Sweet merciful crap, a man whose
net worth is between $190-250 million said he
doesn't care about poor people? And
people are shocked & appalled? My god, we should be
applauding the man for his honesty! About fucking time someone came out and said it.
The law, the public authority: is it not established to protect weakness against injustice and oppression? It is thus an offense to all social principles to place it entirely in the hands of the rich.
But the rich, the powerful, have reasoned differently. Through a strange abuse of words, they have restricted the general idea of property to certain objects only; they have called only themselves property owners; they have claimed that only property owners were worthy of the name of citizen; they have named their own particular interest the general interest, and to ensure the success of that claim, they have seized all social power. And we! oh human weakness! we who aspire to bring them back to the principles of equality and justice, it is still on the basis of these absurd and cruel prejudices that we are seeking, without being aware of it, to raise our constitution!
...what is the source of that extreme inequality of fortunes that concentrates all the wealth in a small number of hands? Does it now lie in bad laws, bad governments, and finally all the faults of corrupt societies? ...I envy not at all the advantageous share you have received, since this inequality is a necessary or incurable evil: but at least, do not take from me the imprescriptable property of which no human law can strip me. Indeed, allow me to be proud sometimes of an honourable poverty, and do not seek to humiliate me with the vainglorious pretension that the quality of sovereign is reserved for you, while I am left with only that of subject.
Maximilien Robespierre,
On the Silver Mark (1791)
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2 comments:
He didn't mean it that way. However, the idiocy of the statement, and what went uncommented upon by most of the press, is his qualifier that he doesn't worry about the poor because they have a safety net, except that the erstwhile party of Lincoln pretty much exists to slash every last web of that safety net.
That was the follow-up comment missed, unsurprisingly, by the reporters.
A lot of the commentary I saw & read did call attention to the "safety net" remark, noting either that Romney did thus not care about the working poor or that he misunderstood the very point of a safety net. (As Jon Stewart cracked, "Whether you're a butterfly, or a fish, or a trapeze artist, or a poor person - if you're in a net, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.")
But yes, what was left unsaid is how the GOP is intent on shredding each & every thread of said net.
In the end, I still think it was another example of when Romney's entitled swagger led to a rare, totally unintended moment of candor - like the $10,000 bet "joke."
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