How lucky am I? My Congresswoman, Judy Biggert was taking the time to call me personally about the dangers of Medicare. She called poor-little-old-me to ask if I wanted to join in on a conference call about health care reform.

She is so concerned. I was so honored.

But I was also surprised because she, as a Republican, and as a huge recipient of health care industry lobbying funds, has always voted against health care reform. She voted against every single version of health care legislation prior to this and every version of any legislation that is currently being offered…that I am aware of…in the House of Representatives. She was part of the Neoconservative Republicans, including Tobacco John Boehner who said that they wanted to destroy the President’s agenda and that killing health care reform would be his “Waterloo.”

Doesn’t have a really bi-partisan ring to it, does it?

I’ve heard Judy Biggert speak and read what she has written. I’m pretty sure that Judy Biggert couldn’t identify the date of Waterloo or who won if you gave her a 100-year margin of error.

She voted against SCHIPS, twice. That was the program to help parents of poor working-class families buy at least some minimal health care insurance for their children. It seemed a little callous to vote against a small amount of money to help poor families buy minimal premiums so that they could take their sick children to a doctor rather than the emergency room. Or take them to a doctor occasionally before they get sick.

She did, as I recall, vote for the Medicare Part D legislation, that gave $400 billion to the prescription drug industry to buy pills at top dollar for senior citizens. It helped seniors a little, except that between the time it was passed and the time it went into effect in 2003, a matter of only months, prescription drug prices went up an average of 26%. So much for the Part D 25% discount.

But I’ve noticed Judy always has a perfectly rational explanation for things, things like, say, voting to bomb innocent Iraqi children or killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. But we have taken care of that. Someone said that we now see to it that they have better health care than we do. But then they are not $12 trillion in debt after 8 years of George W. Bush and more years than that for Neoconservative Republican Congresswoman Judy Biggert.

Well, anyway, I couldn’t make the conference call. I knew that I would be busy recycling old aluminum cans that day…well, just about any day…to pay my medical bills.

She wanted me to know, she said, about the dangers to Medicare of passing health reform legislation. I was touched that she would call. Or she is touched? I had to find out.

I was not aware that Medicare was in grave danger, so I looked it up. It turns out that Medicare is completely solvent until about 2026, if nothing happens at all anywhere anytime by anyone. If the President’s reform plan is passed…any of the versions, House or Senate…Medicare is extended for another 9 years at least. So, the plan is to reduce costs and extend Medicare until something like 2035 before anyone has to worry about it’s being in trouble. By then, with health care costs stabilized, maybe we can do the same for Medicare.

So I thought maybe I should call Judy and tell her that she really doesn’t have to worry. And then I thought…no, she is my representative. She should already know this. So, if she does, why would she be calling me? It could only be that she doesn’t know….or that she is…how did George W. Bush put it…”dis-assembling.” I think he meant “dissembling,” lying. But would Judy Biggert call me to lie to me about Medicare? After all, you would only lie to someone whom you thought did not know the truth. So is she also calling me ignorant? That’s not nice.

Even if Medicare were in trouble, one way of insuring that it gets out of trouble would be to cut costs, because that is usually the problem. You may remember that some time ago our great President, George W Bush wanted to privatize everything, including Social Security and maybe even the bathrooms in the Senate. During his glorious tenure, he pushed something called Medicare Plus.

Its successor is something called Medicare Advantage. These are private health insurance plans that offer the same thing as Medicare in a single package, at a slightly higher price. The problem is that they are costing the government (your and me) at least 17% more. So Congress says that, because we have horrific costs in Medicare and a $12 trillion Bush Debt, people who now have those plans will simply go on regular Medicare. But they will also now have their prescription drug costs reduced.

One of the changes to Medicare that Judy may have wanted to talk to me about is the “donut hole.” Right now Americans pay part of the cost of prescription drugs and the government pays part. At one point, after the person has paid a certain amount, there is a gap where the person has to pay all of the cost of the drugs up to another amount where the government starts to pay part again. That gap, that “donut hole” is eliminated by the new version of Medicare and the government is now with you all the way through. We can assume also that there will now be efforts, which were not allowed under President Bush, to negotiate drug prices to bring them down to what the rest of the world pays.

So Medicare is not going bankrupt. A lot of people say that but it is solvent until something like 2035 when this health care reform bill passes. Medicare is paid for 86% by premiums that we all kick in. According to the President and to Senator Coburn, a Republican, there are substantial ways to cut abuses of Medicare that will reduce costs dramatically. So that may give the plan another extension…maybe another ten years.

By that time, the Baby Boomers will have all passed through the system, which is what is causing all the concern right now. Once the Baby Boomers have been absorbed into the system and those costs have been planned and scheduled, costs should gradually subside in subsequent years. That, plus overall cost of health care delivery plus the elimination of abuse, and things like the addition of 100,000 new doctors into the medical delivery system will all help to slow the rate of costs in Medicare and make it more accessible.

So maybe Judy was calling to warn me of the danger to Medicare thinking that I was a part of the health insurance industry. She does have friends among the health insurers and I sympathize with them; no one wants to lose big amounts of money, in the billions. And I guess they will when Medicare Advantage is canceled.

