Occupy Movement participants: You may not realize it but through all of those newspaper and television images you are broadcasting hope to millions of your fellow citizens. I wish for a moment that you colorfully imagine the sight of one of you young and passionate people, sitting on your rear-end right smack on the center of the floor of the people of the United States of America's capital building as a pleasant looking Capital security guard brings you a warm drink and a blanket. I am sure this would be the most beautiful display of a free society advancing that you and I and billions of others will ever see in a lifetime. DON'T REST YET! (peace symbol).
Liberals like me have been trying to communicate the following for years. The philosophy of taxation's effect on all of us, rich or poor, is infrequently understood and many false assertions come from this misunderstanding. Warren is actually speaking (video below) about a type of person, with a particular standard of morality. I think these people she is pointing her finger at are those who never properly learned to share in childhood, and so never learned that because we share we all benefit. They then take for granted, for the rest of their lives that the resources they need to succeed will continue to "fall from the sky," and so "Why share?"
They are the exploiters who often get rich by using our resources and our desperation for jobs. Unreasonably they then scream for less government, as they are under a delusion inspired by greed that they had not been hoisted into their comfortable leather seats by taking advantage of our government. A government through which we collectively chose to provide the resources they have used. Warren is speaking below about an ethic that is harming us all. This corrupt ethic also brings us corporations in America with little loyalty to their communities, the first corporations to out-source our communities to their economic death.
Elizabeth Warren understands liberal philosophy and has an eloquent description to aid in understanding the core of one of our most pressing economic issues. If she runs for president, I'll support her over anyone in current contention for the office. See video.
A lot of people in our country think that because something is legal it must be moral. Far from true. Example is a television show called Storage Wars where the stars are tattooed beer bellied scavengers who take advantage of the unexpected losses and failures in the lives of poor people. The motto of the goods grabbers is “Don’t pay your bills we’ll take your stuff!” Most of the storage unit renters, by economic causes beyond their control, have for reasons of food verses storage rental, become rental delinquents. We have all passed the concrete cubicles in our cars, storage prisons surrounded by electrified chain link fences, that to many represent the always losing and ever struggling Poverty Wars.
The whole context of the show is immoral. The stored goods of poor people are auctioned off to strangers. Anyone enjoying this show is either immoral or just too stupid and ignorant to realize when immorality is practiced right under their noses. The winners of these auctions are happy with glee to forage through poor people’s stuff, 99% of which is thrown out, and the show follows every happy moment except those precious moments when poor people's photo albums are thrown in the trash.
If you consider yourself a moral person don’t buy a storage rental compound because you’ll frequently have to make a moral decision whether to sell off the many boxes of someone’s lost dreams, or put it all outside somewhere, like underneath a carport. But if you consider that anything legal you can get away with must be moral, then go ahead and buy one these poor people’s container compounds, you immoral scumbag.
There are a lot of activities that are legal but immoral - here is a short list: It’s immoral and legal to sell cigarettes knowing full well that most of the population of smokers will be killing themselves slowly. It’s a legal offense to all to immorally dodge one’s fair share of taxes. Billing Medicare for something just because the health care providers say it happened and patients won’t check their itemized billing anyway, is immoral. It is immoral to own a bar or lounge miles outside of town with a parking lot that holds the cars of 50 likely drunk drivers. It is legal and immoral to buy a pedigree dog while thousands of perfectly healthy lovable dogs are put to death daily. It is legal and immoral to sit back while your nation begins a clearly unnecessary war that kills thousands. It is legal and immoral to cut back funding for social services based on political hypothesis.
In the minds of the storage unit vultures someone is going to buy this stuff anyway, so why not us! Following the actions of immoral people does not make a follower moral. Whether someone else is going to buy the possessions or not does not make the buyers moral. In this writer’s mind the owners and the buyers of these auctions are all a bunch of scumbags who don’t deserve anyone’s time. Viewers should stop looking at the Storage Wars show before their children see it and deduce that selling off poor people’s things is perfectly moral. If a town or city or state allows these landlords of despair to practice their cold hearted behavior in their districts then they are complicit in this immorality that effects only poor people.
Here’s an idea to be moral and to have some civic pride. If you have a few hundred dollars and feel like helping someone, go to the nearest furniture prison and pay off one or two back rents for people in delinquency. I guarantee that you will be helping poor people and I guarantee you will feel better about having done that than the pride you felt at your graduation.
