I’m listening to a story on KQED’s Forum, about the homeless school age children living in San Francisco. The story is sad. Poignant. And pitiful. Not the people caught in the mess of homelessness but the liberal view that we need more services and we need to take people in or give them from our own slim cupboard. Those calling in were, from what I can tell, the middle class bleeding hearts. One woman wanted to pay the rent on the featured woman’s SRO hotel. Great. Then what happens after the month? The woman who paid the freight is short funds and the woman and her kids in the SRO are again searching for a benefactor.
There were no representatives from Pacific Heights calling in.
During Vietnam people from all walks of life were drafted. The wealthy were able to shelter their offspring from the horror of war but not entirely. And there were just enough of a cross section of the economy and society getting harmed that in spite of entrenched communist domino theory dogma and military industrial complex economic profitability the war was shut down.
The engines of our two wars are being fueled for the most part by the underprivileged and evangelical and because of that the wars have continued unnoticed for over ten years. The seeds for the end of Vietnam came not from Congress but from the ground swell of the diverse social-economic population being mangled in the machinery of war. No one listens to when the poor cry to one another.
When the wealthy are being given bonus’s for being wealthy and the poor are being given pity for being poor we are strapped in and have set in motion a merry go round where neither side will ever meet. Vietnam became more like bumper cars. But in the intervening years the powers that be have devised ways to separate us, to create the merry go round and to eliminate the bumper car. I stood in the long unemployment lines in the cold during the Nixon oil embargo recession. Over the years during the worsening recessions the systems of separation have been streamlined. Today there are more people out of work but you would be hard pressed to actually see the unemployed standing in line. Those out of work have no forum for conversation besides “Social Media” to discuss the rotten state of our economic system. The computer has become the perfect tool for the state and corporate interests to disenfranchise the disaffected with little disruption.
We have more people in peril, economic and military, without actually seeing them, without hearing their voices, without acknowledging their existence. Oh sure there are well meaning stories on public television and radio, but the supposed dynamic generators of economic power are not feeling a pinch. Their children, for the most part are not dying in far away volunteer wars and they are not, in any sustained way relieving the stress of those in dire need by creating jobs.
Gigantic corporate and inherited wealth are the sacred cows of our society but from this vantage place they appear buggerish and rude. After all, one might conclude that they must have screwed a lot of people to gain so much.
It’s been proven time and time again that those of wealth will not voluntarily give up their good fortune. Congress’s lobbying for corporate interests have encouraged offshore jobs and import cheap labor, and with the sharp anti-labor knife have developed no strike contracts for the labor union eunuch meanwhile promising negotiated benefits that they’ll renege . So if they’re not creating jobs in the millions as we are lead to believe is the entrepreneurial mandate, if they feel no social connection to the family sleeping in Alamo Square and the shelters then I presume they leave us no choice – we take it. I mean, all workers understand that if they don’t perform, there are consequences. What’s good for the goose...
Grover Norquist is right, forget taxes.
My idea is simple. We take half. Not a reign of terror; we don’t line them up against the wall like the Romanoff’s, god forbid. And we don’t take everything. We take half.
If a Pacific Heights family of five can’t live on a half a billion dollars I’m sure we can make space for them in the Saint Anthony food line. The billions collected from Pacific Heights, Presidio Heights, Presidio Terrace and the other enclaves not just here but around the state would put our public schools on firm footing, wipe out city and state debt, and put people to work on public works projects creating jobs that may indeed keep families off the park benches, bridges from collapsing, and insuring stable long term financial stability for millions of California humans. The wealthy still deserve a seat at the table, therefore we include those of wealth in this one time redistribution plan. We’ll include them all right. As George Bush said, “it’s your money.” Time for the rich to give it back. Take half.
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