A recent letter to the editor of a
local newspaper warned against “demonizing” wealth or
“demonizing” prosperity, apparently referring to the
attempt to make the rich and Corporate America pay their fair share
of the federal and state budgets. You know, what keeps the lights on.
There
is no accounting for the generosity of wage-working men and women,
who defend the right of millionaires and billionaires to accumulate
riches without end when their neighbors and co-workers are suffering
to make ends meet, paying the rent or mortgage, putting food on the
table, and deciding whether to take a child to a doctor, whose bill
cannot be paid.
Such
is the propaganda that is spewed by the rich and Corporate America
through their ubiquitous television networks, cable TV stations, and
hate talk radio. They own them, hate sells, and it helps to convince
the average person that the rich are the victims and are to be pitied
and allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. It has been reported over
and over in the mass press that the top 1/10 of 1 percent made
billions during the pandemic. They have had a great run of income
while millions have suffered and died, and that’s just in the
U.S. Quarantining, social distancing, and avoiding big crowds have
been a boon to these people and they want to see more of the same.
The
millions they have spent to keep from paying taxes on their wealth
and income would have provided help to untold numbers of working
families, but they care little about them if they think about them at
all. The millions spent on lobbying their politicians in Congress and
in the state legislatures is just an investment in protecting their
obscene and growing wealth. From that, they will reap many, many
times that investment in more money. Money is what they live for and
they would sell their own mothers and grandmothers (if necessary) to
keep on piling it up in their counting houses.
President
Biden’s Build Back Better bill would have begun to address this
runaway avarice, but the powers that be put two of their minions to
work to stop it. In the bill was a beginning of a way to start making
the rich pay just a little in taxes, since it is clear that they pay
next to nothing in taxes, compared with wage-working Americans. They
put Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the case. The evenly
divided U.S. Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the
tie-breaker, gave these two the power of life and death over Biden’s
bill. They put their bodies between tens of millions of working
Americans and the rich, so the latter can breathe a sigh of relief
when the tax-the-rich section of the bill has been excised or
rendered toothless.
The
evenly-divided Senate also gave these two the power of life and death
over millions of people who would have been the beneficiaries of
child care, family leave, tax credits, and so much more. In the
absence of a single Republican vote, they hold the key to relief to
those who pay the national bills for the billionaires. Manchin and
Sinema are bought by the rich and they are doing the bidding of the
rich, even though they are not as rich as they would like to
be...yet. They are Democrats, but they have voted as if they are
right-wing Republicans. Manchin even spouts GOP lines about deficits
and “entitlements” and being on the dole. He little
understands that he (as a coal baron) has been on the dole, as are
his big brothers in Corporate America.
Manchin
thinks that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other such
programs are “entitlements,” but these are benefits that
the workers have paid for through their taxes. They are not there
because the rich all of a sudden got generous. They worked hard for
those benefits. These benefits are not given.
For
Manchin and others of his ilk, what they have is wealth that has been
created by working men and women. And, they have taken that wealth
out of the Earth, which they do not own, even though they act as if
they did. The Earth and its wealth belongs to everyone and everything
on it. However, the rich have schemed through the ages to gather that
wealth to themselves. They have done it through laws, through
contracts, through slave labor, through corrupt judiciaries, through
military and police power, through myth and propaganda, through
miseducation, and through bought politicians.
Mother
Earth can take only so much abuse and the rich have abused it in this
modern era like no other class of powers that have ever existed. The
disasters, natural and otherwise, that are occurring with ever
greater frequency are a sign that life as we know it is coming to an
end. There have been warnings to be seen and read for nearly a
century. All of them have been ignored, especially those of the past
half-century. Now, however, when once-in-a-century storms and
cataclysms are happening about once every year, the powerful still
are pretending that nothing is happening. To do otherwise would tend
to close down their spigot of money.
It’s
why they have ordered Manchin and Sinema to stifle the clauses in
Biden’s BBB bill that would begin to address climate change and
global heating. That the rich can ignore the coming disaster that
will affect their own children and their children is an indication of
the perverse nature of the rich. They really do not care about the
planet or its inhabitants. They only care about the money and the
profits, which makes them sociopathic or psychopathic, or both.
Why,
then, would a working-class American come to their defense and say
that calling for the rich to be taxed like a wage-earner is
“demonizing” wealth or “prosperity?” There
are millions who think just like the letter writer. They have been
led to believe that the rich and Corporate America have somehow
“earned” the riches that they possess. Much of the
beliefs of the workers can be attributed to what they watch and read,
and most of it is on television, on cable. All of these “news”
outlets are owned by billionaires and Corporate America and they
provide a direct injection of their propaganda into the minds of
average Americans and the working-class. If that’s all you’re
hearing and seeing, that becomes your truth.
Few
Americans get their news from other parts of the world or from
domestic alternative sources, so what they see on cable networks is
truth to them, even as they are cast aside like so much chaff. That
the rich are not innocent accidents has been long known. In the 19th
Century, the French writer, Honoré
de Balzac, wrote: “Behind every great fortune lies a great
crime.” Remember that and act accordingly.