On the other hand, that extra money to pay for Medicare Advantage does drive up the costs of Medicare, and while it is nice for some, Medicare Advantage is paid for not only by the premiums, but by government, that is, by all of us. The Medicare Advantage people get a little more, but the government pays more.

Judy’s phone call said that if I could not join in the conference call, she hoped that I would visit her web site so I paid a friendly visit. She has a page called, quaintly, “Judy’s Health Care Reform Bill.” I think it is actually one devised by all Republicans and, knowing a little about Judy’s work ethic, I’m really not too sure how much she actually had to do with it.

It starts off talking about protecting the Doctor-Patient relationship. I was glad to see that she wasn’t openly against that. She refers to “Our bill…” which she says upholds “the rights of individuals to receive medical services.” Wow. That’s great, Judy. I am happy that you will allow me to have the right to medical services, but doesn’t that right, at present… come, not from you, but from my health insurance company? If they say no, it is no. I assume it would stay that way.

Technically, Judy and her other Neocon colleagues don’t really have a bill. They refused to participate in any debate last year or this year. So the only bills passed out of the House are Democratic bills. Judy’s bill is nice looking, no typos, neatly arranged on the page…but essentially worthless. As were her efforts to prevent health care reform.

So, thanks, but no thanks. I already have the right to go to a doctor and he has the right to provide me with medical services. I am afraid that I will have to go with Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama, both of whom have worked for health care reform before, voted in favor of health insurance for poor children, and voted against arbitrarily killing Iraqi babies, That “dissembling” thing keeps popping up in my mind. I guess I’ll go with those who have not voted every time against both current and prior health care legislation.

The next part says I can have health insurance through my employer. Well, God bless you, but I already have that and have the rights to it. No change there either, but thanks for reminding me.

The next point involves CER. Once again, the dissembling thing. Republicans voted against any comparative research results being put into any kind of health care reform. The reason is that some procedures that are better are also more expensive. So the Republican measures have always tried to eliminate CER. Now a “commission” as stated in Judy’s bill might be different. It might be made up of health insurance industry executives who could then say that a procedure is good but too expensive and so you die.
That’s how that could work. But a good idea would be that everyone contact their health insurance companies and tell them that Judy Biggert now supports CER and it is in her bill. In fact, that is a conference call I would like to hear.

The next part talks about lowering costs. And that is good and the ideas are good. They are all about instituting wellness programs. But, you know, does that really reduce the cost of an aspirin from $5.00 down to 5 cents when you get your hospital bill?

I mean I want to help lower costs by costing the insurance companies less. But I also want the insurance companies to pitch in a little. Let’s see how Judy treats that issue. No. Nothing. Nada. So there is a little tiny gap there because wellness programs will handle about 5% and cutting actual medical and surgical and hospital costs will be the other 95%.

Wellness is a swell idea, Judy. So is ice cream for everyone. But I am more concerned about cutting those costs that take place after I get cancer or get hit by a truck. Let’s try to work on getting those costs down.

The next part of Judy’s plan is about flexibility and control of health insurance for low-income families. The idea here is that we want to give “flexibility” to low income families. Judy’s bill would take them off government programs and let them use their public support (I hope that means money) to join a cost-effective private plan.

You know, Judy, I would be a little worried that my “current public support” might not be enough to pay for my “private plan.” Then I would have no health insurance at all, which has really, when you think of it, been the Republican plan. See, as a poor person, I’d have flexibility but no plan. Medicare had something similar before called Medicare Plus. Companies simply walked away, leaving many seniors without health care. Millions of them. I am surprised Judy didn’t consider that when writing her bill.

Public-private partnerships. Judy and her friends want to establish a partnership between the NIH, the government’s National Institutes of Health and biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies and others. It sounds good on the surface, but I don’t think so. We already have cooperation between all the groups in medicine. I think Judy should take a long, hard look at how the Republicans have advanced the interests of their private industry campaign contributors at the expense of the public. This would provide a guaranteed method for pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies to advance their for-profit ventures at the expense of the American people.

Small business Health Options Program. Small business would get the opportunity to aggregate under groups that would negotiate better rates so they could be part of organizations the size of big corporations. This is a good idea. It was a good idea in 1993 when the Republicans first shot it down. It has been a good idea every Republican year since then. It needed nothing to pass it but a lively interest on the part of Neocons in helping small business succeed.

Of course the Republicans had to take sides. They decided to simply tell small business that they were on their side, but supported the giant health insurance companies. There was no reason that the National Association of Roofing Contractors or the National Association of Independent Swaddling Clothes Retailers could not have had a collective health insurance rate as good as that given to a large corporation. No reason at all. But it would have cost health insurance companies money that they were now taking off the top in higher premiums from individuals.

So, now that the have come up with a plan, finally having barely enough members of Congress not paid off by the health insurance industry, the Republicans are joining in. Well, good for them. A day late and thousands of dollars short, but…welcome. We need merely to remember the history, so that it does not happen again. The Republicans, and Judy, were in total control of the House and Senate in parts of the Clinton Administration and most of the Bush Administration. But they did not submit any legislation that would have helped small business with soaring health insurance costs.

