Ed Asner on Recent History

The Rich Are Driving a Billboard Around North Carolina. No Kiddin'!

Photo, Donnie Roberts for the Lexington Dispatch

We have to reprint Rob Schofield here to get the context:

For several days now, Americans for Prosperity NC and the Pope-Civitas Institute have been promoting “a major new effort” entitled the “Real Solutions Road Tour” in which their advocates would "criss-cross North Carolina" to promote their defense of the conservative General Assembly and its extreme policy decisions. 

To read the various tweets and website posts, you’d have thought there was going to be a long series of well-attended campaign-style rallies with tea partying conservatives coming out of the woodwork at stops throughout the state. 

Here’s essentially what actually happened on Day One of the tour today: Nothing. Zilch. Bupkis.
AFP-NC Director Dallas Woodhouse and “Real Solutions” TV spokesperson Donna King drove a billboard around a handful of cities. In a couple of places they parked and got out, took a picture and went into the local newspaper for a few minutes. In Winston-Salem they parked in front of the building that houses the progressive Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation for a few minutes. That’ll show those liberals! 

There was no evident news coverage. There were no rallies. There were no crowds. In most places, most people on the street didn’t even appear to notice the billboard truck driving by....

Well, since Rob wrote that report, there has been one local newspaper article in the Lexington Dispatch. It featured a photograph of the billboard-truck (the photo reproduced above), with a group of five people waving. But the caption on the photo makes clear that these folks were waving "sarcastically," because they sure 'nuff don't support the new Republican majority in the General Assembly.

What if you drove a Rich People Rule! billboard around the state and no one saluted?

The Burden of the Superrich

A reader (hat-tip: Ann) forwarded to me an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich (of "Nickel and Dimed" fame) that raises some interesting points of discussion about the changing demographics of Watauga County: the superrich and the merely rich are buying up (or "hogging," if you prefer) all the best places in this wide land of ours.

Ehrenreich writes, "We are used to thinking that poverty is a 'social problem' and wealth is only something to celebrate, but extreme wealth is also a social problem, and the superrich have become a burden on everyone else."

We know some of the burdens well -- particularly the soaring tax values of raw mountain land, driven into the stratosphere by megalomanical developments like Laurelmor and the reluctance of builders to build affordable housing when there are much larger bundles to be made on McMansions -- and Ehrenreich is thoughtful on what happens to the service industries that feed, water, and clean up after the filthy (rich), particularly the workers who must travel longer distances in order to merely survive the "privilege."

Who are in those increasingly numerous stretch limos we see on Hwy 105? They're people who've earned the right to stay hidden from the likes of you and me while impacting our futures mightily.

(Incidentally, a local carpenter tells us there's trouble at Laurelmor, and all the work that was supposed to sprout up for local skilled and unskilled labor has so far not sprouted. Could it be that the down-turn in the rest of the economy has actually caught up with the types who could afford a Ginn mountain lot?)