Why don't we all quit being so servile?

1. 66

   Ralph Deedsposted 13 years ago

   http://www.harpers.org/media/pages/2011 … 083267.pdf
   
   Servile Disobedience by Thomas Frank
   
   ..."All of which is to say, The rich are
   different from you and me. They are
   ruder and less generous. They don’t get
   what others are thinking. And apparently
   they don’t really care.
   If you stop and think about it for
   a second, you understand that all of
   this makes sense. People don’t craft
   poisoned collateralized debt obligations
   by calling on what they
   learned in Sunday school....
   
   "After all, we have
   spent the past thirty years doing everything
   we could to transfer the
   wealth of the nation into the bank
   accounts of the affl uent, to send them
   victorious, happy and glorious, long to
   reign over us.
   
   Oh, we’ve cut their taxes, gladly
   transferring much of the cost of keeping
   their holdings safe onto our own
   shoulders. We’ve furnished them with
   special megaphones so that their voices
   might be heard over the hubbub of
   the crowd. We have conferred upon
   them separate and better schools,
   their very own transportation system,
   and a full complement of private security
   guards. We’ve built an entire culture
   of courtiers and sycophants to
   make their every waking hour an otherworldly
   delight.
   
   "We let them build a system of bonuses
   and “executive compensation”
   on the theory that it would be good
   for everyone if the people on top got
   to take home much, much more. And
   when it turned out that the theory
   was wrong—that in the most famous
   cases the rich chased bonuses not to
   the shareholders’ benefi t but at their
   expense—why, we promptly bailed
   them out. We allowed them to step
   up to the Fed’s discount window and
   fi ll their pockets, we generously transferred
   their dumb investments to our
   balance sheet, and we sent them off
   with little more than a request that
   they please not do it again. We’ve
   done everything we can to lift them
   up and exalt them as a new leviathan;
   the least they can do in return, one
   feels, is show a little empathy.
   
   Besides, look what we’ve done with
   the old leviathan, the government. For
   decades we have attacked it, redirected
   it, outsourced it, and fi lled it with incompetents
   and cronies. Yes, it still
   works well enough when we need it to
   replenish the accounts of investment
   banks or bang some small country
   against a wall, but those branches of it
   designed to help out Americans of
   “lower socioeconomic status,” as the
   scientists would put it, are now bare.
   The government fails the people of
   New Orleans when they are hit by a
   hurricane, fails to notice the cadmium
   paint in the marketplace, does a lousy
   job educating our kids, can’t keep the
   libraries open or the park lawns mowed,
   overlooks the catastrophic shortcuts
   taken by its pals in the oil-drilling
   industry—and all we can do to express
   our frustration is elect candidates who
   promise to hack it down even more.
   We need the rich to be nice. We
   need them to stop doodling, pay attention,
   and get generous. Now that
   the government has divested from
   the empathy business, we need the
   rich to discover brotherly
   love, and fast. More:
   http://www.harpers.org/media/pages/2011 … 083267.pdf

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2. 77

   barrancaposted 13 years ago

   The links to Harpers don't work without registering.  I disagree with the monolithic judgment about wealthy people.  They are as varied in their lives and generosity as any other class of people.  I agree that the system has been extraordinarily stacked in their favor for the last few decades, but not every rich person or perhaps even most rich people have been party to this development in American society.  Many like Warren Buffet decry this state of affairs and go on to give away the bulk of their wealth.

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   1. 66

      Ralph Deedsposted 13 years agoin reply to this

      "They are as varied in their lives and generosity as any other class of people."
      
      True. On the one hand there's Buffett and Gates and on the other the Banksters of Wall Street and the oil billionaire brothers Koch.

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3. 75

   lovemychrisposted 13 years ago

   Yes, anyone who can't see this is not wanting to!!!
   
   They constantly harangue about the gvt, but it's gvt policies since Reagan that have favored the upper incomes and allowed them to flourish so well....on our backs!
   
   The economic disparity says it all. And if they make those tax-cuts permanent, we are finished as anywhat of a civil society.

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