist (some say it was so northern labor markets would be flooded with eager workers and drive down wages). Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts (enterprises colluding to fix prices), and General Eisenhower warned of the pernicious effects of the military industrial complex. Some Republicans acted in the long-term interest of their constituents. They put their country first. At least, they did so often enough that domestic manufacturing flourished while unions took hold in the labor market, broad prosperity eventually prevailed, and millions migrated into the middle-class.

Now politicians in Congress and state legislatures from both parties do not represent constituents' interests. They represent the interests of those who bought their elections; bought their offices; bought their souls. The buyers are rich, capitalized investors, not poor or middle class wage earners. The politicians that rich capitalized investors prefer to purchase lean mostly to the right toward reactionary conservatism; toward folks who do not rock the boat -- mostly Republican. Or more accurately, Republicans are the most lavishly financed bought politicians. They tend toward greater compliance with patrons' goals, so corporations shower more money on them. Despite their "family values," they act unburdened by moral or ethical obstacles that stand in the way of faithful execution of their patrons' demands.

Democratic politicians are no less bought, but Democrats tend to follow a more academic, underdog line. Democrats attract donations from labor unions that advocate broad prosperity; well-meaning environmentalists; empathetic college professors; and law firms employed by unions, environmentalists, and academics. Democrats tend to take the high road; they tend to advocate rational argument over the feverish exhortation and invocation of God hurled forth by Republicans. Democrats tend to exhibit unsteady loyalty when fate exposes their moneyed alliances. Democrats tend to offer less convincing denials. Soft spoken, fair minded, and not so good at lying, they tend to lose arguments with Republicans. Hence, they attract less filthy lucre from corporate benefactors.

Broad prosperity, fostered by flourishing domestic commerce and manufacturing built on a union backed labor movement, took almost two centuries to reach its pinnacle in the 1960's. At that point, big-business felt pinched. The moneyed class bristled at a marginal tax rate of around 90% during most of the 1950's and 1960's (when we were at our most prosperous).

And then Ronald Reagan came along. Ronald Reagan initiated the evaporation of the middle-class. I feel sad for our republic when I suggest it, but Reagan was too dumb to appreciate the dire implications of the destructive social forces set in motion by his acolytes' policy initiatives. Reagan was a fool who believed his own campaign slogans; slogans based on nothing but enthusiasm, utterly devoid of factual underpinning. Reagan was a blowhard, and a tool of the capitalized rich. He was "George W. Bush 1.0," owned and operated by the US Chamber of Commerce, and everyone who derived their incomes from investments. Ronald Reagan was no "Tricky Dick Nixon." Gone were days of nefarious malefactions committed by bumbling burglars. Ronald Reagan was the marionette designated by the rich to lead the charge toward lasting social change they could believe in: the implosion of the middle-class and creation of a permanent, impoverished, disordered mob eager to work for pennies and ask no questions. Unions would crumble; environmentalists would dry up and blow away.

Reagan, if sincerity motivated any of his expressed aspirations for Americans, failed to recognize manufacturing and the unionized labor who manufactured things as essential components of our economy. Without both, the middle class dissolves. Labor unions, viciously resisted by corporations and the capitalized class throughout American history, provide the basis for wages adequate to live on, worker safety provisions, health coverage, and pensions. Unions negotiated these concessions. Unions organized wage earners to stand up to employers. Unions gained the trust of workers and the power to shut down plants when management defied their demands. Despite misinformation propagated by opponents, nine times out of ten, unions demand only fair, uniform wages and benefits. Instances of union excess are few and virtually eliminated these days, but corporate mouthpieces still exaggerate and perpetually recite overblown stories of gross excess. The highest wage of any union wage earner anywhere, gold-plated health insurance and Great Gatsby pension included, does not even come close to CEO wages and benefits, averaging on the order of a thousand times those of their lowest paid workers. Not to mention the legions of sub-CEO management who bring home lavish wages and benefits in the $200K plus range. Stories of union excess are irrelevant footnotes to the fact that without unions, very few Americans would have been born into, or achieved the lifestyles and education so many Americans take for granted -- or, did. Unions created the broad prosperity and tax base necessary for a civilized and healthy society. If you doubt this, visit factory workers in Shanghai or Hyderabad. Visit Detroit, or Gary, Indiana and see what happens when corporations crush unions and offshore manufacturing.

