Unreported

Sometimes the level of pure contempt aimed at the poor from the ruling elite in this country reaches such an awe-inspiring level that I’m left speechless. Obviously, this isn’t a new trend. There’s always been a class war, of sorts, in America since the days of railroad barons and starving immigrants who did all the railroad building, but things are getting just a tad nutty these days. A couple examples leaped out at me when I was taking my daily rage run on the treadmill at the gym, and for some self-loathing reason, decided to watch CNN.

In Cordova, Alabama, the city’s mayor is denying tornado victims access to FEMA trailers because the single wides might lower property values. Mind you, the police themselves are currently set up in trailers, but the mayor refuses to allow residents, some of who are now living in tents, to access the mobile homes. He generously said he might, maybe one day, allow the FEMA trailers to be set up…on the outskirts of the city.

I immediately thought of the aftermath of Katrina when the Shock Doctrine vultures swooped into New Orleans and demolished public housing. In their place, private investors built fewer apartments that took years to complete, leaving poor black people to fend for themselves in the wake of the traumatic storm. But hey, never let a good disaster go to waste without trying to use it to fuck the poor, right?

And as they starve in the boonies, poor people will have a harder time accessing the fruits of their labor — if they’re lucky enough to have jobs at all. Under the guise of “protecting workers,” Sen. Herb Kohl (WI-D) and Sen. Mike Enzi (WY-R) filed a bill to make it harder for workers to use their 401K savings as “piggy banks.”

There is no more perfect example of the way Congress has become out-of-touch with real American workers. When credit dried up and people started losing their homes, of course they fell back on using retirement money. What other choice was there? I mean, other than crawling to the outskirts of their communities to die quietly in a wooded area somewhere.

The term “piggy banks” really makes my skin crawl. It’s demeaning and condescending, sort of like the whole “government as a family” metaphor Conservatives roll out any time they’re declaring the need for government to “tighten its belt” and implement some new form of austerity torture. The government is not like a family because if it was that would make the government the parents and the U.S. taxpayer the child. Adult citizens are not children. If anything, government is subservient to citizens because without taxpayer funding, government would not exist.

Citizens don’t have “piggy banks.” They have hard-fought life savings that are the direct fruit of their decades of toiling. Every penny belongs to them, and them alone, and it is up to their discretion what they do with those funds.

So let me get this straight : Millions of workers can’t find jobs, many can’t access enough credit to keep their heads above waters, and those who can are getting crushed under the weight of interest rates, millions have lost their homes, and Senators like Kohl and Enzi — who by the way enjoy enormously generous benefit packages courtesy of the American taxpayers — want to rip away one of the last lifelines keeping U.S. citizens afloat.

Fan-fucking-tastic.