QuickyPinion: Warped Socialism for the Wealthy

American citizens keep getting bombarded with smear attacks on socialism. Yet, we live in a country of warped socialism for the wealthy. The very oligarchs who smear real socialism for the people as something that doesn’t work are the ones who receive all the benefits of a socialism for the rich. They are the ones who get enormous freebies from the government and can count on being bailed out by the government if things don’t go well for them.

The very definition of socialism is a socially responsible system of an economy and politics made possible through law and government, the latter often having to come in and help out people at times of need. The goal: everybody receives based on their needs rather than on how much they can pay for in a highly unequal wealth distribution. Instead of this we currently have socialism for the rich, a government and set of laws which almost exclusively helps them at extreme expense for the rest of us.

The rich get huge gifts from our government (like cheap lands and subsidies for their corporations even as they move U.S. jobs abroad or replace working people with machines). They get those even though they are the least needy for financial help (being rich already, after all). These gifts are financed by cutting services to working class Americans who often desperately need them. The gifts to the rich also include tax loopholes and tax breaks. The rich and their corporations get tax havens abroad while working U.S.-citizens get taxed or even hit with ruinous fees by the IRS, treasury, and state tax agencies when they work and live abroad (except when the foreign taxes exceed their U.S. taxes in which case double-taxation protection treaties can come into effect; but costly tax filings are still demanded). And when banks or businesses of the rich fail, they get bail-outs.

These are examples of the unequal treatment of the rich (boost, safeguard, help them in any way, and turn their policy suggestions into law) and the rest of us (tax us, fine us, hold us back, harass us, deny us aid, make false promises, cut our wages and benefits, and ignore our wishes).

So… a gouging capitalism for “ordinary” Americans is combined with a warped parody of socialism for the rich giving them subsidies, gifts, bail-outs, monopoly protections, and tax loopholes while more and more of the rest of us drown in poverty.

 

And if this article was too short for you, there is a great read that came out this Tuesday on The Revolution Continues, reminding me of why I have so long loathed Halloween, telling us how to check up on the toxic tap water we may have flowing at home…

 

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QuickyPinion: Restoring the Rule of Law

Some people clamor for that. (unclear whether they are referring to actual law breaking like election theft, to human rights and constitution violations by institutions or lawmakers, or simply to Trumpmania)

Many people think that a rule of law is the answer to every problem.

One warning:

Law is not automatically good. The rule of law is only good when the law is fair and benign.  

QuickyPinion: “Conservatives” aren’t Conservative

By definition, true conservatives would uphold the principles of our nation’s founders. Republican puppeteers and their puppets, however, have taken over the “conservative” brand and stood it on its head. Instead of defending our founding principles, they defend capitalism and corporations which have undone our founder’s goals and their seeds of democracy. They slander and smear socialism which actually reflects our founders’ ideas of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the general welfare; and so forth. Their religious cultist wing has even twisted the Christian love-thy-neighbour-as-thyself principle into hate-preaching against minorities and justifying corporate rule by divine right. Just as the “liberals” have been taken over by neoliberals (A.K.A. money-aristocracy-serving corporatists), “conservatives” have been taken over by neocons (A.K.A. money-aristocracy-serving corporatists).

This is what happens when people identify themselves with labels and parties and let scheming goons redefine their labels right under their noses and then wash their brains to fit the altered label.

By the way, if you missed yesterday’s well-crafted article because of it’s odd headline, you should give it a try. It delves into the creed that makes our country rotten to the core.

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Equality of Means, not “Opportunities”

What we need is not the neoliberally toted equality of opportunity, but an equality of means!!! The word opportunity can be interpreted in quite unequal ways, turning the equality of opportunity mantra into a trick to scam people into accepting gross disparity in real living conditions. The remote opportunity of the rags-to-riches legend which hardly ever turns into reality for anyone (and usually only by harming others in the process) compares poorly with what I would call a means equality. Considering the vast difference in life’s starting conditions between upper class privilege and lower class deprivation, the claim of having equality of opportunity becomes a sarcastic joke. Furthermore, when someone falls down on their luck, should we have no compassion whatsoever and deny any help based on the sociopathic idea of everybody being responsible only for themselves?  

Quick Analysis: Preemptive vs Retroactive Welfare

Carrying the water from a far-away river to a thirsty city in buckets is a herculean task, one resembling many of the last century’s and current welfare approaches to alleviating poverty. Besides being herculean and inefficient, it is never-ending on top of it.

Redirecting the river to the city or building a pipeline is far smarter and far less herculean. We have been raised to believe in a market economy that accomplishes everything by itself. In reality, markets operate by rules, rules written into law and enforced by governments. We merely need to modify those rules so the modified economy will work for everybody instead of merely a privileged few. Thus it will stop to grow inequality and instead start creating (and fairly distributing!) prosperity for all. Thereby we would finally accomplish the goal chiseled into the famous Preamble of our Constitution by our nations’ founders: namely to “promote the general Welfare.”

