MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

In the news:

Many stories about war, fighting, violence. Domestic, national, international: doesn’t matter, such stories abound. In the 50 state capitals, a different kind of fight: harsh words over budget deficits, each side blaming the other.

In the nation’s capital, the same battle wages between parties, between political labels, between personalities.

New ideas come and go; old ideas reappear, are measured, reshaped, discarded. The struggle develops its own nomenclature: “entitlement” becomes a key term.  Are Americans “entitled” to Social Security, health coverage, retirement pensions, and benefits?

Have we become “soft”, expecting too much?

Can Americans make do with less even if it means losing a home . . . going without medical treatment . . . ending “retirement” to re-enter the workplace . . . reducing caloric intake and cutting pills in half . . . giving up on believing college will be affordable for our children?

Are we expecting too much from our economy, our culture, our country? Are we being selfishly extravagant to the detriment of national needs with financial emergencies piling up one on top of the other?

To what are we, the people, entitled?

How much should we downsize our expectations, our beliefs, our earnings, our comfort level, our material existence, to please the gods of High Finance who wish to warn us via “Doomsday.net” that our lives of sinful luxury and self-indulgence must soon end . . . lest the bankrolls of billionaires begin to shrink to unacceptable amounts!!

EARNINGS BELONG TO THE EARNERS

I would suggest we change the landscape of the debate by adding a new phrase that reads “Earned Entitlement” to counter any suggestion that the American people are part of a selfish aristocracy asking for something which they haven’t earned.

Many four-letter words come to mind in response to this poisoned misuse of the word “ENTITLEMENT” but suffice it to say, in regular (non-vulgar) prose, any such suggestion is pure nonsense!

People who have worked all their adult years while paying into Social Security (or other pension plans) have the RIGHT to expect a sizable amount of money returned to them when they retire: THEY HAVE EARNED IT.

Hence, let’s rename this social issue EARNED ENTITLEMENT or EARNED REWARD to make the point clear!

We need to take the “name game” out of the hands of those trying to suggest that all of the nation’s economic woes are caused by working people, merely because wage-earners expect a level of decency in their standard of living when they retire–after a lifetime of work contributing to the nation’s productivity and wealth.

WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO?

Granted, each person’s rightfully earned expectations, multiplied by the million fold, will create its own economic currents—as a mountain is sometimes said to produce its own weather—even so, that remains but half the story!

What about the enormous amount of wealth sucked out of circulation to be hoarded by the wealthy?  What about luxury yachts, private jets, mansions and villas, art and jewelry collections, and lavish parties on the grand scale?

Tens of millions of working Americans remain the backbone of the economy: responsible for its productivity and services, producing the goods that support the currency that we use as our main medium of exchange.

And yet millions of dollars are daily, hourly being sucked into the private caves, bank vaults, off-shore accounts, and hidden safes of millionaire-billionaires!

Capitalism may be defined in many ways but certainly–especially during a high-crisis recession–we should never forget the most basic doctrine of all: the exploitation of working people’s earnings by the super-rich!

IMAGINE!

Imagine a desert island where survivors of a ship-wreck have arrived. There are hundreds of hungry survivors on the south end of the island.

At the other end of the island are three persons who have amassed a huge amount of food of every kind. They have enough food to feed everyone for days, for weeks, or for months until rescue can be affected.

They are obscenely rich in food! They have 100 times the amount of food they themselves could ever consume.

The hungry people politely ask the three food-wealthy persons if they wouldn’t please share? To which they receive a resounding “No!”

The food hoarders shout out at the top of their lungs: “This is OUR food, OUR property; this all belongs to us and we don’t have to share a single crumb! You are entitled to none of it, do you hear? To none of it!”

Now imagine substituting MONEY for FOOD and America for that island.  You get a pretty good idea of what America is like when it comes to money. Of course, this is to suggest a scenario that most rich people would rather avoid discussing.

(Add to the above scenario the fact that the food the three selfish persons wish to hoard to themselves was first produced by the island’s hungry survivors!  Farm-workers cannot afford to buy crops that they helped harvest).

As thousands of pounds of food are being kept from hungry people on the island, is it not true that millions of dollars of wealth are being kept from struggling American families?

NEW QUESTIONS

Ask yourself: what is a Billionaire? From whence this wealth? Whence the sense of ENTITLEMENT that millionaires and billionaires have developed and made “sacred”?

Somehow it is perfectly all right for THEM to hoard millions and billions of dollars.  How is it okay for THEM to remove this fantastic amount of wealth from the national economy from where it first originated?

Why is all right for THEM to pretend that this extreme almost-pathological selfishness on their part has no effect on the American people or our national economy?

Why are working people, who already suffer from a marked degree of exploitation (being underpaid the true value of their labor) being asked to make additional sacrifices in order to keep the rich people happy and their enormous wealth protected?

What is best for society? What happened to “caring and sharing” as ordinary people do for one another?

What happened to the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution?

THE PEOPLE’S SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT

Where do we, the people, get OUR sense of entitlement?

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

That’s OUR source of entitlement: the Birth Certificate of the United States of America!

Where do the rich get THEIR sense of entitlement? Not from the Declaration of Independence and not from the Constitution nor from the American people, I daresay.

Theirs comes from historical and social inequality, from past and present social stratification inherently and violently unequal.  The wealth at the top derives ultimately from the labor of millions of people at the bottom of society: serfs, slaves, peasants, laborers, factory workers, miners, textile mill hands, railroad employees, ad infinitum.

Simply put and historically-speaking, the rich inherited their wealth based on the exploitation of the labor of the common people. That wealth is as much the people’s wealth as it is theirs, truth be told!

When we talk about ENTITLEMENT in the future, we should carefully distinguish between the EARNED ENTITLEMENT (EARNED REWARDS) of working people and those who grew rich off their labors.

Since the 1930’s, wage-earners have paid in to the Social Security System their whole working lives.  They do so in order to create a viable source of retirement funding for themselves and their families.

We must not confuse the rights of working people with the “self-awarded” (stolen) entitlements of the wealthy, based in large measure on the exploited labor of American workers.

The very richest families control corporations and factories, here and overseas.  They constantly remove billions of dollars from the economy by hoarding selfishly enormous amounts of wealth that are derived from the productivity of working people!

IN SUMMATION

People who work for a living can look with pride upon the fact that they have EARNED their livelihood and their right to a decent standard of living after they retire.  They must resist all attempts to have this money stolen from them by wealthy unscrupulous elites looking to add to their own already gargantuan personal fortunes.

LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS FROM NOW ON TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT:

THIS IS OUR EARNED ENTITLEMENT

AND OUR EARNED REWARDS

AND NOTHING LESS!!!  

PEOPLE ARE “ENTITLED” TO THAT WHICH THEY HAVE EARNED!!  

Roger

San Jose, CA.