Today is Tax Day in the US, and that's almost universally greeted with groans and complaints. That tax word's been so effectively demonized that it may be there's no coming back. Is it time for a new word?
Some research by Duke University's Dan Ariely suggests it might be.
Ariely's study showed that Americans actually want a more equitable society—in fact, they think they have one. When asked to identify their homeland from a list of nations described only by their level of equality--a majority of those polled picked Sweden, thinking it was the US. When asked to create their ideal society, Democrats, Republicans, men and women, the rich and the poor all created a distribution of wealth that is much more equal than the one we've got.
All that "social mobility, low inequality" stuff--Americans love it. They just don't have it. In fact, social mobility here's been shrivelling, as the wealth gap's been opening up.
There are only a few ways to get that more equal distribution: government investment (benefits and services) corporate action (paying people more) or redistribution: taking from each according to their means, to help the whole. We call that tax.
Yet according to Ariely, the very same people who expressed an ardent wish for an equal society have an highly averse reaction to the word tax. Why, he wondered, recently, to National Public Radio.
It's not so hard to figure out. Day in day out, when you hear taxes mentioned, what's the context? Social citizenship? Tools of an equal society? Or is it rather all about how heavy the burden is, how overtaxed Americans are. The Taxman, the IRS--the first public workers our media teach us to hate.
There are taxes to hate--taxes that go to give a blank check to the military, or tax credits for corporations that export American jobs. But the truth is, taxes on the rich have done nothing but fall since the Reagan years. And inequality's only gotten bigger.
What's the money media's stake in all this? It's hardly hidden. Remember that GE tax refund for $3.2 billion? The co-owner of NBC and MSNBC isn't alone either. Time Warner and News Corp, owners of CNN and Fox, are also on a list of the biggest corporate tax avoiders.
Today, when you hear that news story about how tax day is no fun, remember that you're actually paying more than the company behind the news. And remember who it was who taught you to hate taxes. And if you come up with a new word, let us know?
So so right about the sources of all these “ideas” Americans think they get on their own. So much suggestive planted in their heads from the beginning. Carnegie and Rockefeller were behind all this from the very beginning, with their Napoleon Hill book, and also the university econ departments they set up with puppets they controlled to demonize Henry George and land tax based economics! This kind of suggestive use of language by cultural institutions controlled by the Elites themselves to control the people are essential parts of “social construction” theory well spotted and outed by Foucault or Paulo Freire!
That was of course the central function of the Church in Europe, and these institutions including NBC, MSNBC, etc. are those institutions today.
And Americans think they are free with all this privately owned privately interested media and money from Trustees in their highest edifices of higher education!
We learned about this first hand when defectee friends from Czech and Hungary came here and noticed all this back in the 1970s and 1980s. They said then that we Americans were not free, which gave us all pause. It was no different under communism, but for them, they had a much more vibrant intelligentsia that put their fingers all over it. They may have gone to jail for it, but the theories traveled around in samizdat!
Here, no such intelligentsia was allowed to exist by the money men behind curtains pulling strings at universities increasingly dependent on private status quo money as Reagan cut the democratically decided tax support for education. The creators of social construction theory in the 1970s in the US did it quietly and hidden away to avoid being ostracized by the tenure terrorists! They knew what they were doing. They couldn’t do an Inquisition here, that would be too obviously anti-democracy, so they infused private money into everything. This was Lewis Powell’s big manifesto!
Americans had better wake up if they truly want their wallets back. They’ll need their minds back first!
By planckbrandt on April 18th, 2011 at 5:25 pm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbQwCS901AI&feature=feedwll
By wtpeople on April 19th, 2011 at 1:43 am
Original music/struggles in our nation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbQwCS901AI&feature=feedwll
By wtpeople on April 19th, 2011 at 1:45 am