Yesterday, I saw that my daughter had posted the following as her Facebook “status”:

Ten years ago, I was in the unfortunate position, despite both my partner and I working full-time (more than full-time, really), of requiring government assistance in order to receive adequate prenatal care and substantial family assistance … I am now in the fortunate position of being able comfortably to make ends meet, but I would not be in that position had I been sucked into the undertow of the poverty cycle. I do not believe in mythical boostraps, and I do not believe in forcing other people to achieve the impossible when I was not personally able to. I do not believe in stepping on other people’s heads on the way up the ladder, or slamming doors in people’s faces once I’ve made it through them. I am an enthusiastic taxpayer who wants to pay her fair share and make sure everyone has the opportunity to find good, living-wage work. I believe in the rising tide and a hand up. I believe in these things and I live them BECAUSE I love my country and BECAUSE I am an American. And Mitt Romney can kiss my Medicaid-surviving ass.

Mr. Romney stands informed as to his next proper move. I warn him that my daughter is a ferocious force not to be taken lightly.

The following is the comment I posted about her Facebook status. Because she is a daughter and loves her father for no identifiable reason, she flatteringly asked that I write it up as a blog post. In keeping with my warning to Mr. Romney, I do not take my daughter’s requests lightly.

Mitt Romney: Moneyed Imbecile

First, I know of no people more firmly determined to rely on their own resources and build their own lives according to their own values than my children and their families, each of whom would acknowledge their reliance on the benefits of public services to help them meet their responsibilities and achieve their aims. As have their parents. I know of no people more generous in spirit than they.

In the name of God, who the fuck is Mitt Romney talking about?

As I and many of my family members have come to know through personal opportunity, the vulgar and witless manner in which Mitt Romney addressed his audience in the newly revealed video is far from anomalous within his social class. His dismissal of half the nation as self-styled “victims” that he and the folks at that private fundraiser would never be able to convince to take “personal responsibility for their lives” is the routine way that inordinately privileged folk talk when they get together at country clubs and other gathering places of the parasite class. It is the stuff of 19th-hole ritual discourse among the imbecilic self-proclaimed “job creators”.

I was shocked when I discovered the abject stupidity of the wealthy at about the age of 13. Up to that point, to the extent that I gave much thought to the abstract idea of the wealthy, I relied on leftist notions of 19th century fatcat robber barons and the little stripey-trousered plutocrat depicted leaning back in a chair blowing happy cigar-smoke rings upon discovering a bank error in his favor on the Chance card in Monopoly. I assumed the cluelessness and fecklessness of the Thurston Howell III character was a silly stereotype that could not possibly accurately depict the routine level of intelligence of a class of people who were able to extract, concentrate, and ruthlessly defend unearned wealth and unmerited power from a whole nation of workers and consumers.

But shifting circumstances provided an unbidden chance to become intimately familiar with the thoughts, customs, and exchange of ideas among actual rich folk in their native environment. From that lengthy experience, I am able to confidently report that Mitt Romney’s abject ignorance, smug sense of entitlement, vulgar dismissal of those who serve his class and create their wealth and suffer from their daily manipulations is entirely consistent with his tribe’s norms. His arrogant, preening self-congratulations for his “accomplishments” and those of his fellow privilege-deranged cohort are the routine stuff of after dinner chatter among the economic elite.

In the boundless vacuum of their understanding about real America, they remain blissfully ignorant that WE know the truth about who produces what and who is parasitically dependent upon whom:

WE are the creators of wealth. WE are the most productive workers in the history of the modern world while an ever-increasing return on the profits WE create go to capital rather than to work.

So then. WHO are the whining dependents who feel entitled to unearned fortune?

We of the working classes who create all the nation’s assets of value are made to fight each other for the 7% of the nation’s wealth left to us as the table scraps that the wealthiest 20% leave behind for the 80% of us who make up their servant class. And then we are lectured by the parasites that as “Americans” we are to honor their “success”. We are to understand that is they who create our jobs, without whom we would presumably all go around unemployed, shitting ourselves, too lazy or too unwilling to take risks to drag ourselves out of our own filth without the leadership of the aristocracy of the talented elite to care for us and direct our lives.

So, then. WHOSE ideas are “other”? WHO is it that doesn’t understand how America works?