None of this corporate-induced hardship matters to the capitalized class. Retention of wealth matters to them. They never earned their wealth through direct labor; they possess no skills to gain wealth through direct labor; they lack the capacity to do what they insist the poor should do: pull themselves up by their bootstraps. So, the capitalized class lives in luxury, but also in fear. They perpetually plot and scheme to retain the wealth they possess. They know if they lose it, they can never recover it. So they fight relentlessly and mercilessly to hang onto their money. They invest in compliant politicians. Ronald Reagan and the band of Republicans elected to Congress alongside him were some of the most compliant. To further the aims of their wealthy handlers, Reagan's minions devised a plan they called, "Starve The Beast." The idea is that excessive tax cuts lead to fiscal crises that force government program cuts, and hence retention of wealth for the rich. When the knives come out, the slashing falls on programs that benefit the ignored and underrepresented poor; cuts to things like public education and food stamps. (Pain imposed on civil servant and teacher unions by these cuts are an added bonus.) Of course, defense looms as the real beast in the budget, more than 50% of it, but Reagan boosted defense spending to unprecedented levels, and drove the federal deficit to unprecedented levels. Despite glaring reality, Republicans still refer proudly and falsely to themselves as fiscal conservatives. Starve the Beast was never about fiscal restraint, of course, it was about bringing wage-earners to their knees. Unnecessary tax cuts, and overblown defense spending enriched shareholders and management of defense contracting companies, while at the same time unfairly burdening wage-earners with a larger share of taxes, and bought politicians supported it.

Not to worry. The working poor and middle class who contribute a disproportionate share of their wages to taxes will pay down record deficits -- or not -- it does not matter. Deficits do not matter, according to Dick Cheney. Additional permanent burden on the working poor serves the aims of the capitalized rich: bring wage-earners to their knees so they will accept whatever wages and benefits are offered. Consumed with anxiety, embattled wage-earners will ignore the dissolution of education and social programs that benefit them; they will be too busy to notice environmental disasters they will pay for with ill-health, shortened lives, and anxiety over their and their children's diminished sense of well-being.

To further the oligarchic aims of the rich, Reagan set a fearsome example in 1981 when he invoked the Taft–Hartley Act and fired striking air traffic controllers. With his "supply-side," tax cuts for the rich, Reaganomics and harsh treatment of unionized air traffic controllers, Reagan sent a clear message to union members and the middle-class: your needs are secondary to demands of the investing capitalized class.

Then along came Grover Norquist with his Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) in 1985, and his insistence that Republican politicians sign a pledge to never raise taxes -- never -- no matter the circumstances. With his benighted notions of fiscal restraint, Norquist embodies Republican duplicity, sort of like Victorian notions of sexual restraint -- all the sins moved behind closed doors. Except, unlike the Victorians who just wanted to have sex, Norquist wants to have sex and be a disease-infected whore, too. He eagerly sells himself to any corporate john who comes along, who then infects the rest of us with his disease.

After Norquist, born-again "Hot Tub" Tom Delay, one-time exterminator from Texas, blessed American democracy with his self-righteous and criminally self-aggrandizing presence. Besides "Hot Tub," a nickname he earned for adultery, Tom Delay earned another nickname, "The Hammer." In Congress, his colleagues came to fear him because, as House Minority Whip, he regulated the flow of bundled corporate campaign contributions. He insisted Congressmen go home every weekend (long weekends: leaving Thursday afternoon and returning Tuesday morning) to round up more contributions. This had two regrettable effects: it increased the influence of money in Congressional politics and it isolated members of Congress -- they no longer spent much time with their political opponents and so they never formed friendships with them, as was previously standard practice. Gone were weekend sports, card games, and drinking binges with inhabitants of the other side of the aisle. With friendships eliminated, respect and civility dissipated, too.

Before he was accused (and later convicted) of money-laundering in 2005, Delay worked with Grover Norquist to force lobbying firms paid to advocate Republican issues to hire only Republicans. This further polarized the political climate. Delay also ran the Clinton impeachment hearings despite his own confession of adultery. With his two-bit meddling and personal profiteering, Delay rendered real trust and compromise between parties impossible. He blithely ushered out the days of honest political debate and deal making; he strangled comity.

