The Poor Little Rich People
Pretty gall-icious Congress moving on tax cuts for the rich just days after killing a minimum wage raise. I'm reminded of this sort of thing whenever I'm scolded for believing the U.S. government was created and continues to function to, protect and promote the interests of the wealthy over everyone else.
And don't give me that bullshit about how in America anyone can become rich. Anyone could become rich in Czarist Russia too. So what? People struggling on minimum wage aren't concerned with getting rich so much as not getting more destitute, and anyone who's not willfully blinding themselves to the truth can see which possibility is way more likely.
Of course, to keep things running, the wealthy and their allies in the established institutions have to convince everyone else that becoming rich is a very real possibility. They do this by primarily showing images of well-off people in the mass media (and by divorcing images of poor and working class people from the economic realities under which those people live); by pretending that wealth actually circulates continuously; by brainwashing us into believing that everybody benefits when the rich benefit; by brainwashing us into believing that when the poor benefit it's at the expense of the rich; and by putting forth the idea that all it takes to get rich are hard work and a little luck. How else explain the perennial refrain of tax cut proponents that taking money from poor and working class people and giving it to the rich will create jobs, jobs, jobs. We've given them enough to know that's just not happening. The fact is that it's propaganda. A lie told often enough, and all that.
It's simple, really, capitalism and the government that goes along with it, only really work for a small, small segment of the population. The rest of us are being conned.
1 comment:
For a while I've pondered an attitude that seems fairly common in this country: "America used to be X, but now it's Y." As in, "America used to be a Democracy, but now it's an oligarchy (or a plutocracy or a fascist state, or whatever seems most apparent at the moment)."
The truth, which seems more clear the more actual American history one reads, is that America has always been, at the least, functionally a plutocracy. The wealthy have always called the shots for their own benefit, and usually to the detriment of the working classes beneath them.
The thing about America in the beginning, I believe, was that there was alot of it, all there "for the taking" if you didn't mind having to run off or kill the original inhabitants to get it, and anyone could, in theory, become a landowner. Owning land gave a man the right to vote and put him (no women voters at that time, of course) into a more privileged class than that of all the non-landowners, so a man *could* come here and improve his wealth and status. Even then, though, it wasn't guaranteed, and there were many, I imagine, who didn't manage to raise their status by immigrating to America.
(And this doesn't even begin to address the slave economy of the South.)
The pinnacle for America's wealthy came during the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century. Paul Krugman argues, however, that the Gilded Age didn't really end until the 1940's, when the New Deal reforms allowed for the growth of the American middle class. Then, he says, in the 1970's and 80's, the oligarchs started making progress toward widening the income gap, and it's been downhill for the middle class ever since.
(http://democracynow.org/ Scroll down until you see the link for Paul Krugman's address on the right.)
So yes, it is a con, and it has been going on for a while now.
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