WEALTH TURNED AGAINST "WE THE PEOPLE''

Most of us remember the uproar that occurred when #Elizabeth Warren said to businesses that they didn’t build their business by themselves. A hard working small businessperson sees his store or whatever as a product of his or her skill and hard labor. Because of their singular focus, there is no room for the truth. However, #Senator Warren pointed out, we all paid to educate their workers, for police and fire protection, for highways and roads, for providing utility franchises, and on and on. Really, taxpayers have paid for the entire environment in which these businesses thrive. Their businesses could not exist without the infrastructure with due recognition that their business could not exist with out them.

In addition, we have to recognize that by privatizing everything, Republicans are constantly working to change the focus from the taxpayer to the individual. They have succeeded in doing this more than most of us realize using myriad techniques for example private ownership of utilities. In addition, using the insurance concept, they have privatized such thing as medical, police, and fire protection—if you pay your insurance premium, you and not the taxpayer are paying for your own protection. They have shifted the cost burden to the individual user with such things toll roads. I refer to this as the “Mexican solution” because boarder guards in that country made me aware of this—he openly asked me to give him bribe money. He explained that his salary was so low that essentially the government didn’t pay for his services so he thought the people who owned that cars he had to search should pay—like all entrepreneurs, he asked for more than  his services were worth: $20 U.S., which was way more than an entire day’s wage. He had it in his power to make me pay. The point is that the people who use the serves provided should be the ones to pay. The problem with this approach is that people apply the same thinking to public schools and hospitals, for example: I do not have children so I don’t want to pay for schools nor I am young an healthy so I don’t want to pay to maintain hospitals.

Some of this is the way it should be but other things are not. The old classic example of the #Tennessee Valley Authority where the government bought private electric utility companies, used taxpayer money for the costly extensions of poles and power lines in to rural areas to supply electricity to remote farmers, and then resold the assets back to private entities who used the greatly extended grid to make money. Conservative entrepreneurs “loudly hated” #FDR for taking the first step but “silently loved” the second step.

The point in all of this is that Elizabeth Warren has recognized what it is that makes America great; this understanding makes her a great senator. Look at #Ted Cruz, #Rand Paul, #Joe Wilson, and #Steve Stockman, for examples of #Duck Dynasty type people who you have elected as your representatives. I consider them to be on the lunatic fringe that is who don’t seem to understand that everyone knows both communism and savage capitalism are dead; those battles have been fought long ago and capitalism-socialism came out the winner. The unfortunate thing is that people like the Koch brothers and the other people who make up the 1%, want to buy your votes to upset that delicate balance and install a plutocracy. As Warren points out, we all had a hand in building #Koch Industries, banks, insurance companies, and industries that control the wealth. Why would they turn against us, “we the people”, who made them great?

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