From the Sun Times: (A MUST READ!) "The Tea Party is the most indignant domestic political movement since Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, but its wrath is turned in the wrong direction. It favors policies that are favorable to corporations and unfavorable to individuals. Its opposition to Obamacare is a textbook example. Insurance companies and the health care industry finance a "populist" movement that is manipulated to oppose its own interests. The billionaire Koch brothers payroll right wing front organizations that oppose labor unions and financial reform. The patriots wave their flags and don't realize they're being duped."
When I saw Rand Paul on C-Span earlier this week giving a speech at a Tea Party rally, he had one white man and one black standing behind him. I found that to be totally ridiculous as if African-Americans really made up 50% of the racial demographics of the Tea Party in Kentucky (or anywhere else for that matter). Rand Paul was using the same shameful tactics that the GOP had used when they had Michael Steele as their
Clearly the Tea Party has been trying to put a "face of color" forward to discredit claims that members of the Tea Party are racists. How many Mexicans or African-American people do you actually see at the Tea Party rallies (and carrying posters of Obama with a Swastika) in proportion to the actual population of this country?
And I can tell you from personally visiting many of the Tea Party's Facebook pages that many are in fact racists. While the Tea Party's Facebook groups themselves don't promote racism, many of the group's members are, judging by their comments left on the Facebook walls. So the Tea Party's Facebook moderators could at the very least be accused as being "lazy" when not deleting the racist comments. It makes me wonder what does Rand Paul and most of his rabid followers REALLY think of those who aren't white like myself?
Oddly, some black Tea Party members had accused Obama as being racist. Besides the black conservative blogger Kevin Jackson, how many notable African-Americans really believe in the Tea Party mantra, besides the likes of congressional Representative Allen West, who Fox News has been parading on our TV screens lately, as if to say, "See! Even black people agree with us...that we should cut spending for the poor and not raise taxes on the rich!"
I can't believe the African-American community could fall for this ploy. It's been common knowledge that the Tea Party represents an extreme far-right ultra-social and religious conservative ideology that goes directly against workers rights, the poor, the disenfranchised, the discriminated, and those who favor government healthcare - - - everything that a Democratic, Progressive, Socialist, Liberal, fair-minded, and non-white person would be in favor of. So who is the Tea Party kidding? Are they that desperate for black voters that they would try to get them to vote against their own self-interests?
The Tea Party just represents rich people and those who run large corporations that don't want to pay taxes or fair wages...and these are usually wealthy middle-aged white men, not poor young black women. So while the Tea Party (and the GOP/Republicans) may not ALL be racists per se just because the African-American population make up a large percentage of the impoverished (because of past discrimination in the work force), the Tea Party IS against all poor people in general, including a white man like myself (I'm just as poor as the poorest black people living in the United States today.) So I find it despicable that the Tea Party (and the GOP/Republicans) would try to trick black people into thinking they represent their interests at all.
And we all know how the Tea Party darling Glenn Beck used the memory of Martin Luther King and the Lincoln Memorial to try and influence history. Unlike MLK, Beck's message was entirely different.
"The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land." ~ MLK, August 28, 1963. Washington, D.C.
The Census Bureau says at least 44 million people now live in poverty, and they're not just African-Americans, but people of ALL color. The Tea Party only represents the corporate and banking interests who want to create many more poor people, and then to make them suffer further by denying them ANY government services at all! Would Martin Luther King belong to the Tea Party?
I also get a big kick when I see the Tea Party sheeple carrying their signs saying Taxation Without Representation! - as if they were being taxed too much. Actually, most of them are being taxed just about the right amount. While although less taxes would always be nicer for everybody, it really hasn't been too much of a burden on ordinary "middle-class" workers who earns between $50,000 and $100,000 a year (it has been the wages that haven't gone up in proportion to the cost-of-living index that's always been the real problem. Even government tax dollars don't buy as much as they used to). It hasn't been too much taxes on the working people, because after all, the government wouldn't want a full scale revolt like our Founding Fathers engaged in while dressed up as Indians during the real Tea Party. But maybe for the poor and unemployed earning less than $20,000 a year, they shouldn't have to pay any income taxes at all.
