12.02.14
It’s the season for Jesus of America
As usual, it’s the perfect season for shining American character, its reverse-Robin Hood-ism, you know, the theology that teaches it is virtuous to grind tax the poor while rewarding the wealthiest.
Since Romney’s defeat, some Republicans have gently urged their party to ease up … their campaign to force low-income workers to pay more taxes. But adding the cultural-legal panic to the preexisting class-war panic was apparently enough to turn the GOP’s grudging acceptance of the low-income tax breaks into full-scale opposition …
So first Republicans made the tax breaks for business permanent, while allowing the tax breaks for low-income workers to expire at the end of 2017. Since they would no longer be tied to tax breaks for the more affluent constituencies that have influence with Republicans, this would mean they would almost certainly expire. Families earning $10,000 to around $25,000 a year would lose nearly $2,500 a year — a punishing blow to the working class.
The Democratic Party, lousy with high-button body lice OK with giving more to America’s superior class expressed admiration for the idea, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer of New York being its biggest endorsers. The President threatened a veto and, the New York magazine writes, the Democrats “beat a hasty retreat.” For now.
But you know it is always the perfect season the pure milk of American kindness.
And it is best heard in the magnificent sermon delivered at the beginning of Jesus of America from Loud Folk Live.
It is here and you should tick up the numbers and take time to irritatingly jam it down the throat share it with everyone you feel to be a deserving friend!
It’s also the shopping season! Why, just yesterday was Cyber Monday in which everyone was urged most urgently to buy on-line in a deluge of e-mail and web advertising blandishments.
[He] is not the one who fed the poor loaves and fishes. This is not the Jesus who liked lepers. He found the liberty, the land of liberty and freedom; we told him what to do.Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor; if you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’re gonna wind up like stray cats, around your door on the floor, begging for loads of kibble and rich food. Everyone knows they’re just selfish animals.
That’s what Jesus said.
Remember, wealthiness — next to Godliness, that’s what Jesus teaches. Jesus of America says “Guns, not butter!” The rest is all for naught.
Jesus of America says never feed the poor, they’re just too lazy, they’ll never work at all. Jesus of America says tax the weak and sick! They’re always going to be that way, never worth a lick.
— from the Book of WhiteManistan, 1: 1-5
anon said,
December 2, 2014 at 7:03 pm
It doesn’t make sense. If they keep stacking the deck against the poor, eventually, the poor will start dying a lot faster. How will Republicans be able to feel superior if the poor people are all gone?
More importantly, if the poor people start dying faster, how will corporations get to exploit them?
The dead don’t make regular interest payments.
George Smith said,
December 2, 2014 at 7:53 pm
They’re already dying faster. Life expectancies in the lower and middle class took hits in the last ten years. But it’s a really big country with lots of people and it’s a long way to the absolute bottom. The economy has shifted to one that largely only makes stuff for the top and those in the upper middle class acting as servants who can’t yet be replaced.
The dollar store market, pay day loan businesses, liquidation sales, all substantial and growing, are totally apart from the view held at the top. I’m in them a lot and it’s a different world from what my white middle class “friends” who still have substantial work know. You can’t even talk about it with them. They don’t understand the experience and they live side-by-side with people who do, that world invisible except as those who are nannies, lawn-keepers, fast food workers, big box store retail, etc.
That’s the secret of the corporate dictatorship. Lives are completely separated, there is no community of shared experience that crosses class and race boundaries. Entire swaths of our society, if you want to call it that, might as well be on separate planets.
So while there is growing demonstration and protest, it faces a hard time in the face of general apathy and a fierce resistance from corporate and institutional power.
Add to it an empathy gap which has always been a feature of American character, a widespread inability to see what it’s like for other people, or even to feel anything for them. How else to explain the slavish clinging to the actual beliefs in Jesus of America? It’s accepted by millions that poverty and misfortune, lack of economic opportunity, are all lifestyle choices, indications of poor decision-making, failings of character and general human inferiority.
Every aspect of American society is characterized by disbelief and disconnection. For that last two years we’ve had nothing but arrant nonsense, for example, about a company like Uber when anyone could sit down, do the math and figure out that it was all about an app for chiseling people. That you can’t make much of a living as an Uber driver, that it will hammer your car at your expense, etc.
Only now does this come out, and most still don’t know, or refuse to grasp it.
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/30/i_quit_miseries_of_an_uber_driver/
And the app is shoddy, to boot.
This is a sobering piece, too.
http://www.elle.com/life-love/society-career/debt-and-hypereducated-poor
It goes over, in detail, the kinds of things with which we’re fairly familiar. There is some irony in it in the explanation, or standard guilt trip administered, of “get a real job.”
The United States is a corporate dictatorship for the wealthy. Over the course of decades it made changes that refashioned the economy for that lot, in the process tossing literally tens of millions of citizens and maiming hundreds of millions more.