More ruminations, rambles, rants and raves from the downhill side of the mountain.
Just so you know exactly where I stand vis-a-vis today's polarized politics, let me recommend this organization to you.
And I also recommend my gentle employer to you as well. The Barnes & Noble Affiliate Network, which seemed to have stopped working, is back in operation, so the links and banners are working again.
Now, go buy some books.
And I also recommend my gentle employer to you as well. The Barnes & Noble Affiliate Network, which seemed to have stopped working, is back in operation, so the links and banners are working again.
Now, go buy some books.
Links:
Fox Den: Creative (i.e. Fiction)Writing
A Pilgrim's Progress
Ian's Knowledge Modelling Weblog
Future Scan: Future Studies Department University of Houston at Clear Lake
PLSJ (aka Anne, the Anthropologist)
link
Lost in Transit
link
Coffee Grounds
Traveling in Style
Slacktivist Recommended with a bullet!
Hoofin To You: Bridgewater, NJ politics
Inadmissible Evidence
Big Black Van
Overflow
In Spite of Years of Silence
Metamorphosism (Mig's new blog)
Real Live Preacher
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
Alas, A Blog
A Fistful of Euros
BuzzMachine
Eschaton
Pedantry
The Poor Man
Barefoot and Naked
Boing Boing
Craigblog
Fafglob
The Road to Surfdom
link
E-Mail Me
My Other Blogs, Journals and such
Fox Den: Creative (i.e. Fiction)Writing
A Pilgrim's Progress
Business/Economics/Future Studies and other Social Sciences
Ian's Knowledge Modelling Weblog
Future Scan: Future Studies Department University of Houston at Clear Lake
PLSJ (aka Anne, the Anthropologist)
link
International
Lost in Transit
link
New Jersey New York Pennsylvania and Delaware
Coffee Grounds
Traveling in Style
Slacktivist Recommended with a bullet!
Hoofin To You: Bridgewater, NJ politics
Inadmissible Evidence
Personal/General
Big Black Van
Overflow
In Spite of Years of Silence
Metamorphosism (Mig's new blog)
Real Live Preacher
Blogs with Attitude
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
Alas, A Blog
A Fistful of Euros
BuzzMachine
Eschaton
Pedantry
The Poor Man
Barefoot and Naked
Boing Boing
Craigblog
Fafglob
The Road to Surfdom
link
E-Mail Me
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And finally, here are a few books I might recommend for your edification and amazement.
What's the Matter with Kansas?
Monday, October 28, 2002
A couple days ago, BtC was complaining that the Democrat Governor of New Jersey was trying to steal her long inactive savings account. I posted a comment to the effect that it wasn't that Democrats wanted to steal money from citizens, it was that 1)Christy Whitman had raided the treasury and left the state in a bad financial hole, 2) the recession had further cut into the revenues the state depends upon to do its job and 3) this was a ploy that any politician of any stripe would find irresistable. BtC replied that my response was a perfect example of how Democrats think and that only a Democrat would have tried to close out inactive bank accounts and have those funds revert to the state. The following is in response to that comment.
The cult of Me, also known as "gimme mine and fuck the rest of you" is beginning to wear thin. I don't know about the rest of you out there, but from my vantage point the quality of life in New Jersey and lots of the rest of the country has not improved over the past 30 years. And it is not because of the politicians. It's because the size of the pie we're all supposed to be sharing is shrinking in relative terms. There are more of us to share that pie, and the very rich are cutting a bigger slice of the pie for themselves...which means more of us have to compete for less and less.
This conservative cant of "I can spend my money better" is, frankly, at best disingenuous and, at worst, an attack on the foundations of this nation. The fact is that private, individual citizens cannot provide the infrastructure that a modern society requires if it is to function. I don't think anyone of us is going to go out and build new hospitals, new roads, new sewers, new water mains, figure out where all our garbage is going to go,...the list goes on and on. Providing those services and those facilities is the job of government.
The real crux of the matter is that we are not in this alone: we are in it together. We, individually, have a compact with all our fellow citizens which says that we will do what is necessary to make this country, this democratic republic, work. Sure, we compete for things, but, when push comes to shove, we all need to contribute something to the common weal. Our founding documents state that we are a polity of equals. Which is cool in its idealism, but we all know that, in reality, we aren't really. The thing is, this is the ideal and it is what we are supposed to aspire to. We may not even get close a lot of the time, but we are supposed to keep on trying.
This, however, is not what the conservative right tells us. The conservative right tells us that we are not in this together and that the ideal is to look out for #1 first. What the conservative right doesn't say is that it is the political arm of the very rich: the plutocrats. What the conservative right doesn't tell us is that this cant does not really benefit the middle class. It does not tell us that, in fact, this outlook, and the policies it engenders, are the true cause behind the erosion of the middle class.
The lady who writes BtC is not a bad person. In fact, I quite like the person revealed by her posts. She is simply scared. She is watching her life become less than she had been told to expect when she was a kid. And she is looking for someone to blame for this. The insanely rich can afford to pay for the propoganda and disinformation that plays precisely to those fears. The two biggest coups in this area recently have been "compassionate conservatism" and the need to repeal the estate tax. The former is a pure oxymoron and the latter is an exercise in selling binoculars to the blind. (The most recent estimates I have seen are that only about 2% of all estates are subject to current Federal estate taxes. And we all agree that it is truly smart to concentrate more and more of our economic pie into fewer and fewer hands. Right?)
Damn...the more I write on this, the more I find I have to say. This is enough for this post. I'll continue with this subject tomorrow...or later tonight...I have to do some organizing and some research first, though. So, please don't moan to me about how the data backing my argument is not here. I'm just getting started.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005
