the real myths

"The battle over public sector unions exposed the propaganda that is being fed to the easily persuaded. We should eliminate middle class salaries and benefits because “they” shouldn’t have what we don’t have. It would never occur to a worker in the Carolinas or Tennessee that they should aspire to the salaries and benefits that their auto or equipment manufacturers paid up north because earning half what “those union people” earned means having a job. They also suffer from mass amnesia. They were sold this concept when textile and clothing manufacturers moved south to escape New England’s unions, then saw those same companies move their operations to the next place with lower wages, then to the next place with even lower wages, specifically to Central America and then to the Far East. So, we should accept the idea of lower wages, part-time jobs instead of full-time, no employer-provided health insurance, no pensions, no job security while the rich get to protect their right to hoard billions. And we should accept their decree that we gut the programs that provide the social safety net that they refuse to provide in the work place. No. We shouldn’t...

...While the mega-rich might endow a museum (Getty, Alice Walton for example), the kind of charities that serve the poor are supported by the middle class, not the mega-rich. It wasn’t the Forbes 400 that funded free clinics when MSNBC begged for donations, it was ordinary folks. It wasn’t the Forbes 400 who donated their entire overtime pay for a little extra to help the employees of a seafood company in Gulf – it was a middle-class, blue collar man who knew what a little extra could mean. It isn’t the mega-rich who support food banks and homeless shelters and the Salvation Army – it’s us. We’re the ones who drop an extra can of food into the collection bin at our supermarkets or buy a bag of groceries to fill a collection bus. We’re the ones who drop our change in the buckets at Christmas. We’re the ones who donate our used items to thrift stores so they can be recycled for someone who can’t even afford to buy new at Walmart. And there is seriously no point in having museums if people can’t afford to go into them. With admission fees topping $25 per person for what are laughingly called public museums like the Smithsonian, having their tax money to support those would be a much better investment in culture than having Alice Walton create a personal art museum in the middle of nowhere....And then there’s the matter of what “charities” the mega-rich donate to in the first place. Try the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the whole pantheon of right wing think tanks and PACs and SuperPACs and anything else that will further their political power and influence....

Enough already with the scare tactics. It’s time to put the lie to the idea that the mega-rich should be allowed to keep everything they can get their claws on and unions should be destroyed and the middle class should give up any aspirations to a better life for their children."

Quoted from http://lezgetreal.com/2011/08/forbes-middle-class-not-mega-rich-should-lower-expections-spending/