Next provision is for state innovation programs. This part essentially says that if you do not accept the Democratic bills, and you adopt this bill, which has a tiny fraction of the effectiveness of the Democratic bill, that you can organize your own state program. Thirteen or so states already have. There’s nothing that is stopping them now.

Dependent children can stay on their parents health insurance through age 26, as in the Democratic plan.

Finally they encourage health savings accounts. Do you have a savings account? Statistically, most people don’t. They don’t because the overwhelming number of people have no savings. And that is even more true now after the Neocon-Bush Great Recession. The health savings account sounds good. But the problem with it is that, first, you need savings. Not many people have savings in the numbers needed to handle medical expenses.

The idea is pretty simple. You save for health care expenses and it can be tax deductible. You buy a policy with a higher deductible. You pay your own expenses up to the deductible amount and then the insurance plan kicks in. Sounds good. The trouble is that the fix is in. The health insurance companies keep moving the goal posts. Each year the same deductible costs more. Or each year you need to buy a policy with a higher deductible and you therefore need more in your health care savings account. It is the same problem sliced up in a different direction.

The bottom line is this. If Judy is calling out of the goodness of her heart to tell me about the problems with universal health care and its tragic effects on Medicare, well, bless her heart. But there are only two conclusions.

First, she doesn’t have the faintest, foggiest, frickin, notion of what she’s talking about. And given her record, that would not surprise me in the least.

Or, second, she is working for the health care industry. And if she is, and if her fellow Neoconservative friends are as well, in some national campaign, she deserves not merely to be voted out of office. Given the number of people with unbelievably sad and often disastrous experiences with health insurance companies these days, she should literally be taken from her office, tarred and feathered and run out of Washington on a rail.

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There is one thing that the Liberals and Progressives must lodge firmly in their consciousness about the disloyal opposition of the Neoconservative Right Wing. Only when their ox is gored do they respond. How many times must we hear of Republican legislators not merely voting for but initiating anti-gay legislation only to find out that they too, are gay…nothing wrong with that, but also sexual deviants?

We have 2.7 million people who would have lost their unemployment insurance if it had been entirely in the hands of Senator Bunning or Senator Kyl. The deficit hawks cannot understand how anyone would even consider any more stimuli for the unemployed or benefits to the poor.

On the other hand, the Neoconservatives are against modifying any of the semi-fraudulent mortgages that were foisted upon the public. Not only were these mortgages sold under false pretenses, some 3 million more of which may go into foreclosure this year, further retarding the growth of the economy, but they made thousands of mortgage brokers rich beyond anything they would ever have expected or deserved.

So it is time we did something intelligent for once. The original stimulus was not enough because the Recession, or Depression, was much more severe than anyone would admit. When you lose 760,000 jobs in the first month of the year, as happened in January of 2009, you have to know that things are not looking good. Especially after you have been losing over 500,000 jobs a month for the previous 9 months or so.

When the stimulus was passed, about $200 billion was dropped immediately into the coffers of state governments. Even this only slowed the pace of job loss by something like half and even then only after several months. This was more than a serious recession. We’re in a Depression.

The reason it does not seem like one is that the average person doesn’t go to the food kitchens, the free food pantries, where demand has quadrupled. Many don’t see the tent cities in many of the 20 or so cities around the country where they exist, places like Sacramento, Reno, Seattle and Nashville. The AFL-CIO is demanding that Wall Street, either begin to loan some money to start the economy or pay more taxes. If they want to return to the same bad old ways, say the Union members, then let them pay some meaningful taxes on those derivatives so the government can get the economy started.

Structural unemployment was already underway in the latter years of the Bush II Administration. In the “Ownership Society” the individual would take responsibility for a number of those activities that are now shared by government. This would allow each individual more economic freedom. The individual would now take control of his or her health care, responsible for saving enough and for staying well enough so that health care costs would remain manageable for the individual.

Remember the idea about privatizing Social Security? The individual would take responsibility for his or her own retirement fund, with a 401K-like program, managed by professionals but, again, the responsibility of the individual citizen. If the market crashes, you lose, and it is your own fault. In return, each citizen would have returned to him or her a much larger share of the taxes currently being paid. This would enable the person to own more, own personal property, including a home.

Home ownership, in fact, became a hallmark of the Bush Administration, working with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, to keep interest rates low and working with mortgage companies and organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to support mortgages for low income individuals, and for more leveraged mortgages for all individuals. Soon, because of another Bush policy—no regulation—mortgage companies began to make the kinds of mortgages that were unheard of in previous years.

Wall Street firms became involved by offering supposed guaranteed insurance for packages of mortgages that were purchased by investment firms and then sold to individuals, to pension funds, and to general investment funds, including mutual funds. So how could anyone lose? AIG, for example, ostensibly a solid and huge insurer would back would back these securities that were made up of multiple mortgages.

This was the basis for the economic whirlwind that spiraled up and then down. More real estate was purchased. Prices went up causing more people to want to be involved. More of the securitized mortgages were insured and sold. One day, the system became so large, values so overpriced that it faltered and failed and everything collapsed in on itself. Financial firms failed, credit seized up and businesses, with no credit, shut their doors. The economy basically crumbled and took 7 million jobs with it in one year.

