Dear Dirty America

Realize the potential of freedom, the Charles Koch foundation tells us with its new advertisement, which boasts that if you make $34,000 a year, you’re already in the 1 percent income bracket, in the world. Which is probably true, but that doesn’t mean shit if you’re living in the United States and trying to drive a reliable vehicle, pay rent, raise a family, and keep up on health insurance payments.If $34,000 a year makes you a 1 percenter, then the Koch Bros and their billion-plus dollar empire instantly become one of our gods on this planet. And that’s just how they like it.

The Charles Koch foundation also wants to do away with minimum wage, because that’s not economically free. Minimum wages create a culture of dependency, they say.

Abolishing minimum wage might be a great idea if we didn’t have 15-20 million (at least) recently and long-term unemployed Americans. Doing away with our already embarrassingly inadequate minimum wage might be OK if our southern border wasn’t, in places, wide open, and eager, hard-working people weren’t coming across looking for any kind of work possible.

The Charles Koch foundation wants to watch our squandered society race to the bottom, and then swoop in when the swirling pool of impoverished people slit each others’ throats for the right to work for a dollar an hour, or a penny. That would be hitting orgiastic levels of economic freedom for them. Who knows how low we’d go to buy bread for our families.

The more desperate legions of unemployed workers, the better the bottom line is for any established entrepreneur and capitalist. But we didn’t need Karl Marx to tell us that. Or did we?

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