03.16.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 8:44 am by George Smith
Push it up, folks. Wealthiness is next to Godliness, that’s what Jesus taught.
The paradox with American Jesus, Paul Ryan, and his crap stories about what the poor need, the dignity of work and their culture of dependency, is that no matter how often he’s exposed as a charlatan, called out as a Flim Flam Man, compelled to issue a public apology for fabrication or insulting African Americans for citing a notorious racist as an expert on American society, nothing changes.
Six months will pass and Ryan always emerges for another round, unharmed and totally intact.
And that’s because WhiteManistan loves his story-telling about poverty as a morality tale, one in which they’re on the winning side.
In WhiteManistan, God’s favorite tribe lives in harmony, working hard, justly rewarded for its purity of essence.
And the poor are such because they are sinful, lack morals and have made all the wrong decisions in life. To help only makes them worse. What they need is a good whipping, to be administered by the taking away of food and health care, which will certainly make them understand proper values and that nothing in life is free.
Plus, they’re the wrong color, live in the inner city and, as Ted Nugent regularly put its, are bloodsuckers leaching off the system, tearing the place down.
And that’s all there is to it.
Even if Walter Cronkite were alive today and declared Jesus of America to be just the opposite, a Pharisee, on the evening news it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. And that’s because WhiteManistan’s identity is bound up in its regular judgments of others as inferior and wicked.
Diseased as this is, it’s part of national character of the United States, ideologically and spiritually.
Today, the New York Times’ Tim Egan spends a Sunday opinion driving nails into American Jesus, literally crucifying Ryan on his own heritage.
Excerpted:
But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy ….
In 2012, Mitt Romney, made the Tory case with his infamous remark that 47 percent of Americans are moochers, “dependent upon government.??? Part of that dependence, he said, extended to people “who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.??? Food — the gall!
You can’t make these kinds of heartless remarks unless you think the poor deserve their fate …
Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.???
Egan goes onto add you never hear WhiteManistan, in his column — Republicans, cast any aspersion on the wealthy.
Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, too. Incredible timing, that.
Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor! They are just too lazy, they’ll never work at all!
Republican Jesus! Hey, amen!
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03.13.14
Posted in Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 3:56 pm by George Smith
Poor Ted Nugent, propped up in bed or on the sofa, dosed with pain-killers so he can bend his new metal knees a little bit more everyday.
What comes into his mind?
Well, he drifts back to the halcyon time of 1955 America, when everyone knew their place, fondly recalling youthful work pumping gas and, today for WND, delivering newspapers on his Huffy bicycle.
No job was too menial for Ted to take, he rants. And that’s the problem with Americans, he continues in a screed exactly like the one yesterday.
Too damn lazy and entitled! Especially the other people — like in Detroit!
The old man does get-off-my-lawn and the bigot’s dog whistling, for the second time in 48 hours, showing that the prescription pain-killers are, certainly, having some kind of effect:
There was no hesitation then for me to get more jobs at the tender age of 11 or 12. I started delivering the Shopping News newspaper to my 100 or so customers from the elevated seat of my Huffy “StumpJumper??? bike …
I continued to increase my workload with a second paper route delivering the Detroit News to over 90 customers seven days a week, hunting big, fat, slimy night-crawlers in the middle of the night and selling them for fishing bait around the neighborhood …
If someone would have dared to claim back then that someday America would accept an official category of the American workforce as “those who have given up looking for a job,??? or worse yet, a list of “jobs Americans are not willing to do,??? you would have been laughed out of town …
Negotiate for sick days instead of better quality products, and continue to punish the producers while rewarding the bloodsuckers.
Bloodsuckers that won’t work, that’s the problem! Repeat it again and again because not enough are paying attention. Especially the two hundred or more lined up for two part-time jobs, one as a dishwasher and one as a meat-wrapper, at Whole Foods a week or so ago.
These bloodsuckers, dragging down the great nation Ted knew. It breaks his heart.