Enter Barack Obama. Now, not only did he walk into a $1.3 trillion deficit for the first year of his tenure as President, but jobs were still falling in the first half of 2009 by several hundred thousand a month. Before he can get any kind of policy in place, the unemployment rate drops two more percentage points, millions more jobs lost almost overnight.

He immediately put into effect, astoundingly by February 2009, one month after taking over, a plan that is distributing $787 billion to various entities, some private and some public in ways that the economic advisors say is the most efficient and long lasting. Neocon Republicans, however, whom Obama thought might join in a reluctant but bi-partisan effort, wanted tax cuts. They said it was for economic reasons, but the tax-breaks on recessions had little effect in the previous several years. Obama agreed to it, but that part of the economic stimulus shows no effect whatsoever…no results at all.

The people who needed money, who could have used the funds immediately were given unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc. They didn’t need tax breaks. They had no taxes to pay. They were unemployed. And those who made over $350,000, for example, had no incentive to spend a tax windfall. With the economy faltering they already had increased spending and bargaining power. The tax breaks diverted $157 billion to people who already had jobs, had incomes that they were spending and did not need nor in many cases did not want more tax breaks. What they wanted was a strong economy.

Immediately after putting the stimulus package, as much money as an obstinate Republican Senate would let them, the Democrats and President Obama turned to health care reform. Certainly one reason was President Obama’s key economic advisor, probably more knowledgeable than anyone on the long-term effects of runaway health care costs, Dr. Peter Orzsag. So began a year-long effort to create a health reform plan that could surmount the 40-vote obstruction of the Republican Senate on any feature or system that would harm the health insurance industry.

The health insurance industry spent $400 million dollars or more, giving campaign contributions, running television commercials, but most heavily organizing groups to go around the country lying about health care reform and the bills being offered in the Congress. White supremacist groups and fanatical Right Wing groups were brought into marches and into the health care meetings of Congress members. Tea party members had rallies outside government buildings with signs showing the President as a Nazi, as Hitler, with vile slogans…nothing to do with health care reform.

Nationally syndicated RightWing talk show hosts, who make up literally 9 out of every 10 radio talk shows in the country, sent out a daily barrage of lies about health care legislation—that there were death panels, that it would bankrupt the country and that it was a Communist government takeover. By the end of 2009, the Republicans in Congress had stalled final passage and Democrats were looking for ways to combine the bills passed in both Senate and House in order to get at least some of the very strong benefits in a bill that the President could sign.

After much battering by the forces of the Health Care Lobby, the epic struggle will now come to a close, and thank God, Americans will finally have some legislation on a par with Medicare and Civil Rights and Social Security. Now Americans will have both health and personal property and not be forced to decide which to keep. Because enough Progressive Democrats and a strong President fought for them, Americans will be better off soon and from then on.

In order to do this, government did neglect the fight for jobs. It was not totally overlooked. It has been clear that the Republicans will and have filibustered any kind of serious jobs bill. They have filibustered in the Senate 112 times. And each time they do, there is a struggle, days and occasionally weeks of delay. Seventy—70—pieces of legislation that passed in the House of Representatives, each one designed to create jobs, are stalled in the Senate because of the 60-vote rule. All 40 and now 41 Neocon Republican Senators out of 100 have voted…every single time… against legislation on health care, jobs, and any kind of stimulus.
The Democrats are a much less homogeneous political party than the Neoconservative Republicans, who, as Fundamentalists, believe that the world will end soon anyway, and so we should apparently prepare for that first. Still Democrats were able to marshal 60 votes on many occasions even from part-time Democrats like Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, whose state votes Republican about 60% of the time and is the most Republican state in the nation.

According to places like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, just 5 banks control 48% of the country’s finances. These are the “too big to fail” banks. The Federal Reserve and these big banks, plus financial firms, like Goldman, Sachs, have a responsibility to push credit, money, into the market place so that businesses can resume, grow and begin hiring. But that is not happening. So job growth will be slow unless government steps in. But now, suddenly, the Neocon Republicans want us to cut back, stop funding ventures, pull on the reins, and cut back all spending “before it is too late.”

This is the same group that spent $5 trillion dollars more than incoming revenues from 2001 to 2008. In 2008 and 2009, their Great Recession, caused by inattention and lack of regulation (i.e. showing up for work as government employees and supervisors) cost another $1.8 trillion in TARP funds, in a huge budget deficit and eventually resulted in the expenditure of stimulus funds. Of course the biggest government losses came from lost tax revenue from people who had no jobs and therefore paid no taxes and businesses that went broke and paid no taxes. This is the legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. We really need to stop and remind ourselves of what the Bush era did to us.

A completely arbitrary war that killed 4,300 U.S. soldiers and untold Iraqi civilians and another disaster—the shameful lack of response to Katrina and the negligence of going on a golfing vacation while ignoring serious warnings of a terrorist attack, delivered in a memo by the CIA in August 2001. These are the people who got the most from not one, but two, tax cuts while conducting a war. These are the people who now want to cut back on Social Security and Medicare and unemployment.