Following the free spending, budget and deficit inflating Reagan years, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bush I, took office. George H.W. Bush gave us Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, avid reader of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," the laissez-faire, phony individualist, libertarian bible of hard-core Republicans. True to Ayn Rand's fictional principles, Alan Greenspan stood by as the Savings and Loan debacle erupted and cost taxpayers billions in bailouts. This act of negligence was a nickel and dime rehearsal for his greatest laissez-fair, Rand-ian, objectivist moment: the sub-prime mortgage bubble, which he denied existed until long after it catastrophically deflated, engulfing him in a cloud of ignominious chagrin.

During G.H.W. Bush's term, the economy predictably tanked under the pressure of wildly excessive Republican tax cuts and defense spending. George Bush bumbled along, pretending the trickle-down economy Reagan created would fix itself. With false promises of domestic economic growth, he advocated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to placate his corporate handlers who sought cheap labor and lax worker safety and environmental standards in Mexico. The hapless G.H.W. Bush sealed his fate with his self-contradicted pledge, "Read my lips, no new taxes." He raised taxes (to his credit), but as the presidential election rolled around, Alan Greenspan re-surfaced with his laissez-faire, Friedman-esque cowardice, and helped lose the election for Bush I when he refused to cut interest rates to stimulate economic growth. (He finally did cut them, after Bill Clinton took office and Greenspan realized his days as czar were numbered if he did not act.)

Newt Gingrich served in Congress between 1979 and 1999, when he resigned under pressure due to Republican House losses in the 1998 election. Nevertheless, the 1994 elections offered Gingrich his big moment, when he and other Republicans regained control of the House with their duplicitous "Contract for America" after four decades of Democratic control. The "Contract for America" itemized the bloodless, mean-spirited, starve-the-beast agenda of the capitalized class. It advocated cuts to social programs, education, and the capital gains tax -- the taxes paid on income earned from investments, the main source of income for the capitalized class. This last bit, the capital gains cut, Gingrich referred to in typical Orwellian Republican double-speak as "The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act." The "Contract for America" was not about rugged individualism; it was not about picking yourself up by your bootstraps; it was not a contract for America. It was a contract, in the mob sense, on America. Gingrich sought to facilitate the goals of his corporate benefactors, not serve the needs of his true constituency: wage-earners.

After the two Clinton terms humiliated Republicans and repudiated their phony supply-side economic claims, the capitalized class decided not to fool around any more with Republican "statesmen" like G.H.W. Bush, or Hollywood hucksters like Reagan, but instead decided to elect themselves a truly mindless marionette: G.W. Bush. Someone shameless they could trust to unflinchingly advance their interests, no matter how extreme. Extremism became their tactic. Karl Rove grasped the propaganda virtues of extremism: advance outlandish ideas repeatedly, until the absurdity wears off, and then compromise a little, and you end with a victorious and vigorous shift to the right that appears to a memory-challenged electorate as a shift to the left. Voila! The appearance of compromise while in fact the other side compromised. Relentlessly impose such incremental moves on municipal, state, and federal levels, and the political center shifts to the right. After G.W. Bush got his tax cuts for the rich, he moved on to privatizing Social Security, another windfall for stock exchanges and brokers.

Privatized social security, i.e. elimination of social security, proved too extreme -- it became the straw man for the next phony Republican compromise. That would be Medicare Part D: a windfall for pharmaceutical companies and a vast liability for wage-earning taxpayers. Education followed a similar pattern. W's right-wing handlers wanted to do away with public education outright and proposed vouchers to siphon off money intended for public schools and pump it into private "educational" enterprises. Bush "compromised" a little and instead poisoned public education slowly with standardized testing and voucher funded "charter" schools.

Bush's corporate benefactors saw opportunities to profit from surveillance of phone conversations and e-mail traffic, so Bush gave us the Patriot Act -- they only get to eavesdrop on foreigners, and Americans who communicate with foreigners, and make piles of money doing it via government contracts providing electronic network traffic sniffing hardware and software, and consulting services. All these initiatives led to incremental but woefully destructive shifts to the right that erode life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for wage-earners.

