Tea Party Republicans expose their false patriotism by routinely sabotaging American public welfare and the common good. Now they’ve taken that vicious proclivity to its worst extreme.
Despite a brutal winter that brings the danger of hypothermia to even the most prosperous among us, ultraconservative reactionaries have guaranteed that there will be deaths by freezing in the chilly weeks ahead because the jobless—now denied vital unemployment insurance extension due to a completely bankrupt right-wing rationale—won’t be able to afford adequate shelter. Or sufficient food, for that matter.
Well over a million individuals, who had been getting benefits until Dec. 28, are left without crucial safety-net help. Not mentioned in media coverage of this travesty are the additional family members, including tearfully frightened children, who’ve been thrown to a cruel fate.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon and monopoly corporations continue to be lavished with taxpayer subsidies, as Wall Street bulls race to record levels of profitability.
We have more long-term jobless than at any point since WWII. Three applicants vie for every position that’s available. The unemployed aren’t slackers. They must stringently report job-search efforts to remain eligible for any assistance at all.
What’s more, they necessarily spend what they get, giving welcome impetus to a far-from-recovered economy. It’s estimated that the extension cut-off will result in an additional 200,000 lost jobs.
While growing up during the Cold War years, I was always told that ”free enterprise” was the best thing since sliced bread, and that it would guarantee everyone a rags-to-riches pathway.
Now we have countless souls who’ll be unable to feed themselves, or their desperate loved ones, and the only path available to them will lead from rental eviction sites and foreclosed residences to probable cardboard and plastic-sheet homeless camps by the railroad tracks.
Shame on every twisted, sinful, selfish member of Congress who did this terrible thing to those good citizens!
But even greater shame will befall us—you and I—if we meekly tolerate what’s happened and don’t seize this pivotal moment to help launch a unified populist movement that demands people-before-profit priorities.
Vulture capitalists and bankster bandits must be held accountable for savagely attacking the most vulnerable in our midst.
No more coddling the upper crust while regular folks starve and freeze!
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.
It’s weird what the People were running from when this country was ‘formed’. They turned into the very thing they ran from… crooks and oppressors.
It’s very disturbing that I’ve seen jobs exported for decades, yet those nasty creeps turn around a smear the poor every chance they get. Send the jobs away, then yell ‘get a job’. Send the jobs away, then call the jobless lazy.
The only messages that a person can get from the poverty wages offered by megatons of employers are:
You should struggle. Struggling is good for you.
You should work the hardest for the least amount of money.
You should waitress better so your tips will supplement the loving $2.52/hr we bestow upon you.
Disabled and elderly people are burdens anyway, so why should you get any more than $8 working in a group home with them?
Your life has less dollar value than ours because your job requires no skill.
Because you didn’t spend a few years jumping through the hoops of arrogant, pontificating college professors, collecting loan debts, you are beneath us… and you don’t deserve to afford more than Ramen, you don’t deserve TVs, autos, a decent home (stay in the holes built by land grabbers in the 50s, often next to smelly landfills, train tracks, toxic factories, freeways, away from nature). College made us smarter and superior, so it’s only right that you make much less than us. (and oh how disgusting, you are also on welfare, yet you have an xbox and a flatscreen tv… you are living it up, you’re not suffering).
When will those lesions realize that no matter how you spend your work week, it’s 8+hours plus commute spent away from your family, spent making some arschloch rich?! 8 hours is 8 hours and everyone deserves to afford living!