Millionaires made $43,000 additional on every million of income and now do not want to let those tax cuts retire. The country is broke. Their pals bankrupted us so they could have huge tax breaks. They pay far too little as it is. They will not let up until the wealth shift of 34% to the top 1% has become 70% or 80%. If the People want the country back, these are the ones obstructing the return of middle class America.

Jobs will come from Democrats and their allies alone. The Neoconservative Republicans will continue the blitzkrieg about cutting the deficit and obstructing and blocking progressive jobs legislation. We have an annual GDP of $17 trillion. If we collect taxes properly and fairly, that is enough…even with most manufacturing at present sent abroad…to make this country solvent.

The rich who were funded by the Neocons must now fund the recovery. An adjustment of from 35% top rate to 50% top rate, plus making some changes in our trade policies, a cut of ten percent or so in our $600 billion defense budget, and the adoption of health care reform…and all our problems will be solved. Balance what the people need with the need to have 700 bases around the world, 50,000 troops in Japan, 70,000 in Western Europe. And we don’t need dangerous private armies like the 14,000 Blackwater troops in North Carolina running loose all over the country, responsible to no one.

The sooner people look back to recent history and see the greed and the audacity of the Republicans, the sooner we will make the right decisions for all the people, not merely the rich. For example, let us recall, that after several Republicans cheated Native Americans out of approximately $100 million concerning issues over their lands, the Interior department gave away, many parts of our national parks, belonging to all Americans…to oil companies, timber companies and mining companies. The woman who did it is not in jail. She is not hiding somewhere in disgrace. She is running for the Senate as a Neocon Republican from Colorado.

The Republicans need not be afraid…not of terrorists nor of a bankrupt America. But all Americans and particularly those who want and need a good job should be very afraid that Republicans might once again gain control of power in this country. Then we would need to worry about our freedom, our economic well-being, and perhaps our very lives.

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Of course, the “supply-side” wannabe wonks are hollering at peak decibel about the debt. They are prompted by the multi-millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street–who want no regulation, thank you, and no taxation on the derivative-derived multi-millions they stole from the economy. These robotic bloggers would like to have you believe that stimuli do not work. What works, they will tell you, is tax cuts. They have new arguments for going back to Reagan-Bush-Bush economics, i.e., failure, again.

Now here is how simplistic that argument becomes for cutting taxes in a recession where a huge number of people are out of work and the balance are already spending everything they have–and are scared enough to try to save more. Let’s say that someone has $10 in his pocket. Next payday, he has $15 because, with the tax cut, the money you have taken out of his pay is less. So he will spend more. That’s a wonderful, simple argument that you can supplement with data from economic analysis that you can read on a plane or a bus or the subway or on the john. The fact is, however, that if you do not have a paycheck giving you $10 per week, you will not get the increased $15 per week unless someone shows up and not only hands you $10 but also gives you another $5.

Now, there are two kinds of people in a downturn. And what is a downturn? It is when fewer people are employed. The first kind of person is the one who has a job. And the second kind is the one who has no job. In a slight recession, those with jobs will bank the stimuli, or in the case of tax cuts, not even know that they have taken place. The ones without jobs will not care about tax cuts because they have no paychecks to look at to determine if they received a tax cut.

Corporations pay so little in taxes these days (7% of all tax revenues) that tax cuts are nearly irrelevant. So tax cuts in a slight recession mean nothing, have no appreciable effect at all. The deeper and more expansive the recession, where more people are unemployed, the less valuable the tax cuts will be. Those who receive a tax cut are still living in a deep recession. They have the same motivation as everyone else, only to a lesser degree. They are scared, and while they may spend some money, the extra money becomes savings to a higher degree than when an economy is flourishing. And the more marginally employed and secure, the less one will spend. After all who needs a tax cut when they have no paycheck? First, they need a paycheck. That’s called a stimulus.

This applies to Europe this way: Europeans have long had much greater and more all-encompassing benefits merely from citizenship than Americans. This has a negative effect on recovery statistics. In other words, Europeans, with more than a year of unemployment benefits, ranging around 40% of their employed income, with free health care and children’s education paid for take longer to get back to work, and that shows up in statistics as a stagnant recovery. But is it? To economists and statisticians it may be. Not as much to the worker. Not as much to the politicians. And industry has time to recover and make adjustments without the fear of unemployment funds running out and a nation hanging around like a wolf at the door until it can resume retraining and hiring.

We have a different approach. We apparently treasure our independence from government. That leads to very sharp drops when recessions occur…small businesses failing, people losing their homes, going bankrupt. That happens far less in Europe where they have made government a real support system. But of course they are not as wised as we. On the other hand, they are not as bankrupt or as without healthcare, or savings, or 5-week vacations or military budgets that are…next to ours like a mouse next to an elephant. None of their sons and daughters are dying or maimed for life. But we are…um…. the smart ones.

