dogzilla:
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This chatter sounds like a solution looking for a problem. If there's enough chatter from the liberal camp about this poorly structured brief and others like it, that turns into an 'Oh my God, we have to do something to help those poor people' and my taxes go up. In the meantime, wealthy liberal hypocrites who think it's society's job to help the poor continue to accumulate their millions, or in some cases billions.
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again with the phantasms. again with the victimization. again with the reconstruction period politics of petit bourgeois white resentment. the lynchpin of the politics of resentment (to be polite about it) during the reconstruction period (you know, just after the civil war) was aimed at the attempts on the part of the federal government to provide some sort of compensation or head-start or transition from slavery into "freedom" (in quotes because, well, you know this is capitalism and freedom is mostly formal unless there's something like equality of condition)...which alot of white petit-bourgeois saw as taking something from them. this resentment was only racist in its consequences except when it was racist in its form and content. the line was often floaty. i suppose it would have depended on the question, on who you asked and how you asked them.
anyway, it's the same thing with contemporary politics of petit-bourgeois resentment. any attempt to redress structural problems with the american social arrangement, problems which are reflected in massive inefficiencies, labor market incoherences, stifling of innovation, a collapse of any meaningful democratic process behind the weight of an entirely anti-democratic social arrangement, which could not be otherwise because the inequality in the distribution of wealth translates in spatial segregation translates into wildly uneven access to educational opportunities translates into multiple levels of effective citizenship translates into an enormous squandering of human potential, one that has to be visible even at the rah rah america level, or would be were the rah rah america types not so sure that the problems are the fault of the people squeezed through this ridiculous, untenable, unethical stratified system---it's reflected in levels of social violence (and ultra-right gun fetishism is perhaps a recognition of it, but one routed through a refusal of the social and flipped onto an illusion of Heroic Individualism)--its reflected in health problems--and it's reflected in the fading of american empire because a dysfunctional system cannot hold itself together by exporting its pathologies for long...
but hey, no problem is so great that it justifies raising your fucking taxes.