The post below was made by a guy going under the handle Stan1518703 on an MSN conversation. He made a really good point, so I’m reposting it here with a link to go see the conversation for yourselves. It’s regarding all the riots going on in major cities and the Wall Street/Corporate greed. Personally, I think the protestors are American heroes as long as they protest peacefully. It’s freedom of speech at work baby!
It’s the new era of the “Robber Barons”.
If the super-rich are allowed to take everything, they will. And they will use whatever means, legal or otherwise, to do it.
This is not a new phenomenon. And the government has had to step in before. See The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, et. al.
The government, time and again, has had to pass laws to insure that the monied interests cannot run roughshod over the “lesser classes” in this country. Because, if they can they certainly will.
Most people in the world want a job making a decent wage that they can live a decent life on and support their family.
The 1 percenters want all the money they can get. To them, it’s their scorecard. Whoever amasses the most money wins.
What individual really needs 20, 30 or 50 billion dollars in personal wealth. That is an obscene amount of money. More than they can spend in their entire life.
But, to them, it doesn’t represent a “style of life”. It’s power, pure and simple. Power over others, power to get what they want, power to make others do their bidding.
I don’t care what they have “created” as far as a business or products go. No person should have so much power (money) that they can control an entire country. And many of the super-rich do. There’s no question about it. Just look a K Street. For a paltry few hundred million or so, you can buy the entire Congress of the United States. And they do. And now, foreign powers can too. Thank you, Citizens United.
We, the people, get our one vote every few years. But the rich vote every day. Every dollar they use to bribe (and yes, it’s bribery, there’s no other word for it) are their votes. Many more votes than the people ever get. If they give a politician a million dollars (through all of the loopholes that the FEC and Supreme Court can lavish on them), their opinions and desires are worth so much more to that politician than the masses of people that just gave them a stupid vote a couple of years ago.
Money talks and in Washington, it screams. Votes are meaningless. Whoever wins the vote will get the money of the super-rich and super-powerful. And that is who they will represent, regardless of their political party. Republicans and Democrats alike are money grubbing whores. I’m sorry if that word offends, but there is no more apt word to describe them.
The People are powerless. That is why there are protesters, right now, in every major city trying to give a voice to the common people who have been left out of the system.
And if you do not agree with them… you should. It’s your country too. It doesn’t just belong to them.
And to claim that those protesters are nothing but lazy, unemployed, dope smoking, good-for-nothings is the most disingenuous argument one can make. You just put a derogatory label on them to make them and their arguments mean nothing. That’s the Faux News tactic. I would say strategy rather than tactic, but I do not think Faux is actually capable of strategic thought.
The truth is that the protesters are us. The 99 percenters. Mostly employed, except for about 9.1% at this time. Heavily taxed, more as a percentage of income than the 1%. Under water in our mortgages, if not being thrown out of our homes by the same big banks that WE BAILED OUT WHEN THEY ALMOST DESTROYED THE WORLD ECONOMY. And with absolutely no voice in our government. Et cetera.
Argue that.
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