The people who say that Europe’s social network has had a negative effect on unemployment and the incentive for workers to return to work not only has not read all the studies on this which prove the opposite, or actually prove there is no relationship at all, but also shows that the person does not recognize the cultural differences between Europe and the United States. Europeans have a different attitude about work. Work is much more often craft. Things take longer, life is less frenetic, more placid. Yet, Europe survives. My goodness.

Of course the good members of the “Do Nothing” opposition Neoconservative Party have no real ideology. They work for the “Man,” the corporations, and they put up a show of having an opposing ideology but it is merely a sham, window dressing. Their job is to get legislation passed for industry…financial, manufacturing, health, food…whatever and whoever will pay them more.

The idea that small business cannot hire because of “cosmic uncertainty” is idiotic. A man with some capital and some experience in a field goes out and finds an opportunity. He finds a good location or he finds the availability of a group of customers that he or she can attach to a business to generate sufficient cash flow to get a business up and running. There is nothing cosmic about it. On the contrary, it is microcosmic. That is why they call it SMALL BUSINESS!

Oh, you don’t understand, they say. It is the financial uncertainty, the blah, blah, cosmic blah, blah. Well, here’s the reality. You go to a bank. They say no. You go to an investor who has money in a bank, lots of it. You both go to the bank. The banks says yes. Or some variant on that. Not once during any of this did anyone look outward towards the cosmos. They were too busy focusing on pieces of paper with numbers on them! They are called business plans and marketing plans and strategic plans. They quickly fill up that very small cosmos called the local marketplace. Local businessmen and women work 24-7 to develop their businesses. That is their cosmos.

The idea that the Obama stimulus has any relationship to the weak tea stimulus that George W. Bush put into effect—most people felt absolutely nothing, no effect whatsoever—and the huge infrastructure work that is going on now is, of course, silly. This was a real job creating stimulus, and it did not only save a million jobs (the governors kindly said 2 million jobs) but it created another 600,000 to a million while jobs were actually still falling at hundreds of thousands a month. What did George do? The only thing needed during that time was to stop creating legislation that encouraged corporations to both send jobs abroad, and—almost unbelievable now, looking back on it and given the current state of the economy—locate headquarters abroad.

The current line among the ardent Neocons is that Nixon was like Carter and Hoover was like Roosevelt and Reagan was some kind of savior. Hoover was working within traditional economic boundaries, much like those resurrected by the Neocons. They failed miserably. Roosevelt stepped it up, got the pace of intervention in the public, the consumer economy…the private economy had totally disappeared…to the point that people were put to work, some cash was flowing and the private sector had a platform from which to launch again. War provided the impetus, but it was basically the size of the government stimulus that made the difference In 1940 and beyond the kind of stimulus that should have been done in 1933 was launched. The use of the funds…in that case for war…was irrelevant. It was the size of the stimulus that made the difference.

Nixon was a fairly liberal guy by today’s standards, and would now be called a moderate Republican and would be drummed out of the Fundamentalist Christian-Right-Wing-political-theology-tax-cut-and-spend-Neoconservative Republican Party. Nixon would have laughed Sarah Palin back into the wild. He would have jumped all over Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity to get them to push his propaganda. Had he not been impeached, forced to resign, and had he been able to marshal the kinds of conservative radio propaganda we have today, he might have become Dictator.

Just recall during the Bush Administration how much war contracting and security contracting…private armies and locating major corporations in the heart of Muslim terrorist country…how much truly anti-American middle class stuff they were able to accomplish using the lies of Limbaugh, Hannity and O’Reilly and others as cover. Every time they would drill a new well in a national park, Limbaugh would have a show about how we will run out of oil by next Thursday or the Muslims will be coming over the wall after sundown. Scare, scare, scare….then steal, steal, steal. And in anticipation of an outraged reaction to more public land being given away to oil companies, he would launch some invented tirade against the Sierra Club. While they were reacting, Cheney would send out more Neocon corporate troops to mine more land, cut more timber, drill more wells.

Reagan, Bush, and Bush have put us into a terrible position. They left us $11 trillion in debt. We got nothing for it. The rich, statistically, became richer and the middle class actually lost both wealth and average wages during that period. We not only created a mere 7 million jobs under Bush, we then lost those 7 million jobs under Bush…in one year! Was it deliberate? Did the Neoconservatives deliberately obliterate the line between common sense in offering real estate mortgages and blatant fraud? Did they sell fraudulent mortgages by selling them to people whom they knew had no possibility of making the payments, although they were told not to worry?

The Neoconservatives are now telling us that the national debt is too high. We knew that before. Perot blew the whistle, Clinton pooh,poohed it during the campaign but came right back after the election and raised taxes. He did it, just as the Democrats are forced to do today…without one single Republican vote. These guys haven’t changed. It is merely a new set of crooks doing the same bidding for the corporate mob, hoping to become capos like Billy Tauzin. Push through a $26 billion windfall for the pharmaceutical companies on the backs of American seniors. Do nothing to cut costs. Let seniors eventually pay what they would have anyway, but pick up additional billions from the government, adding to the debt. If you’re Tauzin, get yourself a $2 million a year job running the pharmaceutical lobbying organization. It is criminal yet these crooks pay no price. In some countries there would be a military coup and firing squads would be set up all over the country, festive, like labor day picnics.