One solution to the storage unit immorality is for towns and cities to build their own concrete compounds and charge a not-for-profit fee. Rentals can be restricted to local citizens only. These towns should offer complete forgiveness to any renters who have hit rock bottom. One good rule: never throw out or sell somebody’s stuff. Those towns and cities that do this should receive an award for morality above the call of legality.
"Government is the coming together of people to do for one another collectively what they could not do as well or at all privately through the market system or philanthropy." - Abraham Lincoln (liberal!)
“People” coming together as a “collective,” disrespecting our market system and the failures of “philanthropy?” Does that quote sound like something a conservative would say? No of course not. It sounds socialist and practically communist. In the 1860s the fairly new Republican party was comprised mostly of members with Liberal ideals. And the Democratic party members had conservative ideals. A lot of people who study American history know that, but you newbies to politics choose to not find that out, or you are just in denial. Even your leader Glen Beck didn't know that when he chose the Lincoln memorial for your fall rally in 09. There have been party ideology switches this century in the baby boomer generation, such as the conservative democrats flight to change parties after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (the act that effectively ended legal segregation in our nation). Go ahead ask somone! The quotation above is famous in Liberal circles and was said by Abraham Lincoln(See "Lincoln's Hands," his original manuscript). If you folks, who praise President Lincoln, and think he represented your party today, knew this to begin with, you would not have been making fools of yourselves in front of the Lincoln memorial and in the minds of US historians, intellectuals and liberals, 8 out of 10 Phds, 94% of all scientists, and half of our politicians. It is apparent to me that Tea Partyers and conservatives really only like Lincoln because he freed the slaves (something that Liberals had wanted for for decades). And if they praise Lincoln then that provides cover from the media so that the conservative right doesn’t look as if they are racists. And with President Lincoln in their pockets they can attract more African American members, from somewhere. The racism of the right wing is pretty clear because of the right’s hatred for a black president who is doing less damage and more reform, that helps all citizens, than the white conservative president before him had ever done in 8 years. Where was the tea party while the white President Bush was adding more than 3 trillion dollars to our national debt for two wars that were not even necessary? Where was the Tea Party when that white President Bush gave tax cuts to rich people without even making up for it anywhere else in his budgets! President Bush was a tax and spend Republican. So was the white Ronald Reagan who tripled our national debt. Why were the Tea Partiers not carrying posters of the white George Bush as a black African witchdoctor with a bone through his nose at their tax day march? Answer: deep down inside, hidden from political correctness of our society, a black president is an affront to the sensibilities of a true conservative.
By pretending to embrace Lincoln’s party politics you conservatives are warping history. Don’t you care that students learn true facts about our past? Or does that concern mean less to you than boosting your roles by hiding behind a liberal. A liberal Lincoln who clearly used “big government,” to better the United States as whole, when the states had continuously failed to better themselves and bring fairness to their citizens?
Our government representatives have not spent 234 years passing laws willy nilly for the fun of it. Tea Partiers and other conservatives go ahead and study President Lincoln’s record of laws passed. While you are studying Lincoln’s ideals and ask yourselves which federal government laws existing today used to be run just fine without Lincoln’s ideal of what our government really is? Ask yourselves which federal laws can you honestly say were not even needed before they were created, and why were they needed, and do those problems that cause us to write laws, remain today? What were the continuing failures of small governments and individuals that caused our representatives to come together for nationwide solutions? You can also contemplate which specific laws you want to get rid of now that you think that the problems that they had addressed can be handled well at the local level? Look at your past and find evidence that supports your beliefs that the big bad government can’t do anything right. The truth is our Democratic Republic has a centralized government that does a hell of lot more good for its citizens than a pack of conservative governors running around in circles, mostly ending up where their state had started from.
At your convention last year, 80% of the audience when asked if “you have ever been involved in politics before?” raised their hands to answer no. This ignorance is really making you guys look foolish. Tea Partiers and other conservatives should return to school, take civics and United States history. Perhaps you could make a new website called Government as Seen through Tea Party Tainted Glasses.”It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”
-- Abraham Lincoln, chiding the editor of a Springfield, Illinois, newspaper
