[ExI] anti-capitalist propaganda

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:23 AM 5/9/2009 -0700, spike wrote:
>
>It sets off alarm bells in my head when he
>utters comments like "We all benefit when we spread THE wealth around."  THE
>wealth?  Define THE, sir.

I always assumed this is an incredible beat-up (as Aussies say of 
journalistic hysteria where a statement is taken out of context and 
inflated absurdly).

THE wealth is the wealth created by all the productive forces of the 
community. As everyone knows, in recent years an increasing 
proportion of this wealth has been funneled into the richest segments 
of (so-called) capitalist nations. Some of this upward drainage is 
due to unmitigated theft and scams on a colossal scale, pyramid 
schemes and other depredations. Some might be deserved, as brilliant 
and risky entrepreneurship increased wealth and convenience and 
lifespan etc for the entire community, and Atlas deserves his 
payment. Nevertheless, it can be argued that a disproportionate cut 
has been scooped up by the richest, and that this is not only morally 
dubious *but damages future wealth-making processes*--by, for 
example, as we are seeing, leading to a clusterfuck of such enormous 
dimension that 539,000 jobs disappeared last month in the US, and 
nearly 6 million in less than a year and a half.

I'd have thought that good capitalists would *want* to see as many 
citizens as possible creating and sharing in the wealth of their 
community. If shunting more and more into the pockets of the 
wealthiest plutocrats actually *despoils* the productivity of the 
community, throwing millions out of work, it might be rather a good 
idea to find ways to have the communally-produced wealth spread 
around again. Hostile rhetoric about "welfare queens" can deafen us 
to this call to a return to real functioning capitalism. Yes, there 
are spongers and petty criminals, but it seems to me extremely 
unlikely that Obama was appealing to them in his invocation of 
traditional American values of fairness and community.

Damien Broderick
[a stranger in a strange land--so hey, maybe I've got the ethos 
wrong, and Americans always *have* wanted the very richest to own 
almost all the nation's wealth and to hell with the rest]