Robin Hood Reversal

Posted on by under animals, Bits 'n Pieces, Economic issues, guns, Law and justice, Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry, Social commentary

Hypocrisy abounds in the United States.  Take, for one example, those who call themselves ‘pro-life’.  They will take away women’s rights in order to ensure that a fetus, that may or may not turn into an actual human life, is protected, sometimes at the cost of the woman’s life, yet they will go out and shoot innocent animals, not for food, but simply for the ‘pleasure’ of killing, of taking a life.  Oh … you say it’s only human life they are ‘pro’?  Well, let’s delve a little deeper there.

Many of the very same ones who call themselves ‘pro-life’ support the death penalty, whereby at some point we could take the life of a perfectly innocent human who will later be exonerated … but he cannot be freed, for he is dead.  They rail against tax dollars being used in support of single mothers struggling to buy food to feed those babies that the ‘pro-lifers’ insisted they have.  They also stand firm for unlimited guns in the hands of any who want them, claiming it is a “god-given” right.  Guns, I might remind you, have a singular purpose:  to kill, to take those lives that these people claim to be protecting.  ‘Pro-life’ is really nothing more than anti-women.  Call a spade a bloody shovel, as my friend Mary says.

Perhaps one of the greatest hypocrisies that abound in the U.S. today is the attitude of some toward immigrants.  I would bet money that every single person who wants to ‘build a wall’ or ‘shut down the border’ is the child of immigrant ancestry.  Their grandparents or great-great-great grandparents – someone from their family tree came to this country from another seeking freedoms or opportunities they were deprived of in their ancestral land.  And yet, when people are knocking on the door at our southern border or seeking admission from a Middle Eastern nation, the people of this nation would turn them away.  Too bad the Indigenous People of North America didn’t have the wherewithal to turn away those who came to our shores in the 16th and 17th centuries and beyond!

As a child, I was told that ‘America’ is the land of opportunity, the ‘Land of milk and honey’, the land where you can grow up to be anything you want.  And that’s true for the mostly-white, mostly-male millionaires and billionaires, but for the rest of us … we have an opportunity to try to survive as best we can.  Dodge the bullets, folks, keep your head down and work your ass off and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to afford to pay your rent and buy groceries next week.

And speaking of those wealthy people … here’s a statistic that will blow your mind.  19,000 – The number of Americans who made at least $1 million in 2020 who also collected unemployment assistance that year, according to new IRS data. That included 4,500 people who earned between $5 million and $10 million and 229 people with eight-figure incomes or more.  Think on that one for just a minute … a person whose total salary in 2020, the year of the pandemic when people were in serious danger of going hungry or losing their homes, was over a million dollars, got an additional $13,900 from our taxpayer dollars!!!  Not just one person but 19,000 millionaires got extra money from We the People.  Talk about hypocrisy!!!  That anyone who had already made $1 million or more that year, or had millions in the bank, would even apply for unemployment benefits is the lowest of low.

Certain members of Congress are hoping to be able to cut Social Security and Medicare soon … programs that we working people have paid into every day of our working lives … but there is no mention of cutting their own pensions or salaries or perks.  I call it Robin Hood Reversal … rob from the poor to give to the rich.

23 thoughts on “Robin Hood Reversal”

  1. It’s all about greed now. All the big corps buying up everything so they can raise prices on EVERYTHING – from groceries to housing. Robin -hood reversal is sadly, the perfect term. 😦 xx

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  2. Jill, the US no longer lives up to its hype on being the best place where people can move up. To whom people are born is increasingly important in the US, as we have fallen in the global ranks of moving up in economic class. Gronda cited a truism in a recent post that relative CEO pay to the company’s workers has risen well beyond that in other countries. It is embarrassingly so.

    Interestingly, the folks who tend to get ahead are immigrants to the US. They tend to be hungrier, more educated and more entrepreneurial than the average US citizen. In other words, they use what we have to offer better than folks who have been here longer. This is why an influx of immigrants tends to be a good thing to our country helping drive revenue and innovation.