Next week, another column of Horatio Alger-like tenacity, Nugent writing about his days shoveling snow and chipping ice off the sidewalks before the sun came up so old folks wouldn’t slip and fall in the Motor City. And he took that ice and snow, put it on his wooden sledge, named Rosebud, carting it back to the house where it was melted for the sweetest free drinking water.
Tapped out on Ted’s tablet as he stomps around on his new knees, now the size of cantaloupes, blood leaking slowly into his boots but bulling through the pain, tending wild game, clearing brush and picking up the brass from the morning machine-gun firing at the ranch.
America! My America! Where have you gone!!!
Effin-ay, the man’s pathetic to the third power.
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03.12.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 11:33 am by George Smith
Ted Nugent’s Facebook page and Twitter feeds are run by staff, the former primarily for the purpose of peddling merchandise and hunting tourism. And since his double knee replacement surgery Nugent has been quieted, emerging lucid only once on Facebook to announce his ongoing recovery and that it involved a considerable amount of pain.
Today, at the right wing conspiracy theory news site, Newsmax:
Today I will write and record some more killer music, write more killer articles, review the artwork for my new CD, review the military logistics for my 2014 killer tour, edit my killer Spirit of the Wild TV show, check my trapline, train my dogs, conduct media interviews, work on my trucks, shoot my bow and some guns, do my post-double knee replacement surgery therapy, perform various chores on our ranch, and as always, do what I am driven to do in order to live my ultimate American dream of independence to the fullest.
Liar, liar, pants on fire. Nobody does this soon after double-knee replacement surgery.
The graph comes from a longer column, easily something canned, dictated or ghost-written, in which Nugent excoriates all the lazy Americans who won’t work and allegedly don’t want jobs.
It is delivered with the usual Republican Party bigot dog-whistle, the big city where African-American people live, in this case, Detroit.
Ted relates a story from his youth, perhaps apocryphal or exaggerated in some way. (Nugent regularly lies about everything, the most recent example being on CNN before he went into the hospital, delivering since refuted claims that he was a sheriff and often engaged in law enforcement activities with a variety of local agencies as well as the DEA and ATF.)
Nugent’s youthful morality tale has him outperforming two supposedly lazy rivals as a dollar-an-hour gas-pumping kid at a local service station. It’s a good old man’s get-off-my-lawn stem-winder, reminiscent of the kind of thing my grandfather used to love retelling at Thanksgiving get-togethers.
“I remember my first job paid 25 cents an hour … Why can’t young people etc …”
Nugent, excerpted:
Well there ya have it America, especially you lazy bums who so embarrassingly chose to give up looking for work or won’t work at jobs they consider beneath them. Have we become France?
Until America returns to the pride of excellence, productivity, and the pride of earned ownership, we will continue to spiral at high velocity down that suicidal death march of dependency that liberal democrats have brainwashed us into. I remember the real Detroit.
Entitled? Economic equality? Social justice? Are you kidding me? Those two jerks at the gas station sure would have loved to have a Barack Obama negotiate their wages for them …
And here’s an emergency alert for all you bloodsuckers — you are entitled to jack squat.
Yes, Nugent remembers the real Detroit before it was ruined by the blood-sucking other people.
It’s the Republican thing. One of the reasons there is high unemployment is the other people in cities.
Jesus of America, Paul Ryan, today:
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed his upcoming legislative proposals for reforming America’s poverty programs during an appearance on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America Wednesday, hinting that he would focus on creating work requirements for men “in our inner cities??? and dealing with the “real culture problem??? in these communities. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with,??? he said.
One restores the learned value and culture of work in the mostly-working poor by taking away their food stamps and health care.
Emergency alert for all the blood-suckers.
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03.11.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:35 pm by George Smith
Timely as ever.
There’s something wrong with using the WhiteManistan Koch brothers as whipping boys. Why would a political party ever think of vilifying other Americans? Who’s heard of such a thing?
