| | Steve:
Thank you. I apologize for endlessly using Bangladesh as an example, but it is illustrative. The endless politics of 'top half/bottom half' falls on its ear when it is pointed out to the bottom half in America that they are well into the top 10% in the world at large. Much of the top half in places like Bangladesh would kill to be in the bottom half of America.
Literally.
The politics of top half/bottom half in America is just so transparently abused by power seekers.
One half of the power seekers panders to the bottom half by telling them they are in the bottom half because the top half stole their cheese, and the power seekers are going to redistribute the cheese by force. Birth, connections, luck, crime. Behavior and actions and personal actions and responsibility have nothing to do with outcomes, outcomes are the result of force and chance, and the bottom half panderers seek power by pretending to ever change that endless treadmill of envy offered to the bottom of the hill. In an irony, instead of being encouraged to emulate actions and behavior that result in the generation of wealth(and let's not pretend that success is measured in any other way, because the basis for 'top half/bottom half' is not based on the result of the standing long jump, or specific skill with a paint brush, or number of friends on Facebook who give you 'likes' today...), the bottom half is preached a politics of disdain for those actions and behavior. Why? For lots of reasons. Because it is an easy sell at the bottom of the hill to sell 'Don't try to run up the hill.' Remember, in their religion, there is no hill to climb, only the shortcuts and chance and crime and accidents of those above. Because preaching it as well maintains an endless supply of buyers at the bottom of the hill, a forever dependent class ready to buy this excuse. They sell their vote cheap; the price is, the validation of the parking of their lives at the bottom of the hill. The power grubbers never even have to deliver on their implied promise of forced redistribution, only lip service, and Thank God, or else I would not have seen Ted Kennedy so often on those flights to the Caymans back in the day.
In that Zero Sum World, people don't bake pies: they unequally share 'the' pie, and it is the function of the guns of government to coerce 'more equitable' shares of 'the' pie when the pie has already long been baked and all the mess of pie baking has been cleaned up.
And, to a great extent, what is the mess of pie baking? What is the accessible to everyone path to climbing the local hill? It is by-and-large education.
They even corrupt the concept of education, by totally poisoning the debate. Their endless drumbeat message has been 'What is wrong with our Education System?' As if. Education is a process that is primarily taken, not given. It is at best 'well offered.' In America, education has long been 'well offered.' When the process of education fails, our very first response should not be to look at the teachers, other than insuring that education is well offered. Our first response should be to place the responsibility on the takers. When generations of those potential takers are told that they are entering a 'system that is failing' they are given the wrong impression that it is their function to walk effortlessly into their provided for free public education building, slouch in their chairs, and wait for someone to fix the Golden Education Funnel that is supposed to be effortlessly administering their education to them. Nothing could be farther from the truth, it is their job, as once told to me by my father, to reach up out of their seats and go after their own education by the throat, as if their lives depended on it, because they do. Encouraging kids to slouch passively in their seats and wait for 'the system to get fixed' -- because that is what meets the needs of the power grubbers selling 'fix the system' solutions -- is resulting in just yet more people at the bottom of the hill. Which is why the power grubbers sell the 'fix the system' nonsense.
The panderers to the top half are not much better, possibly worse, because they act like corruption magnets. They also sell the 'fix the system' nonsense. Few offer the far harder sell "clean up your act, send your kids to school with breakfast and a less than shitty attitude, make them responsible for taking their education."
The power grubbers on the right who sell the idea that they will use government to sell favor to businesses seeking shortcuts up the hill, no matter how they dress it up in a flag, are pushing fascism, cozy crony connections between the guns of government and commerce. It's one thing -- non-leveragable to power grubbing seekers thing -- to be anonymously 'business friendly,' and quite another to craft specific legislation favorable to specific winners at the top of the influence buying list, and unfavorable to the specific losers at the bottom of the influence buying list. As in Moynihan and IBM and a million other examples just like it. Not to pick on either, but we'd be here all day.
That process of selling government, creating IKE's MIC, the CronyFest on the Potomac, was not the exclusive act of only the bottom half pandering power grubbers. Our current soft fascism didn't get here by way of just one party.
We should be honorably electing state plumbers, to honorably keep the plumbing of state clean and free flowing. Not 'running the nation' and its economies, plural. That is courting fascism. I've no hope at all for our current out of all control political process until we stop electing American Emperors and start electing honorable plumbers. This started out as an exercise in hiring someone to fairly paint the double yellow lines down the middle of the road, and like every Jr. High committee On Average, We're Average effort, has devolved into a graceless, clawing mess.
One more windy rant.
regards, Fred
(Edited by Fred Bartlett on 5/08, 7:42am)
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