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Taxation without representation again as July 4th approaches
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Sometimes I believe that the world is just insane. Economically and politically we may be losing our country and the Corporate media gives us Michael Jackson's death and Gov. Mark Sanfords insanely rambling hypocrisy. I think if we lived in old Rome this would be the stuff of bread and circuses.
These two incidents are in reality patently meaningless. They represent little more than how we have been duped into a culture of celebrity as a diversion from reality. As another July 4th approaches maybe it is time to focus on the reality this fantasy has been designed to keep us from discovering.
Over the course of the last twenty years Middle Class America has increasingly been removed from active participation in our government. This revolution would have Karl Marx rolling in his grave. In his theory we proletarians were supposed to rise up and over throw the Rich and powerful. Through the miracle of a private financing scheme for our political campaigns, American government has come to represent the interests of a narrow set of the richest Americans who have little if any real loyalty to America itself. While Marx theorized that the state would wither away after the proletarians had taken over the means of production in America the rich made the state wither away first because the State and law provided us with protection from their rapacious greed and blind selfishness.
Many of us had ancestors who came here as indentured servants or slaves. Visa and mastercard have restored our indentured status through debt. Our obliging Congress who are little more than corporate employees, are only too willing to pass laws that keep us from being able to negotiate for what the value of our labor is. My ancestors worked when company owners set the wages, charged the rents , controlled the prices, and set the value of your finished product. You always owed them more than you were going to be paid . No problem, in this locked closed system they gave you credit, and insured that you never could get out of debt and couldn't quit your job till you paid them off. Intead of Script money at the company store it is now plastic at Wal Mart but the principle is the same.
Corporate America wants cheap labor, no matter, our congress passes NAFTA, GATT and other treaties that destroy the Middle Class so that we can give some other nation the opportunity to have their thirteen year old girls exploited by American capitalism 16 hours a day seven days a week. The Corporate CEO, I have never met one yet that had the brains God gave a moss plant, will get a huge bonus so we don't lose the talentless moron to another country where he might drag someone else down for a change instead of Middle Class America. We get six months of unemployment for his efforts. Wall Street celebrates profitability and Main Street suffers bankruptcy.
We start a war in Iraq, that I will always believe was for oil and oil alone. The rich reap the profits, the compliant flunkies from Congress approve tax cuts for the wealthy, and allow no bid war profiteering for campaign donors and friends. It is our children who go off to fight and it is Middle Class America who foots the tax bill while the Rich count the cash.
Middle Class America needs help after twenty years of being screwed out of our jobs, our pensions, our 401K's and good health insurance. We can ante up one trillion for the banks so they have money to set the next speculative bubble in motion and rob us some more. Congress can't pass mortgage assistance for Middle Class America so we don't lose our homes after CEO greed and terminal stupidity cost millions of jobs and collapse the economy. They can't seem to pass credit reform to stop the Corporate thieves from putting what is left of the mafia out of the loan sharking business. They can't seem to pass a bill on climate change that does anything but give Corporations cover to gouge us on our energy bills.
We need health care, but you best believe that bunch of moral midgets in Congress won't be standing up to Pharma and the Insurance companies let alone the AMA very soon. When it is done you will have more health care by Jiffy Lube only it will cost even more while delivering even less.
The botton line is we have no representation in Congress. We pay our taxes but they don't go to fixing our roads, or the 1 in 4 bridges in this country that are almost beyond repair. It doesn't go to creating better schools and better teacher training. It doesn't go to cleaning up our waters, or improving our national parks. It doesn't go to restoring America as the leader in research and design. It doesn't help create jobs. It seems to find its way into corporate bank accounts in the form of bailouts and tax breaks that haven't created jobs here in twenty years.
We live in an insane dysfunctional country because our government willingly sells out the interests of eighty percent of its citizens on a daily basis. Our representative democracy fails its most basic duty to govern by the consent of the governed. In two more days will we pay lip service to the principles that each of us have an unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or have we been sedated beyond action by the insanity of our media driven bread and circuses.