By comparison, if you're uber-rich, such as a big bankers or corporate executives (especially white ones), then you HAVE BEEN receiving great representation on your taxation from our elected officials (albeit, paid representation in the form of campaign contributions given from the CEO/Banker > Lobbyists > Congress). Most of the uber-rich are in Tax Heaven compared to 10 years earlier, and much better than the 1950s. Just recently America's "former-middle-class" just had their Medicare taxes lowered beginning this year, in exchange for extending the Bush Tax Cuts for the super-rich. That's how the uber-rich have been getting their windfall profits...they buy people in Congress to NOT raise their taxes while throwing the little guy a bone to make it all look fair and reasonable for everybody. And the politicians get a little political cover for not changing the tax code that's been the center of controversy for decades.
But the rich will NEVER be rich enough, and they have masterfully manipulated the masses (Tea Party sheeple) to stand outside carrying stupid signs for them on their behalf. It almost makes me laugh out loud at their gullibility, stupidity, ignorance, and naivety. They look so foolish carrying those idiotic signs that I could almost feel pity them for being the dumb, uninformed, and expendable "Beck-Head" pawns that they are...doing THE MAN'S dirty work.
Does anybody remember being "anti-establishment" back in the day?
If you're an 80-year old corporate scrooge worth $1 billion in personal wealth, why would you get up at 4:30 in the morning 5 days a week to read the Wall Street Journal just before leaving your 15-bedroom country mansion to be chauffer-driven in a Rolls Royce to your gaudy glass and ivory company tower to trade digital dollars, fire people, and amass more wealth? When would enough ever be enough? Is it a game? Is it an addiction to power, control, and money? Wouldn't there be something inherently and psychologically wrong with someone's mental state of mind if this were true?
A person living just on the interest of a $1 billion dollars could live out their life very comfortably...going anywhere they wanted to, doing anything they wanted, wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and doing it with whomever they wanted. Why do they constantly strive for ever more wealth; hoarding the money supply and depriving everyone else? Can't they turn off their runaway greed? That is very sick!
If it were me, after my first $1 billion I'd just kick back on the beach drinking Margaritas with a pretty woman enjoying the sunsets. Are these corporate robber baron/billionaires just greedy, or are they evil as well? An evil person with that much power is very scary. Just look at the Koch brothers!
With the exception of notable philanthropists such as Bill Gates (who at least contributed something to the world and spent money helping sick, impoverished, and diseased people), I've come to the general conclusion that most of the corporate generals in this country (as mere cogs in non-entities such as a corporations) just destroy people's lives for profits - and while working for "limited liability companies", they take no personal responsibility, bear no blame, or pay any personal price...either monetarily or criminally, for the actions they take and the decisions they make. They can even screw their own shareholders and walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars. (And the bankers fund arms dealers for wars that kill millions of people).
And we have AT LEAST 400 people like that in America, who are doing nothing but amassing (hoarding) more wealth and choking off the money supply from the rest of her 308 million citizens.
Tom Davis - “If we seized the entire wealth of the richest 400 people in the country and distributed evenly to everyone in the United States, we would each get a check for $2,000. Then what? Or, if we seized the entire wealth of the richest 400 we could use it to pay off pay off less than 5% of the national debt. Then what?"
Zing Daddy -"You don't get it. This isn't just about grabbing and taking from the top 400. This is about cash flow. They grabbed and took the wealth of the nation and choked off the cash flow. Businesses can't hire because they can't get loans, which means they have to lay off employees, which means people stop buying their goods and services and stop paying their debts. That means they lose their homes and the real estate market crashes, states and the nation appears to go broke because our cash reserves go to "bail out" these rich people and their crooked corporations, and they then use that money to buy each other's banks and companies in a consolidation game, instead of using it to start lending to smaller businesses again. If we were able to rebalance the national wealth and get the cash flow moving again, instead of having it stagnating in the hands of a few, most of the economic problems we are suffering today would vanish in months. Businesses could hire, people could get jobs, buy goods and services, tax revenues would rise."
