A co-worker forwarded to me the following right-wing rant--a rant that I just had to respond to.
Free Stuff
Will the US survive ???
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.
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, 235 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!!!
Lets 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?
My reply is after the jump.
We all own the air and the clean land with fat deer [he's a hunter] and the drinkable water; the people who "own all the stuff" forget that we all own America and the 99% of US is tired of THEM (the 1%) getting "free stuff."
They get all the free stuff because they make the tax laws and they cut the environmental regulations; hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than plumbers. Who's getting free stuff? GE and a bunch of other multinational companies haven't paid ANY taxes in three years! Who's getting the free stuff? Taxes are at the lowest rate in 50 years and the gap between the poor and the wealthy is the widest it's ever been; who's getting the free stuff?
1% own 40% of America: who's getting the free stuff? Rich people don’t go to jail: who's getting the free stuff? That free room and board for minor drug charges that rich people will never get? Is that "free stuff"?
They get all the free stuff because the bankers and elites who "own all the stuff" bet all the stuff on the stock market and on derivatives, lost their bets and lost grandma's savings, and then had the Fed and the US gov give them 16 TRILLION dollars (the GDP of the entire US is only a fraction of that.) They were "too big to fail," yet they failed, and failed hard, and failed wide. They were made good, at a cost of several times the entire U.S GDP; we spent almost a third of the entire wealth the US had accumulated in its 200+ year history and blew it all away to make Wall Street's gambling debts good; who's getting the "free stuff"? Do you know how many food stamps and welfare that 16 trillion dollars will buy? Who's getting the "free stuff"?
How much is $16 trillion? That is an amount equal to or more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America. That’s more than every penny that every American earns in a year. That’s an amount equal to almost a third of our national net worth -- the value of every home, car, personal belonging, business, bank account, stock, bond, piece of land, book, tree, chandelier, and everything else anyone owns in America. That’s an amount greater than our entire national debt, accumulated over the course of two centuries. Alan Grayson, http://www.dailykos.com/...
The people who have all the stuff are making all the laws to benefit them at our expense: they want to spit crap into the air for free and make us peasants breathe it, they want to have cheap labor on demand, with no unions and "right-to-work" states ("right-to-work for the lowest possible price"), they want to rip up mountains for coal and not have to bother with pesky regulations that hurt "job creators." They want extra, extra tax breaks to built a factory in your area or they want to move their factories to the lowest paying countries, while selling their crap back to us. Who's getting the free stuff?
Do you know how many food stamps and welfare that 16 trillion dollars will buy? Who's getting the "free stuff"? Don’t even get me started on the corporate welfare we fund through the Defense Department. Are BAE and GD [two very large defense contractors] getting "free stuff" in your professional opinion?
And as to the laundry list of complaints: many of these are very ironic.
Borders: Deportations under President Obama are at the highest they've ever been under any President. As a liberal, I see that as a bad thing; the conservative rally to "Close the borders" means a check mark to vote FOR Obama.
Language: English only. The US has no official language, by the way. http://www.usconstitution.net/.... Another check mark for Obama. Let's not forget that there are a bunch of Hispanics that live in this country quite legally and who aren't going anywhere. We can pretend that they all speak English, or we can just quit moaning about having to press one for English. Unless there's a Spanish test that we're all forced to pass, honestly, what's the big deal?
Drugs: Obama is still cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries in states where it's supposed to be legal (another thing I would have against him but that checks the conservative desire to see the War-On-Some-Drugs-That-Poor-People-Use). When do Defense Contractors get drug tested? When do hedge funds managers get drug tested before they receive their corporate welfare and are taxed under lower rates than teachers and plumbers?
Culture: Constitution, and the Bill of Rights!. Er, President Obama is a constitutional scholar and was a Harvard-grad Law Professor at U of Chicago...Any specifics gripes about how he's usurped his Authority as President (that would not also apply to either of the Bushes or Reagan)?
Also, unless you're counting Greece, which invented democracy and then didn't have it for a few thousand years, the US is pretty much the oldest functioning democracy around. It's hard to compare us to other democracies. The phrase "All great democracies have committed financial suicide somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded" is somewhat silly. What democracies are they referring to?
Who's getting the "Free Stuff"? The 99% of us or the 1% who make the laws and "own all the stuff"?