Two Short Videos - One To Make You Laugh, One to Make You Cry

Let's do our crying first.   Our political debates flounder when the parties do not agree on the facts.  Much of the debate today is over taxing the rich.  The Republicans are refusing to add more taxes.  I believe that part of this is the old Reagan motivation - to simply starve government by cutting taxes.  Some think government is simply bad.  Others know that with less government, business can be free to act with little oversight on treatment of workers, safety of products, impacts on the environment, price fixing, etc.

In any case, here's a short video which graphically shows

• people's perceptions of ideal wealth distribution, 
• believed wealth distribution, and 
• actual wealth distribution.

When a small number of people have huge amounts of money, they can pay to create and disseminate propaganda - like the Koch brothers - to influence millions of people with blatant lies, such as their denial of the human impact on climate change.  

But it's not helpless. Slavery ended.  Women got the vote. The Soviet Union fell.  And gays and lesbians can get married in a number of states.  Things change.  Extreme inequity can't survive - especially when they arm the right-wing poor, who will one day realize they've been duped and it's not the Blacks and Gays who are their enemies, but the filthy rich.  But let's hope that a little enlightenment - like the dissemination of information like this video - will lead just enough people to vote out the reactionaries in Congress and allow us to reestablish some economic equity in the US.  The myth is that people are rich because they work hard.  While that does work to a certain extent, much of the wealth comes from rigging the system.  So that people could borrow money they couldn't afford to pay bankers more.  And then the poor borrowers get screwed and the rich bankers get rewarded.   (But, of course, don't take anything at face value.  Check out these numbers just as you'd check out numbers you disagree with.)


And now it's time for a little laughter.  



Le papier ne sera jamais mort / Paper is not dead on influencia.net !
from INfluencia on Vimeo.

It's not only funny, but it reminds us to think and to get our points across with imagination.