BlogWood: MT Archives

Thousands of children left behind

There’s money for Tampa’s wealthy white racist elite. Those ill behaved misogynists who run this city and who parade down Bayshore Blvd. each year before their obsequious breast-baring serfs have not had their government subsidies threatened by tight state and local budgets.

So the parade will go on, and the city will pick up a large part of the tab.

There’s no money for children, though. Even as Tampa’s movers and shakers pay professional makeup artists to turn them into pirates for a day, hundreds of bay area families will be trying to figure out what to do with their children. See, in order to work, these parents need affordable child care, but funding for child care just isn’t as important as, say, tax cuts for wealthy political contributors. So the children are left behind.

This would seem to mirror a national trend which indicates that the wealthy are doing just fine, but the rest of us are struggling:

The Bush tax cuts and the turnaround in the economy have been a boon to folks at the high end of the economic ladder. The Wall Street Journal ran an article on Wednesday about the resurgence of lavish spending by the investment crowd. It featured accounts of giddy highfliers getting married at the palace of Versailles, stepping up their purchases of Porsches, Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces, and exhibiting "a renewed appetite for chartered jets."

At the same time, the underclass and the middle class are increasingly facing similar predicaments: job losses, hard times and an extremely uncertain future.

The blows are coming from myriad directions. On Tuesday The Times's Milt Freudenheim wrote: "Employers have unleashed a new wave of cutbacks in company-paid health benefits for retirees, with a growing number of companies saying that retirees can retain coverage only if they are willing to bear the full cost themselves."

No child care for the working poor. No health coverage for retired workers. High unemployment, record numbers of bankruptcy filings, but don’t worry about any of that. Go out on Saturday and cheapen yourself by begging for worthless plastic baubles. Legitimize the rule of the cruel, worship at their feet, and maybe they’ll throw you a few scraps of gristle before kicking you in the head and throwing you outside into the rain.

Enjoy the parade!