There is no balance to be found in greed. Those who are motivated by greed are not giving you a single cent more than they have to to get you to do the work that generates their wealth. Even in the corporate world that I work in, they make it clear that before you are considered for a promotion you have to demonstrate that you are willing to give more to the company than the company is giving to you. You have to demonstrate that you are willing to work extended hours, nights, weekends, answer your cellphone and check emails even during your earned vacation time or the promotion will be offered to someone else who will. This is a double standard that is just accepted. It’s how the game is played. It would be considered laughably absurd to suggest the reverse, that the company compensate the employee in benefits and wages before they are actually doing the work to give the employee an opportunity to see if he or she could get accustomed to living at that means before offering them the position. Yet they think nothing to laying off workers and asking the workers that remain to do the work of 2 people for an indefinite amount of time. For many compensation only comes once the employee threatens to quit or notifies them that they have found employment elsewhere.
What I found interesting about Edwin Lyngar’s piece is that it showed me that there is a correlation between shame and the degree that poor whites in particular support the politics and ideologies that slash their own throats. “They vote against their own interests, often hurting themselves in concrete ways, in a vain attempt to deal with their own, misguided shame about being poor.”
Clearly, some whites have been told that poverty is something that is for others, whomever those others may be, Blacks slaves, then after the civil war free Blacks, immigrants both legal and illegal but not them. And they are taught to be shamed for being poor. That they have failed to live up to their Whiteness somehow, not understanding that the very system they live under necessities that someone has nothing so that they will appreciate $2.15 an hour waiting tables or for $20.00 a day picking fruits and vegetables.
So there is a history in America of Whites, particularly poor whites being taught that poverty is a personal failure when poverty is built into the system itself. For some whites the shame of having to take a job that doesn’t provide a living wage is a heavy burden to bear but they will vote for politicians that oppose raising the miming wage because their shame tells them that they don’t deserve a living wage.
“I have a close friend on permanent disability. He votes reliably for the most extreme conservative in every election. He always votes for the person most likely to slash the program he depends on daily for his own survival. It’s like clinging to the end of a thin rope and voting for the rope-cutting razor party.”
Edwin Lygard concludes his piece with the simple and logical question, “Rich people vote their self-interest in every single election. Why don’t poor people?”
There will always be far fewer rich people than poor people. Wealth, in every society that has ever existed on the Earth has always been concentrated within the hands of a small group. For example, in the United States of America, 85% of the wealth is in the hands of 20% of the population. 85 cents of every dollar is controlled by 1 out of every 5 people. Even more appalling was an article in the Huffington Post from October of 2013 titled Russia’s Wealth Inequality One Of Highest In The World highlighted that reported that 35% of the wealth of the entire country is held by just 110 individuals.
The only way this kind of gross inequity exists, particularly in a democratic system is with the loyal support of a sizable portion of the poor majority who have been taught to hate themselves so much that they refuse to vote their own self-interest. And the way the wealthy have maintained such inequity is by using US and THEM politics to define poverty as a THEM problem and then shaming poor Whites into voting against their own interests because voting their own interest would put them in the same category as the Other. It worked in the Civil War to get poor non-slave owning Whites to lay down their lives for wealthy slave-owning elites who often weren’t even willing to do the same to save the very institution that was responsible for creating their abundance of wealth.
We also can’t forget that wealth is inheritable. It is passed on generation to generation. The 20% of Americans that control 85% of America’s wealth are not new families every year. So just because your wealthy does not mean at all that you “earned” anything. In fact you were most likely born into it. And although there is nothing wrong with that, let’s just be honest about what it is. Trying to sell to poor people that you have earned your wealth is painting a picture that is disingenuous to say the least. It is an attempt to guide the poor, particular the poor whites you are trying to appeal to, to believe in something that they can relate to and that is work.
Do you think the children of the Waltons, the Kochs or the other 183 families in America that are worth over 1 billion dollars earned their wealth? The children of those families didn’t earn their wealth any more than children of poor people earned their poverty. Wealth buys more than just material things like cars and fur coats and sprawling mansions, it also buys opportunities and advantages like access to better schools, access to decision makers and the wealthy they didn’t earn those advantages over you either. There are over 30 private high schools in the United States that cost more than 40,000 a year for children to attend. Let me ask you, do you think that the education and opportunities those children are receiving is comparable to the opportunities your child is receiving in an increasingly cash strapped public school system? Do you think that child is earning his or her way into these elite private high schools by paying the 40,000 a year tuition by working part time at the Gap or Starbucks?
I am not trying to be an asshole here I am just trying to point out the absurdity of believing that poverty is an indicator of a personal flaw or failing.
If hard work were the determining factor of wealth then why is it that some of the hardest working people in the world, doing the the worst jobs imaginable are also the poorest and will remain poor for their entire lives?
Lyngar, Edwin (2014, July 16) I was poor, but a GOP die-hard: How I finally left the politics of shame. Retrieved from http://www.salon.com/
Page, Bartels, Seawright (2013, March) Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans. Retrieved from faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu
Kroll, Luisa (2014, July 21) America’s Richest Families: 185 Clans With Billion Dollar Fortunes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/
Russia’s Wealth Inequality One Of Highest In The World. Retrieved from http://huffington Post.com