The One Percent

    Suppose you go shopping to a giant department store and the greeter -- lets call him Grover -- tells you to sign a pledge in order to get in.  The pledge states that if you are a working person and your income is less than $50,000 a year, you have to pay full price on any merchandise that you need.  But if your income is over one million and you achieved it not by working, or producing goods, but by manipulating money, than you do not have to pay for any goods or goodies that you acquire.

     It just doesn't make any sense to me.

     And yet 270 Republican members of Congress signed a pledge to never raise taxes on the richest Americans, thus providing them with a free ride at the expense of the rest of us.

    It seems that for some, politics like religion, requires the suspension of logic.  If one believes that the universe was created in six days some five thousands seven hundred and seventy two years ago, that person might believe that Rick Perry, or Michelle Bachman, or Newt Gingrich (to name a few), could become a good and caring President.

     But, applying logic, Henry Louis Mencken observed that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."   Some seventy years later, the amalgam of Republicans/Tea Baggers does base their electioneering strategy on trying to convince the American public to vote against its own interests.  

     Ronald Reagan, the  beloved patron saint of the Republican right, had one good quality that is totally lacking in the present Presidential candidates of his party: a great sense of humor.  So its not totally impossible that when he said "Government is not the solution, but the problem" he was joshing.  

     However the Republican Presidents, Governors and Congressmen who followed him worked at making  governing a problem.  They advocate the elimination of the social net that protects the most needy while increasing the wealth of the most greedy.  If they could have their way, they would shrink the size of the government so that its only remaining function would be controlling women bodies and their reproductive organs.

     So, is it in the best interest of women to vote for the repressive Republicans?

    Working men who contemplate voting Republican should remember that one of the primary aims of that party is to destroy their unions.  It started in 1947 with the Taft-Hartley legislation and then Ronald Reagan firing of the air-traffic controllers in 1981, and continues today with the Republican governors assault on state employees.

     So, if it is not in the interest of most women and most men to support the Republican party, than who should be the people that vote for them?  

    How about the one percent of the richest Americans whose interests are served and protected by the GOP.

2/10/2012 (Sun Sentinel, Los Angeles Times)