Here.
Boy, the Republicans sure are friends of the working class, aren’t they? Not to mention the middle classes. Honestly, the rich all across time and space have always govern in the interests of the rich and the upper middle class (top 20% income earners), and they almost always screw the middle class, the working class, the low income people, the poor, the old, the disabled and the kids in the worst possible way.
The old, the disabled and the kids are often screwed hardest of all because they can’t fight back and are largely helpless. I remember under Republican governments here in California, year after year, one thing they always cut was state aid to the blind. It was like a ritual, every year: cut aid to the blind people. This is typical Republicanism. They always attacked those blind people because they are the weakest of all, they have no voice or power and they can’t fight back. Screw the weak, the helpless and the powerless. The more weak, helpless and powerless they are, the harder you screw them over.
My heart always sank every time I read that. “There they go again, cutting aid to the blind,“I would think. And after reading that, my faith in the decency of humanity would usually plunge lower than whale shit, and that’s at the bottom of the ocean. Screw the blind. How evil can you get?
If you make less than $75,000/yr and you vote Republican, you need to have your head examined. That’s the top 20% income earners in the US. Repeated studies have shown the Republican policies only benefit the top 20% income earners.
Republican policies are always class war policies. They always involve mass transfer of wealth from the bottom 80% to the top 20%. As a matter of fact, this seems to be true of neoliberalism as a whole. During the “lost decades” of Latin American neoliberalism, repeated studies showed that Latin American neoliberalism was only benefiting the top 20% of the population. The entire 80% of the population was getting reamed hard. The project was simply a mass wealth transfer project from the bottom 80% to the top 20%. Why do you think Latin America went Left in the past 15 years? Because the policies of the Right had been ruining the people for 20 years. The Right failed them, so they put in the Left. How is that hard to understand?
And studies of neoliberalism globewide showed that it always resulted in dramatic loss of health care and education for the population. It was calculated a while back that neoliberalism had already killed millions of people, mostly by depriving them of health care.
It was fairly similar in Chile, the neoliberal poster child that the rightwingers like to wave around.
Chile is one of the most unequal countries on Earth. The rich and the poor don’t just hate each other, they literally want to murder each other. This is what always happens, without fail, as income inequality rises to high levels. It’s so reliable a finding that we could nearly call is a scientific law. You can see why Marxism claimed to be a science with actual scientific laws.
This glorious Chilean miracle under Pinochet and successors resulted in mass transfer of wealth from the bottom 33% to the top 67%. The Chilean working class was ruined. I have been told that that wonderful social security privatization is not working out very well at all.
Medical care is to this day largely unavailable. I had thought that they had some sort of socialized medicine, but a Chilean counseling client of mine, a regular working class guy, told me that Chilean medical care was largely fee for service, and you had to pay in cash at the time of your appointment. He said it was largely unaffordable, at least for him. I asked him what he did about this, and he told you try not to get sick, and even when you are sick, you don’t go to the doctor. He said he almost never went to the doctor. As you can see, Chilean health care is working out just fine.
This man had a very cynical and defeatist attitude towards the government. He said no matter who’s in power in the country, they only help the rich and they screw everyone else. His faith in the state was about zero.
GDP is largely a junk figure if all the money is going to the rich and the upper middle class. If the money never trickles down, what good is economic growth? It’s worthless.
I could go on and on about this stupid country. Chile’s no poster child or success story for much of anything if you ask me. To me, it’s a story of failure, not success, and it’s a nightmare state, not a showcase country.
