Representative Alan Grayson (Democrat -FL) has a message for the
corporations and repugicans who are spreading income inequality.
Grayson warned that the greed of corporations has spawned a new
political movement that will take them down.
Grayson told Salon,
If one person falls out of the middle class, that’s sad. But if millions of people fall out of the middle class, that creates a backlash which is being seen all over the country, and will potentially create a new political movement of the disenfranchised.….Even people who are employed now, many of them are not making enough money to survive. And the outlet more and more for people that they see is this kind of civil disobedience, because the political system has become completely unresponsive to their genuine concerns and their physical needs.….Wal-Mart is a machine that exists solely for the purpose of enriching its owners and…the top managers of Wal-Mart, and in so doing wreaks havoc on the lives of both workers and suppliers.
Rep. Grayson was correct. History has shown that once people get pushed too far, they push back. There is a reason this year’s Walmart Black Friday protests were the biggest ever.
The same income inequality fostering dynamic that means workers starve
while the wealthy and corporations profit also plays a large role in
creation of the environment that leads to people brawling in stores to
get those “doorbuster” deals on Black Friday.
As The Washington Post’s Luke O’Neil wrote,
“The exact demography of shoppers on Thanksgiving and Black Friday
isn’t clear, with the former being too new a trend to track, and it
seems to have been changing over recent years, with a higher percentage
of millennials taking part of late, but studies have shown the shoppers
are more likely to be non-white, or single mothers.”
The same people who are being underpaid for their
work by their corporate employers are also the ones who feel so
desperate that they resort to physical violence to save a few dollars
while shopping.
The undercurrent of frustration, anger, and
desperation is the mixture that fuels the creation of new populist
movements. What Rep. Grayson was discussing were the forces that cause
people to stand up and fight back. The rage of the new class of “have
nots” has been growing since the economy collapsed. The repugicans along
with their wealthy and corporate backers don’t see the danger coming.
When the people who have been held down do stand up,
it is going to be repugicans and the Koch pro-corporate agenda that
will feel their wrath.
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