Life on Maggie’s Farm
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more
Well, I wake in the morning
Fold my hands and pray for rain
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane
It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more</i>
Bob Dylan turns 70 today. He released his first album in 1962, the year I was born. And like Bob, I got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane. Like when I read something like this:
A new study by Deloitte confirms everyone’s worst fear (and every millionaire’s wettest dream): the wealth amassed by millionaire households is set to increase by more than 100% over the next 9 years. From a total of $92 trillion held by the world’s richest in 2011, by 2020 the world’s millionaire households will possess $202 trillion, or roughly 4 times current global GDP. Even though much of move up is attributed to the wealth surge in the developing world, the biggest beneficiary is, you guessed it, the United States where the millionaires (those with net wealth of at least $1 million), who currently account for $38.6 trillion of total wealth, will see their assets increased by 225% to $87.1 trillion!
And as has been the case for the last 30 years, incomes of the lower and middle classes will remain stagnant, and social services and infrastructure get further slashed, in order to fund more gimmies to the wealthiest among us. But that’s the thing, you see. They aren’t “among us”. They live behind walls in gated communities, drive expensive cars to private airfields- you don’t hear Warren Buffett whining about the TSA, do ya? Their children don’t go to public schools, or sit in emergency rooms with a cough.
I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more
No, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more
Well, he puts his cigar
Out in your face just for kicks
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks
The National Guard stands around his door
Ah, I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s pa no more</i>
The oft-quoted axiom that democracies survive until the public learns to vote themselves money frequently gets tossed into discussions about this, despite it not being an actual quote, nor it being particularly factual. Show me a society that collapsed because the majority of the citizens had the majority of the nations wealth, and it will be the first I’ve heard of it. In fact, in this country our darkest hours are generally the exact opposite. The majority of the wealth- wealth that should be moving around society, hiring people, building bridges, paying school teachers, is instead sitting in bank accounts off shore, waiting. Same as it was before the last Depression. So please explain to me how the rich of this country are going to get richer when nobody is working enough to buy anything? Start another war? We have enough of those, no more room to increase production to sate the war profiteers (make due with what ya got, Cheney and crew), and since taxes are at their lowest since the 1950s, and most large corporations have rewritten the laws to pay nothing at all, so where is the money going to come from? Are we going to wake up one morning with crude stitches where our kidneys used to be? Or all in jail on bogus drug charges, while private prison investors get a check each month for keeping us there?
Just how long you think this nation’s wealth can continue to be pilfered by those who write the laws until we’re just a bare husk of a nation? Until we have no teachers? No firemen? Until our food is nothing but masses of GMO poison, contaminated and uninspected? What will happen then?
