The so-called “(corporate) Civil Rights Movement” of the 21st century and school choice are both subversive assaults on the U.S. Constitution that was written to protect the people from the government that is represented by the public sector: public schools, public police, public firefighters, public prisons, volunteer public military, elected representatives, medical care from the VA, Medicare, Social Security, and even tax collection by the IRS. If the IRS abuses people, then the people can go to their elected representatives and this is something the people have already done making it more difficult for the IRS to destroy people financially to the point of becoming homeless.
The U.S. Constitution was not written to protect the people from corporations worth more than many countries. These profit-driven monsters of business did not exist in the 18th century when the U.S. Constitution was written by America’s Founding Fathers.
The big brother that Orwell and other authors warned us about was never going to be a government guided by a document like the U.S. Constitution. The threat of a Big Brother is a private-sector corporation and/or a country ruled by a Putin or Trump.
The public sector and the U.S. Constitution stand in the way of the corporate Big Brothers. The swamp that the Malignant Narcissist in the White House wants to get rid of is that public sector that, like the earth’s wetlands, is important to reduce the impact of damage caused by the malicious greed of the few in the private sector.
Without a strong public sector and its elected representatives, there will be no force strong enough to stop the corporate abuse caused by those that worship at the church of avarice.
Reagan’s trickle down economic theory wasn’t new. Before the 16th Amendment was passed in 1913, trickledown economics was the economic system in the United States.
If anyone wants to know the result of living under a trickle down economic system, look at 1900 when 40-percent of the American people lived in poverty, children as young as seven could be sold into a form of indentured slavery, 7-percent graduated from high school and 3-percent from college.
Investopedia says, “Most of the taxes we pay today have been around for less than half of our country’s history. One of the oldest is the estate tax, which was enacted in 1797, but was then repealed and reinstituted over the years, often in response to the need to finance wars. The modern estate tax was implemented in 1916 and the gift tax came about in 1924. The federal income tax was enacted in 1913, and corporate income taxes were enacted slightly earlier, in 1909.”
As you see, before 1909, the United States already had a trickledown economic system where the 0.1 percent decided how much they’d drip on the other 99.9-percent. No one is alive today who lived during that era of trickle down pennies to the masses.
Our ancestors have already been there, done that, and fought their way out of that swamp of avarice deliberately filled with quicksand to trap the rest of us.
The Civil Rights movement of our time is where only corporations have rights and the people are to be invisible and silent except when they are out consuming, and then they must go into debt to the banks and corporations wearing a fake smile painted on their faces.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.
