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.
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.
