Have you ever wondered: What do mega-rich Republican Captains of Industry who are not elected officials actually do these days? Do they build libraries like Robber Barons of the past? AS IF. No one should have nice things that they didn’t personally buy. Rather, they are rescuing us from the tyranny of public libraries.
Are they using their vast wealth and love of God to spread the word that greenhouse gases is tantamount to wanting to “kill about 5.7 billion people”? Nay, they are making up words about the industrial revolution, driven by coal and petroleum, made population growth and economic development possible, how exploitation of fossil fuels is a miracle, enabling transnational markets for food, widespread travel and education, heavier-than-air flight, full-time employment for left-wing commentators, and even the abolition of slavery.
Are they investing in the next generation by investing in our public schools? Ho-ho. They are making up words about how if your kids learn history in the Government Schools, they will be indoctrinated in the Marxist belief that the Industrial Revolution resulted from some confluence of economic and technological developments, and where the secular student might read about the “Gilded Age” as a time of great wealth and privilege for some, and exploitation and tainted meat* for most?
Do they go to weird gatherings of a “Secret Society” (rich people code for “club ludicrously wealthy dudes use to try to fill the gaping hole where their humanity is supposed to be), to plot against democracy and talk up their plans for the apocalypse (do you buy the converted missile silo and spend a billion dollars on upgrades? or do you buy a huge tract of land in some remote New Zealand wilderness, and work on a contingency plan to keep your servants from murdering you and taking over after the collapse of civilization?).
At these weird gatherings, do they callously hunt for sport as part some sort of specially imported endangered species, like the world’s most adorable emperor penguin, or a pregnant panda that knew the cure for lymphoma with armor-piercing bullets until they are dead?
At these weird gatherings, are they jazzing over solid gold idols of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan, successful entrepreneurs who, they believe, in their drive to increase their own wealth, brought manifold benefits to others and helped to provide the world with much-needed commodities to help create better, safer, and more enjoyable living conditions for mankind, or at least, those members of mankind who didn’t develop black lung disease or get their arms ripped off by machinery?
Or, more practically, do they convene at weird gatherings to strategize on how to squeeze ever more money out of the taxpayers (that’s us), via the government they now own lock, stock, and lying, treasonous, reactionary barrel, from John Roberts to Mitch McConnell to nutso fat Donald, that creature from Hell, and all points between?
Yes, this is what they are doing.
For forty years, more or less, these fat white penis -Americans felt obliged to come up with a whole genre of Bullshit Financial Fan Fiction to justify their attack on democratic governance and their insatiable hunger for public money. Trickle down works! A rising tide lifts all boats! I never heard of a poor man creating jobs! This swill swarmed across the front pages of America’s great newspapers and billowed into the studios of network and cable news and spewed out, largely unchallenged, for decades: blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, ya. It’s years since even they believed any of it, although to be sure, the Koch people keep argue bargling the words and stuff: but then, they have a huge grift machine fueled by articles and white papers and chairmanships of economics departments and economists who regularly appear on PBS, they can’t help themselves, they don’t know how to stop.
* Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, aka a “socialist writer” who “charged America’s industries with being ‘oppressors’ of common workers.”