Alice "Antoinette" Walton: Let The Peasants View Renoir . . . .

The Gadfly has been talking about the steadily vanishing American middle class for years.  Why?  Well, first - because The Gadfly has long and proudly considered his self part of that economic demographic and secondly history has shown that a robust and growing middle class is a very good thing for a nation's long-term prosperity and growth, which The Gadfly thinks are good things for people.

But since the age of St. Reagan and the inception of the insidious and now wholly disproved conservative theory of trickle down economics, the American middle class has been disappearing faster than what little remains of the Tea Party's sanity.

Bill Maher talks about this sad state of affairs and he highlights the case of one of the Walmart heirs, Alice Walton, who while publicly claiming she wanted to "make a difference" in people's lives, spent over a $billion building a haughty, gaudy art museum near Bentonville, Arkansas (Walmart's HQ).  Maher, rightly flabbergasted, wondered if a $billion art museum, which everyone knows will cater mostly to the kind of people that billionaire baroness Alice Walton associates with, was really the appropriate way to "make a difference" in American's lives at a time of such widespread economic hardship.  And especially so knowing that the company Walton inherits her billions from pays a measly average of $8 an hour to their employees - of which nearly a third make so little money that they find it necessary to apply for public assistance like food stamps to support their families.

Watch:






Maher also correctly notes the slowly disintegrating goods and services sectors which for decades existed almost solely due to the patronage of middle class consumers.

So if Americans truly believe the conservative and Tea Party mantra that the Alice Waltons of the world are more in need of tax breaks and economic help than the cashiers and floor walkers at Walton's Walmart --- well then you just need to make a beeline for the nearest restroom, dunk your head in the toilet, and pull the flush lever repeatedly.



----TFG