From the AP:
Democratic Senate candidates, facing withering criticism on the national health care law, are gambling they can turn voters against two billionaire brothers funding the attacks — even if few Americans would recognize the pair on the street.
In an accelerating counteroffensive stretching from the Senate chamber to Alaska, Democrats are denouncing Charles and David Koch, the key figures behind millions of dollars in conservative TV ads hammering Democratic candidates and their ties to President Barack Obama …
In a time of stagnant working-class wages, they note, the Kochs have grown stupendously wealthy while pushing their conservative-to-libertarian causes.
Republicans respond that Americans don’t like it when politicians demonize others. With exceptions for everyone in the majority in the House of Representatives and Ted Nugent, who unfortunately is on sick leave.
They’re right. When you ride with WhiteManistan, you’re riding with truth, honor and the American way.
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03.10.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 9:42 am by George Smith
No ranting about Nazis and Commies.
The report, on Facebook.
It’s a hard road. Read some of the fine print.
“You can still fight the good fight from your favorite chair,” writes a well-wisher.
Even when they obviously mean well, some people are just a little too stupid for words.
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03.08.14
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 10:07 am by George Smith
The tunes just get better with age. That’s quality!
The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, America’s best crazy scary gun salesman ever, delivered the best dose of steroids to WhiteManistan, ever, Thursday:
I’ve never been worried about his country until now … That’s why more Americans are buying firearms and ammunition. Not to cause trouble, but because that America is already in trouble … In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want!
Woo-hoo and the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air! See all the guts and glory here!
That’s real eloquence. You should be in awe. I am. There’s no better exhibition of the defining American psychosis.
Putting the nitrous line aside for a moment, Wayne LaPierre is a master of the motivational speech for a tribe that’s characterized by its anger, paranoia and fear. Armed to the the teeth, bearing more weapons than any country in world history, LaPierre is the perfect pitchman for the healing salve to soothe their fevered insecurities, for sale to anyone at the local Walmart.
Real perfection in dog-whistling to the bigots who all know why America is in “trouble.” Defend yourself, stand your ground.
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03.06.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 8:12 pm by George Smith
Jesus of America said don’t feed the poor. If you do, they’ll come right to your door. They’ll wind up like stray cats, shedding on the floor. That’s what Jesus taught.
Paul Krugman has crucified Paul Ryan no less than four times this week at the New York Times for the latter’s new Congressional report on poverty and what poor Americans need: slashing food stamps and health care.
And even those four nail drivings may not quite be enough.
The capstone, his Friday column:
[If] generous aid to the poor perpetuates poverty, the United States — which treats its poor far more harshly than other rich countries, and induces them to work much longer hours — should lead the West in social mobility, in the fraction of those born poor who work their way up the scale. In fact, it’s just the opposite: America has less social mobility than most other advanced countries …
It is, in a way, nice to see the likes of Mr. Ryan at least talking about the need to help the poor. But somehow [his] notion of aiding the poor involves slashing benefits while cutting taxes on the rich.
“Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue,” is Krugman’s lede. Great sentence.
“So when you see something like the current scramble by Republicans to declare their deep concern for America’s poor, it’s a good sign, indicating a positive change in social norms. Goodbye, sneering at the 47 percent; hello, fake compassion.”
The fake compassion shtick brings the blog back to Jesus of America’s citation of Tory Iain Duncan Smith as someone informing Republican efforts on how to lift the unfortunate.
From here, a couple days ago:
Paul Ryan also huddled with Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Smith is well known in the United Kingdom for his attempts to better connect conservatives with the poor.
“We’ve been paying very close attention to the Tories and their think tanks,??? Ryan said … “[We] can learn from their experience, both their mistakes and their successes, so we can rework our welfare system and get people out of poverty and onto lives of self-sufficiency and dignity.???
Paul Ryan …when mentioning Iain Duncan Smith, counts on American disinterest in whatever is happening in other countries to render the stupid … oblivious to the fact he’s drawing ideas from someone roundly condemned for attacking the poor in British society.
