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Comments from the "right" frequently express fear of what happens to society if people are rewarded for not working.

GOOD POINT.

That's exactly where we are now, and that's what the Occupy folks have, in the larger scheme of things, been protesting -- the reason there's a huge "wealth gap" between the ".01%" and the rest of us is because non-work is being rewarded through the financial sector, at obscenely high levels.

Most of us "99%" people truly aren't aiming for "absolute equality" or "socialism," but rather for making sure the people who actually *do the work* get to see a *reasonable percentage* of the "fruits of their labors" -- i.e., getting the "inequality" back to healthier levels (but not to the point of being unhealthily "equal"), so that people on the lower ends DO have an incentive to work.

When the "wealth gap" becomes this super-high, that's not happening. Why? Because too high a percentage of the wealth created by "those who work" -- i.e., "labor" -- is being air-suctioned directly up to the top (to more accurately structure Grover Norquist's neo-sociopathic "put our foot on the air hose" analogy -- **see below) instead of being invested back into our economy as an incentive for people to work.

When the "wealth gap" gets bad enough, because of this disproportionate redistribution of work-created wealth to the top, the folks increasingly stuck at the bottom realize the "game" has become rigged against them so that they can't take care of themselves even if they DO work, so they end up eventually *having* to resort to socialism.

Ayn Rand adherents like to threaten that if the wealthy are taxed, they'll have no incentive to participate in our economy, and will "go Galt," effectively taking their toys and going home.

Similarly, inevitable anti-capitalist revolution resulting from disproportionate redistribution of wealth to the top may be viewed as a sort of metaphorical, reverse "Galt's Gulch" -- likewise "an organized 'strike' against those who [...] confiscate the accomplishments of society's productive members" -- a "strike" against "'continuing to endorse' our own 'economic disenfranchisement.'"

What this means is that allowing a huge wealth gap to form, by routing as much money as possible to the wealthy via irresponsible, unsustainable tax cuts, eventually RESULTS IN socialism (or something equally not-capitalist). Whereas tax policies which encourage investing in America (and which tax the heck out of *only the top, wealth-gap-causing tiers* of income of those who don't invest said top tiers of wealth in America), in ways that create incentives for everyone else to "work to take care of themselves" (like decent-paying jobs, benefits, etc.), helps PREVENT socialism/anti-capitalist revolution, while still encouraging work and rewarding ambition.

Deregulating and the Bush tax cuts didn't get rid of the society-destabilizing "wealth gap" spike. To the contrary, in order to do that, you have to be able to (a) make basic rules, a.k.a. "regulations," for the financial sector to play its gambling/rentier games within, and then (b) make sure tax policies aren't excessively rewarding non-creative work and gambling on either end of the "wealth" spectrum.

Our economy has, since deregulation, gone from one where work and community-building were rewarded, to one where playing incredibly risky games in the financial sector with other people's money is rewarded... and where laying workers off without concern for the effects on their communities and families, in order to "boost shareholder value" is rewarded... and where blowing off employees, clients and customers, and destroying the good name of an American company that's been built over generations, in order to "boost shareholder value" in the immediate short-term, is rewarded.

Because of the cost to each of us of the devastation caused by the sheer ginormousness of the private financial sector's recently-unfettered greed, compared to the relatively tiny expense to each of us of a non-working person receiving public welfare, financial sector gaming deregulation is a much *more dangerous* problem for America than poor people depending on welfare. (Yes, disincentives for self-sufficiency in that system should likewise be subject to reform -- but right after the more dangerous stuff.)

Until the financial sector gets both regulated and taxed sanely, in such a way that gambling and "rentier" behavior is NOT rewarded more than genuine work that actually creates worthwhile things, then the "bad things" going on now will only get worse...

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** Original transcript - Grover Norquist at CPAC 2012:

"Our job is to say no to tax increases, stop throwing money in the center of the table, put our foot on the air hose*, and watch that pile of cash begin to decline. And then our friends on the left begin to look at each other around the table a little bit more like the second to the last scene in those lifeboat movies. Now they're wondering who they're gonna eat, or who they're gonna throw overboard. [laughter] The left is not made up of friends and allies. It is made up of competing parasites. [applause]" [Response to "parasites" analogy here]

* Why Grover Norquist's "air hose" metaphor is a neo-sociopath scam on fiscal conservatives...