Fading now into murky history, we may yet recall that this nation once built the world’s most broad, educated, and enduring middle class the world had ever known; NOT coincidentally, we did this during the time of our highest marginal tax rates, our most steeply progressive tax structure, among the world’s most highly regulated financial markets, an era of our most protective labor-rights laws, and most affirmatively redistributive tax/fiscal policies. Yes, we were at our economically strongest when we were most openly committed to redistribution. RE-distribution.

RE-distribution is the policy of returning wealth to those who created it from those among whom it has become unproductively or dangerously concentrated. If not for RE-distributive policies, democracy would be endangered and the nation imperiled by a widening gap between wealth and poverty with a withering middle class to provide the stability and trust that every democracy relies on. Oh…

That’s right.

That is exactly the pattern since the flattening of the tax code began under Reagan…

Since the 1980s rise of the ideology now on undisguised and unapologetic parade in this election, the middle class has shrunk and become far less durable against the cycle of speculative bubble riches carted off by the likes of Bain Capital-types and others at the top of the predatory capitalist pyramid during the collapse of each bubble. Manufacturing has been outsourced as we have been told that globalization ate our jobs and we should embrace the new service economy because it is the only possible future for us. The good news is supposed to be the cheaper consumer goods we can now afford on our declining income–the gift of plutocrats and invisible foreign folk laboring in the punishing sweatshops of the mythical elsewhere. And we have been reduced to pleading for our elected officials not to take away the last vestiges of public provision in their ongoing rush to pamper the plutocracy.

Fuck that.

I refuse to be among the self-loathers of the working class who parrot the language of their masters. I will not apologize for demanding economic justice or public provision. We do not beg for handouts or petition for public dole. We authoritatively demand the just fruits of our production and will only vote to elect public servants who will govern in our name and on behalf of our interests–just as the plutocrats do. The only difference being that we have earned that which we seek to use government to ensure we receive.

I stand by the motto uttered (with complete lack of understanding by the ever-idiotic) Clint Eastwood. WE OWN THE GOVERNMENT! Thus, when we seek policies that guarantee health care, higher education, unemployment insurance, dignified retirement, and general welfare, we are not asking government for anything…we are quite properly using it as a tool by which we share our collective burdens and benefits of being Americans. WE ARE USING THE TOOL THAT WE OWN TO CARE FOR OUR NEIGHBORS AND OURSELVES.

This is how we achieve and maintain American freedom and democracy. It has always been so. It is written into the genetic code of American society. It is that impulse to use government as our tool for realizing common dreams that undergirds the American Creed.

It is only as the ambit of that American Creed has, over the last 50 years, increasingly widened to include those previously singled out for special disenfranchisement, marginalization, and oppression that the predator class has successfully been able to subvert that core commitment to genuine democracy. Thus has arisen the discourse of a class of “makers” ever vigilant against the incessant importuning of the class of “takers”.

What Mitt Romney said “privately” to a roomful of swine-donors is in no way different from what he and Paul Ryan have said publicly in the language of policy and their rhetoric of “principles”. They have openly acknowledged the class war they and their ilk have been waging for a generation. And Mitt Romney is the perfect avatar and warrior-king of his tribe. They may not love him, but he is the perfect champion of the would-be predator class.

Well, they are not predators unless we run like prey.

Else they are parasites. Useful parasites like the microorganisms in our gut that aid digestion—necessary and beneficial when under proper control; dangerous and sickening when out of balance.

And so I declare myself NOT a member of the 99%. I am not a member of Romney’s quarter-of-a-million-a-year “middle” class. I am a proud member of the 47% of whom would-be Vulgarian in Chief, Mitt Romney speaks. I am a member of that part of the public who make up America’s working class.

I am a class patriot and partisan of the kind maligned and slandered (and feared) by every member of the Republican Primary-circus this year.

I will go to the polls this year no matter if lightning splits the earth and I will vote for Barack Obama. I will vote for him because no socialist is on offer and because a Republican is.

Related articles

• The secret video reveals Romney as “the sneering plutocrat…” (althouse.blogspot.com)
• New Ad Slays Romney for Calling the American People Victims (politicususa.com)
• An Arrogant, Insulting Plutocrat Would-Be President? – Hmm (afnclarke.wordpress.com)