"There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump
of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that, because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in
the winter, things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I
can't see it that way."
-- Bat Masterson
Stuart Carlson, with a cartoon that may (or may not) have been inspired by this video that has been going the rounds.
Six minutes that say a lot. Go ahead and watch and I'll keep today's entry short so that, like Masterson's rich man and poor man, it'll come out even for you in the end. And, if you've already seen it, you're that much ahead on the day:
You don't have to be a socialist to see that this is not a good thing.
Maybe you have to be a socialist to consider it "wrong," but, then, if that's all it takes to be a socialist, Jesus was a socialist and so were his apostles:
And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in
their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts
-- Acts 2, 44-46
But even if you think Jesus was a commie, it's foolish to burn out your workforce. It's poor strategy to eat your seed corn, assuming, that is, that you have the longterm good of the economy, and of the nation, in mind.
Which was a silly thing for me to assume.
I've said it before: Nothing matters to the Wall Street crowd beyond the next quarter. At the top, the system is based on the idea of boosting the numbers and then cashing out before the house of cards collapses.
And things seem rigged in their favor, despite their cries of being thrown into the briar patch, as Nick Anderson observes:
Clay Bennett adds a little more bite to the current headlines:
So the question becomes, why aren't we out in the streets?
The last time things got this out of proportion, Theodore Roosevelt stepped in with progressive reforms, not simply to aid the less fortunate but to forestall Bolshevik unrest.
But there aren't a lot of rich folks like TR around these days, or, at least, they don't seem to aspire to that kind of power.
Roosevelt spent a lot of time in the woods and out on the plains, and, though from a wealthy family, he preferred to surround himself with people who worked for a living. We have plutocrats who play at that -- chopping wood and cutting brush on their estates before retiring for sherry in the lounge and leaving the rest to the groundskeepers -- but TR was the real deal, and part of his acceptance among the guides and the cowpunchers was his willingness to both laugh at himself as the city boy, but also to endure the discomfort of the trail alongside them.
His like will not be seen again, and it should be remembered that he was only put up for vice-president because the power brokers wanted to stash him away in a position where his crazy notions of fair play and reform would not interfere with the work of their Robber Baron supporters.
And then Leon Czolgosz screwed it all up. As Senator Mark Hanna -- one of the Gilded Age's most shameless powerbrokers -- so eloquently put it upon McKinley's death, "Good Lord, that God damned cowboy is President of the United States!"
We're not going to get that lucky a second time. That's one stove lid the fat cats will never sit on again.
But speaking of luck, our All-American belief in that, and in fairy tales, along with our All-American lack of math skills, does factor into the matter.
I am not a fan of Keith Olbermann, but even a pompous blowhard finds a few acorns, and he was, two years ago, spot-on in this analysis of our situation (but, first, the Clay Bennett cartoon that inspired his most-excellent rant):
Comments