If we are a more civilized society then we must honor the will of the people, not wait for 60 senators or 67 senators to decide what 54 percent of the population said—not in a survey but with their votes for Congress and President. We need health care reform, green industries that will create jobs, higher mileage standards leading to flex-fuel cars, duties on American products made abroad by U.S. corporations and then re-imported, and we need very strong…the strongest possible…union organization and worker protection laws we can create. We need to get back to a people-oriented, a Populist society.

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Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? Sounds ridiculous. Apparently not to Senators John Kyl of Arizona and Sentor Jim Bunning of Kentucky. Bunning held up unemployment insurance payments for millions of people and Kyl backed him up on it. They don’t understand, it seems, that people who have been laid off and cannot find another job need money to survive. Now, people on the Right may look at the legislative situation and say, “Yes, but…” There is no “Yes, but…” There is only doing what you are supposed to do, being a decent human being first and an irascible, bought-and-paid for lobbyist-pandering Senator second. When it comes to people’s lives, the answer is simple: do it now!

By any standard statistical measurement, we have at least 14,900,000 people unemployed. How is there any discussion of this other than to plan ways to get these people help until we can create sufficient jobs to employ them?

It is time that we all started offering alternatives and pushing them on Congress by any means of communications possible. We all agree on one thing for sure. In the United States especially, it costs money to live. Food, water, shelter and much, much more. Life is not free. We’re not the richest country in the world when it comes to per capita income for our people, or the second or even third. But we are the tenth richest, with a median income of $47,000 per year. We are the wealthiest in simple gross economic terms. So, that means that we have the ability to solve our economic problems.

Let’s get right to problems and solutions. We need to spend about $400 billion to get the economy back on track. We can do it piecemeal but that will take years, probably 3 or 4 years, of high unemployment, gradual return of liquidity to banks, and a slow gradual build up of businesses. It could take longer. And it will hurt the economic infrastructure of the country. Last year, for example, we lost 120 banks. If we try to recover gradually, it will be at the cost of our lifestyle, the “American Way of Life” that we came to expect after WWII and which continued into the late 1970s, when we were already making some mistakes in economic theory. Some people, the wealthy, still have that lifestyle, in spades. But not the average citizen.

Let’s just take a look for a second at the American family unit from an economic standpoint. Let’s take a family of about $40,000 in income. They would pay something like $4,000 in taxes and would have about $3,000 per month to spend on food, clothing, transportation, health care, and other items. Disregarding for a moment whether that is enough to live on, the after-tax $3,000 per month would go right back into the economy.

We could get back to about 5% unemployment, which many people think, for a variety of reasons, is the minimum we can get to anyway, by handing out $40,000 over one year to 10 million people. That’s $400 billion. Let’s say for argument sake that we do so. We bring 10 million people into the workforce through a dozen or so government department where we already have large, national, administrative channels set up.

But the main programs would be in the kinds of needs that governments all have now at the state and local level that they cannot fund. Many would be involved in the development of small businesses, as interns or consultants or in marketing. Some would teach. Many people need training. Some would be working with inner city problems, both plant and facility and security and education. We know that African-Americans are running a staggering unemployment rate in many areas of 40-50%. There would be more infrastructure improvement…roads and bridges and building renovations. Let’s name this effort to jump-start the economy. Let’s call it the “Emerging Enterprise Corp.”

Ten million employed people, working for Emerging Enterprise Corporation spending their incomes at this level will generate about $70 billion in tax revenues from personal income taxes and the taxes of small businesses and their employees. But that is not where it ends. This is

real

supply side economics.

Ten million people added to the workforce, driving it down to the essential number of people who are available and skilled to do jobs will jump start the economy. Employers must join in because, despite what they would like, they do need workers. Right now these people work for Emerging Enterprise. So as businesses grow, they begin to poach employees from Emerging Enterprise. Right away, many of these employees, on average of course, are making the median income of the country. Over a period of years tax revenues from these newly employed workers in private industry will pay off the investment, especially now, borrowed at the cheapest money has been since probably 1930. In the first year, $70 billion will come from the Emerging Enterprise workers themselves. So that means the program already pays down 20% of the investment.

So as these jobs are being created, phase two of Emerging Enterprise goes into effect. We know that many, many jobs have been relocated overseas. We also know that we must restore some manufacturing and other kinds of solid businesses here in order to handle our full employment needs. So we need to change the import-export game for a few years.

Emerging Enterprise, like so many businesses begins to feed on its success and goes off into all kind of fields. Like all workers, they want better opportunities. So Emerging Enterprise decides that it is going to challenge the manufacture of goods for domestic consumption. We have deeded that to the Japanese, Chinese and Indians. We’ll take some of it back. Some employees begin to move from public to private enterprise.

Emerging Enterprise will go into various categories where it sees the best opportunities. Maybe home entertainment systems, or computer software, playground equipment, energy efficient air conditioners, wind and solar, battery technology, toys and games, educational equipment, chemicals, irrigation and light farm implements, light aircraft, batteries, mopeds, roller skates, lighting, organic food, and health related products or many others. Each company a private investment, funded with loans from private banks, underwritten by Emerging Enterprise.

