DYLAN RATIGAN, HAD IT FIGURED OUT years ago, back when he was still on MSNBC and MSNBC was still worth watching. “It’s all about extracting the wealth” he’d say. But nobody wanted to talk about it. So he’d repeat it, obviously frustrated. He kept repeating it until, eventually, he was fired, along with Ed Schulz, Keith Olbermann, and anybody else who spoke their truth as opposed to playing a role for their corporate bosses.
That’s not to say there aren’t still some good people at MSNBC. There are. But there’s also an elephant in the room. A big fat Republican economic elephant that needs to be recognized for what it is.
Where do you go after agreeing that predatory capitalists are going after all the money, sucking it up to the top and holding it there, turning America into a neo-feudal society? I mean, what’s left to talk about after the truth is set free? Especially when it’s too complicated for most common folk to understand and too terrible to contemplate for those that can understand it. You can’t talk about it anyway, because those same predatory capitalists watching their numbers rise on Wall Street are the same guys that send you a big fat paycheck every couple of weeks.
Ratigan, was right. So was Ralph Nader, when he wrote his book, “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us.” Only they can impose a balanced economy as opposed to an unacceptably massive gap between the rich and the poor that grows broader day by day.
Wouldn’t it be something, if, in two hundred years or so, historians look back on our era with curiosity, amazed that the country’s last best chance for survival as a Constitutional Republic may have been an elderly senator from Vermont? An old grandpa looking guy with a heart condition, who stuck it out, trying to wrench his party away from elitists and back into the hands of working class centrists – even while PC extremists tore the party to shreds from the inside out? No point in thinking about that now. That one’s already out of the barn and galloping away.
“Its the economy, stupid!” – James Carville, 1992
Under Trump, watch billionaires and millionaires suck more wealth up to the top of the economic food chain than ever before. Watch for them to put the squeeze on the elderly, with higher and higher deductibles, making health insurance less and less affordable. They’ve wanted to kill Medicare and Social Security from their inception, and now the push will continue, but this time it will be done Trumpist style. That is to say, “bigly.” The cost of auto and home insurance will also keep climbing as will inflationary pressures forcing old folks to obtain reverse mortgages, giving their homes back to the banks just so they can afford to keep buying food for themselves and Christmas presents for the grandkids who will no longer be able to afford college.
Ratigan, was right. Wait for it. It’s all about the rich extracting the wealth from the masses. Just wait for it, suckers. Sure, the Democrats blew it, but “sharing the wealth” was just a stupid pipe dream somebody had. Anyway, it sounds kinda Socialist, doesn’t it? And we want nothing to do with that, do we? Even though most of us have no real idea what the hell it even is.
So now you’re gonna get exactly what you voted for, everything this new Republican Party has to offer. A retirement age so high that you’ll be working until you drop, and even then you’ll have nothing left to leave the family. It’ll all go back to a bank, sucked up to the top of the economic food chain as the gap between the rich and everybody else continues to grow. And there’ll be nobody left to care. Just the rich on one side, and suckers and losers on the other.