Darryl Issa, the richest member of Congress, (and also one of the most corrupt), started his career in business as a car thief. Yes, that’s right, a car thief. He wasn’t just playing Grand Theft Auto, he was living it. He then parlayed that, erm, “experience” into a car alarm company–which he is suspected of then burning down for the insurance money. And then he parlayed that into another car alarm company that made a product you might have heard of, the Viper. And now he’s worth an estimated $448.4 million, (as of 2013), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
So Darryl Issa is a thief, an alleged arsonist, an alleged insurance fraudster, and now a Congressman. You can make that into a joke, but there’s no punchline needed.
Anyhow, this paragon of virtue was on CNN the other day, when he was asked if he felt responsible to do something about income inequality. Issa responded with a glib line that here in America, “we’ve been able to make our poor somewhat the envy of the world.” And he also said:
If you go to India or you go to any number of other Third World countries, you have two problems: You have greater inequality of income and wealth. You also have less opportunity for people to rise from the have not to the have.
And he’s right, he’s absolutely right.
But if you stop and think about that for a moment, that doesn’t exactly support the larger argument that Issa and the rest of the Republican Party are trying to make–that the poor and working class in America have it too good, and we should share some of the
American has “been able to make our poor somewhat the envy of the world”, Issa said. Well, the third world, at least. But WHY is that? The answer: everything the GOP is trying to undo.
pain of the long-suffering rich. And that any and all programs designed to help the working class and the poor, have only made us lazy and dependent upon government. Which, of course, is why we should all get off our lazy butts and get busy making the rich richer, working longer hours for less pay, being even more productive than we already are, (compared to past generations), at the jobs the so called “job creators” haven’t created, or have shipped to wherever wage slavery is the best deal this week.
Or something.
Instead, Issa’s statements put the lie to all that even more effectively than I just did, if somewhat less obviously. Because what Issa’s comments didn’t address was WHY America’s poor are the envy of the world. Well, OK, they’re not - especially not in places like Baltimore, where Freddie Gray was one of the more recent casualties in America’s war on the poor to be protected and served to death in a community with real upward mobility problems. But he did say, “somewhat,” and did focus on the third world, so we’ll cut him some slack… Yeah, our poor are the envy of the third world – whoopie!
But seriously, WHY our poor aren’t (all) dying of starvation or living lives completely devoid of hope or happiness here in the land where the pursuit of happiness was always supposed to be the point… That matters in this discussion. And that why is Welfare. That why is Social Security. That why is Medicare, and Medicaid, and “Obamacare,” unions, minimum wages, family planning, and food stamps. And everything else that the GOP is out to undo.
So, Issa is right–things are better for the working class and the poor in this country, than they are for the poor in the third world. And this may seem like a no brainer – but we should keep it that way. |
