Class Warfare

Here is my political rant for the season. Does this ad that showed up on my screen while visiting a favorite website really piss off anybody besides me?

The Republican National Committee obviously thinks that we are so gullible that we will fall for this crap, again, and again.  So, let me get this straight. It is good to bail out banks after they greedily and stupidly require over seven hundred BILLION of our hard-earned dollars just to keep them afloat, but to do things that would assist the majority of this country’s citizens like providing them with health care when they need it is bad? While casting aspersions on the left for engaging in “Class warfare” whenever we have pointed out such inequities, the right has — ever since the election of Ronald Reagan — conducted an actual class war. In case you haven’t noticed — we lost.

Are we so stupid that we will vote once more for the politicians and their policies who have no understanding, or concern for the needs of the majority of us citizens? Will we again vote against our own best interests just because they tell us to?

Let me say here that I believe that a healthy business climate does benefit everyone. However, that does not mean that the majority must sacrifice everything in order  to guarantee that Wall Street investors get even richer. That is NOT democracy.

My feeling is that there is a huge difference between making  a fair profit, and maximizing one’s profit. A fair profit system benefits everyone. When profits are maximized things happen like; employee’s pension funds are raided, rather than an employee working for thirty years for a company where there is reciprocal loyalty there is a series of short term jobs — sometimes held simultaneously — with no stake in the product, health care is rationed simply by the ability to pay, the majority of the nation’s wealth is jealously held by a tiny percentage of the population, there is no motivation to upward mobility because of the chasm  between economic classes.

If all that sounds familiar, it is because we elected the people who made the rules that created the situation. You did it while they were telling you to, as in the Wizard of Oz,  “Ignore the man behind the curtain”, and you did. Maybe you didn’t peek, but I did. The “man behind the curtain” is GREED.

It becomes more apparent every day why many of the regulations that have been purged from the books over the last twenty years were there in the first place.They may have been somewhat “bad for business”, but they were certainly good for society. The people who orchestrated the recent bank bailout are the same ones who killed the controls that would have prevented the need for a bailout had the controls not been eliminated.

Not until we become more concerned with the needs of ALL of our fellow citizens — not just the wants and needs of the wealthy and therefore powerful — will we all benefit from what democracy promises.

I am personally fed up with the “Screw you, I got mine” mentality that is so prevalent in today’s American society. That attitude is everywhere. Even religion is not immune. Can you even remember when churches extolled the mutual benefits of altruism, instead of — as I actually heard Pat Robertson say about the Internal Revenue Service, “They are stealing our wealth!” Today’s churches are more likely to have an, “I’m going to Heaven and you are not, nya, nya, nya!” attitude.

The truth is that we are all in this together. For example, you can either concern yourself with the health problems of the poor now, or when the plague that starts in their neighborhood spreads to your house. That is the lesson taught to us by history. “Let them eat cake”, is not a good, long-term strategy.