Here we are in the land of the 1%. It's their world - you just work here.
I'm talking about the world where women make 82% of what men do and where we've stopped improving that number over the last decade. I'm talking about a world where corporate profits return to record levels while school districts, student loan holders, the underemployed, and the unemployed struggle to get by because their bail-out never came. I'm talking about a world where worker productivity is up 80% over 30 years while working wages stagnate and benefits are disappearing. I'm talking about a world where we can spend over 7 billion dollars to subsidize one of the most profitable industries on earth and as much as the next 13 countries combined in defense spending - but somehow can't afford healthcare for citizens or a stable retirement for our elders. Welcome to modern day America.
This is a world where the 1% yell at you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps --
All while systematically cutting the threads that hold those same straps together.
These bootstraps are precious things. They're particularly fragile when you're young. Whatever you're pulling yourself up by and wherever it is you're going, how you develop as a child makes an impact. Want good hard workers ready to pull themselves up and make good on everything we invest in young people? Well, their bootstraps better be built right - right from the start.
We know head start programs and ensuring children have a sufficiently nutritional diet are both critical in promoting early learning.
What have austerity-obsessed politicians chosen to cut?
Head Start and SNAP (Food Stamps)
Stop cutting children's bootstraps.
When those kids grow up, they're going to trust that if they work hard they can make a living wage and start a family. Historically, that meant wages that don't leave unskilled workers languishing in poverty. It meant affordable higher education. It meant fair benefits. It meant CEOs making 15 or 20 times their workers, not 270:1 - on average.
Workers ensured these conditions with unions and spent decades fighting for better worker safety regulations and health benefits.
What have austerity-obsessed politicians and corporate CEO's sought to cut?
Unions, Fair Wages, Pell Grants, and Employee Health Benefits
Stop cutting young adult's bootstraps.
Of course, at some point in life it is no longer time to pull on bootstraps. Some want to work well into their elderly years but they certainly shouldn't be forced to. Since the development of the New Deal, we've sought to replace the years of pulling on bootstraps with a hammock made of well-earned safety netting.
After all, these improvements were what drove American quality of life for decades and made them politically untouchable.
Yet what have austerity-obsessed politicians and conservative saboteurs still sought to cut?
Social Security, Medicare, and Pensions
This is the world of the 1%. They don't want our children adequately prepared for the real economy. They don't want economic mobility - definitely not up and only down if its us. They don't even want our seniors to retire with the dignity they deserve.
If they did, they wouldn't be working to cut the bootstraps right out from under all of us.
This year, let's show the Koch Brothers we will have economic opportunity long after they're gone - and the netroots will work to strengthen the bootstraps of all Americans.
None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots. -Thurgood Marshall