“It would all be hilariously funny,” Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman writes in a recent blog post, “if these people weren’t destroying the world.” (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/hard-times-on-wall-street/)
“These people” are bankers who are sad about working harder for less, even though their salaries are still 5.5 times larger than the average salary in the private sector.
It’s all part of a larger trend of selfish weepiness among the powerful and rich in America.
Rick Perry complained, in the announcement of his presidential campaign, about the 47 percent who do not pay federal income taxes. That’s because they’re too poor.
A decade of Republican policies have made the rich richer, the poor poorer, and shrunk the middle class.
Now, to add injury to insult, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and other intellectual luminaries of the right wing are calling for more taxes on the poor and middle class, to protect the tax cuts given to the rich. (http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/10/gop-demands-middle-class-tax-hikes.php)
The world now seems safe from the prospect of Rick Perry as the leader of the most powerful nation of the world.
That’s a relief to me for two reasons. One is that I have a nickel bet with someone near and dear to me that Perry will lose the Republican nomination. “Governor Hair,” as the late, lamented Molly Ivins used to call him, seems intent on winning that nickel for me, and I’m indeed grateful.
More importantly, though, the story is that when Rick Perry was George Bush’s lieutenant governor in Texas, people used to refer to Bush as “the smart one.” Think of that, and then imagine Governor Perry with the power of the United States government at his command. War with the penguinian hordes of Antarctica seems a likely result.
Mitt Romney recently tried to claim the crown of martyrdom because a preacher at a Valuer Voters summit referred to Mormonism as a “cult.”
He was right to be annoyed on behalf of his faith, but Romney has been conspicuously reluctant to defend other Americans, like Muslims, who choose to exercise their freedom of religion. If it doesn’t affect Mitt, it’s not a problem.
Republican politainer Sarah Palin has made enormous amounts of money and garnered a baffling amount of media attention by moaning in public about the “lamestream media” and how it silences voices like hers.
If only.
It’s bad enough that these people are running this great country into the ground with their selfish, short-sighted, ineffective policies.
The least they could do, as they strip away our rights, our incomes and our future, is to stop whining about how hard their privileged lives are.
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