eameece
New member
Here are some things that people need to get.
The right-wing's constant refrain is, why should someone else pay for what you get. That is a tempting argument to swallow. It would be nice if the economy worked so that people would get what they pay for. But the problem is, most of the 99% of the people who get something like 1% of the income in the USA, are working all the time. They are not freeloaders. A college student who can't pay for education is studying to learn things that will benefit people when (s)he goes to work. This is not freeloading. Most rich people get their huge salaries for doing no work, but for gambling or extorting money from their workers because they are the boss and don't have a union to negotiate with.
Yet they claim they are earning their money, and that if they have to pay more in taxes "to help people trying to get my money through the government," the economy will suffer because they are the "job creaters." But guess what, we had 30 years of your job creating, and the result is several millions of unemployed and underemployed people, less economic mobility, and extreme inequality. They claim free trade creates jobs, while they send jobs overseas to get cheap labor and avoid regulations. Their way to create jobs is to automate their factories and fire workers, and then buy out competitors and monopolize the market, and fire more workers. If that's job creatin,' we don't need any more of it thank you very much.
It's time that the wealthy paid more in taxes, and contributed to our crumbling roads and bridges and schools and mass transit and health care that helps all of us. The more people have the money to buy things, the more the rising demand will create customers, and that's what creates jobs. The more people have a safety net, even one that does not encourage dependency, the more people can quickly recover and keep spending money that creates customers and jobs.
The big corporations and wealthy bankers and financiers on Wall Street and in other skyscapers and mansions across the USA have used their money to buy ads to convince voters and workers for 30 years that loosening regulations on them and letting them do whatever risky secret schemes they wish without any oversight would make them rich, and the benefits of this new wealth would trickle down from their skyscrapers to the average guys in the street. So regulations were loosened, allowing financiers to gamble with peoples' savings and mortgages, instead of protecting them and using them to make loans to local small businesses. The result was a huge housing bubble that burst, causing all the risky derivatives built from bundled mortgages to fail and bring down huge banks and insurance companies. To keep the economy from crashing as a result of this collapse, former bank CEOs in our government bailed out the big banks, from which the bankers took more huge bonuses and suffered no consequences for ruining the economy, destroying jobs and businesses and causing starvation and poverty.
Meanwhile those who lost their homes and their jobs from this mess got inadequate help at best. And when our president tried to pass some basic reforms so the mess wouldn't happen again, he was denounced as a socialist, his reforms were fiercely resisted by Wall St. lobbyists and by dopey Republican presidential candidates, and swarms of deceived Reagan worshipers gathered for TEA and terrorized Republican and some Democratic politicians and the voters fed up with the slow pace of recovery due to the vastness of the problem that the Reagan worshipers themselves created, resulting in total D.C. gridlock and political and economic hostage-taking. And the Bush-appointed Supreme Court made it legal for the wealthy corporations to buy as many politicians as they wish, and in secret, so they can try to buy and deceive the people indefinitely.
And meanwhile these wealthy corporations get subsidies for pumping more oil to cause more energy depletion, oil spills, pollution, and climate change, and they resist new green energy businesses. They arouse the people with slogans to oppose health care reform that would be good for business as well as the people, so that insurance and drug profits won't suffer and so sick people can die without getting the care that they don't want to provide. They dry up funds for government regulation of our food industry, so that our food is unsafe, unnutritious and genetically-modified. They demand, and get, their government to finance unfunded, deadly, endless wars overseas to protect their oil supplies, and to spend more money on the military than all other countries combined. They make sure that their taxes are so low that the nation piles up a huge, endless debt that is the perfect excuse for not spending any tax money on things the people really need, and that ensures higher taxes on interest payments for our children and grandchildren for generations to come. They attack entitlement programs that the people are entitled to because they paid for them, even though they are not only solvent but are robbed to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy. The jack up prices for housing, education, health care, energy, banking, food and transportation so high, and keep wages so low, that most people (especially younger people) can't advance economically, get a good start in life, or even make ends meet. Those few who have lots of money are protecting themselves and getting more while those who have little are made to have even less through no fault of their own.
And so some people are protesting; many not exactly sure what needs to be done, but making their voices heard about a situation that is obviously wrong. Whether they get the political situation or not, there needs to be a political movement to change these policies and the system that perpetuates them. Muddled moderation and accommodation may be tolerable for a while. But in the end, it will not do. Real change needs to happen, and a truly democratic and fairer society needs to be built. The alternative is continued national decline. We can enter the 21st century, or be a banana republic. The choice is ours. And it seems to me that some people like me have to keep making these obvious points, because a lot of folks just don't get it.