Jesus of America says don’t feed the poor! They are just too lazy, they’ll never work at all!
Republican Jesus! Hey, amen!
Not satire. Jesus strike me down, I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t absolutely true!
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03.05.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 3:04 pm by George Smith
Our pundits — stupid and lazy. They continue writing about America’s favorite racist as if he’s still in action and paying attention.
“Ted Nugent, the old rocker from the ’70s, is now just plain old — and off his rocker,” writes Jim Hightower for the Colorado Independent.
“Some years ago, ’70s-era rocker Ted Nugent reinvented himself as a professional rhetorical bomb-thrower on behalf of right-wing causes, especially gun supremacy,” writes Katy Burns, for a New England newspaper.
“He mostly blathered on the fringes, unnoticed by mainstream media but embraced by a collection of Republican candidates and conservative media figures … But even then, calling the duly elected and re-elected president of the United States a ‘subhuman mongrel’ seemed initially to be unremarked on by anyone but a few leftist bloggers,” she continued on Sunday.
Last week Ted Nugent went into the hospital for double knee replacement surgery. And as I predicted, the ranting stopped.
Most have missed it. And that’s because our six-figure explainers don’t really follow Ted Nugent. They just get their material from others — “leftist bloggers” — or the most inflammatory video segments at the top of the Google pile-up.
Here’s Ted Nugent’s Twitter feed.
Nugent’s medical problem and its solution are serious.
No “animal skulldancing” any time soon.
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03.04.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:55 pm by George Smith
Can we push it to 700 views?!
From the Washington Post, yesterday, on Jesus of America:
“The [federal government’s anti-poverty programs] effectively discourages [those who are recipients] from making more money.???
Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income families, is the object of a sharply worded review. “Medicaid coverage has little effect on patients’ health,??? the report says, adding that it imposes an “implicit tax on beneficiaries,??? “crowds out private insurance??? and “increases the likelihood of receiving welfare benefits.???
As he crafted the report, Ryan — a former adviser to the late Jack Kemp, a longtime GOP voice on poverty issues — consulted with a diverse group of conservative thinkers. Ryan counselor Yuval Levin, a policy analyst, played an instrumental role, as did the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks …
Ryan also huddled with Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Smith is well known in the United Kingdom for his attempts to better connect conservatives with the poor.
“We’ve been paying very close attention to the Tories and their think tanks,??? Ryan said. “They’ve done a lot of work already, and we can learn from their experience, both their mistakes and their successes, so we can rework our welfare system and get people out of poverty and onto lives of self-sufficiency and dignity.???
Before becoming a beneficiary of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, for many years I paid for what is now referred to as a “junk” health insurance policy from a private sector vendor. It was policy that came with high premiums, one that returned nothing. If you got sick, the deductibles and you-pay-for-it loopholes were so large the insurance provider was essentially extracting a fee from you for guaranteeing no access to health care.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks comes in for special mention because I used a quote from him yesterday.
The essence, envy of the wealthy is bad for America:
[We] must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor.
Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy …
Like Paul Ryan, Arthur Brooks is just another wealthy libertarian dickhead.
He is most famous for writing a series of books promoting the insipid idea that only through entrepreneurship can all Americans know true happiness and freedom.
In other words, those who run their own small businesses are the most happy of Americans. Of course, Arthur Brooks has never been an American entrepreneur, making his living only writing that it is the best thing in life, over and over, for a right-wing business institute.
But never you mind that. As a logical Brooks extension, people who are Christian, centrist-to-right and supporters of totally free markets, are the most happy of all.
Brooks’ biography, on Wikipedia, presumably ghost-written by an American Enterprise Institute staffer, gives one the flavor of the philosophical grab bag.
