TO OBAMA: Tell the wealthy to stop being selfish crybabies

I was visiting Obama's Change.gov website the other day, and one of the sections was on "service," and it occurred to me that themes of public service are always directed at the poor and middle class.

Someone is always coming up with a bill for kids to pay for college by doing community service or joining the military, and conservatives especially like to lecture us about doing volunteer work and giving to charities (so they have an excuse to cut the government programs that perform the same function on a broader scale).

I remember in 2004, John Kerry was going to make an appearance at a college, and I hoped he would address how Democrats would help students avoid the crushing debt of student loans or having to work full time and go to school part time, so they can't finish their bachelor's degree until they're thirty or pay off their student loans until they're dead. Instead, he talked about what THEY should do for their country, as if providing cheap labor at a fast food restaurant wasn't doing a big enough favor for the wealthy in this country.

How often is a similar speech given to the financial elite of this country?

I know what the immediate retort to this will be.

The wealthy have their charitable foundations, scholarships, and advocacy for this or that cause.

But most of their "charity" work would not be necessary if they acted responsibly in all the things they did with their money to further enrich themselves. The things they should be asked to do for their country:

• Every employee of yours or companies you invest in is paid enough that they never have to apply for food stamps or other public assistance.

• Those employees should never have to wonder how they will pay for medical treatment for themselves or their children or be bankrupted by seeking it out.

• Only close a factory because you can't make a profit there anymore, not because you could shave some labor costs by moving it to Bangladesh, or your accountant told you that firing people makes the company look more profitable in the short term and tweaks your stock price.

• If you own or invest in an industry that does have unavoidable fluctuations in labor needs, make sure the community can take care of those workers.

• If you invest in a factory or mine, ask yourself if you would like to breathe the air or drink the water nearby, and if not, do what needs to be done to correct it.

• When it comes time to pay taxes, ask yourself if paying what you actually owe will cramp your lifestyle one iota. Will you have to sell your primary residence, your only car, or pull your kids out of private school? Or do those taxes only cut into your bragging rights at the club and how many generations of your kids can survive without doing the honest day's work it took you or your ancestors to accumulate that wealth in the first place.

If they did these things, their charitable contributions and advocacy would be far less necessary because there would be fewer problems and fewer that the government couldn't afford to address.

But the wealthy have rarely been faced with the call to service the middle class and poor routinely hear.

Instead, politicians get in line with the orphans and blind and talented kids who can't afford college and beg the wealthy for a handout. And if the politician grovels extra well, and does EXACTLY what the rich tell him to do in Congress, the politician will be rewarded when he leaves office with a job as a CEO, do nothing board member, consultant, or lobbyist.

For at least the last thirty years, we have not treated the wealthy in this country as citizens but as Greek gods who we must not offend lest they withhold their bounty of jobs and prosperity. We have allowed them to tell our supposed representatives in Washington how to run our economy and foreign policy and they have obeyed to the least jot and tittle.

Our elected officials have become so servile that when Wall Street demand $700 billion dollars with no strings attached, an amount greater than we have spent on the Iraq War so far, and greater than the entire federal budget just a few years ago, Congress scrambled to give it to them as quickly as possible and they saw no irony when some talked a few weeks later about cutting the budget for programs that help the rest of us.

The results of this worship of the already rich is that the wealthy have become exponentially wealthy, the middle class is become poorer and the working class, apart from a few skilled workers, is being left without a way to make enough money to keep a roof over their heads and food on their table. Our tax money goes to the pockets of the wealthy, and then they lecture us about how irresponsible we and our government are for running up so much debt.

And when the profits from our labor and subsidies from our tax dollars aren't filling their pockets fast enough, they demand our children go to war and die to seize more oil or keep banana pickers in Central America from demanding a decent wage.

So it is time to stop saying to the rest of us, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," and time to not ask but REQUIRE this of the wealthy.

We must say to the wealthy:

The middle and working class don't want to steal your wealth--we even like to imagine we are one invention, novel, business or lottery ticket away from becoming one of you. We simply want you to stop being crybabies, pay your fair share of taxes, treat every employee as if they were your own child, and every community where you build a factory as if it was your own neighborhood.

If that doesn't register with you, imagine that all your investments were with Bernie Madoff and his ilk, and you were kicked out of the country club, the board room, and your house. Have you created an America where you could build that wealth again through hard work or could you even survive?

GRAPHIC: Who is redistributing wealth?

The latest right wing talking point is that Barack Obama wants to redistribute wealth.

You would think the right would want to steer away from that issue since for the last thirty years at least, they have done everything possible to redistribute wealth UPWARD.

While worker productivity and corporate profits have gone up, and CEO salaries have gone up exponentially, wages for most of us have remained flat or even declined.

Conservatives try to squirm away from a basic economic truth: it's not just capital that creates wealth, but labor does too. And one of the ways a business makes a profit is paying you less for your labor than it is worth (if they paid you exactly what it was worth, they would break even).

It seems like basic fairness that wages would at least keep pace with productivity and profits.

As it says in the Bible,

For it is written in the Law of Moses: "Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain." Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn't he? Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest.

(1 Corinthians 9)

I guess this is a part of the Bible "God's Own Party" missed.

click to see full-sized:

From The New York Times based on Federal Reserve data:




In 1984, George Orwell had a creepy explanation for why this income inequality persists.

Gallup poll: Financial "elitist" is McCain

A favorite dig of the now defunct Hillary campaign and likely of McCain's once Karl Rove kicks into high gear is that Obama is some kind of elitist.

However, John McCain is the one with the back of the financial elite according to this Gallup poll, and Obama has the lead with people struggling to make ends meet.

MORE GALLUP ANALYSIS OF OBAMA VS. McCAIN

People must be figuring out that the GOP is the party of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. For all their talk of family values, patriotism, and religion, they would send your job to Bangladesh in a heartbeat, and if you are lucky enough to keep a job, they'll rob your paycheck by not regulating health insurance companies or checking the power of oil companies to jack up gas prices.

The evidence is pretty clear if you look at after tax income in the last couple of decades we have been guided by Republican economics:



The Republicans love the wealthy like their own family, and love the rest of us the way a lion loves a gazelle.

ORWELL's 1984: War economy exists to prevent equality and democracy

I heard Tim Robbins reading this on the Randi Rhodes Show, and it struck me as profoundly true and sad.

Ironically, by choosing George W. Bush to be their public face, the wealthy did more to destroy the myth that they are somehow morally or even intellectually superior than any progressive, commie, anarchist, or nonpartisan curmudgeon ever could.

1984 excerpt

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

1984