This is a response to right-wing comments about how charity is supposedly only valid at the one-on-one level, that taxation in the democratic republic of America = "taking at gunpoint," and bogus claims that Republicans want to reward "hard work" while Democrats want to "take what you worked hard for," when it's actually the opposite:

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Ya know, it -used- to be that you could get a job, "WORK HARD," and be paid fairly for that work. As you helped a company prosper, you saw the fruits of your labor through raises, promotions, benefits, retirement, etc. That was the legacy of early labor unions fighting for those who "WORK HARD." Now, you get a job, "WORK HARD," and the shareholders of your company, and/or people at companies like Bain, and/or game players in the finance industry, **make off like bandits**, while telling you there's no money for raises, and that in fact you have to work harder, and take a pay cut, and pay more for worse benefits. The way you can tell they're making off like bandits is by looking at the post-deregulation spike in the "wealth gap" charts.

>> There's -no way- those people at the top of that "wealth gap" spike aren't ripping off everyone else's HARD WORK. <<

There was a significant period of time, during the post-9/11 crash, where the mid-sized tech company my spouse worked for cut all its professionals to minimum wage, and **they only paid that much because the Dept. of Labor made them** (<-- see "'big government' makes sure those who 'WORK HARD' at least aren't being -totally- screwed over"). There were -no- other jobs to go to at that point, because of the whole Enron thing (<-- see 'rich people' taking money that other people 'WORKED HARD' for) crashing the economy as well. Note that the Enron thing was -caused- by greedy rich people, and it -affected all of us-. The tech company eventually paid back some, but not all, of its employees some, but not all, of their money, but in the meantime, it was operating in effect off of forced loans by employees from their retirement savings, borrowing from our family members, etc., and the company DID NOT pay interest on those "loans."

So we lost literally YEARS of potential retirement investment, etc. -- and the Republicans who enable these kinds of financial crashes where the wealthy game the system to profit, are also the ones who want to take away the social safety nets and make us invest for our own retirements. INVEST WHAT? You've enabled the super-wealthy to decimate people's -entire life savings- they "WORKED HARD" to build, and then to give themselves bonuses while families they preyed upon are getting shafted! So I have no patience for those who try to give me nonsense about how only the wealthy investors take "risks" to make their companies work, or that the wealthy get wealthy only because they "WORKED HARDER" than less wealthy people. Because that's a bunch of BS.

Now the same kinds of things are happening to a lot more folks, because greedy rich people crashed the economy on an even broader scale.*(see links below) So how is it the "right" isn't complaining about **rich, greedy sociopaths** taking money from the people who "WORK HARD"? I'm sorry, but being a shareholder isn't "working hard."

And don't tell me about how they "risk more"... 

Rush Limbaugh says...

"Do you think that it is accidental, that the name of the really vicious, fire-breathing, four-eyed, whatever-it-is villain in this movie is named Bane?"

Um... YES!

Here's an alternate question: "Do you think it's accidental" that Rush Limbaugh pushes the trinity of fear, ignorance and hate to his audience?

Image via The Other 98% >>>>>>

Fact Check on Bane, the Batman character:

"The character's origin was in Batman: Vengeance of Bane #1 (January 1993)" Read more...

Read the EXTENSIVE history of the character here. Nothing to do with Mitt Romney; what a surprise.

For what it's worth, "bane" is actually a word. Let's use it in a sentence: "Bain is the bane of Mitt Romney's campaign." Oo, a poem! Maybe the folks who named the company "Bain" should have thought that homonym issue through...

Or maybe, while Rush Limbaugh is on the subject, he can ask next: "Do you think that it is accidental, that the name of Mitt Romney's infamous corporation sounds JUST LIKE a word that means 'A cause of harm, ruin, or death' or 'a deadly poison'?" Hmm...

"Democracy - use it or lose it." -- Bernard Waugh, Jr., NH Municipal Association Legal Counsel; The Bradford Bridge, March 1992, p. 5

**NEWS FLASH** "Democracy" not a four-letter word!

Still running across coworkers trying to confuse our revolutionary U.S. brand of "democracy" with "communism"?*

Here's a snapshot of true-blooded American reality from before the crazy-pants brainwashing began...

