Prisoners in the Promised Land
This past winter we holed up one night in San Jose, Costa Rica on the way back home. Miles of razor wire, concrete walls, security gates, metal fences. Not a place where you’d take a stroll after dark, maybe not even in the daylight. The motel we’re at here in Oakland reminds me of the barrio down south, ramshackle houses, razor wire, homeless encampments, a third world nation invisible to most of the 1%’ers who would gladly take welfare away from these poor and add it to their portfolios. It’s a land of equal opportunity, they like to argue, and these people squandered it out of laziness or because of drug dependency.
The America of gated communities, razor wired walls and security patrols is fast coming, a nation that blames the victims and champions a bully President and his toady minions. We will have walls within walls, walls at the borders, walls in the cities and walls in the prisons and detention centers.
In the land of really not very equal opportunity, the Ladder to Success is missing a few rungs for, say, someone of color, or a woman, or an immigrant than, oh, the son of an Ivy Leaguer. If you start at the bottom, you might hit a home run, but not one 1/100th as likely as the guy born on third base whose dad owns the stadium.
There will always be inequality in a democracy but let’s not call the attempts to minimize it ‘socialism’. Trying to shift the wealth to correct those income gaps only seems unfair to those at the top who don’t find a problem with lowering corporate taxes or skyrocketing CEO pay, or taxing stock portfolios as capital gains, not income. They know perfectly well how to redistribute wealth; after all, they write the laws. And from the looks of things here at street level, they want more and maybe they want it all. We’ll see how that works when they’re afraid to leave their walled kingdom without bodyguards they trust.
Hits: 76
Tags: Income Inequity, the 1% want it all, wealth redistribution for the rich