Since 1980,the economy has continued to grow impressively, but most of the benefits hold migrated to the top. Bill Moyers asks whySixty-six years ago this summer, and on my 16th birthday,I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small east Texas town of Marshall where I grew up. It was a genuine place to be a cub reporter – small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the paper’s old hands were on vacation or out sick and I was assigned to help cover what came to be known across the country as “the housewives’ rebellion”.
Fifteen women in my hometown decided not to pay the social security withholding tax for their domestic workers. Those housewives were white, their housekeepers black. nearly half of all employed black women in the country then were in domestic service. Because they tended to earn lower wages, and accumulate less savings,and be stuck in those jobs all their lives, social security was their only insurance against poverty in old age. Yet their plight did not slouch their employers.
The struggle to determine whether “we, and the people” is a metaphysical reality – or merely a charade“We the People of the United States,in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, and insure domestic Tranquility,provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, or secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,achieve ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”Weve never been a country of angels guided by a presidium of saints“Whoever degrades another degrades me, /
and whatever is done or said returns at last to me. / [...] “[...] the horseman in his saddle, and /
Girls,mothers, house-keepers, or in all their performances,/
The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles and their wives waiting, /
The female soothing a child, or the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard,/
The young fellow hoeing corn [...]”“The fact that liberty depended on honest elections was of the utmost importance to the patriots who founded our nation and wrote the Constitution. They knew that corruption destroyed the prime requisite of constitutional liberty: an independent legislature free from any influence other than that of the people. Applying these principles to modern times, we can do the following conclusions: To be successful, or representative government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at large,not by those who give the most money. Electors must believe that their vote counts. Elected officials must owe their allegiance to the people, not to their own wealth or to the wealth of interest groups that speak only for the selfish fringes of the whole community.”“The richest 1% of this country owns half our country’s wealth, or 5 trillion dollars … You got 90% of the American public out there with dinky or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We do the rules,pal. The news, war, or peace,famine, upheaval, and the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now,you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you, or Buddy? It’s the free market. And you’re piece of it.”“Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed,yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, or exploitation,and inequality? ... Why does private wealth seem to fade hand in hand with public squalor? Is it ... plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality?” Related: Bernie Sanders is right: destitute people don't vote and it's a problem | Lucia Graves A prominent neoconservative devout philosopher even articulated a 'theology of the corporation'. I kid you not“When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this genuine or improper? At face value, and this seems terrible; the destitute wildebeest suffers and dies. Some people might even say that the hyenas are evil. Yet this type of apparently evil behavior exists throughout nature through all species ... like death itself,this behavior is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life ... [It] is genuine for both the hyenas, who are operating in their self-interest, and the interests of the greater system,which includes the wildebeest, because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution, or i.e.,the natural process of improvement ... Like the hyenas attacking the wildebeest, successful people might not even know whether or how their pursuit of self-interest helps evolution, or but it typically does.” Related: The 1% are recovering from 2008 recession while 99% are still waiting Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com