I once heard it said that America was a country of millionaires looking for a place to happen. We value and cherish success. We admire those who’ve achieved financial success. We don’t hate millionaires. That said, a growing number of Americans are coming to despise the greed, venality, and self-interest of those bent on enriching themselves at the expense of those less fortunate. As it turns out, we don’t hate millionaires…but we do hate the air of entitlement and privilege that so many millionaires assume as their birthright. We may value and respect success, but we’re finally beginning to recognize and reject the notion that wealth and success do not earn you the keys to the kingdom. You may have worked hard and earned every bit of your success…but that doesn’t ipso facto translate to you being a better person worthy of more, more, more- not when it comes at the expense of those less fortunate than you.
We hate that things have become so out of whack that we now live in what can most accurately be described as a “trickle-up” economy, with laws and a tax code written by and for the benefit of the oligarchy. How bad, how thoroughly craven, how thoroughly inequitable have things become?
- The top 1 percent of Americans still own 40 percent of our country’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent.
- The richest 1 percent earned one out of every four dollars in 2007. Thirty years earlier, the richest only made one out of every 11 dollars.
- One in four millionaires pays a lower tax rate than 10 million middle-income Americans.
- Fourteen million Americans are unemployed.
- Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash - more cash than at any time in nearly a half century - instead of hiring more employees.
Memo to the rich (and their Republican enablers): If you want to wake up one morning to find that you’ve got a revolution on your hands, just keep riding the greed train. Keep acting as if greed and avarice are two of the Seven Virtues. Keep expecting that your tax burden will continue to decrease because that’s what God and Eric Cantor believe should happen. You might be surprised to learn that money doesn’t mean you get to bend the rules to your advantage. You don’t get to try to create a servant class designed to defer cater to your “needs” and make your life easier. You don’t get to trample basic rules of fairness, nor do you get to trample the social contract. Congratulations; your greed and avarice helped spawn the Occupy Wall Street movement, and it looks as if it may well be with us until your fingers are pried from this country’s laws and tax code.
Americans admire and respect success…but it turns out that we also demand fairness and equality of opportunity. Your money may purchase power and influence, but eventually that those things will crumble under the size and momentum of a movement not geared to advance your interests. Eventually, you will no longer be able to dictate the course of events nor determine the results. You can either accept what will become increasingly inevitable, or you can continue to feed the revolution.
Americans aren’t asking for equal redistribution of wealth, but they are demanding fundamental change. They want a leveling of the playing field. They want to live in a country where the already rich don’t pay for Congress to erect barriers to separate them from the grubby hands of the unwashed masses of the proletariat.
You can remain part of the problem…or you can become part of the solution. It’s your call.
