Obama and friends need to wake up and realize that calling tax breaks for the top income earners of the country 'unfair' is not the way to sell the idea of shared sacrifice through tax revenues! Conservatives aren't moved these days by appeals to fairness. It falls upon deaf ears and heads full of Friedman economics. The way to sell this is by shouting out the hard factualized reality which lies at the heart of the matter.
Billionaires do not ascend to monetary Mt. Olympus as solitary achievers. Although they routinely disseminate this shallow pretense, it is workers who create the majority of economic value by their work. It's the fist and arm of labor that generates most profits. Then, ironically, they gratefully morph into consumers to justify those same profits at the nation's malls, buying back what they just produced. And the community of citizens-at-large maintains the vaunted playing fields and infrastructure of the free market place... and capitalism's celebrated baronial elite strut like feverish roosters, crowing about their well-deserved successes on dung heaps of fallen glories... and this economic mystery re-emerges again and again to woeful sobs of "tax cuts for those who create the jobs!"
Balderdash!
The emperor has no clothes and he's getting sloppy about covering his grand ruse. The time for renewed class awareness is today or our children will curse the past in shanty towns through all their sad tomorrows.
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Ted Frier
Abrawang
Tom Cordle
Paul J. O'Rourke
Ernesto Che Guevara
skinnydave
Salon.com
Comments
Good call! I was feeling a little tentative before I posted this. What you've described as a 'high-pitched tone' satiring 'literal truth' is the same shrill whine that I noted in the writing as a bit over the top and out of character for me.
I guess I'm a little frustrated over the current state of public discourse and the politics that follows in its wake. BTW. I consider myself a life long lefty... lately leaning to democratic socialism.
I am involved in many things. My OS profile is honest enough. I'm a veteran of Vietnam era service and work with vets at my local VAMC. I'm an openly declared recovering alcoholic with 30 years (just this month---yea!) in AA and a registered voter. I'm also semi-retired but fully-inspired about American history, minor league baseball, bicycling, cinema, chess, reading & blogging, birding and grandchildren... whew! I'm tired just writing it out!
So yeah, frequently I engage in self-parody but I can be somber and brooding all too often with loads of extra gravitas on the side. My one saving grace is that I do enjoy all this and am 99% authentically me.
Therefore, I think the real challenge is to talk to people, to show them HOW they're being screwed by the rich. And when people do have an understanding of the mechanisms for their impoverishment, then you're going to get some understanding of class consciousness in this country.
I suspect class consciousness raising seminars are better conceived as impromptu affairs using what ever crisis is available in the public square to illustrate familiar social ideas with new socialistic interpretations. Of course, there's no quicker path to marginalization than spouting political ideas from a soapbox. That's the fiendishly clever ruling class mechanism of preemption. I've felt it... felt preemption and it's painful. But then again... there are always drugs for that.