The rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer. Too many in West Virginia have forgotten who we are as a people as they scrabble for the crumbs given to us by the barons like Don Blankenship, who has a contempt for the rules that keep his workers alive. In this deeply depressing and unfortunately too-sound-to argue-against speech by Bill Moyers, he writes:
Instead of enforcing the rules of fair play, government served as valet to the plutocrats. The young journalist Henry George had written that "an immense wedge" was being forced through American society by "the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity." Now inequality exploded into what the historian Clinton Rossiter described as "the great train robbery of American intellectual history." Conservatives of the day - pro-corporate apologists - hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right.
As we saw in John Raese's recent Senate bid, with his opposition to the minimum wage and support for elimination of the Social Security system, the Republican Party opposes even leaving the crumbs for workers. And many West Virginians who will never inherit wealth from a grandmother the way Raese made his money supported him. They have fallen for the lies told to them by the corporate apologists Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Faux News and are thoroughly convinced that they need to protect the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans or else they are not good Americans. The problem is not that they are rich. The problem is they are using their wealth to actively repress the other 98 percent by laying off people even when having record profits, by repressing wages, by consolidating political power through unlimited spending and through domination of the airwaves. They are not bound by the same rules as the rest of us and that is how they like it. Here in West Virginia we saw how Blankenship's bought-and-paid-for disgraced former justice had the audacity to run for the House of Representatives funded again by Blankenship's millions.
The inequities in the income system that are becoming even more extreme than in third world countries is allowing the wealthy to continue to assure the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If only they did not work so hard to make certain of the latter part of that they could be forgiven for the first half. But it is not enough for them to be rich and make money. They want to take away more from us.
Class warfare is being practiced and we see the body counts in the deaths of coal miners just trying to do their jobs and we see it in the not-so-hidden toll of the uninsured and the underinsured dying from a lack of proper health care.
The story of America goes that the early settlers of America migrated from Europe to create new lives for themselves where everyone was equal. But now the story in the 21st Century is how many Americans are helping the ruling class turn them into powerless serfs, who divert their own fears by trying to repress even those less fortunate below them.
In West Virginia we've seen how Don Blankenship and his ilk destroy the landscape, leaving behind a toxic wasteland that poisons the people and leaves behind grieving widows all while hiding behind the flag and a pretense of populism.
West Virginians used to fight back and stand up to the barons. We need to do so again at the ballot box. |
