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Will be demonized in America.
Especially since the ascension of Reagan. Although it has long been a streak in our history, as the Gilded Age reflected.
A generation later, the dogma of so-called "free market conservatives" has run this country into the ground, and so when someone (anyone) speaks up, they are going to be attacked from many fronts.
They'll scream about the haircut, the speaking fees, the hedge funds, and any number of issue-avoiding talking points. When they lack a argument against the eradication of poverty, they will get more strident and desperate and ugly.
There will be more Coulteresque poison. More smarmy editorials. More hypocrisy, and more false dichotomies ("you can't be rich and speak out against poverty!").
So while they distract and distort, the problem continues being ignored... just like they want it to be.
Why?
Because the dogma of free-market economics, as honed by Friedman in the ivory crucible of the University of Chicago, dictates that the wealthy have earned their ill-gotten booty, and that being poor is more than just an inevitable and necessary economic outcome, it's a moral failure. This rationalization helps them keep their consciences suppressed, keeps their prejudics justified. IT keeps them feeling complacent and entitled and smug to do absolutely nothing, and feel good about doing it.
Or as they sometimes cloak it, poverty is a choice. "People choose to be poor! They need to work hard! If they just pull themselves up..." *bootstrap snaps*
When those fuckers aren't choking on Horatio Alger's Mighty Boner of Bucks, they are gargling on Ann Coulter's wart-ridden nutsack.
The biggest lie they ever sold America is that wealth is not a zero-sum game.
It is.
And when too many people have more than they will ever need in a thousand lifetimes, too many will have too little. The powerful will classically scapegoat the poor just to scare the fuck out of the shrinking middle class. A middle class edging more towards the downside of the scale, rather than the upside. And those on the upside are leveraged to the moon.
The middle class is sagging, about to fall from its own weight in debt, negligence, and a failing healthcare system and decaying infrastructure.
Wealth is a zero-sum game.
The solution isn't simply, as the free-market propgandists fear, just "socialism and redistribution of wealth". That's an important element, but far too simplistic to stand on its own, and creates its own kind of dogma only slightly less desirable than what it claims it will replace.
What is actually needed is the will to recognize free market blather for what it is, and question it at all opportunities. Its assumptions and prejudices go consistently and completely unchallenged every day, in every mass medium. Goebbels was exactly right about the power of repeating lies often enough so that they become 'truth'.
So it's not just 'the system' that needs reforming. It's our way of thinking.
Creativity which transcends ideological pigeonholes and endless theorizing. Not just reacting to what is, but re-creating it.
Not working to change things from within necessarily, but to change things from without.
The attacks against Edwards will only increase in their hysteria and stridency the more he presses forward.
Just remember though: Ayn Rand wrote for shit, about shit. Milton Friedman was a sociopathic liar. Their ideas are as rotten and decrepit as anything they ascribe to Marx. They claim allegiance to Adam Smith, whom like Marx, was a prophet destroyed by his disciples.
The bottom line, besides the Bottom Line, is that the wealthy and powerful are afraid their money and power, both of which they have in infinite surplus, will be taken away. Never mind the supreme irony inherent in that fear.
If it were only so simple as shaking them by the neck, and saying "Relax! You, the wealthy, will never be eradicated, or taxed out of existence, or regulated away!" No one is aaying they should, either. Not Edwards, especially.
So we work to eradicate poverty, not wealth. That continues to escape them as long as they are so deeply ingrained with their free-market dogma.
We work to eradicate poverty.
The creation of true wealth demands it.
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