a "makers versus takers" type email

I was distressed that a friend forwarded this email:

Subject: FW: FREE STUFF....

Worth reading.

>  
>
> I have never heard this said as plain or as well.
>
> Class war at its best.
>
> The folks who are getting the free stuff, don't like the folks who are
> paying for the free stuff, because the folks who are paying for the free
> stuff, can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own
> stuff.
>
>  
>
> And,
>
>  
>
> The folks who are paying for the free stuff, want the free stuff to stop and
> the folks who are getting the free stuff,
>
> want even more free stuff on top of the free stuff they are already getting.
>
>  
>
> Now... The people who are forcing the people who Pay for the free stuff,
> have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff, that the people who
> are PAYING for the free stuff, are being mean, prejudiced, and racist.
>
>  
>
> So, the people who are GETTING the free stuff, have been convinced they need
> to hate the people who are paying for the free stuff, by the people who are
> forcing some people to pay for their free stuff, and giving them the free
> stuff in the first place.
>
>  
>
> We have let the free stuff giving go on for so long that there are now more
> people getting free stuff than paying for the free stuff.
>
>  
>
> Now understand this. All great democracies have committed financial suicide
> somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded. The reason? The
> voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the treasury by
> electing people who promised to give them money from the treasury in
> exchange for electing them.
>
>  
>
> The United States officially became a Republic in 1776, 231 years ago. The
> number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the
> free stuff. We have one chance to change that in 2012. Failure to change
> that spells the end of the United States as we know it.
>
>  
>
> ELECTION 2012 IS COMING
>
>  A Nation of Sheep Breeds a Government of Wolves.
>
>  I'M 100% for PASSING THIS ON.
>
>  Let's Take a Stand.
>
>  
>
>
>  Obama: Gone.
>
>  Borders: Closed.
>
>  Language: English only.
>
>  Culture: Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
>
>  Drug Free: Mandatory Drug Screening before Welfare.
>
>  NO freebies to: Non-Citizens.
>
>  We the people are coming....
>
>  
>  Only 86% will send this on. Should be 100%. What will you do?
>

And I had this response:

People who do not pay income taxes (because they have little or no income) pay sales taxes. Many of them get “free stuff” in the form of temporary aid. Some of them get “free stuff” in the form of temporary aid that lasts a long time. This is a problem because they are consuming and not producing.

People who do not pay income taxes (because they have a lot of money, and spend a small portion of it to shield a greater portion from taxation) pay sales taxes. many of them get “free stuff” in the form of access to roads and bridges, fire and police protection, clean water, hurricane warnings and the like. This is a problem because the system that everyone else pays for allows them to benefit enormously without contributing to the system.

People who do pay income taxes make up the majority of Americans. They also pay sales taxes. Their tax payments educate the vast majority of the future doctors, engineers, and construction workers – of all of us. Their tax payments allow governments to build and maintain roads and bridges, test cantaloupes for dangerous bacteria, and inspect cost-cutting/profit-maximizing airlines’ planes before takeoff. They also own the airwaves that the government they pay for licenses to broadcasters. This is good because the people who pay the taxes by law make the decisions, however indirectly, in government.

This is where it gets interesting. The people who don’t pay income taxes (because they have enough money to shield their money) own a lot of broadcast media. They do it as individuals, as corporations, and as interest groups. They are a bit scared of the people who do pay most of the income taxes. They have a choice: fight us (hard) or co-opt us (not quite as hard). They have tools for fighting (bloody) and tools for co-option (less bloody).

I’m glad they chose the easier, less bloody route of telling you what to think. Now I am still alive to tell you what I think. I think they are filling your head with misinformation.

If there’s a class war, who won? The people who are out of work and hopeless and still sitting on their hands, or the people who are comfortable and well-fed and in control of media and government? Or, to use the original writer’s metaphor, the wealthiest are the wolves.

I have to get back to work if I’m going to continue supporting public education (my kids are in school right now), the interstate highway system (how I get to work and how my food gets to the grocery store), the public utilities commission (which helps keep electricity rates down so my boss can keep the lights on), et cetera, ad nauseam.

Stay well,

Steve

---

I think I was very diplomatic. Now I really have to get back to work!

Seeing clearly - multiculturalism and its discontents

I won't write today to complain about the New Know-Nothings or the Amurrica-Firsters or the millionaires and wannabes who pine for silly things like Whites-Only schools. I'm not even complaining (except about how hard putting contact lenses in turned out to be). I read with interest an article in In These Times at the Optometry Clinic at Cal--that's the University of California at Berkeley to people who don't recycle alumni fundraising requests--while waiting for said contacts.

It struck a nerve with me. More things are doing that lately. Probably about to spout off on some poor, unsuspecting person. Still, I've been a bit quick to anger.

This nerve, however, did not bulge in my neck or cause comical wavy lines to indicate steam escaping from my ears. (No. Those comical, wavy lines are hair.)

John M. Davis' piece, called "Still Separate, Still Unequal," reprised a theme I used to entertain thoughts of writing on. Come to think of it, I guess I'm doing that here.

Davis (in the March, 2011 issue, and online dated March 2, 2011) writes that progressives have allowed the original genius of ending school segregation to stand for the entire project of social equity. By insisting that only schools desegregate, we've missed the point of total desegregation, which is to undermine the attitudes and affiliations that channel wealth and power in this country by racial categories.

Descending a generation further from Brown v. Board of Education, progressives allowed themselves to become protectors of a new inequality, one not of power but of softer privilege, the privilege of recognition, of official sanction. (It's this, really, that right-wing buffoons like Newt Gingrich complain about--having to celebrate the achievements of the disabled, the dark-complexioned, the left-handed...) By so doing, we not only unnecessarily tweak clown noses (clowns with bullhorns, and lobbyists' phone numbers tucked into their oversize shoes), we reify difference.

And the consequences of the two together are greater association of poverty with melatonin, greater differentiation between rich and poor schools, and a current trend toward abandonment of desegregation in public schools at all.

My feeling is that Davis leaves out progressive malaise. Maybe that's not the right term. Maybe it's decency. Progressives these days, and as far as I can tell since around the time left-wingers in the US stopped lobbing explosives at plutocrats, tend to fight against the maelstrom of right-wing power and publicity by steering straight for our goal. We then fight against the greatest concentration of wealth and media ever known, a concentration concentrated on concentrating political power to a degree almost never known. (You remember, the "permanent right-wing majority" to be reached by redistricting, media and campaign deregulation, and a constant state of fear.)

Just as progressives cringed when President Obama proposed Bob Dole's health insurance reform plan and the Republicans called it a socialist takeover casserole with a side of death panels, I feel progressives should not have pushed hard only for school desegregation. Doing so set the battle lines too close to the status quo ante.

What we need to do going forward is push for the (sorry, but I'm getting the munchies) whole enchilada. Don't let the fact that a pasty-white guy wants it with "manchamanteles" red mole sauce distract you from Davis' doctrine, and my corollary. Progressives should push far to the left of what we think we can get. Be honest. If it were 1954, would we want school desegregation alone, or social desegregation and economic justice? There's always going to be pushback, whether against school busing or against recognizing GLBT citizens in the social studies curriculum, so why not legislate morality, and start the battle there? Certainly the right wing wants to legislate morality, now that it means something other than outlawing sexual and racial discrimination! Why should the left be any more timid.

Well, it's because timid is sort of like nice, at least nice to bullies, and that's what we've become. Nice to bullies. That approach draws the line at the question of who gets my lunch money, rather than what all the bullied kids in school plan together in resistance.