This is my rant against the "compassionate conservatives" argument for the elimination of the social welfare "safety net." I am reminded of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," when I think of George W. Bush & Co.
Human Nature?
Entitlement programs for the poor are called welfare, food stamps, health care, public education, Social Security, overtime pay, etc. Entitlement programs for the rich are called massive subsidies paid for by the working class & tax payers, tax cuts for those already wealthy, tax shelters, the ‘Free Market,’ privatization, ‘Free Trade,’ NAFTA, tariffs, etc.
The rich claim that if you give the poor something for nothing e.g. welfare, health care, etc. they’ll become lazy and dependent but if you give the rich something for nothing e.g. massive subsidies to the aerospace industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the telecommunications industry, weapons manufacturers, etc. & tax breaks and sweetheart contracts aka no-bid contracts, they’ll reinvest in their companies by hiring back laid off employees & by creating new jobs.
History has shown who the truly dependent & lazy are. The Reagan Revolution showed us that his ‘trickle-down’ theory of economics was in fact a torrent up i.e. stealing from the poor, the working class, the middle class, the tax payers and giving it all to the rich. Instead of hiring back their ‘displaced’ workers after Reagan opened the floodgates of deregulation, there were record mergers & record profits. And that flood that Reagan unleashed has now turned into a tidal wave of wanton greed. American jobs have been permanently ‘outsourced’ to countries where workers have absolutely no rights whatsoever and earn 20 cents or less an hour. America’s benevolent businessmen who first moved their companies to Mexico for cheap labor, cheap resources, & no environmental protections are no longer satisfied with the paltry profits they made there. And now the gold rush of greed & gluttony is to even more depressed countries like China where workers make less than a dollar per day.
Two billion human beings subsist on less than $2 per day and still the filthy rich cry that the poor are lazy & dependent and that every entitlement must be abolished. Dear old Ronnie Reagan, that darling of the conservative cockroaches even tried to have catsup declared a vegetable in order to cut back on another ‘entitlement’ program i.e. the free lunch program for poor & hungry school children. Reagan epitomized the spirit of the robber baron class and their callous indifference to human suffering. And today they call themselves ‘compassionate conservatives.’
So, who is right about human nature? The power elite who believe the poor are lazy, freeloaders incapable of higher thinking and undeserving of any sort of assistance from the government, or the ‘people of the abyss,’ as Jack London referred to them, those who have lost their jobs, their health insurance, their homes, their dignity & self respect? History is one long, sad tale of exploitation of the many by the few. But history also offers us brief glimpses of hope & of a better world e.g. revolutions against despotic tyrants, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, leaders like Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, etc.
As for me, I side with the poor and believe that love, compassion, empathy, & trust are stronger human traits than greed, and the lust for power. Yes, we do have a darker side but our better natures will win out. If not, then how do you account for the perseverance of the human spirit even in such nightmarish conditions as Auschwitz?
---Rob DeLoss, Feb. 13, 2006