Just the Working Life
Subsidies for Me but Not for Thee
“Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food.” He paused, and sighed, “I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.” ― Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
It’s a good thing the ‘forgotten man’ voted in his own best interests once again. The incoming cabinet is going to have a net worth north of $9 billion (not including Elmo and Vivek and the Department of Gigantic Egomaniacs, or D.O.G.E.)
Yep, these every day folks were tired of being sneered at by the Washington D.C. “elites,” the people who looked down their noses at these low life working class mooks.
Now they have champions for their cause, a plethora of plutocrats who have already been steadily draining the till in their favor. Now they have power over every lever of Big Gubment and are threatening “Temporary Hardship” for those forgotten men and women.
The wealth of the top 1% grew by $42 trillion in the past decade!
“Inequality has reached obscene levels, and until now governments have failed to protect people and planet from its catastrophic effects,” said Max Lawson, Oxfam International’s head of inequality policy. “The richest one percent of humanity continues to fill their pockets while the rest are left to scrap for crumbs.” --CNN
We have been living in the greatest wealth transfer in the history of Earth. If you are living in a trailer in Alabama and claiming it was the “pronouns,” you have missed the plot.
“Taxing the super-rich and big corporations is the door out of today’s overlapping crises. It’s time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow ‘trickling down’ to everyone else. Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn’t lift all ships —just the superyachts.” --Oxfam
Another Day in Paradise
“She calls out to the man on the street
"Sir, can you help me?
It's cold and I've nowhere to sleep
Is there somewhere you can tell me?"
He walks on, doesn't look back
He pretends he can't hear her
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street
Seems embarrassed to be there”
--Phil Collins: Another Day in Paradise
While they build super-yachts and rocket ships, the rest of the country suffers. Well, if you are white, you won’t suffer quite as badly since whites own 85% of the wealth.
The markets have been jizzing themselves since November 5th. The gorging and the gluttony are on a total sugar high as they see their ability to fleece the fuck out of the world getting ever stronger. They live virtually debt-free and don’t have to account for the federal debt…even though they get massive subsidies.
“America’s top 1 percent, for instance, holds more than half the national wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds. Most of the wealth of Americans in the bottom 90 percent comes from their homes — the asset category that took the biggest hit during the Great Recession. These Americans also hold just around three-quarters of America’s debt.” -- Wealth Inequality
The one thing the super-rich may not have calculated into their strategy of unlimited gorging is Christofascism. It is one thing for the oligarchs to take control in broad daylight, it’s another when it is wrapped in Bible verses and Jeebus.
What is going to happen when they start their austerity plans? They won’t be hurt, even a market ‘correction’ never touches the super-rich. Will we see an Argentina unfold? A Georgia? Russell Vought, the human turd set to take over the OMB, has already stated that they have plans to use the U.S. military against protestors. Are there water cannons and rubber bullets in our future so the billionaires don’t have to face any “moral dilemmas?” And Vought is saying we live in a “Post-Constitutional” world now. As OMB Director, there will be NO Constitution.
“For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.” ― Douglas Rushkoff
They don’t want to even look at us, they just want their pound of flesh. The goal of the “Libertarian Elite” is to live in secluded compounds or create a ‘floating country’ off the coast where they can live in “Sovereignty.” It’s called “Seasteading” and has been in the works for almost a decade.
Too much is never enough. What human needs multiple billions to survive? What motivates a person to hoard wealth while people around them are suffering?
“Greed is a factor in the well-documented growing concentration of wealth in the United States. The super-rich claim to be deserving of their wealth, but it’s likely that greed—not wisdom, common sense, or concern about the common good—was a factor in the creation over the past decades of a “financialized” economy that unduly tilts the playing field in favor of those with the most capital to speculate.” -- Greed as a Mental-Health Disorder
The author argues that “self-doubt” motivates greed as much as it motivates narcissism.
It appears they go hand in hand, as the guy who was honest enough to tell Rushkoff he didn’t want the “moral dilemma” of seeing the woman with the baby made clear.
Maybe from his rocket ship window she wouldn’t be so impactful on the part of him that appears to be dead?
Rooting Out the Marxists
Mango Mussolini promised to root out the Marxists. Maybe it’s time the country actually becomes Marxist and throws a good old-fashioned class war.
If the forgotten man is so concerned about ‘muh kuntree,’ maybe it is time for him to pick up a pitchfork and go after the real villains, the people who have robbing the country blind for the past five decades. Lord knows they will be coming after the forgotten man, shaking him down for every penny they can extract to add to their massive pile of opulence.
It isn’t Big Gubment that has been screwing him, it is the oligarchs, and perhaps it’s time for a proletariat revolution? A Battle of Blair Mountain moment?
The weirdo MAGA keep screaming “1776.” It’s time they define who truly is the enemy?
It started with the TEA Party freaks, never realizing their “movement” was astro-turfed by the Koch Brothers. Then they were sucked into MAGA by a demagogue who made it all about the “Liberal Elite.”
Now, they are about to take it in the poop chute by the wealthiest people on the planet. And those people claim to be doing this all for Jeebus.
They are worshipping someone who does not even want to look at them, much less be in the vicinity.
“This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality.” ― Douglas Rushkoff