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Tuesday, September 20, 2005

"Socialism for the rich"

What follows is a brief excerpt from an address Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gave on September 10th, 2005 at the National Sierra Club Summit in San Francisco, CA. It's a compelling and provocative look at contemporary life in the US and the "infrastructural" role the environment plays therein. The transcript is long but worth reading. I cannot recall the last time that I encountered such a savvy, informed, and well-reasoned account of why *everyone* should fight to preserve the environment.

"[T]his is an administration that represents itself as the White House of values, but every value that they claim to represent is just a hollow facade, that marks the one value that they really consider worth fighting for, which is corporate profit-taking. They say that they like free markets, but they despise free-market capitalism.

What they like, if you look at their feet rather than their clever, clever mouths, what they really like is corporate welfare and capitalism for the poor, but socialism for the rich. They say that they like private property, but they don't like private property except when it's the right of a polluter to use his private property to destroy his neighbor's property and to destroy the public property...."

You can read the complete text of the transcript at: http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/rfkspeech/

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