Author and Community/Economic Development Consultant, Sharon Slayton, answers a recent column by Chris Joosse, Limited government, fiscal conservative.
In no particular order:
- No, the conservative right doesn’t harbor deep-seated desires and grand plans to control every aspect of your life in ‘political in-correct’ totalitarian style. You’re being told that because it makes you easier to influence politically (there’s nothing so unifying as a common enemy, and considering your group is now trying to overthrow our elected President, it seems they’ve got that down, right to their very strategy).
- Yes, the folks on the right do love America too, and no, they don’t hate you or your freedoms. Whoever tells you these things is not your friend or ally- you’re their tool to the extent you believe that stuff. When righties sound frustrated with you, part of that is they don’t like that you’re being taken advantage of in ways that affect everyone. The removing of your freedoms and ours, which has brought us to the present state of today, is entirely the result of your 8 year administration in the Executive Office and your control of the US Senate, and their complete success in passing and installing legislation that they approved, codified and enforced into law. Two branches of the government backed your actions. Also, they’ve been trying to tell you this a lot, even to the point of electing Donald Trump and replacing your party in all but a few obscure political bodies, but it doesn’t seem to be getting across.
- Conservatives are never going to force you to have guns. They might want you to comply with some rules and accept some limitations to prohibiting their ownership, and some are beyond angry with how the no-gun diehards refuse to accept that without their dumping the heavy hardware on our US streets like they do in all the countries they’ve tried to overthrow, needing much regulation would become minimal, but it’s just. not. going. to. happen. The folks keeping this from happening are the same “liberal” folks who just sold $Billions in arms to their friends who then slip them to our enemies to create a regime change strategy that’s now responsible for refugees and disaster the world over. And all because you were convinced you could save some “poor people” from the evils of governments that didn’t want to give us their natural resources and their oil. You’ve tried telling us that they’re our friends, too, but they’re not. They’re not your friends; you’re their marks.
- No, righties aren’t in favor of outlawing Sharia law when they make it clear they don’t like to see Muslims practicing it here. It means they don’t want the USA to act like a theocracy, and that they don’t want some “alternate system” replacing our own system of rules and justice. Not because they want to impose a Christian one.
- No, the Nazis and fascists weren’t right-wing Americans, but the ones who set them up in government were the people who sold them arms, goods and supplies from their now giant American corporate interests who make up the majority of both Party campaign contributions here at home. It DOES matter that the DNC was once the party of the Confederacy and against civil rights, especially since the DNC is the party of election fraud, machine tampering, media corruption and manipulation, propaganda legalization, fake news and intelligence reports and false manipulative polling claims about non-existent rampant voter preferences. Oh- and getting your pals at the AP to call elections in your favor before the voting is done is something no liberal or conservative should do.
- Not “getting tough’ on social issues such as crime or drugs clearly doesn’t work. If it did, the problem would already be solved. What doesn’t work is invading and taking over countries with large drug and crime problems, diverting the money they create into your own coffers and criminal distribution networks. After 8 years of your controlling our Criminal Justice System, and having every opportunity to institute reform, here we are. What else doesn’t work is continuing to prop up a failed system with our money while we figure out what to do, and by controlling our borders and our streets until we do. It’s quite possible that the perceived unfairness of ‘get tough’ rules, (carried out while simply enforcing the rules and laws you created and passed, by the way) contributes to the issues today (like the way community:police relations aren’t good in high-crime areas created by your special trade zones).
- No, the money from tax cuts to the poor never ever ever, ever trickles up, because it never exits your bloated government. Instead, it finances your illegal military-industrial complex, that consists mostly of non-US contractors now indiscriminately bombing 7 or more countries in undeclared wars created by your last 8 years’ activities in office, and which has siphoned off more than $7 Trillion of unaccounted for taxpayer money to their illegal regime change activities abroad. And the people who tell you it will are making out like bandits while you wait.
