|
Because of the greed of corporate America, real wages in the private sector are 8 percent less than they were thirty years ago. And where has all of that accumulated wealth gone? It has gone to the people on top, who have seen a huge increase in the percentage of wealth and income they receive.
Let me say a word about those people. And it's important that we talk about that because you're not going to read about it in most newspapers or see it on television.
It is very clear that these people have put their own greed ahead of the middle class and working families of this country. What they are now doing is living in guarded compounds. They don't have to get on the airlines like you do. They fly in their Lear jets. They don't get on crowded mass transit to get to work. They don't have to worry about how their kids are going to go to college or high school because they have the money to send their kids to the best private schools in America; they have enough money to buy their way to get their kids into any college in America. That's how they live--separate and segregated from what's going on in this country. And our job is to tell them that if they don't come back to America, then the hell with them. We'll go forward without them.
If the President of the United States were here today--and believe me, I wish he were here today, I wish he would come out and talk to ordinary Americans--he would tell you his greatest accomplishment is the tax breaks that he has given America. What he won't tell you is that 40 percent of those tax breaks went to the richest 1 percent, the people who need it the least, and that millions and millions of Americans who really need those tax breaks are getting nothing or only a few dollars. What he will also not tell you is what's really behind those tax breaks.
The President of the United States represents, and works very hard for, the very wealthiest people in this country. And, just coincidentally, he is on his way to raising $200 million from these very same people for his primary campaign--and he doesn't even have an opponent. So it doesn't surprise us that when he gives out tax breaks, they mostly go to the rich and the heads of large corporations. That we can understand. It's grotesque, but that's politics. More money is flying into Congress in campaign contributions than you can believe. You've got to duck so you don't get hit by the money.
What is even more cynical about these tax breaks is that here you have a conservative President and a conservative party, which for years have been ranting and raving about how terrible deficits are. But now they are giving us the largest deficit in American history. Why are they driving up a huge national debt that our kids and grandchildren are going to have to pay off? I'll tell you why they are doing that. They are doing that so that they'll come back before the American people and say, "We cannot afford to maintain Social Security; privatize it. We can't afford to protect Medicare and Medicaid; privatize it. We can't afford to protect the Veterans Administration; privatize it." That is their cynical plan: to destroy the basic rights that millions of people have fought for and received, and to bring us back to the nineteenth century, where the American people had no rights, where the elderly were the poorest people in our society, where children slept out on the streets without nutrition programs, where workers were unable to form unions, where there were no health care programs for the elderly. That is what they are trying to do, and we are not going to allow them to get away with it.
Our struggle, the struggle of millions of people for 150 years, has been for basic human dignity. It has been a struggle to create a country that belongs to all of us and not just the people on top, and that is our struggle of today.
Sometimes progressives say, well, you know, we're right, but we're really kind of fringe. Our views are not reflective of a vast majority of the people. After all, Bush, well, was almost elected, and there is rightwing control of the House of Representatives, led by a gentleman named Tom DeLay. There is rightwing control of the United States Senate. Very few people in the media reflect our point of view. So they must be representing the majority of the people, and we're just a smart minority of the people.
I want you to disabuse yourselves of that notion. You represent mainstream America. We are the majority.
Go out on Main Street, stand at the corner, and ask people a simple question. Tell them you're doing an informal poll, and ask them if they want 40 percent of the tax breaks, hundreds of billions of dollars, to go to the top 1 percent, or whether those breaks should be spread around more fairly and be used for education or lowering the deficit. Then tell me who is "fringe." Ask them if we should maintain our disintegrating health care nonsystem or establish a universal health care system that guarantees health care for all. Then tell me who is "fringe." Ask them if we should continue to let polluters destroy our environment, or move to safe, sustainable energy. Then tell me who is "fringe."
So how do the rightwingers get elected if they have nothing to say about the most important issues facing the American people? That is the central question of modern American politics. And the answer is that they work day and night to divide the American people against each other so that they end up voting against their own best interests. That is what
|
|
