Transferring tax money to the richest is so reprehensible because its proponents base it entirely on a lie. Despite nearly a century of experience, they would have it that letting the filthy rich pay no or tiny taxes, these billions of dollars will immediately find their way into company investments in infrastructure and expansion. Then we millions of minions who actually labor to create the wealth for the wealthy will find ourselves showered with their largess.
Back to this nation on this planet in this universe, we long ago learned that such trickle-down economics are a scam and a sham. That pretext for waste was the bulwark of President Ronald Reagan's guns-and-butter debacle. This mythology includes the one about small businesses keeping our economy healthy with job creation. Examples abound of how these are patently untrue, while so many of us cherish the fairy tales.
Instead, egoism more aptly defines us as nation in this Great Recession. These straining times should be the catalyst for pulling together (think Great Depression and WWII). We should share the pain and struggle for a renewed nation. We should be literally and figuratively writing new folk tunes of our resulting triumph from our common effort.
Instead:
- The richest families are on huge spending sprees — for personal property and goods — with their government windfalls
- The richest corporations, including banks and their ilk, are hording cash, maximizing their interest returns with their windfalls
- Most other companies, public and private, follow suit with the big guys and do not hire or expand
- The remaining WWII and Korean War Era adults scream not to cut any of their benefits…to hell with all the following generations who have supported them for decades
Listen in Congress, hark to AARP's PR campaigns, and if you can take it, try winger radio and TV. They are united in not having a united United States. Give the haves whatever they want and pretend that all will be well.
Share the pain? Not in this lifetime and certainly not in this country!
This is our huge national disgrace, our malaise. We are not rowing together. We are not willing to help our fellow Americans. We are more like wild animals, dragging our share of the kill to our burrows. The others should have been faster or stronger or more vicious.
If the clichés of character being what we are when no one's watching and when we face dangers are true, our national zeitgeist is ugly and nasty indeed. If we search about us and in the news very carefully, we can find inspiring tales of the goodhearted who watch out for their neighbors and larger community. Yet, those snippets wash away in the flood of selfishness and of disregard for the common good.
God help me, I do have some hopes. I recently cited George Price, who developed and expanded formulae supporting people acting for commonweal. Even more recently, I read the pop anthropology book, Sex at Dawn, in which the authors describe the evidence for and benefits to our hunter/gather ancestors of sharing and protecting each other.
I'm not enough delusional about this though. Our national tenor still leans heavily in favor of self-interest at the expense of others. Even the libertarian and Randist sorts tend to differentiate between watching out for what benefits you and intentionally harming others to get yours.
As a group, Congress and corporate America don't seem to get that.
This is precisely the time to work together, to do with less for the larger good. We do have those historic periods when we have done just this. We emerged from these as a stronger nation, with nearly all of us contributing to growth and common prosperity.
It is again time for the rich to share in the national discomfort. It is again time for corporations huge and wee to risk by hiring and expanding. It is again time for financial houses to invest in America.
Cross-post: This also appears at Marry in Massachusetts.
“hard truths” and “tough choices” are for the little people. Always. It’s sad. The wealthiest Americans have long been out of recession.
She is resigned to never having Social Security. I don’t know whether to be angrier at the propagandists or at those who buy into it.
I’m nearly 62, and I’ve been hearing that claim since my early 20s. The only problem now is the country’s financial difficulties, and the brazenness of the Republican party in their zeal to kill Social Security, once and for all. They call it fixing, need to save, and any number of other things, but the goal is the same, kill it, and the ideology driving it has been doing so ever since SS was established. They don’t want it, don’t want to pay into it, and never have. Look to the private pensions and what has happened to them since the advent of the 401k for a clue. Also, how did your 401k and IRA do a couple of years ago? Mine tanked, I still haven’t fully recovered, and I may never, given my age.
I should have been clearer in my previous comment: I’m angry at those who buy into the propaganda that the demise of Social Security is inevitable. In other words, I agree with all you say.
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p>It makes me nervous that the media drumbeat against SS seems to be having an effect.
The media is owned and controlled by the same wealthy individuals (overwhelmingly old white men, sadly) that have sought to destroy Social Security (along with all the other FDR changes) for decades.
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p>Media advertising is expensive because it works — the combination of video and sound is astoundingly effective at altering the behavior and emotions of its audience. It is no accident that an emerging — and under-reported — battleground is net-neutrality, driven by the ability of dangerous upstarts to publish and promote effective videos on sites like youtube. The smokescreen is “bandwidth cost”. The reality is the struggle for control over what the masses can see and hear.
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p>In my view, this is the most important underlying theme of the government’s attempt to silence WikiLeaks. The government is exercising its newly-developed and heretofore secret weapons against the internet.
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p>The bottom-up nature of the web, as exemplified by blogs and wikis, threatens the strangle-hold the wealthy have had on the media and therefore on society. None of us should be surprised that the government, in service to that power elite, works so hard to crush this threat to its hegemony.
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p>We should all remember that the same weapons used against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks will someday be used against sites like this, as night follows day.
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p>This is real, my friends. The battle is joined.
Folks, we seem to be struggling to face a terrible reality: the unholy alliance between the religious right and the GOP is a political Jihad. It truly is a “holy war”.
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p>The right wing believes that the wealthy are that way because “God intends it”. The right wing believes that the free market “does God’s will”. The right wing believes that the poor and suffering are being punished by God for their own failings (a venerable faith tradition, by the way, go back re-read Job). The right wing believes that God has blessed the “free market” approach and interpret the prosperity of the wealthy as evidence of this blessing. Therefore, those who would change any of that (especially those who would challenge the wealth concentration) are agents of Satan who seek to destroy God.
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p>For more insight, I strongly recommend Al Gore’s Assault on Reason:
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p>I truly fear for the future of the American society that we all revere. The fundamental freedoms of America have been, after all, the immediate target of Muslim terrorism since it began. The awful effectiveness of Osama Bin Ladin is that he has shown the extremist Muslim world how to provoke the American far right into advancing the AQ agenda.
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p>He has triggered an American auto-immune disorder. He has used the American far right to turn our fear, insecurity, and hurt against ourselves, with devastating effectiveness.
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p>The horrible truth is that Muslim extremists, at their core, have far more in common with American right-wing extremists than they have differences. Both are committed to a cosmology that is literalist, fundamentalist, and most of all unchanging.
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p>This fundamental cosmology is in primal conflict with the freedom and liberty we all hold dear.
…your penultimate paragraph. I don’t think our religious right goes around blowing up themselves and others. Would have given a 6 without that paragraph.
Or the Oklahoma bombing, or the many Planned Parenthood clinics that have been bombed and burned?
As far as I can tell there is no Christian equivalent to this organization which actively recruits people to go on mass jihad and destabalization of ours or any other country. Planned Parenthood attacks are generally lone nutcases quickly denounced by the prolife movement. Waco self-destructed and as I recall was not on a mission to change the rest of us. Though we heard stories about some Christianist elements to some anti-government groups, I sense that Timothy McVeigh’s motives were anti-government without much of a Christian element to it. Even if we were to stipulate to those examples having Christian motivation the scale is VERY different. If you make these comparisons I would just ask that you to be careful about religious right=religious right. As scary as it would be if Christian reconstructionists or even the Christian Coalition got its way, most of them wouldn’t hurt anyone physically.
I didn’t mean to sound overly argumentative.