Saving the commons

[mqbush]

The commons,-the parks and roads and police and libraries and community centers and “Sesame Street”,-those things that give us the faith that we are each part of a worthwhile effort over the generations to create and live in a civilized place, a community where we can raise children for eons to come,-this is what the right is taking away from us, brick by brick, under the rubric of “fiscal responsibility.” Everything we’ve paid for all these years to build up, the right is selling it out from under us, “to save the economy.” If we lose the commons to save the economy, is it worth it?

If they take from us what we’ve built, in order to save the economy, whose economy is it that we’re saving? Obviously not ours; ours is the one being sacrificed for some other economy,-you know, the one that’s supposed to “trickle down” to us, the wildly irresponsible one that we’re forced to bail out, again and again.

If there are adults in the room, they’re not the financiers, the bankers, the speculators, the Republicans. Adults are not the ones for whom a greater threat than terrorists is a community organizer! They’re not the ones who claim that it’s prudent to hand over Social Security and Medicare to Wall Street, and hand over our schools to BP and Halliburton.

No, the adults here are those who faced beatings by anti-union goons in service of the belief that working people are no more unworthy of humane treatment than are the millionaires and billionaires who tell us that WE are the children, whining brats dependent on a nanny state. The true adults are those who work to set aside our little contributions to the commons, with the long view of building a permanent structure of civilization for our children and children’s children, unlike the short-sighted views of the get-rich-quick schemers and their corrupting lobbyists. Adults are the ones who pay their taxes, not the corporations and the wealthy who shirk their responsibility and yet still cry all the time that they’re so burdened with taxes that they can’t afford to invest in America, who expect us to support them while they make their millions and billions, who say they’re so indispensible that we cannot exist without them, like the spoiled brats they are.

When Japan is dashed by disaster, it’s the infrastructure BUILDERS who will fix her up again, not the selfish and short-sighted and greedy. When Wisconsin workers start getting Mississippi wages, setting off a flood of foreclosures and a consequent decimating of tax revenue, resulting in a state budget deficit greater than today’s, it will be the believers in humans over blue-in-the-face corporations who will painstakingly rebuild what we had. When the child poverty rate in America is 20% and rising, while it’s less than 3% in Finland,-oh, wait, that’s right now!-it will be the grown-ups, the parents paying taxes, who will rise to the occasion and shout down the anti-tax cranks who keep chipping away at our commons. And it will be not a moment too soon.

[liberal N proud]

1. Greed is consuming America

It is a cancer that will kill the country.

[Newest Reality]

3. True, but

it is not greed in itself that is doing it. We must connect the word to those who are actually practicing greed and deliberately acting to metastasize the cancer.

The question is, who's greed and how much of it are they indulging in?

[RufusTFirefly]

2. Enthusiastic K & R. n/t