"Remember that people worldwide are throwing off communist oppression to create and secure for themselves precisely the kind of *democratic* rights we in our complacency take for granted."

"Grover Norquist Pledge Against Taxes Attracts Fewer Republican Candidates," by Patrick Svitek >>>>>>

Did you know... A well-known corporation in the finance sector thinks we -- "the rest, the ‘non-rich,’ the multitudinous many" -- are economically irrelevant ...except as potential threats in the voting booth? [Read their words here]

Let's repeat this part... Except as potential threats in the voting booth. <-- Here's where we come in.

Back in 2006, in a candid and informative publication geared toward its wealthy clients, a well-known corporation in the financial sector explained the fiscal hazards to the wealthy (like Mitt Romney) if "the rest, the 'non-rich,' the multitudinous many," were to actually pay attention and vote for, rather than against, their own best interests...

The 1% speaks:

"Perhaps the most immediate challenge to Plutonomy comes from the political process. Ultimately, the rise in income and wealth inequality to some extent is an economic disenfranchisement of the masses to the benefit of the few. However in democracies this is rarely tolerated forever. One of the key forces helping plutonomists over the last 20 years has been the rise in the profit share – the flip side of the fall in the wage share in GDP. [[i.e., greater % of all income going to wealthy people doing nothing, less going to people actually creating/working]] As plutonomists or capitalists tend to be long {on} the profit share, they have benefited from trends like globalization and the productivity revolution, disproportionately. However, labor has, relatively speaking, lost out. We see the biggest threat to plutonomy as coming from a rise in political demands to reduce income inequality, spread the wealth more evenly, and challenge forces such as globalization which have benefited profit and wealth growth. ...

Our own view is that the rich are likely to keep getting even richer, and enjoy an even greater share of the wealth pie over the coming years."

(Wait, isn't that "wealth pie" something the income-inequality apologists claim doesn't exist?)

Let's reclaim the meme...

The name "Obamacare" has always been annoying to me.

In part because the real issue is health INSURANCE reform, coupled with getting health care costs under control, and "Obamacare" makes it sound (incorrectly) like "government run health care." It isn't, and it NEVER WAS "government run health care." "Health care" and "health insurance" are not the same thing.

And in part because using the term "Obamacare" was an effort by those who profit from defects in the status quo to associate health insurance/care reform with President Obama in the minds of his haters, and thus turn their hearts and minds against the reform, even though their own party initially devised said reform.

So, with this in mind, I was delighted to read about a woman planning to put an "ObamaCares" bumper sticker on her car...

Obamacare is “not even the biggest tax hike in the past .. 20 years.”

Understanding "ObamaCares"...

Wherein Mitt Romney explains that the individual mandate is the "Personal Responsibility Principle."

More:

Michael Stafford:

"As a local GOP official after President Obama's election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies.

"In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change- a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world- is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans- the notorious birthers- believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them.

"Republican economic policies are also indefensible. The GOP constantly claims its opponents are engaged in "class warfare," but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose- one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan's budget to see that.

"As Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have written, "the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." Its reckless behavior helps drive the political dysfunction crippling our nation.

"In the end, it offers a dystopian vision of our future - a harsher, crueler and more merciless America starkly divided between the riders, and the ridden. - Read more...

What boggles the mind is the cluelessness of folks like the one in the comments who says "That's why people came to America in the first place. The right to work and enjoy the fruit of their own labor," and then thinks the modern GOP "sides with" that pro-labor, pro-worker idea (see http://bit.ly/KH78GN "a society in which working people enjoy the fruits of their own labour"), rather than being diametrically opposed to it.

The GOP "side" is more realistically "for" the "right" of the wealthy to not have a job, and yet enjoy the fruit of the labor of the less fiscally and politically powerful.

via We survived Bush. You will survive Obama.

"The thing that some people will never understand is that there is more than one type of family." - WSBYSO

In January 2006, this happened in Kanab, Utah:

"[T]he mayor and city council passed Resolution 1-1-06R, titled The Natural Family: A Vision for the City of Kanab, codifying the definition of a 'natural family': 'We envision a local culture that upholds the marriage of a man to a woman, and a woman to a man, as ordained of God... We see our homes as open to a full quiver of children, the source of family continuity and social growth. We envision young women growing into wives, homemakers, and mothers; and we see young men growing into husbands, home-builders, and fathers.'" Read more... 

