One Percent Economics

When Romney tried to make his ten thousand dollar bet with Newt it was taken as a sign, of his cavalier attitude toward what he certainly considers chump change. It adds to the impression that he is a card carrying member of the “one percent”, and has no regard for the challenges, aspirations, or life style of the “ninety nine percent”. To him ten thousand dollar bets are equivalent to the five dollar bets, of the average person participating, in the office Super Bowl scoring pool.

Speaking of the Super Bowl, this year’s ticket prices are the highest yet, and fifty yard line seats on the bottom level even exceed the dollar value of Romney’s proposed wager. Of course, neither of these expressions of economic value can hold a candle to the asking price of the Jaguars owner Shahid Kahn’s yacht, which at One hundred and twelve million dollars exceeds the team’s annual payroll. Then there is the Koch brother’s decision to spend one hundred million dollars to defeat President Obama.

What all these expressions of monetary value have in common, is the sort of people who consider them just the usual cost of satisfying their current inclination. The access to vast wealth does not in and of itself make one an immoral person or diminish one’s sense of the most valuable things in life like love, truth, and kindness. Take Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, for example, they are extremely wealthy people whose selflessness and philanthropy set shining examples to their financial peers.

There is though the other either already extraordinarily wealthy or wannabe wealthy individual, whose value system is driven exclusively by the pursuit of wealth. I am talking about the hard, right wing tea party republican who believes they should be taxed at less of a rate than the common member of the proletariat. This individual judges their own self worth, and everybody else’s, by their amount of net worth. You know the type; they are the ones who want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

These are the ones who will resort to any tactic, no matter how unpleasant, any prevarication, no matter how false, and any subterfuge, no matter how reprehensible, to further their aims. They revel in their ability to hoodwink the masses into believing the unbelievable with propaganda, innuendo, and outright lies. They have called into doubt Obama’s genealogy, birth place, religion, and political affiliation with no regard to the truth. They have lied to the country to garner support for unjust and immoral wars.

There is no limit to their perfidy, and no limit to the deaths, and destruction they are willing to inflict on the rest of humanity, to further their pursuit of money. Their value system does not consider justice, truth or common humanity of value. They care not one whit for the health of the planet or anyone on it, including their own children. They are self indulgent, self-absorbed, and greedy beyond measure; and consider all of these attributes to be among their finer qualities.

Some will disagree and point to Romney’s supposed largess in contributing so much to his church. One must take into account his belief though that god commands him to do that, in order to achieve the highest of three levels of exaltation that exist in the Mormon version of heaven. His tithing is not from the heart as much as from a fear of his god. When it comes to how he feels about the poor he has made that exceedingly clear through his actions and pronouncements.

President Obama and the democrats are right that this coming election is about choices, consequences, and the direction of the country into the foreseeable future. If we don’t give him a clear and decisive mandate along with the house and senate needed to achieve it, we are guaranteeing the destruction of the middle class as we know it, and the impoverishment of all, but the one percent. Oh, we’ll get our bread and circuses in the guise of soup lines, and super bowls, but the American Dream will die a miserable death, and the stench will live in our nostrils for generations.