Shortly after G.W. Bush and his merry pranksters persuaded the Supreme Court to steal the 2000 election for him, Dick Cheney kicked off his Energy Task Force, which issued a report in May 2001 detailing Cheney's vision of the nation's intended energy policy. In formulating that policy, Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton, the drilling equipment and "oilfield services" company, met with representatives of all the major oil, gas, and coal extraction companies, along with the electric utilities. Together, they determined that the nation needs more (wait for it) oil, gas, and coal -- and nuclear electric generation -- at any cost. Cheaper, safer, and more reliable efficiency and renewable energy sources (the link focuses on a comparison between distributed renewables and nuclear power, but applies equally well to fossil sources) were included in their view of the future, but not for the bulk of our energy needs. Cheney and the fossil men downplayed the potential role of improved energy efficiency, mass transit, and distributed renewables for one reason: control. Cheney's chums like to maintain control over energy sources. Control means the profit goes to them, not some little nickel and dime operators who do weatherizing, or install rooftop photovoltaics, battery systems, wind turbines, solar hot water heaters; or companies that manufacture, sell and install mass transit rail and bus systems. Yielding to these small operators would mean that millions of well-paid, possibly unionized, domestic jobs would be created, and thousands of new products could be designed and built profitably in the US -- but Cheney's crew would lose control of our antiquated, toxic, insecure energy supply.

The capitalized investor class -- the ones with the most money -- oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy providers, decided that would not happen on their watch. Not while the president, vice president, and Congress were bought and paid for. So we continue to offshore trillions of dollars a year to oil exporters (Canada, Saudi Arabia, Angola, Venezuela), and send billions into the coffers of gas and coal extractors who destroy our landscapes and poison our drinking water at no cost to them.

If Cheney and his crew had instead focused on what is best for the nation, not a handful of corporations and their investors, we could instead gainfully use the hundreds of billions we send to other countries or spend here to destroy our environment to create millions of jobs. We could create millions of jobs dedicated to the implementation of proven, clean, reliable, secure domestic energy sources that perpetually renew themselves (we're not talking about far-off, blue-sky technology here, this stuff has been around for decades -- but suppressed by taxpayer subsidized fossil and nuclear power industries). Meanwhile, we fast approach climate tipping points where it will be impossible to roll back the catastrophic effects of fossil fuel induced global warming, and 50% or more of the species that inhabit this planet will be wiped out forever in the service of Dick Cheney's greed and the greed of people like him. Nice planet we leave to the kids.

Once that far seeing energy policy fell into place, securing profits for fossil fuel and nuclear power providers, and guaranteeing environmental destruction (along with most cities as sea levels rise), Dick Cheney decided it would be good for business if we went to war, and he focused on Iraq, which happens to be steeped in oil. And then the towers fell, and off to war we went. Off to war to fight for opium in Afghanistan, and oil in Iraq (oil everywhere, actually). At least, that seems to be the way G.W. Bush's nation building, shock and awe for the oppressed and destitute turned out. Private companies like Xe, nee Blackwater, who provide overseas security personnel made out like bandits of course. And they often behaved like bandits, too. In the Republican zeal to privatize, we now privatize our wars, and that comes with the same high ethical standards demonstrated by the rest of our free market aficionados who run our multi-national corporations here in the homeland, but Blackwater's employees roam around with assault rifles.

Along the way, Cheney and Bush convinced Congress and many Americans they must give up their Constitutional liberties in the name of "homeland security." Liberties like free and fair elections, the right to assemble, the right to communicate privately. Instead, our faces are scanned, our voices are monitored, our e-mails are trolled, and our pockets are picked, and our bodies x-rayed and rendered nude at airports. And when we gather to peacefully protest, body-armored, baton and zip cuff wielding centurions surround us, beat us into submission, and haul us off to jail. We never were, nor are we now that insecure. This is about intimidation and, of course, profit for "security" providers, who ironically render us less secure.