To their credit, the good people of Kanab were mostly offended: "Family resolution divides Kanab" | Deseret News

Shortly after, in April of that year, UVUU, a small Unitarian Universalist fellowship in the socially conservative hub of predominantly Mormon (LDS) Utah, arranged a multi-denominational gathering to host a bus full of LGBT Soulforce students on their first Equality Ride through Utah, when the group protested at BYU in Provo. The joint UU/UCC/Presbyterian/Soulforce service, held at the Provo Community Church, made the front page of the Provo Herald accompanied by a photo of a gay couple attending the service side by side with local church members. The paper received some negative feedback, especially regarding the front-page photo (no longer available online), resulting in a follow-up editorial by the paper, "Should papers hide 'bad' news?", which, alongside other observations, felt it necessary to point out to offended local readers that "a picture of a man with his arm around another in church is not pornographic."

One of the sermons presented at the service, "Our Loving Family", responds to the unnaturally narrow view of the "natural" family that was espoused in the Kanab resolution, instead witnessing in support of real "natural" families, which come in all shapes and sizes.

"When a child is in a stable, loving family relationship with adults -- whether gay or straight, whether biological relatives or adoptive -­ if our culture or government then acts in ways to undermine or destabilize that family relationship, it cannot rightfully claim to be "pro-family," nor that it puts "family first."

A child (in fact, any individual) knows, better than any civic or church leader, or writer of "proclamations" of any sort, who makes up his or her "natural family." If we are to claim, as a culture, as a state, as a church, as a nation, to be supportive of families, and claim that we seek to strengthen families -- and especially if we claim that we're doing so in order to ensure a stable, loving environment for children -- we must then be supportive of, and seek to strengthen, actual, existing, stable families, as experienced by those children, regardless of those families' structures.

We've heard it said that "the family is the basic unit of the church." Indeed, "Our Loving Families" -- as they actually exist, as stabilizing influences, and as loving and accepting and supportive home environments in our lives -- are in fact the "basic units" which we need to be strengthening as a society, through both churches and government. We cannot undermine and devalue and destabilize these families, and still expect to nurture either a healthy society and community or a strong or a moral nation. Read more...

"HB 363 simply goes too far by constricting parental options.

[...]

"Existing law respects the ability of Utah parents to choose if and how their student will receive classroom instruction on these topics. Under current law, a parent must opt in, in writing, before their student can attend all or any portions of any class discussing human sexuality. If HB 363 were to become law, parents would no longer have the option the overwhelming majority is currently choosing for their children. I am unwilling to conclude that the State knows better than Utah's parents as to what is best for their children.

"In order for parents to take on more responsibility, they need more information, more involvement, and more choice-not less. I cannot sign a bill that deprives parents of their choice."

-- Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert >>>>>>

Teju Cole, "The White Savior Industrial Complex," March 21, 2012, The Atlantic >>>>>>

"Love your neighbor as yourself"... "...made as simple as possible, but no simpler"

What does "love" mean, here?

These five words:

Humble compassion, selfless service, forgiveness.

Each of these words is necessary.

"Arrogant compassion" doesn't cut it, nor does "humble indifference" or "selfish service" or "selfless tyranny." We all know folks who fit these descriptions, while saying they act out of "love." But that kind of "love" is not the "love" of "love your neighbor."

Humility. Compassion. Selflessness. Service. Forgiveness.*

And again, the combination thereof:

Humble compassion, selfless service, forgiveness.

These five words are also necessary for real "charity."

"Giving" and "donations" and "help" may not always be offered in a spirit of humble compassion, selfless service, and forgiveness. "Arrogant charity," "selfish charity," "tyrannical charity" are "charity" not based on love.

Love-based charity entails giving respectfully, giving what is actually needed from the recipient's point of view, giving without expectation or demands, and thus serving in a manner that empowers and frees the recipient to exercise individual agency.

What matters? Love, and the Golden Rule... "all the rest is commentary." >>>>>>

Humble ... Compassion ... Selfless ... Service ... Forgiveness