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This was to funny to not post for you.
LtGov of SC: "Don't feed the poor. They'll 'breed.'"
by goinsouth Sun Jan 24, 2010
Once in a while, one of the ruling elite is so overcome by hubris or stupidity that he lets slip out one of the truisms that the rich tell themselves to justify their never-ending rape and pillaging of their neighbors, their communities, their nation and the world.
A few days ago, it was Pat Robertson who let slip one of the old myths about Haiti. God had cursed it, Robertson claimed, because those black slaves had made a deal with devil to get rid of the French. Don't think that Robertson made that story up on the spot. He had picked it up somewhere: from his FFV family, as he studied for his Yale Law degree or sitting at the knee of his U. S. Senator father.
Now comes Andre Bauer, Lieutenant Governor (edited--thanks to comments) of South Carolina, with the following wisdom, also oft-repeated around the dinner tables of the wealthy:
Read the unbelievable things he said after the break:
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed," Bauer said, according to the Greenville News. "You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better."
It might be easy to dismiss both Robertson and Bauer as Southern whites imbued in the racism of that region, but that would be wrong. Through the comment of a fellow Kossack, I came upon this Truthout article exposing the attitudes of a rich young Brazilian, scion of a wealthy family, who now worked for Goldman Sachs. What the Brazilian Master of the Universe spouted were the same, elaborate myths and pseudo-science all designed to justify his great wealth obtained and maintained by ruthless exploitation of his fellow human beings.
The next day, we were all sitting poolside at Pedro's plantation. I got up to go into the kitchen of the house 20 feet away to get a beer. Pedro said to me, "Oh, just ring the bell; they'll bring a beer." Thinking of what folks at home in Pittsburgh would do if they found out I had used a bell to call for a servant to bring a beer, I decided to get up and get my own damn beer.
The next day, as Pedro and his buddies, who were visiting the plantation that weekend, sat around at the pool, they sounded off against the popular Brazilian welfare program for single mothers - Bolsa Familia. Bolsa Familia helps single mothers living under the poverty line to send their children to school, which alleviates the pressure on poor families to send their children to work in violation of child labor laws. Bolsa Familia was cited by the United Nation for reducing poverty by 27 percent in Brazil.
The success of the program and its significance to progress in their country was apparently lost on the privileged, as Pedro and his friends lounged by the pool ringing bells for servants to bring them beers while they complained about how poor people should be rewarded to be lazy and unproductive.
In their country clubs, around their swimming pools, over their power lunches, these are the stories and attitudes that circulate. These tales are concocted to justify the sociopathic behavior of the rich, to quell the rare and faint stirrings of conscience complaining about their absurd wealth in the face of such massive world poverty. The thrust is that those whom they oppress with their financial schemes and wars are not truly human like them. They are "stray animals" who would just "breed" if they had ample access to the simple necessities of life.
It is the Robertsons and Bauers who are less than human, devoid of compassion, deluding themselves with their own silly fairy tales so they can pretend to believe that their savagery toward their own species is moral.
