Hello Hillary

From Random Hipatia

Hello Hillary, it was so nice of your phonebank to call. Most people would say it is far too early to be bugging people though calling banks, heck, there is no primary even in sight until next year, but such facts do not seem to deter you. It was equally lovely to see your initial infomercial announcing your candidacy, which appeared produced to the same quality and standards as Madison Avenue marketing people can be expected to do for a late night run of some paid television advertising that often appears on cable. In fact, it reminded me of the set used for the late Jim and Tammy show, minus Jim and the fake tears on command, but I digress. Since you asked people to comment, I thought I would do so. However, while you have two perfectly good ears, I very much doubt you will listen.

Of the few vague things you mention, I am sure others have already commented on America’s imperial war. However, it is those issues you do not even mention which for me are the most profound. What I did not hear was any mention of restoring constitutional government and civil liberties, effectively and illegally suspended by Mr. Bush, whom you state you wish to replace. A potential presidential candidate who neither respects the constitution nor apparently the rule of law seems to me both to be no better than the current tyrant nor even fit for elected office, whether as a Senator or a President. In that you seem unable to comprehend, let alone are able to even comment on this issue suggests that you are to me so very out of touch with the people of this country and their real needs in a most profound and even dangerous way.

On the question of Healthcare, this I think is a very basic start. A real revolution would be in recognizing that all lives are equally valuable, not just those of the wealthy. Rather than end at “affordable Healthcare”, we need universal human dignity and human care, including true and equal access to education for our children without creating indentured servants to banks, and free and universal social and health resources for EVERY person living or working in the borders of the United States regardless of race, social status, etc. Which brings us to the question of poverty.

You accidentally touched upon the topic of poverty when you spoke so falsely of the idea that by “hard work” someone will be successful in this country in your video. This lie that is sold by that con artist and part-time used car salesman known as Uncle Sam is both damaging and socially destructive. Telling the Mexican laborer that he will somehow “purchase” the “American Dream” by working for $2.50 under the table sweeping the floors of our Walmarts, or nannying the babies of the wealthy only assures that he and his decedents will remain trapped in intergenerational poverty.

I do speak authoritatively when I speak of this. I was born to a lower class family, in fact to a then single mother and life in a trailer park in the Chicago area and raised in foster care, the kind of lower class and forgotten background far too many here speak of in only entirely theoretical or abstract terms. Even in my 20’s I often was so poor and lived so far on the margins of society that for a couple of months one winter I occupied a building with a few others not far from Cabrini Green in the old printer’s row area. No, hard work had nothing to do with my success, and those few others I have known who have also done it, in escaping the poverty and the expectations of those born to labor in the lower class in America.

So please, Hillary, spare me the false and condescending lecture on hard work. One of the things that does work in poverty relief, from what I have found, are micro-loans, and I understand why. It matters not how hard or how skilled one might be in a skill or profession, if one has a certain amount of starting capital, they will be successful, and if they do not, they will fail. Simple as that. Indeed, if you have something over the minimum needed, such as found in the resources of a wealthy family, it matters not even matter how poor your products are, how unskilled you are, you will still be successful, and the best example I can offer being Bush.

Some societies try to achieve social justice through redistributionist policies, while others use milder forms of “progressive taxation” as a policy tool simply to prime the consumption economy of the wealthy exploiters which stands on the backs of the working class when they are not busy applying the lash. But you especially, Hillary, should understand this truth about the hard work myth so well. After all, your presidential ambitions and oppertunities are not at all related to how hard you may have worked or how skilled you are, but rather, like for many who found what is still the most common escape from poverty, a result of whom you married.