A Christmas Message From America’s Rich
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/a-christmas-message-from-americas-rich-20111222
I like this guy Matt alot. He doesn’t post as much as Glenn does, but I find his writing style quite direct and to the point. For instance:
What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.
Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.
But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.
I read something else today that said what is lacking in our oligarchy is shame. The total lack of shame allows these people to steal candy from babies mouths and then, like this article details, brag about it while complaining about the baby’s cries.
It isn’t that all the rich and powerful are useless parasites on our society, it is that so many of the rich and powerful are it is hard to generate the enthusiasm to sort them all out and makes one want to get rid of all of them. Unfortunately, I think a reaction (if it ever comes, I don’t think the sheeple will actually rise up) will tar too many of the beneficial rich and powerful and we could easily sink into a generation or more of idiocy (see the Cultural Revolution and a dewd named Mao).