It is unintentionally hilarious:
Conservatives, he writes, are twice as likely to call themselves “very happy” than liberals. Those with extreme political beliefs, right or left, tend to be happier than moderates—although their provocations lower happiness for the rest of society. Devout people of all religions are much happier than secularists …
[In The Road to Freedom (this is a play on the Austrian libertarian Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom)], Brooks argues that only free enterprise encourages true happiness based on earned success … Next, Brooks claims that only free enterprise creates true fairness by rewarding merit. Last, Brooks states that only free enterprise lifts up the poor and vulnerable. For this last section, Brooks cites many statistics regarding world poverty reduction from increased trade and globalization, as well as statistics concerning limited government breeding charity.
Therefore, yesterday’s lollipop of free market optimism from Brooks — “It means regulatory and tax reform tailored to spark hiring and entrepreneurship at all levels, especially the bottom of the income scale” — makes perfect sense.
All that needs to be done is to stop being angry with the 1 percent and become, too, an American entrepreneur.
“Brooks believes America is locked in a culture war in which either America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise, limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces, or America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution,” continues Wiki.
Moving along to Ryan’s assertion about taking inspiration from Iain Duncan Smith and the Tories of the Cameron government in Blighty, this is prelude to further recommendation of American adoption of the former’s Universal Credit plan.
Ryan never mentions Universal Credit in his new Congressional report on poverty, but on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, about a month ago, he explicitly did so.
Universal Credit’s aim in England, and British readers please correct me if I’m wrong, was to place all social welfare programs in one big new bag so they could be more easily slashed. This was marketed as the conservative effort to show empathy for the disadvantaged.
Universal Credit appears to be a failure.
Ryan’s affinity for the Universal Credit scheme is easy to grasp. It puts all the social welfare programs for the poor, the 47 percent, those he disdains, into one easy to destroy sack. One big program is far easier to slash than many nationally distributed programs.
Since Paul Ryan is Jesus of America, today it took only a couple hours for Paul Krugman to crucify him. Twice.
Early in the morning:
I took Paul Ryan’s measure almost four years ago, back when everyone in Washington was determined to see him as the Serious, Honest Conservative they knew had to exist somewhere. Everything we’ve seen of him since then has confirmed that initial judgment. When you see a big report from Ryan, you shouldn’t ask “Is this a con job???? but instead skip right to “Where’s the con????
And so it is with the new poverty report …
What he offers is a report making some strong assertions, and citing an impressive array of research papers. What you aren’t supposed to notice is that the research papers don’t actually support the assertions.
In some cases we’re talking about artful misrepresentation of what the papers say, drawing angry protests from the authors.
And a few hours later:
Now, as it happens the best available research suggests that the programs Ryan most wants to slash — Medicaid and food stamps — don’t even have large negative effects on work effort. There is, however, some international evidence that generous welfare states have an incentive effect: America has by far the weakest safety net in the advanced world, and sure enough, the American poor work much more than their counterparts abroad …
In fact, the evidence suggests that welfare-state programs enhance social mobility …
I mean, think about it: Do you really believe that making conditions harsh enough that poor women must work while pregnant or while they still have young children actually makes it more likely that those children will succeed in life?
Jesus of America sez ‘Don’t feed the poor!’
If you do, they’ll come right to your door.
They’ll wind up like stray cats, shedding on your floor.
Republican Jesus, he’s our favorite guy!
He believes in markets, sing praises to the sky!
If Jesus said it, you know it must be true!
So now it’s time to whip the poor, you know what to do!
“[We need] to bring the poor in — to expand their access to our country’s free enterprise and civil society. Luckily … other countries are doing just that…
“In welfare, rely on simplicity and standards. In 2012, Great Britain approved a far-reaching reform called the Universal Credit. The government is now putting the program into practice, and it’s going through a rough patch. But the basic concept is sound. Britain collapsed six means-tested programs into one overall payment…But the payment isn’t a giveaway. Every recipient, except the disabled, must either have a job or be actively looking for one.” — Paul Ryan, the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2014
Some recent news excerpts on the inspiration to Paul Ryan, Tory Iain Duncan Smith:
Nearly 70,000 job seekers have had their benefits withdrawn unfairly, making them reliant on food banks, the right-of-centre thinktank Policy Exchange has said .
