Talking About Inequality, but Doing Nothing About It

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION has decided to make income inequality a major item on his second term agenda, according to White House spokesperson propaganda. Obama has hired a new lawyer who has his own think tank dedicated to studying income inequality, as if it needs to be studied any more, rather than eliminated. Its always good to hear stuff like that though, the mere fact that there aint a damned thing Obama or anyone in his administration can do to alter income inequality in the United States or anywhere else notwithstanding. Nor is there a damned thing Obama or anyone in his administration cares to do about income inequality. Its legacy making time in Obamaland, and that's what really matters to those Obama-folks. Image is everything, substance is irrelevant. The expression of good intentions is key. If nothing else, the expression of concern, though feigned, about the nation's teeming masses of poor folk should be sufficient to arouse the wrath of America's conservative republicans, for whom the very mention of income inequality is sufficient to evoke expressions of dismissive contempt and accusations of intent to confiscate the wealth of the wealthy. The fact that tens of millions of Americans are impoverished though fully employed is nobody's fault but their own, according to conservative dogma, and no attempt should be made by anyone other than the fully employed impoverished themselves to alleviate the situation. Socio-economic "you're on your own" Darwinisn is a perfectly valid philosophy, but the more highly concentrated wealth becomes, and the more numerous the impoverished become, the more likely the impoverished become, through anger and desperation, to revolt against the status quo. It happens over and over again, because the wealthy and powerful among us seek not, in general, to distribute their wealth and power, but instead to hoard it for themselves, and increase it. Such is human nature. Who needs human nature?