| ....Clinton's labor
secretary:
Financial capitalism has taken over from real
capitalism. Financial capitalism is taking over
from product and services, from people that actually produce goods and
services. And that has distorted our entire system. When so much money
and so much income are at the top—and by the way, the 400 richest Americans right now have more wealth
than the bottom 150 million Americans put together. When you get that
much income and wealth at the top, inevitably some people at the top—not all people at the
top, but some of them—are going to abuse their
income and wealth and corrupt the political system. I don’t want to
mention names, like Charles and David Koch; that would not be nice of me; that
would not be fair. But they, each of them worth $25 billion—each of them worth
$25 billion, what they are doing is using a chunk of their fortune to pollute
and corrupt American democracy. And why are they doing that? Because they want
to entrench themselves. They make petrochemicals, they want to stop the
environmental movement; they want to create doubts about whether there is, in
fact, climate change. They want to cut the budget; they don’t want taxes to be
raised; they and other people at the top are using their political muscle to
entrench their power and privilege, and we cannot allow that in America.
[applause]
_________________________________________________
Just
in case you skeptics resist the point, Reich isn't seeking that awful-sounding
"redistribution of wealth" that some politicians these days like to throw
around to frighten us into a renewal of anti-communist hysteria; he's talking
about quite the opposite--the vast accumulation of wealth by a handful of
financial privateers and corrupt businessmen at
our expense.
I
have difficulty accepting how some of us still don't get it, how some of us will
continue to vote against our own best interests. It has more to do with the
suspension of common sense than with common sense.
Blindness
to reality, the result of the unwillingness to shake off entrenched loyalties,
has never been more a danger to this country than it is today.
thanks to David A. Tree
|
