Woke up this morning to four gun shots. Being raised in Detroit I knew what to do, duck and cover away from the windows until you hear the police, then if no more shots, threat over. No police today. My condo here in Dallas was built in to 60's before gated entries were a thing, and so we get hit all the time; mostly it is just people checking for unlocked doors to see what they can get. Over the last years it has progressed to breaking in to get sun glasses and other items of worth. For the record: it gets worse every year no matter who is president. Yesterday I went to the old Farmers Market in Dallas to get some fruit. The market used to be isles of tin sheds with Mexican farmers offering samples of fresh strawberries and oranges that make my mouth water today. Now most of the sheds are gone and so are the farmers. There are a few organic fruit booths hosted by well-groomed millennials, but no farmers, oranges or strawberries, just edible soap, snobby tee-shirts, and smoothies galore. Yep, the Farmer's Market in Dallas is now the Bourgeois Market of Tomorrow, and the area is now filled with high-rise condos, manicured pets, and over-priced coffee shops. That's what it looks like on the surface, but a few blocks away in the remains of the old Farmer's Market, there is a different story: a hundred homeless people with lazy limbs wondering if they will ever eat again, some, looking for a place to shower before their McDonald's afternoon shift. This isn't the homeless, this is the working poor, displaced, suckers, whatever you want to call them. They missed the starting gun in the race, or got hooked on a drug with no Betty Ford clinic money to help them get off. Whatever their reason, there is no human welfare system to help them, for a human welfare system that works takes tax money. Tax money the rich refuse to pay. It really is that simple.
Use to be, you might see a handful of homeless here in Dallas. I'm old enough to remember that. That was back in the 80's, before years of tax-cuts for the rich and corporate welfare for the MBA Stud took its toll. Funny, if you listen to the conservative talk they still blame the poor for the problem. You think they would wise up by now. I've seen it my whole life, from when Ronald Reagan said a person who is honorably discharged from the military can no longer get unemployment because he left his/her job, to Newt Gingrich and his pals taxing social security and unemployment benefits, all while they were cutting taxes for Football Team Owners, Trump Ltd Inc., and Jeffrey Epstein. Reagan and the Republican Light, Clinton, cut social programs to offset tax cuts. At least back then, they did try to offset the tax cuts, since George Bush they just cut the taxes and increased spending on war and corporate bailouts. It's a crazy mess that will not end until the rich pay their fucking bill. The trickle down profits they have been hording for years isn't theirs, it is ours, and it is time we demand it.
So I'll receive the comments on this post as I do the others, that I'm full of shit and don't know what I'm talking about. The problem is liberal welfare, bla, bla, bla. I now know what it must have felt like being a conservative man/woman in the groovy 60's with peace rallies and free love. The funny thing is that back then, I was what you would call a conservative. I knew the war was bullshit but enlisted in the Navy because that's what my conservative family did. I also believed in less government, but also, a worker's right to organize. All conservatives did, but then they started the lies that unions were breaking the system, when the problem wasn't the workers making a good living, it was the top executives raiding the profits with exorbitant million-dollar bonuses instead of using the money to retool their products to compete with the Japanese. Paying a worker a fair wage has never been a problem. The money auto workers made in the 60's was put back in the economy and caused growth galore in the economy. Then the 80's happened and worker's wages had to be cut at the expense of... wait for it... TAX CUT FOR THE RICH. Which really begs the questions: why do they hate a worker making a living wage so much? Why? Why do they hate the fact that a worker should make $15.00 an hour flipping burgers at a McDonald's burger joint? What are they afraid of?
Their argument is that everything will cost more. Hello, what do you think tax-cuts for the rich does to our economy? It takes money out of the school system, roads, etc. Since the rich stopped paying for our roads by supporting their profitable tollways, we pay more in license fees. It's a tax given to us in secret, but know that when the wealthy paid their fair share, our roads were free and better, the envy of the world...
So the police have arrived and no more gun shots. I can stop typing now. I'm safe.
~~ Dr TV Boogie
