Politics Done Right (PDR) post several videos every day both from the program or from several shorts we do frequently on many issues. These days, videos seem to be better storytellers.
Yesterday I uploaded a video titled “Gov. Kasich gives bad advice: Big Democratic win means tack center.” and posited an important question, “What exactly is the middle.” My YouTube follower “Just Me” did not disappoint. He first apologized for the very long response and then went to the pathology of many of the rich.
I wrote back and ask for permission to make it the blog of the week today and he accepted. I have always said that PDR is responsive to its audience. It is your show. “Just Me” changed the topic of the day because as I was writing my Daily Kos Sunday article, it presented the perfect complement and preamble. I will cover the Daily Kos article sometime next week.
Article about the rich by Just Me
Dear Egberto:
I promise faithfully that I will never write this long of a post ever again. 😀 But you DID ask…….”The Political Middle” is what the ultra-rich must maintain so that nothing is ever done to dismantle their agenda. What’s their agenda? The ultra-rich are the top 1% – 10% of the population. A very small minority. Together, they manage and own more wealth that the entire rest of the 90’% of American Citizens put together. And they want to keep it that way. Historically speaking, in most nations, the top 10% typically has always owned the majority of wealth.
After the end of WW II, the United States made one of the largest investments ever made in American Society. The soldiers were coming home with all the skills and training they got during their military service. War torn nations all over Europe, including Japan, etc. were in dire need of rebuilding. The manufacturing giant that America became between WW I and WW II grew into a behemoth during the 1950’s and 1960’s. How? The G.I. Bill. Affordable housing and home loans for Veterans. Public Education was fully funded and needed teachers to train the future generation of labor and skilled trades and academics and scientists necessary for continued growth. At the urging of President Eisenhower, expressways and highways, state and federal, were built, criss-crossing the nation and allowing travel with a whole new fleet of gas powered automobiles. Electrification of rural areas added to an already functioning electrical grid in urban areas. Funding low cost/No cost college classes helped with Adult and Continuing Education needs. Women in the workplace became a new and different market for American corporations. Don’t forget that Social Security was established in 1935 and was beginning to lift Elderly Americans from poverty too. The era during the 1960’s and 1970’s became an anomaly that created the smallest $$$ difference ever between the richest and poorest in America since the Great Depression and the Middle Class was born. The problem was, the ultra-rich, in all the hoo-hah of establishing rewards for returning soldiers and their families after the war ended, lost a portion of their profit margin in the process and they just weren’t as rich as they used to be.
Beginning in the 1970’s, the ultra-rich began to use their influence to manipulate legislation to claw those investments back. Taxes on the Ultra-rich fell. If you want to see precisely how they managed it, just follow the career of Paul Manafort and Donald Trump. Today, being in the “Middle”, politically, is to traverse a tight-rope between those ultra-rich who want to just loot the country through authoritarianism, (like what happened to Russian society when the USSR dissolved in 1991), and those ultra-rich who want to continue to make as much $$$ as possible off the American Citizen by maintaining the vicious form of “Winner Take ALL” Capitalism we see today. Corporate owned and operated politicians in the “Political Middle” exist on BOTH sides of the aisle in America. Why? Because the ultra-rich need to hedge their bets to maintain their control. It’s not as difficult for the ultra-rich these days now that they have their new tool, the 2010 Citizens United decision which provides unlimited amounts of $$$ from unidentified “donors” from Domestic AND Foreign sources to “buy” Congressional seats for those who will work in the legislature to further their agenda. Once those “bought and paid for” politicians are voted out or term limited, they just go on to become CEO’s and members of various Board of Directors or lobbyists. As such, they continue to carry water for the ultra-rich until their usefulness ends.
I am neither a scholar nor a historian. The things I write here are what I have witnessed during my lifetime. My experiences of work and school and marriage and raising kids and paying a mortgage and retiring and being utterly grateful for Medicare and Social Security are real and heart felt. By requiring the participation of our entire American Society through fair taxation to provide $$$ for programs that supported the Common Good, the parents and grandparents of the “Greatest Generation” provided a better life for several generations of American People they would never meet. Like Me. If it weren’t for their efforts – I’d be living in a card-board box under a freeway overpass somewhere.
A Socially Responsible Capitalism is every BIT as possible as a Democratic Republic. I know it because I’ve lived it.