Of Ronnie and the eighty five!
It has come out this past week that the eight five richest people in the world are now worth more than half of the world’s population. Any way we would like to cut this that means that under one hundred people are worth more than over three billion people on this planet.
We have long preached here at ramblings that there are vast numbers of people on earth who live on one to two dollars a day and who have no assets at all other than the clothes on their backs and some rude hut that they might call a home. Here in the United States, even our poorest souls have far more than much of the rest of the worlds population. We talked to a lady yesterday whose brother is now on the street again in zero degree weather with no place to sleep and only a suitcase to carry all of the possessions that he holds in this world. But he at least does have a suitcase and a warm coat. Much of the world does not even have that.
There was a time in this nation when most people were exposed to rising expectations and could generally feel that if they worked hard and exhibited some intelligence that they might find some sort of material satisfaction in this world. Now, so many of them, especially since the great recession of 2008 and 09, have fallen out of the middle class and are trying to get by on what little that they might find in the way of work and some sort of what is left of the once adequate safety net that was put together in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929. They are opposed by a collection of individuals who have, through inheritance or otherwise--the Koch brothers et. al--achieved great wealth in this nation through, so often, no fault or much effort of their own. These people have never had to do a days work in their lives but they are absolute experts at telling people who have worked in the daily toil that they need to find some sort of a job that pays next to nothing that so often does not exist. It is hard to give up a middle class existence when you have had one and it takes people some time and grief to finally realize where their station in life in finally going to end up. The old adage that our children will have it better than we did is officially dead in America.
We remember when Ronald Wilson Reagan ran for president back in 1980 and told us all that lower taxes would set the nation free and that great wealth for everyone would come from this experiment. They called it trickle down economics and some people called it voodoo economics because that was what it was. Now we are thirty three years on down the road from the Reagan inaugural and this nation is in the worst mess it has seen at least since the Great Depression. People who are willing to work for a living wage are suffering because along with trickle down economics we began the trek through ever increasing mechanization and greater efficiency which has sliced more and more people off of the employment lines. And all of this was done to increase shareholder value while there are fewer and fewer shareholders to spread the wealth around among.. It has become so absurd that we read recently where one stockholder in a perfectly sound food corporation wants that company to take on a couple of billion in new debt just so that he and his friends can get a one time twenty percent dividend payment.
Greed in rampant and it is everywhere among the monied class. When they might look out the windows of their mansions or their corner offices and they might see a homeless person wandering down the street they simply look over the whole experience and simply want those people to go away and die. They do not want them to have food or shelter because they do not care whether they live or die. It is as simple as that! And they have purchased their members of congress to help them with their legislative agendas and these “public servants” serve only those who pay them well. And then you have radical organization such as the Tea Party and the Libertarians who want to go even further and destroy the government that was set up to protect the rights of those who have no other way to get protection at all. The defenseless are being steamrollered by those who know no bounds to the amount of wealth that they can accumulate. It has gotten so bad that some large American corporations are holding seminars for their lower paid employees on how to apply for government benefits to bring them above the poverty level as they go about legislatively trying to destroy those same benefits so that they can further lower their already artificially low tax burdens, such as they are.
We wonder sometimes what Ronald Reagan would think today of what he helped to unleash but then we remember that Ronald Reagan never really thought much about anything at all. He was the tool of the uber rich and they drink their toasts to him today as they lament the fact that there is no Reagan on the horizon to further help their cause along. But, make no mistake about, another one will come along and then God help us what they will do!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
| 