For the longest time, we have had a system that produces vast inequality by design. With the New Deal we got the government to arduously shovel some of the lopsidedly hoarded prosperity back (through steeply progressive income taxes, for example), year after year, month after month, and against a growing resistance from the top. It’s like the old movie scene of two guys digging two holes throwing the dirt back and forth into each other’s hole. Modifying the rules of the system so it does what we all need and want is a far smarter approach. That requires that we put our heads together though. I hope that’s not too herculean. It’s why I keep writing and inviting everyone to comment, discuss, contribute their own pieces, and share the instructive pieces widely.

Summary: Prevention is always better than the cure. That’s also true in matters of gross inequality and poverty.

P.S.: One of the articles in which I went into some detail on a better economic arrangement – in case you missed it and are curious – was What if We Were Paid for Work in Assets rather than Ephemeral Wages?

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QuickyPinion: The Democratic Party Trap and Outside Pressure

We want change. We badly need change. Tea Partiers tried to make change happen from within the Republican Party, and right now people try to make it happen from within the “Democratic” Party and consider other approaches (like forming a new party or building up existing third parties) as a competition that weakens their own inside strategy.

What this stance overlooks is that, as long as the Democratic Party can rest assured that progressive/working class/leftist/Black/etc. voters have nowhere else to go, its party bosses will continue as before, unimpressed by any inside takeover attempts which they can squelch as long as they can count on sufficient votes. In the end, they don’t even need to win elections, since their deep pocket Big Money donors will gladly continue to dowse them with money for enabling their Republican buddies.  

Quickypinion: Impeach Trump for Russian Collusion – Really? Why?

Even if evidence should show up and not be fabricated or exaggerated, I simply don’t see the significance. Practically all the people in high legislative, executive (and even many judicial) positions are rich thugs or in the pockets of rich thugs. We have to replace them all with honest representatives of us, the people. As long as we are ruled by bandits, swapping one bandit with another won’t make any difference. Nor do bandits with foreign passports make a difference.

Our home-made election rigging far outdoes what some remote Russians could do. This makes Russiagate, whether it is factual or not, a very marginal issue. (and maybe, just maybe, if we are so concerned about foreign meddling, we should find it in ourselves to take a look at the much more substantiated and much bigger financial support of the Clinton campaign machine by Saudi-Arabia in exchange for a shady arms sale to one of the world’s worst dictatorships)

Once we repair our broken democracy, then we can worry about foreign meddling; although I suspect that by then we will have a democracy so secured against domestic meddling that it will be quite immune against foreign meddling.

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The United States has been quietly providing weapons and support to Saudi Arabia’s brutal military campaign in Yemen – driving more than 8 million civilians to the brink of famine, if death by bombs and cholera doesn’t get them first. You can sign the petition urging the Senate to pass Bernie’s resolution to end U.S. support for this international war crime.

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Quickypinion: Is Government the Problem?

Government is the problem only when it is controlled by the 1% instead of the people. ~ Dirk  Droll

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Quickyinsight: Our Imperial Oligarchy (with video)

Michael Parenti has deep insights to share. On the downside, his speeches can be of a rambling nature (probably because of Academic privilege). This one is quite well done, though. It’s slightly on the old side (from the Bush-Chenery era), but it nicely illustrates the imperial nature of our oligarchy. We are far less removed from the slave-holding Roman empire, or the feudal empires that followed it, than we tend to think:

FSTV Keynote: Michael Parenti

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “FSTV Keynote: Michael Parenti “)

The nicest spot starts at 29:00 min into the speech.

Mentality of the oligarchs (slightly reworded): In their view, our country should be run by and FOR the rich and well-born. They completely believe they are deserving of their station in life (and we of our dreadful station). As has been said, G.W. Bush was born on third base and grew up thinking he had hit a triple. They believe that America should lead the world, and that they should lead America. They believe that the poor are the authors of their poverty and that we – the working class / middle class – are a troublesome lot that needs to be reined in. They believe that we have to ratchet down our standard of living and level of expectations a lot more so that the people at the top can get even richer than they already are by diverting more wealth to them.

Conclusion (by Michael Parenti or someone he is quoting): There’s only one thing ruling classes have ever wanted throughout all of history, and that’s everything(!).

This is so well said, I don’t want to dilute it with additional commentary. Just let the above sink in.

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Quickypinion: Why and How Working People Must Revolt

The robber billionaires don’t work for their living. They have us work for their living and for their obscene riches and the power these riches give them over us — both at the workplace which they control directly and our government which they buy away from us. As they stake out ever more of our world, our lives get ever worse. We work harder and harder for less and less. Our revolutionary task is to wrestle the government back into our side of the court (since it is the major weapon we can wield) and then cut the floor from underneath the robber billionaires’ wealth-based power by altering our political and economic rules, so we can then arrange our country (including its economy) the way we want it to be: a place for a free us, not a place for modern-day kings and queens surrounded and propped up by a horde of struggling wage slaves and discarded slum dwellers.

 

Related recent posts:

1. Stock Market Up, Economy Down
2. Inequality for All (BM, RR, & DD)

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