Where The Rubber Meets The Road

I hear it all too often: “What’s wrong with making money?!?”

Of course, this little bit of misdirection is usually delivered in an angry tone by someone who is oblivious to the nonsensical non sequitur it is. Whenever the argument is made that perhaps those who have benefited greatly from the past 30 years of deregulation, massive decrease in taxation, massive public subsidy, criminal refusal to enforce laws protecting labor, the environment, public interest – you get the idea; you’ll be treated to a rousing chorus of that dogmatic propaganda line so inextricably driven into the public consciousness:

“What’s wrong with making money?”

As if (insert any of the following: a national health care plan, tax cuts or subsidies or services or any help whatsoever for the poor, returning taxes on the superwealthy to a minute fraction of their pre-Reaganomics levels, etc) has any effect on the Working Joe who so vigorously defends the very people who keep him poor and wretched – save possibly a positive one.

So, listen, Working Joe: There’s nothing wrong with you making money. But then, you are not a global corporate CEO with a multimillion dollar golden parachute, who feeds off the public trough.

Yes, that’s right, the public trough. You see, we pay taxes, and that money is funneled into research and development in the state/Pentagon system. This R&D eventually produces technological breakthroughs, which then the public again pays private institutions to apply in the marketplace (which, not incidentally, is full of even more subsidies, tax breaks, and protections, all at the expense of guess who), with all the profit channeled back into those private corporations, further enriching the superwealthy.

What’s wrong with making money? The wrong people are making it. You pay in, and someone else gets richer. Isn’t that your whole objection to welfare? Because that’s what it is: welfare for those who couldn’t possibly need it less.

Nobody’s asking for redistribution of wealth, class warfare, or any of the other buzz phrases kicked out by the monumental public “relations” machine that greases the gears of the monumental high-tech feudalism machine. At best, it’s a re-redistribution of wealth, where in the people (that means you) are allowed to reap a tiny measure of benefit for all the money they give to that fragile, teetering-on-the-edge, barely-making-ends-meet class known as The Top 1%.

Turn Faux News back on and get fed another line of propaganda; yours is getting old.

More so than any election I can remember, the 2008 Presidential race exhausted the public’s interest in politics. I know I took a break from sifting through the mountains of total horseshit being spewed by both sides (and their shills), even if I kept up with major happenings.

So it was a novelty when I flipped through the talk radio stations, listening to hacks thump their mics with clumsy talking points, until I overhead this next bit on The Thom Hartmann Show:

To be fair to Mr. Hartmann, he wasn’t exactly agreeing with his guest. But he was far from the contemptuous denunciation said guest deserved. Apparently an apologist for the coal industry, the guest listened patiently to Thom Hartmann’s citation of evidence that burning coal has a negative effect on the environment, and mentioned that the polar ice caps were melting faster than ever. His guest replied that other scientists have claimed otherwise, and in fact, we may be headed for a cooling period should we decide to “go green”.

Really? Really?!?

Are you really suggesting that if we stop burning coal, we’ll hurt the environment? Do you understand that you’re actually saying these words out loud, and people can hear them?
Listen, lady, this is our very survival as a species we’re talking about, not some cute fucking game of public opinion. You don’t spin environmental disaster, and you don’t play chicken with Mother Nature, because Mother Nature doesn’t flinch. She drives a mailbox through your cranium, and drowns your whole fucking family, and if you don’t believe me, ask the city of New Orleans.
If you’re so lacking any semblance of a survival instinct, just scrub your molars with buckshot and get it over with.

These are the moments that fill the foundation of hate upon which I stand and shake an enraged and impotent finger at corporate America.