Here's the thing, rich people: you've been running the country for your benefit, not ours - to the point where the entire fucking system is now coming unglued. You have warred and underpaid and cripple-em-with-debt-ed your way into a big fucking crisis, and all I have to say to you is:
SCREW YOU.
In the last 30 years, your compensation has increased to the point where you are making hundreds of times what your average employee is making. I'm sorry, but you don't work 300 times as hard as I do, you don't experience 300 times the stress I do (want stress? Try getting by on what I'm making some time - it'll be not just "fire the nanny" but "kids, we'll be eating spam for the rest of the month.")
When was the last time you were out of money? And not, stuck in Paris in the summer after college and waiting for mommy and daddy to wire more money, but more like the following situation:
Money in checking account: $8.23
Money in Savings account: $36.18
Days til payday: 8
Proportion of that paycheck that will go to rent: 90%
Proportion of the post-rent remainder of your check needed to buy food until your mid-month paycheck: 108%
Reaction: "Oh, fuck."
That's spelled S-U-F-F-E-R-I-N-G, and millions and millions and millions of people are experiencing it, not just now, but for fucking YEARS because of what you have done and what you have failed to do.
To the politicians who are too afraid to stand up to this corrupt, wicked bunch:
FUCK YOU TOO.
What is so damned hard to figure out about our situation?
We need to organize the working poor into unions who will fight to raise their poverty wages; we need to re-industrialize the economy so that we're taking raw materials and using them to create things of real value and can afford to pay good wages, as opposed to an economy based on hallucinatory "returns" on financial instruments based on abstractions of other financial instruments.
We need living wage laws, and a real, functioning social service system. Government-provided, free daycare for anyone who needs it. Single-payer healthcare. Mixed-use development that is aimed at creating communities with a mix of incomes, rather than a population divided into either "exclusive" communities or slums. Geographically dividing the upper middle class and above from the poor is a good way to destroy the social fabric of a country.
We need a tax system that rewards work, but in which wealthy people pay a higher and higher price for each incremental increase of income, and that pays support to poorer folks in larger amounts as you go down the wage ladder.
We need to support small farmers with crop subsidies and cash supplements to their incomes, while providing incentives to use their land wisely, especially incentives to grow their crops as near to pure-organic as is practicable.
We need more taxes, especially on the rich. Way more taxes. Why is the media treating the huge deficits in California and the federal government as great big, gee-what-can-we-do mysteries?? You either need to:
1. Cut services (which will cause already suffering people's lives to become constant, desperate emergencies, which in turn will result in lots of social unrest and eventually, if it gets bad enough, armed revolution) OR
2. Raise taxes substantially on people who can afford to pay more, which will result in lots of huffing and puffing from the Limbaugh and business right (but I repeat myself), and if it gets bad enough, ridiculous, badly written polemical crypto-fascist novels featuring characters named "John Galt".
All of this would seem to be obvious to me, but that's only because I'm barely getting by.
Too many people call themselves lefties because they drive Priuses, are pro-choice and treat the nanny like a member of the family. Methinks they need a reminder of what real, actual leftism looks like.
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