But the rich don't want to pay taxes either. If they did not have to pay one cent in taxes, and if they had every damn dollar that was ever printed around the world, and if they could only pay the starving masses in all of the countries just one penny a day for their hard labors, then what would they do? Would that finally make them happy? Would that be the END GAME for them? To reduce all of humanity (6 billion human beings) to creatures who live and slave underground for them while they (a mere 400 hundred people) lived in luxury under the sun? Or would they prefer that all 6 billion of us just perish, and their 400 uber-rich accounted for the total population of the planet? Would that be the END GAME? To have all the money while everybody else is dead? Who would be around to lick their feet to be rewarded with crumbs?
What could be their ultimate goal if $1 billion wasn't enough? What is their idea of Utopia? Could Democratic Socialism really be much worse than their version of corporate and inhuman Capitalism? Now what do we have to look forward to...a friggin' Tea Party?
Why have I condemned the big banks and want to nationalize them? Because of all their greedy ill-gotten gains, record profits, and tax loop-holes that otherwise could have generated huge revenues for the U.S. Treasury for the mutual good of ALL the people, instead of just for a very few Wall Street gangsters. And we wouldn't have a budget crisis today. Because of these budget shortfalls, the Tea House Republicans now want to cut roughly $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor and disabled, as part of their fiscal 2012 budget, according to several GOP sources. (Almost exactly the same amount as the Bush Tax Cuts saved the uber-rich over that same 10-year period of time).
Republican, especially "conservative" policies, have NEVER cared about poor people.
All my adult life I tried to be fair and honest. I worked hard, obeyed the laws, filed and paid my taxes every year, and was held responsible for my actions. I showed up for work on time most every day, didn't rob or kill people, didn't abuse drugs, and didn't cheat people. I was respectful towards my bosses (even when they were assholes to me), obeyed all the "company rules and policies", gave "increased worker productivity" (busting my ass giving more work for the same pay), and was professional with all my fellow co-workers. But after 38 years I was still laid off in 2008 and never found another job since then. So if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. So there MUST be something wrong with our economic and political system.
But before I was laid off in 2008, and because I belonged to a labor union, I had employer-provided healthcare. Since that time I have exhausted all my unemployment benefits, cashed out my IRA to pay rent, had my half-paid car towed away, and was eventually evicted. I now have ZERO income, and only have this computer (that was donated to me) and ZERO money in the bank. After working all my life, at the ripe old age of 55, that's what it took for me to just qualify for temporary Medicaid to see a doctor for severe back pain.
I'll say it again: If this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. So there MUST be something wrong with our economic and political system. Now the Tea House Republicans want to cut Medicaid and Medicare too. As if forcing me into poverty wasn't enough, now they're trying to kill me, just because the rich don't want to pay their fair share of taxes.
Rhonda Taylor, a fellow 99er asks: "Can this be perceived as Class Warfare?" It's certainly starting to look that way.
The GOP can't find the money for my doctor's visit, but they found plenty of money for the banks and the big taxpayer-paid-subsidized corporations that were too big to fail. I wasn't too big to fail; they branded me for life with a big "L" on my forehead. I exceeded all my expectations of failure. I was a successful failure. I wasn't too big to fail. I was too small to succeed. Even if Donald Trump was considered successful, earning millions of dollars in failures with all his bankruptcies, losing other people's money, shouldn't he just be considered successful at keeping money for himself while screwing the taxpayers?
From the Huff Po: The Treasury Department celebrated its multi-billion investment in the nation's banking system...but in the end, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts that TARP will have cost taxpayers about $19 billion. But according to Politico, the REAL figure could be as high as $23 trillion! Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told a bailout watchdog group that TARP has been a "dismal failure."
The Fed lowered the main interest rate to nearly zero percent, lowering borrowing costs for banks and other financial companies. The cheap funds allowed banks to continue lending to credit-worthy borrowers at normal rates - if not higher, given the uncertain economy - and book easy profits. The nation's biggest banks, like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase, are among the biggest beneficiaries.
The Fed purchased more than $1 trillion in government-backed mortgage securities, allowing banks easy profits off lending fees without having to shoulder any of the risk by simply transferring it to the taxpayer. More than nine out of 10 new home loans are guaranteed by taxpayers. I was evicted from a one-bedroom apartment and had to help pay the banks back with taxes from my unemployment checks last year.
