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Billionaire club depends on failing children

I recently read U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner’s speech at the Koch brothers’ June 16 billionaires meeting at the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort in Dana Point, California. He let the attendees know that out of his admiration for California’s profitable boxes, he couldn’t wait to move those businesses to Colorado. The 2007 recession came on the heels of our last “Californication.” Will you vote for a return?

Gardner told the billionaires that subsidies would benefit fossil fuels, the Kochs’ coal and tar-sands industry and other fossil industries. Sustainable and clean-energy entrepreneurs need not apply to serve our communities.

All of the attention we’ve been paying to the militarization of police shines the light on the end result of the billionaires’ system to malnourish many children, then slam them into prison to assemble America’s military tools for nearly zero wages. We have as many military weapons as billionaires have profits. The Republican deadbeats demand authority over women’s fertility and then place a percentage of vulnerable children into their malnourished child mill to become future cheap labor. George W. Bush began his terms with 12 million children facing food insecurity and malnourishment. Eight years later, at the end of his terms and policies, America counted 16.7 million children facing malnourishment.

The Bush family is a major shareholder in the Keefe prison commissary industry. Did we vote for the Bushes’ profit at the ruin of our children? The Bushes’ profit – like the Kochs, Cheneys, Perrys and the rest of the billionaires club – depends on programming failure in America’s children. Gardner and his fellow Republicans are crafting the federal personhood law to overcome the promise of over-the-counter birth control, which will be too expensive for poor women – the Republicans’ concubines. What will you vote for: the billionaires club and the Koch burlesque, or for our communities’ future?

Ann T. Johnson

Durango



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