    Keith

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    • No, today there is a giant thumb keeping the vast majority from rising above the fray. Today, like never before in this nation, it’s about who you were born to, how much wealth you inherited. Those with intelligence, motivation, and imagination can still rise to the top, but it takes large doses of all those things to ‘beat the system’. When the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in 13 years, yet corporate profits have soared … that tells the story in a nutshell. And when a millionaire can collect unemployment benefits intended to help a family survive during a dry spell, something is so very wrong with the system.

      You’re right about the immigrants … they come here knowing they must be willing to do anything, and that they must prove something in order to be allowed to stay. They come from an environment where their lives and those of their families were in grave danger, they’ve seen blood run in the streets and known what it was like to go hungry, so they give 200%. It’s also telling that while people are complaining about immigration, about jobs being ‘taken’ by immigrants, many of the jobs immigrants do for very little money are jobs that citizens have refused to do, think those jobs are beneath them. Hunger is a great motivator!

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  3. Unemployment isn’t welfare (not that there’s anything wrong with welfare). A worker pays into their unemployment, like they pay into their social security. The other part of unemployment is paid for jointly by the employer & the state. You are entitled to receive unemployment, if & only if you pass a certain amount of requirements, such as how you lost your employment, how long you were employed, and other issues. To imply that this is taxpayer-funded ONLY shows that you don’t know how the unemployment system works.

    I myself have never received unemployment, because I have never met any of those requirements. But I have lived with men who have worked union jobs & who were regularly laid off & who did receive unemployment, which is how I know how the system works (here in NY State anyway).

    I have no doubt that there are millionaires who applied for & received unemployment benefits but they probably thought that they paid into the system, they should get what they paid for. I understand that.

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  4. Pingback: Robin Hood Reversal — Filosofa’s Word | Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News

  7. It’s greed pure and simple. Life is viewed as a competition where the winners amass the most amounts of money and when they have it they want more .Never mind who they have to step onto get the wealth on their way up the ladder, and they’ll feel good about themselves as they gain millions if they drop1 ten bucks in a charity bucket……That’s’ sharing and helping the poor, who should really be helping themselves and not living on welfare..

    Cwtch.

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    • You’re quite right in all that you say, but I’m always puzzled why some place so much emphasis on having obscene wealth, while some of us don’t give a hoot about large sums of money? I’m quite content to be able to pay my bills and put food on the table, then use the rest to help others. Are some people’s brains wired wrong, or is it a result of being born into wealth and taught from an early age that the only important thing in life is great wealth and that one does whatever necessary to obtain it? Sigh.

      Cwtch

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  8. Astonishing figures, Jill! Thoroughly disgusting! But not a surprise… Where “free” money is concerned (You and I know it is not free!) the people who don’t need it will take it if they can, and someone else cannot!

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      • WE are told from a very early age, you need money to live, because our society has put a price on almost everything except the air we breathe. So we can’t blame the people alone, we all allowed that to happen.
        And when I suggested devaluing our money last year, everyone jumped on me. Because everyone puts a value on money. Just like people value time, and borders, and lots of other things.
        It’s easy to say money has no value, which is a true statement, but as long as people agree it does have value, we cannot get away from it without a major revolution.
        I believe we need a major revolution. But almost no one else does. Our society will not allow it.

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        • Well, as it stands today, yes we need money to survive. But what happens when suddenly that money is worthless? What happens when it is only by our hard labour and wits that we can find food to eat and shelter? As you say, money is like borders … elusive, it exists only as long as we lend it legitimacy. The day will come … not, I think, through revolution but rather through disaster, either natural or man-made, when a man with a billion dollars in the bank will be no better off than one who is homeless, and in fact the ones who are used to struggling will actually be better off because they will already have experience in fending for themselves.

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          • That is what I have been saying, only I have been saying we can create that situation. Why wait till a disaster happens, when it is out of everyone’scontrol. Do it now, when we can control it.
            Yes I am a rebellious jerk, but I am also intelligent enough to see that the longer we wait, the worse it will be — for everyone.

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            • I don’t want us to ‘create’ that situation, rg. Whether it is natural, man-made, or intentionally created, people are going to die when it happens. It will boil down to survival of the fittest. I don’t want any part of hastening the process, of bringing about a mass death toll of millions, perhaps billions.

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              • I don’t want even thousands of people to die Jill. But if you wait for a disaster big enough to accomplish weakening the value of money, people will die or otherwise suffer in huge huge numbers…

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