The intervention is the first by a respected rightwing voice claiming that something has gone wrong with the administration of benefits.
A chorus of churches, charities and Labour has been warning the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, for months that the administration of benefit sanctions has become too punitive.
On Sunday, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the archbishop of Westminster, repeated his criticisms of the welfare system, saying that “some of the priests who are right there on the ground say it comes across as punitive”.
— The Guardian
Sick and disabled people trying to claim a new benefit introduced by Iain Duncan Smith are facing “distress and financial difficulties” because of mismanagement by civil servants and the outsourcing firms Atos and Capita, a spending watchdog has found.
The National Audit Office discovered that the new personal independence payment, which will replace the disability living allowance, will cost almost three and a half times more to administer and take double the amount of time to process.
Iain Duncan Smith tonight stepped up the Tory war on the poor by turning his sights on society’s most vulnerable.
The penny-pinching Work and Pensions Secretary wants to slash winter fuel allowances for pensioners and scrap their free bus passes and TV licences in a move that would spell misery for millions of people.
His cruel cuts could mean OAPs having to choose between heating their homes or eating as they lose up to £300 in cold weather payments.
And the over-75s would also have to fork out £145 for TV licences.
Mr Duncan Smith’s move finally destroyed any claim the party had to being caring Conservatives. — The Mirror
Paul Ryan, Jesus of America, when mentioning Iain Duncan Smith, counts on American disinterest in whatever is happening in other countries to render the stupid, including reporters for the Washington Post, oblivious to the fact he’s drawing ideas from someone roundly condemned for attacking the poor in British society.
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03.03.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:45 am by George Smith
The idea that it’s possible to correct the big problems of the American economy with on-line petitioning needs to be sent to the glue factory.
In the last seven days I’ve been peppered with them. The most recent, multiple mails asking to start a local petition in Pasadena to raise the minimum wage.
This one, administered through the on-line app, YouPower, from Democracy for America.
This one, ala a theoretical Pasadena effort, to raise the minimum wage in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, appears to have zero to little support.
The national campaigns are not a hell of a lot better when compared with the actual scale of the country.
Facebook and social media didn’t free the middle east. And you can’t rectify the problems of US democracy by tapping your fingers on your smartphone or PC.
The purpose of a democratic government was to provide for the common good, to do just the things that the American government cannot do now.
The idea that software devices for on-line petitioning are one remedy is really tiresome. The US government was broken over the course of a few decades. Web widgets, clickbait, and crowd-sourcing won’t fix it.
Now, if you want to use it as a front for donations for your pet cause, that’s a slightly different application. One that’s antagonizing if you mass mail it to people who aren’t even making minimum wage.
Yes, I’m a cynic. What of it?
There is a practical alternative. Proper people don’t care much for it but its use is honored by time. Plus it’s a small way to put money into local economies. People who work at supermarkets need to keep their paychecks.
Really big version, courtesy of Escape from WhiteManistan, suitable as wallpaper, for framing, and many other decorative purposes.
Quote of the weekend, from the “president” of the American Enterprise Institute, a kinder gentler plutocrat, writing for the NY Times:
How can we break the back of envy and rebuild the optimism that made America the marvel of the world?
First and foremost, we must increase mobility for more Americans with a radical opportunity agenda … It means regulatory and tax reform tailored to spark hiring and entrepreneurship at all levels, especially the bottom of the income scale.
Second, we must recognize that fomenting bitterness over income differences may be powerful politics, but it injures our nation. We need aspirational leaders willing to do the hard work of uniting Americans around an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success. This will never happen when we vilify the rich or give up on the poor.
Only a shared, joyful mission of freedom, opportunity and enterprise for all will cure us of envy …
We really haven’t given vilification and envy enough time to work their magic yet.
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