Republicans.

Editor,

The sick, children, the elderly, and the poor do not work for corporations and therefore do not make corporate executives or shareholders money. That is why Republicans have no interest in spending rich people's money on services for them.

Look at it this way. Multinational corporations have colonized the USA. Americans who work for the colonizers are paid bottom dollar and threatened with increasingly violent measures if they try to organize. Americans who do not work for the colonizers, either because they are too old, too sick, too uneducated, or redundant are free to ... what? Rummage in garbage cans, I suppose. You see lots of them sleeping on city streets and standing in line for a meal at certain churches.

Arguing to a Republican that government, rich people, or corporations are obligated in any way to fund what we euphemistically call a safety net is even more fruitless than arguing that they should pay anything to maintain roads, bridges, courts, schools, levees, water mains, sewage systems or do anything to protect the oceans, rivers, atmosphere, or other things that live on this planet.

In the Republican view there is "us" -- corporations, rich people, and Republicans -- who own the world, "employees" whose job it is to make them rich, and everybody else, who do not figure into the economy and for whom there are plenty of cops and bombs and prisons to shut them up if they do not like it.

Re: "The Austerity Delusion" (3/25/2011)