The following is a letter I wrote to my senators and congressman regarding the Wallstreet bailout.
America has been actively creating a permanent aristocracy for the past thirty years and the educated youth of this country who are not a part of this aristocracy are beginning to wonder whether or not they should remain in a place where they will never reap significant rewards for their work. If the Secretary of the Treasury has his way, many of us may be looking for a new country to call home.
Here is my letter…
Dear Senator,
My name is Dan Portincaso and I am a natural born U.S. citizen and registered voter in Illinois. As an independent voter, I have been generally pleased by the representation you have given me in the United States Senate and I thank you for your hard work.
We are living in perilous and pivotal times where the class divide has become wider than at any other time in our country’s history. The recent banking mess is a perfect example of this and it is why I am writing this letter to urge you to please do nothing to bail out Wallstreet.
This country is in the process of making a permanent aristocracy the likes of which have not been seen since the times of Louis XVI in France. The wealthy have corrupted our political system to ensure they pay the least percentage of their income in taxes than any other group, having hypnotized the American public with consumerism and the myth of “the American dream.”
I am 30 years old and even though I have a Masters degree, I can expect to make about the same amount of money at a new job as I would have made 12 years ago when I graduated high school. Meanwhile costs have increased dramatically. I work hard, I’ve gotten more education than anyone in my family, manage my money wisely, own a home and still can’t move up the financial ladder. The American dream of my grandparents is now a myth.
The media and the establishment extol the virtues of “free markets” and “capitalism” as if they were systems of economy that actually existed in the United States. I contend however that our economy more closely resembles that of China or of the defunct Soviet Union.
In our economy, real, sustainable money can only be made by people who have it already, small business owners (like some of the people in my family) in the end really only make as much money as employees of larger companies. Usually, they make less and it is not because they pay too much taxes, it is because large corporate companies that exploit their workers charge so little for their products that people can’t support small business costs because they don’t have the money, because their pay is stagnant.
However, if one of the small businesses in my family makes a bad decision or collapses, what does the government do? Nothing, they stand by while mega billionaires and the companies that represent them swallow any remaining assets of the business. They certainly don’t get a government bailout.
At the end of the day, corporate billionaires get coddled and protected by the government when they make stupid and greedy mistakes and the rest of us, without millions of dollars to give to our members of Congress, only get to pay for it.
I am tired of my government paying for rich people to stay rich!
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