In Celebration of the America Revoluton: A Rant (Updated)
I posted this here on DU a few days back, this is the Daily Kos version, reedited, polished a bit, and lengthened. We should never forget that we are a part of a centuries old revolutionary tradition, and that the struggle continues:
Most of America's Super Rich Think THEY Make America Great
In their universe it's the size of a nations castles, not the size of it's slums that matters. It's the glamour of the ruling elite, not the character and industriousness of the people, by which they measure greatness. It has always been that way. Nothing has changed about the super wealthy - from the close of Europe's dark ages to the dawn of America's current one.
They used to call themselves Nobility. Now they call themselves “Job Creators”; even if every dime that got them where they are today was originally inherited. It’s a lot easier to make millions if you have millions to start out with. Their ideology, once derived from “Divine Rule”, is now simply “Just Rewards” - a circular logic that says massive wealth is de facto evidence of superior personal attributes, which hence make the possessor fully worthy of his or her massive wealth.
Their attitude toward everyone else fundamentally still remains “Let them eat cake”. Only the window dressing has changed, the theatrics needed to harvest sufficient votes to keep their status secure in an era when royalty is passe. War is Peace, Hate is Love, and Long Live the Job Creators. Yes there are exceptions to the rule; fabulously wealthy decent and generous individuals who do not fit that template. They too serve the rule, by muddying the picture with a fig leaf of plausible deniability. Like the blanks that fill the chamber of one rifle in the firing squad – you can't say they all are killers, but the execution is assured.
And for the most soft hearted of the lot, who want to be known for more than wealth alone, well they can busy themselves as patrons of the arts, reaping great honor as museums and galleries are named after them. As if only through their magnanimous gifts can a people truly have culture.
The poor will always be with us they all say, while they shave benefits from America's bare bones medicaid safety net to cut billions from their own taxes. Those less fortunate need the example of our great wealth, they argue, to be inspired to want more out of life; in order to be motivated. As if a parents love of their children is not incentive enough to strive for fiscal security.
The elites self serving policies for America can be shown to rest on sound economic principles; each of them carefully designed through reverse engineering to prove the facts that they need established. Produced on demand by hired hands, men and women just like those employed by the tobacco industry back in the sixties to de-link smoking from cancer.
Kings never had trouble finding tax collectors to shake down peasants either. There is always money to be made by collaborating with the elites. Nothing has changed in the ruling class world view. It never does. It is only a matter of what we allow them to get away with.
Remember slavery? Remember seven day work weeks? Remember child labor? Remember company stores? Remember mass foreclosures? Remember migrant worker camps? Remember foreign sweat shops churning out products with swank logos? Remember pharmaceutical companies hiking prices on life saving drugs by a thousand percent or more?
It is all the same mind set, it is ageless: Take what you can get from the many because you deserve to have more. Regrettably America can't afford those “entitlements” for the poor and middle classes that ensure their basic survival. The “responsible” path forward is to “deincentivize” poverty, by shrinking the safety net that lulls the masses into a false illusion of security. Any serious effort to actually reduce poverty, or even attempts to make it somewhat less lethal, could divert the funds needed to fuel continued growth of personal fiefdoms, and empires owned by the elite. And they are the ones striving to make America great again, just like it was before the rise of Unions, back in the days of the robber barons.
Yeah, I know that this is one long rant that omits a lot of subtleties about why people make the choices that they make. I know real life villains are three dimensional, that they too love their kids and pets. Very few are true sociopaths (though still more than we can afford to ignore). None the less they remain willfully blind to the toll they place on others so that a select few can revel in mind numbing overindulgence and that has been true for millennia.
America is not so advanced, not so special, that America's elites won't hesitate to continually skim a little more off the top for themselves at the expense of the bottom of the economic pyramid that they sit astride. That is going on this Fourth of July weekend with their push for Trumpcare. They are literally willing to kill tens of thousands of us by tweeking the safety net we depend on so that they can grab a few more bucks out of it for themselves. They believe we can all cut one more hole in our belts, and if we tighten them just that one notch further, just one, they’ll be able to let theirs out another foot.
The elites behind the Deathcare push pretend otherwise, but they know more Americans will suffer and die if they get their way, so how exactly are they really any different from Marie Antoinette? I am really pissed this week. We all damn well should be. I actually thought that maybe our country was a little better than this - that even our oligarchs wouldn't fight this hard to steal more crumbs from our tables that consign people to death, not this blatantly, not on this scale. A Trillion dollars cut from Medicaid - from the most vulnerable among us, for more tax cuts for the rich. All in the so called name of "fiscal responsibility" and "greater freedom".
We see their type every century. There will always be changes in fashion, and radically new technologies continually transform our economy, but human nature is a stubborn thing. It seems the greedy will always be with us.