The FDIC also guaranteed a wider range of deposits, allowing banks to benefit from even more cheap cash as depositors flooded the firms with money.
Federal overseer Special Inspector General for TARP, Neil Barofsky warned of the ongoing moral hazard, "This is precisely the sort of behavior that could trigger the next financial crisis, thus perpetuating a doomsday cycle of booms, busts and bailouts."
From Mother Jones: Wall Street and the Public - "The fact is that the public was never really all that angry at the financial industry in the first place. The Tea Party anger toward TARP has been mainly directed at the government, not at the financial industry. And the occasional protest against AIG bonuses aside, there's simply never been any real, concerted attack on the financial industry from either left or right. On a scale of 1 to 10, with the healthcare fight rating a 9, I'd say that anger toward banks rates about a 3. That's why Congress has been able to get away with doing so little about it."
Before I went to sleep last night I pondered the history of the world - and the many problems we've had in different societies throughout the world. I thought of the ancient rulers and the more modern ones. Chairman Mao's and Joseph Stalin's brand of Marxism didn't turn out very well for mankind during the 20th Century, nor did Hitler's Nationalism. Tribalism lagged far behind as well, but America's or Europe's Capitalism didn't do much better either. Under each of these ideological economic systems of ruling, millions of people suffered and their governments either failed, declined, or disappeared from human existence completely. Earth needs a brand new way to manage its resources and wealth for the better of humanity and the planet. We need an all new ideology and system of governing, "incorporating" not a small minority of people to have control of a vast majority of the wealth, but a much fairer and equitable way of sharing our creator's goods and labors.
As I pondered these things I fell asleep and had a dream.
The corporate monsters had immediately DOUBLED all their employee's wages, and many major companies began paying DOUBLE in taxes - - - and the CEOs and Board of Directors still had plenty of money to burn (their personal wealth, not their company's wealth). Everybody's standard-of-living increased, the economy boomed, and our state, local, and federal government treasuries all became flush with cash. There was no hunger, no poverty, and very little political bickering - and no Tea Party! With the added tax revenues we developed nuclear fusion, then we had finally gotten rid of the oil barons too! Humanity went to Mars as well. And the most amazing thing of all, even the roads, bridges, and the power grid were fixed too!
Eventually we had outlawed limited liability corporations and eliminated all members of their board of directors, promoting those below them to fill their place with starting salaries equal to only 5 times their highest paid employee (instead of 400 times higher) up to a $1 million salary cap - - - and paying them a half-salary of stock-options as incentives for job performance at the company, but taxed them at the same rate as regular income (the same as everybody else). If they ever reached $1 billion in personal wealth, they were forced to retire. We placed caps on all company perks and banned extravagant corporate-owed private jets and limousines so stockholder's aren't paying for luxurious non-company related business expenses. We eliminated ALL business tax loopholes and outlawed outsourcing jobs. Stock shares had immediately shot up. With DOUBLE their salaries, the employee's moral had been the best ever!
Then we
We changed the tax codes to a more fair and simpler tax law...written in plain English, was only one page long, and taxed all people and corporations at a flat rate with no loopholes or deductions or credits.
Lastly, besides outlawing corporations and nationalizing the banks, we had cut all congressional salaries by half, limiting their allowances and expense accounts, and placed limitations as to their use of government assets such as military jets. We banned all "company" (no more corporate) campaign and labor union campaign donations, but instead we set a fixed amount of taxpayer dollars held in trust for equal campaign expenditures for all political candidates. By law, campaign promises were put in writing as legally binding contracts. After all, they were "public servants" and worked for THE PEOPLE, doing a "service" to their country. Too quickly and too often, with power and bribes, they seemed to have forgotten, but we had firmly reminded them. We branded political bribery as treason: a capital offense, punishable by death.
The next morning I woke up, looked around, and realized I had just been dreaming. I looked in the mirror and saw a white face still looking back at me. But the real world I was living in had been the horrible nightmare...and it is terrifying!
Love your dream! Love the 1975 pic and really enjoy your use of cross outs in your article.
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of people who have the same dream Bud (maybe with different details) but the fact you have it means it is possible.