Anand Giridharadas gets it perfectly right as he excoriates Joe Manchin and those who put capital & war over the average American.
Anand Giridharadas is on point
Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” hits the nail on the head. He quotes President Joe Biden to make his point.
“The president of the United States has a saying that I love, which is, ‘Don’t tell me your values. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you your values. So as the year ends, let’s look at what America has been willing to spend money on this calendar year and what it has been reluctant to spend money on.
Anand then painfully enumerated the American reality. It is always capital and business over the wellbeing of the average American.
“They are willing to spend money to send your kids to their death in war,” Anand said. “They’re just not willing to spend money to keep them alive and thriving with health care and education and food via those child payments. They’re willing to spend money to build schools in Afghanistan, or at least they were for the last 20 years; just not to spend money to have your kids get an education, get daycare, get universal pre-care, get retrained in community college. They’re willing to spend money as we saw to fix bridges, but they’re not willing to spend money to relieve your debts, so you have some vehicle, can afford a vehicle to drive those across those bridges. So we are seeing that there are many things in this country that continue to be priorities regardless of what the budget is, regardless of what is happening. But in a global pandemic amid a severe threat to democracy itself, they are unwilling to act to protect the freedom to vote for leaders who will deliver for us. And they are unwilling as those leaders to deliver for us.”
Americans have been taught through all of our institutions to accept things as they are. Until we are first taught to accept our worth and realize it is us and not the billionaires that are deserving, the status quo will be maintained.