Knowing, of course, that ultimate power in this nation rests in the hands of the electorate, corporations who buy politicians also buy votes from the electorate. Not explicitly, of course, the days of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed are long gone. And long gone are the days when "all politics is local" as former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once said. Now, with exception of pork barrel spending targeted at corporate interests, politicians stay on message, and the message comes from national party headquarters and corporate boardrooms. When G.W. Bush signed the "Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, McCain–Feingold Act)" in 2002, Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky immediately filed suit. He claimed the act violated our right to free speech.

McConnell's real motivation was to protect "soft money" ads and the 527 organizations who run them -- these are ads financed by groups "independently" of candidates, and not subject to campaign finance rules. McConnell sought to enhance the influence of his corporate benefactors in our election of representatives. McConnell mostly lost McConnell v. FEC, but the corporate trolls were not finished. After that Supreme Court ruling, the court then heard Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to determine if a documentary smearing Hillary Clinton could be termed a political ad. In its ruling, where it struck down provisions of McCain-Feingold, the court stated: "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." The key point here is that the court indicated corporations were citizens, and thus shared the same rights. Corporations could now dump all the money they wanted into ads to sway public opinion on any issue that affected their interests. The Super PAC was born, an entity entitled to collect and spend all the money it can without ever disclosing where the money comes from -- including from overseas. As we swing and swerve into the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney the corporate puppet finds his position very well supported indeed.

Corporations, while they spend lavishly to buy politicians and elections, and keep their lobbyists well fed, they distinctly do not like paying taxes to the nation that fostered them. They lobby hard for reduced taxes. They also conjure up new ways to dodge them. These days, corporations go to great lengths to set up shell corporations overseas where there are little or no corporate taxes, or they bury their profits in domestic entities for which they can claim phony losses to negate their tax burden. The most famous approach, invented at the ever inventive Apple Computer, is now known sneeringly as "Double Irish With A Dutch Sandwich."

As a result, corporations feel no allegiance to their home country. Their only allegiance it to their own interests and their shareholders. Another result is that the cost of maintaining our immense defense budget, bigger than the next 25 countries combined, falls on wage-earners. However, these tax-dodging corporations would never hesitate to call in the cavalry when their interests feel threatened overseas. But, most likely they will not need to, not with our heavy-handed military presence around the globe, like in the Middle East where we maintain carrier groups ready to defend oil and gas fields run by these corporations at a moments notice. When you spend more than the next 25 nations combined on defense, your "interests" are not often threatened. But you do piss a lot of people off with your support of dictators and suppression of nascent democracy movements, hence the "war on terrorism." And you do bankrupt your own nation. How do our noble corporate enterprises thank their homeland? Most, after offshoring profits and other clever accounting tricks, give back less than 3% of their profits in taxes, and pay the second lowest rate in the developed world.

US of A, you've been had; you've been done to; you've been scammed. If you believe the nonsense you hear coming from Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Mitt Romney about the virtues of lowering taxes for rich "job creators," and proportionally boosting tax rates for the working poor and the now dilapidated middle-class, you are a naïve dupe. Democrats have done little to prevent the disaster visited on us by Republicans, and many have profited from it, so I will not defend them.

Look around and ask yourself if all this free-market, free-trade, pro-business, anti-worker policy really serves yours or the nation's long term interests. Look at our crumbling roads; our pathetic rail system; our woeful education system (outside of rich suburbs -- and even there we are not educating kids that well); our ridiculous costs for higher education that leaves graduates indentured servants to banks; our overpriced, insecure, and toxic energy policy --- both for humans and every other species on the planet; our factory farm industry that feeds us unhealthy food and destroys our environment with CAFO's, unsustainable land stewardship, and genetically modified crops; or our rationed, inadequate health-care system that under-serves us and overcharges us so executives can extract immense salaries from your premiums. Is this the nation your kids sing for when they sing "This Land Is Your Land?"

A superfluous class bought our nation. They contribute nothing to our long-term prosperity, to our life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. They bring no useful skills to the table. They are clever, and know tricks for influencing people and exploiting weakness in our political system. They live off investments made with money they either conjured through nefarious back room deals, or inherited from parents who actually worked for a living and created industries that benefited everyone. We do not need these people for our nation to prosper. They do not create the jobs we need, or share their wealth to help build our nation. They are fatal parasites. Demand the superfluous class pay their share, and share in re-building the once great nation their greed destroyed.