It really is a class war!
And, we ALL are in it, whether we want to be or not!
I just returned from the grocery and the garden store. This isn’t big news for many people right now, but prices are up, way up.
I expected higher prices because I have seen them going up, but today I realized that at the grocery I paid something like 55% to 60% more for what I bought than I did two or three months ago. And, yes, eggs were up again.
At the garden store I didn’t buy much, but the seeds I purchased cost me about $15.00, and last year they would have cost half that.
None of this is a surprise to you, I’m sure. But when we let that sink in, we have to wonder how low-wage workers, or even people with average-level incomes, are managing to get by, especially now that the extremists have cut every social support they had. For those income earners, this inflation and gouging — for there clearly is some of that too — isn’t an inconvenience; it has to be a disaster. Imagine having kids to feed now!
A gilded age “cottage” of the rich.
Democratic politicians — liberals in general — are talking about affordability, but they really are getting the message very wrong. As Michael Tomasky said today in his own Substack, this is a five-alarm fire. He was talking about the billionaire attack on all of us as well as the economy. Of course, the economy is part and parcel of the efforts of the rich to disenfranchise and impoverish us.
Those paragraphs above are so easy to write, but to get all Americans to understand that this is a real, exigent, deadly threat is far harder than getting our people to believe aliens are visiting Earth! Literally, very many folks find the fantasies about aliens more credible than they do the truth about the class war.
Every American is in this, regardless of whether she wants to be. United, we can end the oligarchy and the eugenics experiment of which the obscenely rich want us to be the subjects. Please, keep in mind that rich people are not special. Their intelligence levels follow the general averages of the whole population. Because they’re rich, they are totally self-absorbed. They are not any smarter than the rest of us but think only of themselves, and that combination makes them very dangerous.
So the message must be that candidates are expected to promise to take all those steps that will end this assault on the rest of us by the insanely rich. Tax higher incomes much, much more — 90%+ for the highest bracket — and tax wealth as well. Remove the Social Security tax cap! Eliminate truly stupid court decisions such as Citizens United. The justices were bribed to set those precedents! Install legal limits on campaign contributions! On and on; there are many steps to the process, but we all clearly see where we must go.
Most importantly, we must elect candidates who see this need very well and we must keep our voices and our activism loud and visible. People have the power, but only when we use it. Wishin’ and hopin’ won’t feed the bulldog.
We all gotta get busy!
All those Substackers who are suggesting that you like and restack their work are correct. Your actions control the algorithms!