Skip to content Skip to footer
Bleeding-Heart Republicans
Who says that Republican congress-critters don't care about minorities in our society? Why

Bleeding-Heart Republicans

Who says that Republican congress-critters don't care about minorities in our society? Why

Who says that Republican congress-critters don’t care about minorities in our society? Why, at this very moment, they are pushing hard to pass a $372 billion federal program to lift the economic fortunes of just one minority group — a far more generous proposal than Barack Obama has even dared to contemplate.

The focus of the GOP’s generosity is a true American minority: the richest one-tenth of one percent of our people. Living in penthouse ghettos like Manhattan’s Upper East Side, this tiny minority of about 120,000 people (who have an average annual income of $8 million) would get some $3 million each over the next decade from the Republican proposal. Doesn’t that just make your heart bleed with empathy?

This windfall will go to the most un-needy among us if the GOP gets Congress to renew the Bush tax cuts for the superrich. Yes, the same Republican lawmakers who have opposed even modest funding to keep schoolteachers and firefighters on the job are wailing that we should take hundreds of billions of dollars from our public treasury and hand them to some of the richest people on the planet.

What’s at work here is the narcissistic psychosis of the privileged — the delusional belief that they are entitled to special treatment because they’re … well, they’re rich and therefore consider themselves to be both superior and especially deserving.

This attitude was expressed in a recent letter to The New York Times by a guy with the rather foppish name of Mr. Standish Fleming. He deplored any effort to deny these special tax giveaways to the elite, declaring that such efforts “discriminate” against the minority of wealthy and “productive” members of our society, thus rending America’s “social fabric of trust and respect.”

Of all the crying needs in our country today, these Republicans are wringing their hands over the discrimination against the wealthy minority. Sometimes, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or go bowling!

This is one of those times.

Don’t miss a beat – get Truthout Daily Email Updates. Click here to sign up for free.

Is it possible that these pampered ones and their congressional pamperers haven’t noticed that “America’s social fabric of trust and respect” has already been rended by three decades of policies knocking down the workaday majority? America is now in a Great Jobs Depression that already has lasted 10 years and continues to rage unabated across the land. This Depression has devastated our country’s middle class.

Yet, it took two months and endless compromises this summer for Senate Democrats to woo a few Republican votes needed to pass even a weak and meek jobs bill to help deter mass firings of schoolteachers and firefighters by local governments. Pious, purse-lipped Republicans — who have eagerly backed Wall Street bailouts, needless wars and other budget-busting expenditures — demanded that other programs be cut as the price of saving these essential public-service jobs.

So, what program did our stalwart senators choose to loot? Food stamps!

Yes, even as millions of Americans are stuck in long-term, relentless unemployment, thus increasing the urgent need for family assistance, our well-fed, big-butted solons grabbed nearly $12 billion from the supplemental nutrition assistance program. This puts the “dumb” in dumbfounding!

Because of the economic collapse caused by the reckless greed of Wall Street bankers, there has been a 50 percent increase in the past two years in the number of Americans relying on food stamps. In the coming months, more and more people — including schoolteachers and firefighters — are going to lose their jobs, and many of them will need the helping hand that Congress has now so stupidly and callously withdrawn.

Instead of stealing funds from our country’s essential food stamp program, Congress should get the money for its jobs bill by taxing the multibillion-dollar bonuses that Wall Street bankers are paying out to themselves. And if that’s not enough money, cut the pay, pensions and health care freebies that congress-critters give to themselves — most of them need to go on a diet anyway.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.

Copyright 2010 Creators.com

We’re not going to stand for it. Are you?

You don’t bury your head in the sand. You know as well as we do what we’re facing as a country, as a people, and as a global community. Here at Truthout, we’re gearing up to meet these threats head on, but we need your support to do it: We must raise $50,000 to ensure we can keep publishing independent journalism that doesn’t shy away from difficult — and often dangerous — topics.

We can do this vital work because unlike most media, our journalism is free from government or corporate influence and censorship. But this is only sustainable if we have your support. If you like what you’re reading or just value what we do, will you take a few seconds to contribute to our work?