No Billionaire Left Behind!

There is something horribly, structurally wrong with the way America has been doing business for nearly 30 years and simply getting credit flowing and jobs created ain't gonna fix it.

For instance, why isn't demand a better economic barometer than supply? Why is trickle down better than trickle up? Why is a million dollars in one guy's pocket more "multipliable" than a thousand dollars in a thousand pockets? How do tax breaks for people who will be investing in Latin American factories, taking ski trips to the Alps or buying German-made luxury cars help our economy? Or how come income earned from labor is taxed at higher rates than income earned from investments? -- other than the fact that people who earn income from investments, including most politicians, have more pull.

And what about that market thingy where the "free" part only applies when corporations are making money and avoiding taxes, government regulations and their social responsibilities, but when they stop making money like now, they get billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to bail them out? When the rest of us need a "bailout" we get to go to Amscot!

The right-wing illusion that democracy and capitalism are the same thing has allowed a kind of gonzo corporate culture to evolve that enshrines greed, corruption and rapaciousness with the same inviolability as free speech and suffrage.

Jefferson, Madison and other intellectuals among the Founders were well versed in the writings of 17^th and 18^th century European theorists. Jefferson borrowed freely from John Locke's "Second Treatise" in writing the Declaration but specifically rejected Locke's view that the fundamental role of government is protection of property and thus replaced his phrase "life, liberty and estate" in favor of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Likewise, the Preamble of the Constitution defines its purpose "in order to...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility...promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty..." (The military-industrial complex resulting from "provid(ing) for the common defence" is doing quite nicely without my help. It's the one provision that never seems to need any clarification or reinforcement.)

So then, the two founding documents of the nation emphasize life, liberty, happiness, justice, tranquility and welfare. Nowhere do they mention "the right of the rich to live large by finagling their way out of paying their reasonable share of the common good."

Look, the world's mega-rich, being less than two percent of the population, can only exist by sidling up to some right-wing despot and his storm trooper palace guard for protection and to mutually pillage their country's wealth as is done in numerous second and third world countries. Or, as is done in "civilized" nations such as ours, paying off the gatekeepers and corrupting the political-social institutions. All proper and legal-like doesn't mean it's right. It just means a whole lot of politicians got lucky.

Right-wing blowhards like Limbaugh and Coulter label such notions as "class warfare." But it's not the working class that declared war on the rich. Joe Six-pack didn't abandon American workers and begin making cars in Mexico. No one in the expanding food lines defrauded hundreds of thousands of employees and retirees out of their pensions. Minimum wage earners don't contribute millions of dollars to influence favorable legislation.

Now in the midst of this current crisis -- a crisis fueled by the same greedy disregard for their fellow Americans that has widened the gap between the executive class and the workers to an extent not seen since the 1920s -- we're told...Hold on! Wait a minute! America can't afford to fix it's infrastructure that the American Society of Civil Engineers says will cost $2.2 trillion because we have to decrease the estate tax for millionaires. That we can't provide college education, universal health care and a social safety net comparable to every other industrialized nation because the top marginal tax bracket must be reduced to 25 percent. That we can't reduce greenhouse gases and save our environment because it could be detrimental to corporate bottom lines.

Higher taxes are an abasement of the Constitution, Republicans insist. A despicable "taking" by government! An assault on freedom, liberty and the American Way! The specious, but clearly appealing, "fairness" argument that the rich deserve bigger tax breaks because, well, they've earned it has an all-American, frontier ring to it. After all it's their money not the government's.

Nonsense! Fairness cuts both ways, and the inherently unfair way in which wealth is earned and retained in this country more than trumps any claims of ownership. The fact is the number of original fortunes can be counted on two hands that didn't entail exploiting workers, natural resources or the environment; engaging in political shenanigans; skirting ethical conduct or abusing local and regional land use policies.

Not one cent of wealth in this country is made without some grunt first planting, picking, digging, mining, herding, cutting, loading, welding, hammering, driving, key punching or otherwise engaging in some form of manual labor. The five percent of Americans who will be taxed to help pay for the Obama initiatives to get America back on the track that Jefferson and the Founders envisioned are simply paying for the decades of government favoritism that allowed them to pillage our country in the first place. And it's about time!