The right-wing's constant refrain is, why should someone else pay for what you get. That is a tempting argument to swallow. It would be nice if the economy worked so that people would get what they pay for. But the problem is, most of the 99% of the people who get something like 1% of the income in the USA, are working all the time. They are not freeloaders. A college student who can't pay for education is studying to learn things that will benefit people when (s)he goes to work. This is not freeloading. Most rich people get their huge salaries for doing no work, but for gambling or extorting money from their workers because they are the boss and don't have a union to negotiate with.
Yet they claim they are earning their money, and that if they have to pay more in taxes "to help people trying to get my money through the government," the economy will suffer because they are the "job creaters." But guess what, we had 30 years of your job creating, and the result is several millions of unemployed and underemployed people, less economic mobility, and extreme inequality. They claim free trade creates jobs, while they send jobs overseas to get cheap labor and avoid regulations. Their way to create jobs is to automate their factories and fire workers, and then buy out competitors and monopolize the market, and fire more workers. If that's job creatin,' we don't need any more of it thank you very much.
It's time that the wealthy paid more in taxes, and contributed to our crumbling roads and bridges and schools and mass transit and health care that helps all of us. The more people have the money to buy things, the more the rising demand will create customers, and that's what creates jobs. The more people have a safety net, even one that does not encourage dependency, the more people can quickly recover and keep spending money that creates customers and jobs.
The big corporations and wealthy bankers and financiers on Wall Street and in other skyscapers and mansions across the USA have used their money to buy ads to convince voters and workers for 30 years that loosening regulations on them and letting them do whatever risky secret schemes they wish without any oversight would make them rich, and the benefits of this new wealth would trickle down from their skyscrapers to the average guys in the street. So regulations were loosened, allowing financiers to gamble with peoples' savings and mortgages, instead of protecting them and using them to make loans to local small businesses. The result was a huge housing bubble that burst, causing all the risky derivatives built from bundled mortgages to fail and bring down huge banks and insurance companies. To keep the economy from crashing as a result of this collapse, former bank CEOs in our government bailed out the big banks, from which the bankers took more huge bonuses and suffered no consequences for ruining the economy, destroying jobs and businesses and causing starvation and poverty.
Meanwhile those who lost their homes and their jobs from this mess got inadequate help at best. And when our president tried to pass some basic reforms so the mess wouldn't happen again, he was denounced as a socialist, his reforms were fiercely resisted by Wall St. lobbyists and by dopey Republican presidential candidates, and swarms of deceived Reagan worshipers gathered for TEA and terrorized Republican and some Democratic politicians and the voters fed up with the slow pace of recovery due to the vastness of the problem that the Reagan worshipers themselves created, resulting in total D.C. gridlock and political and economic hostage-taking. And the Bush-appointed Supreme Court made it legal for the wealthy corporations to buy as many politicians as they wish, and in secret, so they can try to buy and deceive the people indefinitely.
And meanwhile these wealthy corporations get subsidies for pumping more oil to cause more energy depletion, oil spills, pollution, and climate change, and they resist new green energy businesses. They arouse the people with slogans to oppose health care reform that would be good for business as well as the people, so that insurance and drug profits won't suffer and so sick people can die without getting the care that they don't want to provide. They dry up funds for government regulation of our food industry, so that our food is unsafe, unnutritious and genetically-modified. They demand, and get, their government to finance unfunded, deadly, endless wars overseas to protect their oil supplies, and to spend more money on the military than all other countries combined. They make sure that their taxes are so low that the nation piles up a huge, endless debt that is the perfect excuse for not spending any tax money on things the people really need, and that ensures higher taxes on interest payments for our children and grandchildren for generations to come. They attack entitlement programs that the people are entitled to because they paid for them, even though they are not only solvent but are robbed to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy. The jack up prices for housing, education, health care, energy, banking, food and transportation so high, and keep wages so low, that most people (especially younger people) can't advance economically, get a good start in life, or even make ends meet. Those few who have lots of money are protecting themselves and getting more while those who have little are made to have even less through no fault of their own.
And so some people are protesting; many not exactly sure what needs to be done, but making their voices heard about a situation that is obviously wrong. Whether they get the political situation or not, there needs to be a political movement to change these policies and the system that perpetuates them. Muddled moderation and accommodation may be tolerable for a while. But in the end, it will not do. Real change needs to happen, and a truly democratic and fairer society needs to be built. The alternative is continued national decline. We can enter the 21st century, or be a banana republic. The choice is ours. And it seems to me that some people like me have to keep making these obvious points, because a lot of folks just don't get it.
