Inspirations and Aspirations

I have long argued — it seems once to have been a canon of American political belief — that what the wealthy “buy” with their taxes is social peace.

I hope our fellow Americans will take away at least some of the right lessons from the “unexpected” and “unprovoked” attack on Prince Charles and his wife, as they rode in their Rolls, swathed in their £10,000 topcoats, on their way to the theater through the midst of mass student protests over the overnight TRIPLING of English university tuition fees.

Oh yes — tuition must be TRIPLED — we have no choice say the Tories and their coalition partners the Lib Dems — because, because, well… because the rich and their bankers and the occasional lucky footballer have made off with simply everything — all the money! Poof, gone! Well fancy that. How’d that ever happen? Guess we’ll never know. And now we simply have no choice but to make it back somehow. No more university for you, Mr. Chav, or you, Ms. Brown. “Peaceful protests only, please,” they say, “we’re civilized people.” Well, one of the first rules of civilization is that the criminal should be held accountable for his crime. And if the typical English university student sees the Prince of York and his wife the Duchess of Cornwall as perfect symbols of the new haute bourgeois master thieves who have succeeded in turning the Western world into the best semblance of their banana republic dreams — where them’s thats got deserve everything and the rest deserve their lot — who can blame them?

So as the fasco-Marxist GOP — those mealy mouthed southern gentlemen of true faith who reduce all succor to the measure of “the economy” and its rightful domain over all — who daily practice their distinctive style of “class warfare” (for the “other” side, of course, but isn’t that just as their G*d ordains?) — continue their project of dismantling the petit-bourgeois state that was the economic and political glory of 20th century America — well we certainly can’t do anything about this Treasury problem until we dismantle Social Security, Medicare, public education and all these other “luxuries” (after all, we got rid of welfare during the Clinton administration, so the really low hanging fruit’s been picked) — they should ask themselves this question:

Would you rather give up a few more dollars in taxes on your ill-gotten gains, or stop driving your Bentley to that hip show downtown? ‘Cause the lesson of Charles and Camilla is, in the end, that you can’t have it both ways. Your choice, boys. Seems the rest of us don’t really have much say in the matter.

Prince Charles and Camilla caught up in London violence after student fees vote

Attack on royal car as tumult grips capital city’s centre following MPs’ vote for measure trebling English university fees

Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt
The Guardian, Friday 10 December 2010

Comments (1075)

We’ve come to the point in this country where we seem to be very comfortable talking, economically, about “the bottom 90%.”

And here’s the kind of bargain the ruling 10% and their Republican allies call fair: $10 billion in unemployment insurance in exchange for $600 billion+ in tax cuts for the already wealthy.

Until such day as these seem once again, on the one hand, an absurd formulation, and on the other, a ridiculous bargain, the Democratic response to Boner’s demands should be simply and unequivocally, “over my dead body!”