Speaking Truth to Noise

The recent "tea party" demonstrations by the Republican Party raise once again what I believe will become, and in fact now is, one of the most insidious threats to democracy, namely excessive wealth.

The so called tea party was funded by Dick Armey's corporate-funded FreedomWorks and vigorously promoted nationwide by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. The event was premised on distortion, i.e. the Boston Tea Parry was not a protest against taxes, it was a protest against taxes without representation. The need for the tax increases in this state and nation is to address the fiscal debacle caused primarily by Republican destruction of financial regulatory oversight imposed after the Great Depression. All this anti-tax blather is in the context of massive tax breaks for the wealthy and the largest gap between the rich and the poor in a hundred years.

We have very serious problems in our world and society of which our current economic situation, bad as it is, is not the worst. Yet the wealthy and their minions will exercise their power and pervasively deceptive influence on the citizenry to distort and obfuscate the truth no matter what the cost to humanity.

We are often urged to speak truth to power, indeed to find solace in so speaking. However, in the cacophony of lies, distortions and distractions that technology provides the wealthy the assumption that the voice of truth will be heard is tenuous at best.

The truth is that excessive wealth and democracy are incompatible. Progressives need to come to grips with this truth and raise the wealth issue to prominence. We must become very clear on how the wealthy employ their resources to preserve their control and subvert the democracy. This will require their subordination to the needs of society. In a time of overpopulation, rapidly decreasing resources and drastic climate change it is extremely dangerous to let wealth continue to play a dominant role, especially in one of the world's wealthiest nations. Kevin Phillips in his book Wealth and Democracy provides a history of the insidious role wealth has played in our society. I would add that the mechanics and consequences of wealth accumulation for a democracy must be clearly articulated in order to reverse our traditional worship of wealth. The fundamental axiom of wealth is that wealth attracts wealth. The wealthy are more likely to attract more wealth than are the non-wealthy. This is how family fortunes such as those of the Rockefellers, Kochs and Coors have been permitted to so thoroughly distort our democracy that the majority of us have far less influence on our legislatures than do the wealthy.

Until progressives make the concentration of wealth a preeminent focus of reform they will not be, in the fundamental sense necessary, truth speakers and the obfuscating and half measures of the Obama administration will continue to the point of a social crisis that could well leave us with a fascist regime. We must point out that Bill Gate's billions are a threat to democracy, despite giving millions to fight aids. We must realize that H. W. Bush's "thousand points of light" solution to social problems is a ploy of the rich to deprive citizens of both the resources and public choice that the taxes avoided would have produced for society. We must see charity, especially in an affluent society, as a failure for a democratic society to provide adequately for its citizens. Bill Gates' father, an affluent physician, argued against the repeal of the estate tax successfully pushed by the Bush administration. His son did not. Perhaps Gates senior understood the malevolent effects that the accumulation of great family fortunes has had on democracy.

I should point out that I am also opposed to MoveOn's acceptance of money from billionaire George Soros who made his fortune in one of the most pernicious forms of enterprise, e.g. speculating in changing monetary values. One only needs to think of the democratically-determined social needs that could have been realized with Soros' self-enrichment.

The daunting part of this is that a sustained focus on the adverse effects of wealth, demanding as it is, is but a part of bringing reality into citizen focus in a culture of distraction.

Bob Newhard