Skip to main content

Anyone who is willing to work ...


The bit of wisdom above is from the second page of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by the mysterious B. Traven. It is often the case that wealthy people believe that jobs are readily available for the poor -- and it is probably not a coincidence that this is self serving in that it helps them to justify being wealthy.

Marie Antoinette is, by tradition, credited with saying these words in response to the information that poor people had no bread to eat: "Let them eat cake." It was a demonstration of how utterly calloused she was or of how utterly ignorant she was of the circumstance of most of the people in France at the time.

Today, we are in a new Gilded Age with extremes of wealth and poverty and a shrinking middle class. Yet, it is the wealthy from whom we hear complaints. The Republicans complain that Obama is initiating class warfare by drawing attention to the great disparities in our country, and the fact that for over the last forty years wealth that has amassed from gains in productivity by workers has almost all gone to rich people and not to the workers, themselves.

Too, there is the absurd situation where many middle-class people are paying higher income-tax rates than those making many millions of dollars. Yet the Republicans are unwilling to allow a correction of this circumstance.

The wealthy no longer live in regular neighborhoods like the rest of us.  They have their gated communities to put them in a wholly secure, other world where they cannot be touched by suffering or the troubles of ordinary people.  A high number of wealthy people come to think themselves royalty of a sort.

The Times are frivolous and superficial. Welcome to our own private garish, tasteless, gaudy Imperial France.

Comments

Steve said…
Outstanding post, Tom! It echoes what I'm reading right now in Robert Reich's great new e-book "Beyond Outrage." As you imply and he explicitly states, the REAL "class warfare" is what the rich are inflicting on the rest of us by using their wealth-enabled political power to grab bigger and bigger slices of the American pie while leaving the rest of us to scrap for a diminishing number of crumbs. Marie Antoinette had nothing on them. And they're so isolated from us behind their security gates that they probably don't even know it, and they actually feel slandered when someone dares to suggest that Mitt Romney's wife has no understanding of the daily challenges most women face.
Unknown said…
I have Krugman's new book, End this Depression NOW which echos much the same sentiment.

Too, I am happy to see that yesterday the Times had an editorial highlighting some frightening facts about disparities in income and debt between the rich and the rest of us, "Inequality, Debt and the Financial Crisis."

Maybe, just maybe, the people in our country will wake up and rise up against the injustice that is alarming already and quickly getting worse and worse.

Popular posts from this blog

Sex, Lies and Exegesis

Definition: exegesis [ek-si-jee-sis]: critical explanation or interpretation of a text or portion of a text, especially of the Bible. Painting by He Qi , a prominent artist from China who focuses on Christian themes. This piece is inspired by The Song of Solomon. In his May 21 column, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stirred up a hornets’ nest. His column wasn’t really a column, it was a quiz, titled “ Religion and Sex Quiz .” The questions and what he provided as the answers were provocative, to say the least. We would later learn, in his follow-up, a post to the Times online in the afternoon of the same day, “ Reader Comments on my Religion Quiz ,” that the information that was used to create the quiz came with the help of Bible scholars, “including Jennifer Knust, whose book inspired [the quiz], and … Mark Jordan of Harvard Divinity School.” Kristof doesn’t name Knust’s book, but a quick googling reveals that it must certainly be Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s...

In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day

Calvin [a "green hat" in Unfriendly Park] makes the argument for continued incompetent management. Hobbes represents me — only, in real life, I don't have that good a coat . In an act of Collective Punishment, Loaves & Fishes closes its park in the morning on New Year’s Day In one respect — and only one — that I can think of, Loaves & Fishes is NOT hypocritical: The management hates the way America is run and wants to turn it into a backward communist country . Consistent with that, Loaves & Fishes’ management runs its facility like a backward communist country. The People’s Republic of Loaves & Fishes. A seemingly minor thing happened on New Year’s Day. A couple of people smoked a joint in Loaves & Fishes’ Friendship Park and one of the park directors, or both of them, determined, at about 10am, that, in retribution, they would punish all the homeless there by closing the park for the day. This is something the managers of the park do all the ...

Loaves & Fishes implicates Buddhism and Jack Kornfield in its June Donations Plea.

The Sukhothai Traimit Golden Buddha was found in a clay-and-plaster overlaid buddha statue in 1959, after laying in wait for 500 years. It's huge and heavy: just under 10 feet tall and weighs 5 1/2 tons. At the beginning of their June newsletter , Loaves and Fishes relates a story, taken from the beginning of renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield's 2008 book The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology . The first part and first chapter in Kornfield's book is "Part I: Who are you really?" and chapter 1 is called "Nobility: Our Original Goodness," which ought to serve as a clue to what the beginning of the book is about, not that that sentiment isn't strewn through-out the chapter, section and book such that what Kornfield is telling us should be crystal clear. Somehow, the not-ready-for-primetime management at Loaves & Fishes have managed to use Kornfield's wise and kindly words in a way that mangles th...