11-06-2010, 08:09 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Spice Master
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 17,969
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Do the rich need the rest of America?
BUniverse: Bill Moyers at the Howard Zinn Lecture
Quote:
While the "main street" economy was racked by high unemployment, and the real estate crash, the wealthy, whose financial fates were more tied to capital markets than jobs and houses, picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and started buying luxury goods again...the "super rich" earn their fortunes with overseas labor, selling to overseas consumers, and managing financial transactions that have little to do with the rest of America, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of their several homes around the country.
...So the answer to the question "Do the rich need the rest of America?" is as stark as it is ominous: many don't. As they form their own financial culture, increasingly separated from the fate of everyone else, it is hardly surprising, that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people.
Now you would think that the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from history. Ultimately, gross inequality can be fatal to a nation.
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Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing.
― Terence McKenna
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