It's as American as apple pie. "Let's drink to the hardworking people. Let's drink to the salt of the earth."
We like the underdog. I have a stronger tendency than most to root for the underdog. All it took was bootstrapping myself out of my toxic family situation and being a Red Sox fan for years.
Rant Warning
I said I wasn't going to talk about politics, and I'm not going to get into party politics, but at some level any public issue is political.
I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street with some interest. Back in the day I did a little demonstration time myself. While I get decidedly uncomfortable with some of the crazies that such events attract, this "movement," as it is beginning to be called, has more of a focus than some media would care to admit. Our local alternative paper published this link: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
You might check it out. Some very interesting charts.
Another place to do a little research is on the SEC EDGAR website. You can read the annual corporate filings called 10-Ks. Pick a couple of random large coporations and when you are in the document search "executive compensation." What you find will make you ill or at least throw up your hands in despair. The provision for golden parachutes and the like pay out in the event of almost any termination, with the possible exception of criminal indictment, and pay out handsomely. Unlike the employee who don't get a raise unless they perform, the standards for executives is completely different--entitlement on a grand scale. Can you say "Let's loot this place and screw the little guy?"
Truth is while I am by no means wealthy, having been a wage slave most of my life, I am better off that the bulk of the 99%. I suspect our income even reduced as it is by my semi-retirement may be in the top third or quartile. I am one of those who almost made it to the "promised land" offered by America's so-called social mobility. I also still buy a lottery ticket every so often.
"The rich get richer" hasn't been truer since the Gilded Age, and there's no Teddy Roosevelt in sight. And some spend their energy trying to scare us about the bugaboos of big government and taxes when the really big dogs on the block are the Corporations which are now free to outright own Congress. Not that corporations are necessarily bad. I've worked for at least a couple that could be termed positively enlightened.
But the magician's sleight of hand has us focused on the ideological dialogue and how taxes are "stealing" and that any questioning of the way things are is "class warfare," and so on. Any suggestion that the tax burden should be distributed differently is met with cries of "socialism" and rants against "social engineering." I haven't quite gotten yet how DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and "nation building" after at least one war we maybe should not have started in the first place isn't "social engineering" on a grand scale. But I guess maybe my "social values" is your "social engineering," and vice versa.
I keep wondering where all that "job creation" is that certain tax cuts were supposed to help promote. I keep wondering how the same people that trashed a lot of value in my retirement savings got a bailout AND huge bonuses.
I wouldn't want to be rearing children now. My parents could say with some truth that this was the land of opportunity, and that I would be better off than they were. I'm not so sure that my children can say that to theirs.
I grew up going to public school. I went to good ones and bad ones, twelve of them, and managed to get a fairly decent education. Of course at the time there were whole classes of people excluded from that system by race or being differently abled, but the experience and the quality of it seems different now from what I can see, and I think we all lose something because of that. I remember being at a university alumni luncheon where everyone was talking about the community they moved to in order to have their children in good schools, or the private school their young scholar attended. I made myself quite popular by saying something to the effect that "don't we all have a stake in a good public school system." (Please note the sarcasm.)
The so-called 99% are upset partly because the thing that extreme wealth confers is the ability to stack the deck in favor of themselves and their issue. They have access denied to the rest of us. As long as there was a chance that mobility could take us there, most folks probably didn't begrudge this. But the game of Three Card Monte is just about over and the illusion of mobility is wearing thin.
Maybe it never was a society based on fair play, but we thought it was. It's how we got sold the American Dream.
I've lived it and gotten a piece or two, but I think the door is closing. Something is broken and I, for one, see nothing on the horizon, that offers a hope of fixing it.
Sorry if this one seems so bleak.
We like the underdog. I have a stronger tendency than most to root for the underdog. All it took was bootstrapping myself out of my toxic family situation and being a Red Sox fan for years.
Rant Warning
I said I wasn't going to talk about politics, and I'm not going to get into party politics, but at some level any public issue is political.
I've been watching the Occupy Wall Street with some interest. Back in the day I did a little demonstration time myself. While I get decidedly uncomfortable with some of the crazies that such events attract, this "movement," as it is beginning to be called, has more of a focus than some media would care to admit. Our local alternative paper published this link: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
You might check it out. Some very interesting charts.
Another place to do a little research is on the SEC EDGAR website. You can read the annual corporate filings called 10-Ks. Pick a couple of random large coporations and when you are in the document search "executive compensation." What you find will make you ill or at least throw up your hands in despair. The provision for golden parachutes and the like pay out in the event of almost any termination, with the possible exception of criminal indictment, and pay out handsomely. Unlike the employee who don't get a raise unless they perform, the standards for executives is completely different--entitlement on a grand scale. Can you say "Let's loot this place and screw the little guy?"
Truth is while I am by no means wealthy, having been a wage slave most of my life, I am better off that the bulk of the 99%. I suspect our income even reduced as it is by my semi-retirement may be in the top third or quartile. I am one of those who almost made it to the "promised land" offered by America's so-called social mobility. I also still buy a lottery ticket every so often.
"The rich get richer" hasn't been truer since the Gilded Age, and there's no Teddy Roosevelt in sight. And some spend their energy trying to scare us about the bugaboos of big government and taxes when the really big dogs on the block are the Corporations which are now free to outright own Congress. Not that corporations are necessarily bad. I've worked for at least a couple that could be termed positively enlightened.
But the magician's sleight of hand has us focused on the ideological dialogue and how taxes are "stealing" and that any questioning of the way things are is "class warfare," and so on. Any suggestion that the tax burden should be distributed differently is met with cries of "socialism" and rants against "social engineering." I haven't quite gotten yet how DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and "nation building" after at least one war we maybe should not have started in the first place isn't "social engineering" on a grand scale. But I guess maybe my "social values" is your "social engineering," and vice versa.
I keep wondering where all that "job creation" is that certain tax cuts were supposed to help promote. I keep wondering how the same people that trashed a lot of value in my retirement savings got a bailout AND huge bonuses.
I wouldn't want to be rearing children now. My parents could say with some truth that this was the land of opportunity, and that I would be better off than they were. I'm not so sure that my children can say that to theirs.
I grew up going to public school. I went to good ones and bad ones, twelve of them, and managed to get a fairly decent education. Of course at the time there were whole classes of people excluded from that system by race or being differently abled, but the experience and the quality of it seems different now from what I can see, and I think we all lose something because of that. I remember being at a university alumni luncheon where everyone was talking about the community they moved to in order to have their children in good schools, or the private school their young scholar attended. I made myself quite popular by saying something to the effect that "don't we all have a stake in a good public school system." (Please note the sarcasm.)
The so-called 99% are upset partly because the thing that extreme wealth confers is the ability to stack the deck in favor of themselves and their issue. They have access denied to the rest of us. As long as there was a chance that mobility could take us there, most folks probably didn't begrudge this. But the game of Three Card Monte is just about over and the illusion of mobility is wearing thin.
Maybe it never was a society based on fair play, but we thought it was. It's how we got sold the American Dream.
I've lived it and gotten a piece or two, but I think the door is closing. Something is broken and I, for one, see nothing on the horizon, that offers a hope of fixing it.
Sorry if this one seems so bleak.
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