Big, Bad, Evil Government; this is what Republican talking heads like Jonah Goldberg want us to believe, which really is just a cover for the real evil; wealthy billionaires using our government for their own personal gain. A recent USA Today opinion piece he wrote, Mr. Goldberg assails Charles Schumer concerning remarks he made about government and the Democratic Party’s embrace of it.
Government is just what we the People make it to be. If government is evil, it is because money corrupts it, to the core. You never hear conservative journalist like Goldberg talk bad about guys like the Koch brothers, because it would be like cutting off his own foot. It is the super wealthy who keeps the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to some extent, afloat. Without those big bucks flowing into their campaign coffers, politicians would have to find real jobs in the real world, not jobs that allow them to decide if poor working class people deserve a raise in the minimum wage and if polluting industries can pollute our air and water without penalty.
I understand well what Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) means when he says, "Democrats must embrace government. It's what we believe in; it's what unites our party. If we run away from government, downplay it, or act as if we are embarrassed by its role, people won't vote for our pale version of the Republican view."
Government, in all its failings, makes our lives so much better. Government builds our infrastructure so that we have good roads to drive on and for clean water to be pumped to our houses, not private industry. Government protects us, stands guard over us, and sees that we have what we need, even the least of us, the poor, the middle-class and even the wealthy who consistently works to control it, no matter if private industry provides for us or not.
As usual, Jonah never misses an opportunity to take pot shots at our president, Obama, mentioning the president saying, “You didn’t build that.” This of course is very true because without those government-paved roads, those businesses could not even get their products to market, but conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and guys like the Koch brothers do not like to admit they needed anyone’s help to build their businesses. To hear them tell it, it was they who stood on hard concrete floors 8 hours a day, at least 5 days a week, producing a product to take to market, not workers who, no matter how much they were paid, never even came close to what the owners and shareholders of those businesses made in profit.
Sen. Schumer and President Barack Obama does not have blinders on like Jonah Goldberg and his ilk, they both know what it takes to make a nation, and it is not just a bunch of rich guys and their money. If it were up to the super wealthy, we would all be living in extreme poverty and journalist like Mr. Goldberg would be telling us just how lucky we are to have a job in the first place, even if it only pays a few pennies a day.
I also really take offense at Jonah Goldberg taking much of what Sen. Schumer said about Obamacare out of context about “how the law was designed to help mostly poor people who for the most part don't vote”. He called what Schumer said, “Uncompassionate Liberalism”. No Mr. Goldberg, you have it all wrong. Sen. Schumer was simply pointing out that Obamacare is not all about politics but about taking care of the least of us, though we vote or not, or in other words, true compassionate liberalism.
True, the poor do not vote much and that is because they do not trust that their votes really count. Sen. Schumer believes we should take care of the poor, though they vote or not, unlike you and your wealthy conservative politicians who only seem to care about those who show up at the polls to support their greedy, uncompassionate conservative politics.
Liberalism or progressivism, whatever they want to call it, is the future. Backward-minded people like Goldberg will find themselves preaching to the choir as they continue to point fingers at those who are willing and bold enough to tell us the truth, like Sen. Schumer and President Obama. Jonah Goldberg would like us to keep believing that government is the evil that besets us all and not the wealthy interests behind government, pulling the strings behind the curtain.
As far as Sen. Schumer’s remarks, he is right on; Democrats need to stop running from who we are and stand tall when it comes to defending the government. Yes, the government needs fixing and to fix it, we need to stop letting the wealthy control it with their dark money in our campaign system. We need to publicly finance political campaigns and make it illegal to donate even a dollar to elect anyone, then we can begin cleaning up our government and making it work the way it was intended to in the first place.
Like Obama said, “Government is us.” Now let us ordinary working class Americans wrestle control of our government from the hands of the super wealthy so that our votes really do count and then Jonah Goldberg’s rich friends will only have the same power the rest of us have, which is one vote for each American, rich, poor and anyone in between.
This is a republish from my website: Fidlerten Place