- No, we’re not rich from draining the idle moochers system or living large on cutting already meager benefits. Most of us are struggling worse than you. We’re hoping to cut off the system that has clearly failed to improve these people’s lot in any way. We’re hoping that instead of throwing money at something, and expecting that those receiving it will apply it to the problem, that you’ll finally step up to the plate and demand that they do so. If your program isn’t working, you don’t get more money. Stop funding people just to make yourselves feel better – clearly it doesn’t fix the problem. Start rewarding people who solve their own problems. WE don’t mind letting someone borrow our car occasionally, so long as they don’t expect us to give them one to keep us from the trouble.
- No, the USA isn’t number one in the world at anything now, except for per-capita incarceration, military spending, and the prices we pay for medical care and pharmaceuticals – all provided by the legacy of your policies for 16 of the last 24 years. Actually being number one in any of these things requires high standards and steep ladders. Otherwise we’re pretending that everyone deserves a trophy. One day they will, in something. But until that day, we have lots of potential to be better, and wanting the USA to be better isn’t the same thing as not-loving America.
- We get it, the future in which white people are a minority makes you uneasy- but the problem isn’t who’s a minority, it’s that minorities are regarded and treated as second-class citizens by too many people. Your banking and economic and criminal justice and trade policies keep them in that second-class status, and the apparatus you’ve built to support that illusion are filling elitist DNC machine pockets. Fix that part, and everything has potential to turn out fine. Not fixing it means when we’re the minority, it’ll be our (or our grandchildren’s) turn to be treated as second-class, and we’ll deserve it when we have to protest about how White Lives Matter. Social justice isn’t about taking away white rights, it’s very much in our interests to understand that we have a right not to share unless we agree to, not to have people take things without properly accounting for them, then leaving the rest of us to figure out how to replace what was involuntarily given. That’s abuse and co-dependence, and surely you are also not for that.
- No, it’s not always moral failure when conservatives are tolerant of intolerance or bigotry. It would be hypocritical if they were not. But nothing, especially today, happens without everyone doing their part. There’s a place for everyone who wants to pitch or chip in (sometimes it’s no pay too), but there’s no time for anyone to sit by and wait if they want what is truly a fair share. Immigrant and citizen alike, if you’re not contributing, your consuming, and when that happens on a big scale, there’s no choice but to seek out foreign goods to get what we’re not producing at home. Opening borders to an unconstrained influx of unverified potential talent to consume while not contributing is not the same as investing in people. They mess up our budgets. Being a conservative means you believe in planning, conserving for emergencies, and controlling production to meet goals. Spending money on people who either aren’t contributing or are unplanned, makes us irritable. Un-budgeted consumers often get called names, and people start excluding them from getting any more without earning their fair share. The rest is words, and those kinds of words are used every day by liberals to describe the people who want them to knock off the kumbaya and stop perpetuating the things that make people bigots..
- A lot of those jobs and most certainly those corporate wages are never coming back, and politicians telling you they will aren’t your friends- you’re their marks. Already the easy-to-automate work has been automated, and eventually even the skilled labor (like automating work) will eventually be automated. (yes, today there is software writing other software, machines building other machines). Bringing in cheap labor to fill the last of those jobs that will inevitably disappear is not a strategy you want to manage to without an endpoint on how long those jobs and those people will be around. You need a plan for where they’ll go or what they’ll do when the jobs or the need for some kinds of work are done. No matter how much you like him once he gets there, you don’t invite the electrician over to enjoy the hot tub he just hooked up in your backyard. You might not hire him if he doesn’t have his own tools. You probably won’t drive to his house to pick him up either. And you’ll definitely send him home when the job is done. You don’t invite him to stay with you and offer to support him until the next time you need an electrician. You don’t invite him to move in with his kids while you all wait. You might invite him for a night or two if you know the job is going to take a few days. That’s why we have comprehensive labor laws and work Visas. We learned about that during that last great “melting pot wave of immigration – only then we were expanding and creating needs and jobs. We’re not really doing that today. It’s kind of like that very likable brother-in-law who overstays his vacation in your kid’s room. We want to stop these things and go back to liking our visiting friends and helpers. We want to stop making them a problem and start making them our friends again.
SMSPirate 