When Greed Became Good

          Sacrifice is for the little people. -- Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman writes, "Political rage is coming not from the jobless, but from the very privileged, who are furious at the thought of their tax cuts expiring."

The Constant Weader add another reason to be furious at the greedy, self-pitying rich:

Tiny Violins, Please.

This country changed dramatically when the fictional characters Ronald Reagan & Gordon Gecko made greed “good.” We went from being a country where the majority believed they were their brothers’ keepers to a country that proudly perverted the Golden Rule: “Do unto others before they do unto you.” We became, seemingly overnight, avaricious & characterless. The “Greatest Generation” and the “Make Love, Not War” generation faded or adapted to the new cynicism. The federal government, which had pulled the nation out of the Great Depression, became the enemy, not the source and defender of the nation’s welfare.

The great irony in this disgusting transformation is that its leaders effected it on the completely false claim that they spoke for the “Moral Majority.” There was nothing moral about them. Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a city so misnamed that it was the exact opposite of a “city of brotherly love.” It was the city that was the center of American apartheid, where civil rights workers were murdered & the juries of their peers let their murderers off. Reagan knew what he was doing: he was telling the white bigots they could count on him to end the push for racial equality. They could. And he did. Although Reagan increased the size of government, he and his enablers did everything possible to end federal protections for all ordinary Americans, not just black Americans. They abandoned civil rights legislation. They deregulated financial institutions. They ran roughshod over federal lands, treating them as resources for mining, logging and ranching interests. They waged war on unions, even firing some of the most critical workers in the nation – air traffic controllers. As for their protection of children -- they said school lunch programs could consider ketchup to be a vegetable. Moral? More like stomach-churning.

The result of the Reagan/Gekko Revolution was both predictable and catastrophic for the average American. Last week Bob Herbert cited statistics Robert Reich gathered about those whiney super-rich Americans. Herbert, via Reich, noted that the share of the national income that has gone to the top one percent of income-earners was 8 or 9 percent in the 190s, rose to 10 to 14 percent in the 1980s, went to 15 to 19 percent in the late 1990s, and in 2007, the last year for which figures are available, Americans in the top one percent of income were “earning” more than 23 percent of all income going to all Americans.

And now. And now. Those inglorious bastards – who instead of taking in 8 percent of national income as they did in pre-Reagan/Gekko days, are hoarding 23 percent of national income -- are complaining that they might have to pay a little more in taxes on their unprecedented windfalls. Everything about these greedy, “entitled,” super-rich Americans is despicable. Everything. Their enablers in the Congress are beyond despicable. They have all earned their places in Dante’s Ninth Circle. But before their descent, instead of “subjecting” the whiners to Obama’s wimpy proposal to merely allow tax cuts for the wealthy to lapse, I suggest Congress tax income above $250,000 at 95 percent.