Of course you may say and every single Neocon Republican will definitely say that it will not work. We cannot compete. Actually they say that we can compete as long as: a.) American workers are not involved and b.) we don’t worry about how high are the untaxed profits of the major corporations. But Emerging Enterprise says that it wants the government to create a much more level playing field between American workers and those around the world who make 50 cents an hour working 12-hour days, 6 days a week in sweat shops.

In 2008, the GDP of the United States was over $14 trillion. It is the richest country in the world, based on economic output. We export about $1.3 trillion, which makes us the third largest exporter of goods. We imported about $2.1 trillion. So we import almost twice as much as we export.

The question is this. Of the products that we import from other countries, which of those products could we make here, thus increasing the number of manufacturing jobs? Here are some:

Crude oil.

We import approximately $349 billion of crude oil from abroad. Let us suppose that we began a movement to cut that in half, only $175 billion, in five years or less. Alternatives to gasoline, according to professor Robert Zubrin, flex fuel cars could be engineered quickly to have flex-fuel apparatus installed on every vehicle for less than an additional $200. The technology is here, in use, in the United States right now.

The ability to fuel automobiles with other than gasoline would create hundreds of thousands of jobs, domestic jobs that would carry on for years. The oil industry will fight it because they have a great business right now. Bring in the oil, refine it, sell it at the pump. Only four or five competitors. Charge as much as $4.00 a gallon. Raise or lower prices at will. Make obscene amounts of money and pour a tiny fraction into buying off Congress to keep things as they are.

The many benefits are: probably 50,000 to 100,000 new jobs in the next two years. Less money going to the Middle East. Better balance of payments which strengthens the economy. Cleaner atmosphere. Also, you can run your car on almost anything.

Passenger vehicles, trucks, utility vehicles and agricultural and industrial vehicles.

We should be able to add at least $50 billion in U.S. vehicles of all kinds with a simple re-direction of emphasis. If we commit to bringing a third of the passenger-car and light truck business to this country that is now imported ($125 billion) we can add many other vehicles that will bring the total to $50 billion and we can still permit other countries to compete in this market. Simple farm vehicles that can run on anything can be exported.

We would need to do some things with tariffs, and work with unions to develop an incentive-based wage. We already have all the plant and facilities necessary. It is merely a job of re-directing financial incentives. This should create at least 150,000 jobs over several years at good wages. We export some cars, but very few to countries that now send cars here. Consequently, we would suffer almost no blow-back from slightly higher tariffs. But quality control technology must switch from tanks and planes to peacetime products. We need the kinds of redundancies in our domestic vehicles that will make them the envy of the world, not merely in our drone aircraft.

Consumer and Industrial Goods.

There are another $800 billion of products that are made elsewhere that we could also make here. In addition to the $225 billion in flex fuels and vehicles of all kinds we could make for domestic consumption and export, we could add another $100 billion easily, with some small additional balancing tariffs. So that is a lot revenue and additional jobs of jobs. But not enough. Remember, we have a $14 trillion economy.

So, we would still have about $1.75 trillion of imports. Of that we export some of the same things we import. Auto parts we export at the rate of about $40 billion and we import about $70 billion. We could turn some of those products around. Import $40 billion and export $70 billion. Or we could do something else.

This country is the biggest and best market in the world. We could charge a very small, say a 2% tax or all imports…a very broad, shallow tax…on all products made abroad but imported back into the U.S. while avoiding the employment of U.S. labor. So let’s say that our imports by American companies making things abroad amount to $1.2 trillion of the $1.75 left over from our $2.1 trillion in imports.

Let’s get some help for Emerging Enterprise Corp. This very slight re-importation tax would generate something like $24 billion a year. Not huge, but it could be earmarked to guarantee loans to Emerging Enterprise. Emerging Enterprise could then try new fields of manufacture, expanding the job market. That $24 billion could very conservatively guarantee $100 billion in business loans for second-level development.

How many jobs would this create? Well, first of all it will create some, as opposed to…none. Since U.S. manufacturers and importers, like Walmart will probably pass the duties on to Americans, products will cost 2% more. A $1.00 piece of cheap crap from Walmart will now cost $1.02. If it costs more than that, people may start to go to American companies and buy really good products, made by American workers, for $1.25. But this tax, this very small duty, allows us, Americans, to stop giving away our biggest asset, our wonderful economy to other nations completely free. And this alone will create 2 million more jobs. It will continue, also, year after year.

When you start to add everything up…the amount we import from other countries in products we used to make here, the oil we import from the Middle East, the amount of product that U.S. manufacturers send abroad to have made and then bring back to the U.S. to sell to the workers they circumvented…there are a lot of jobs.

But there’s more. We said that we would borrow another $400 billion and simply create one-year, useful jobs for people while we are reorganizing the economy as we have shown we can do. Over and above the initial $70 billion in immediate taxes from the 10 million one-year Emerging Enterprise jobs, there would be another perhaps $50 billion in revenues from various tax adjustments…the income taxes from workers in the private service sector, the import duties and the retirement of the Bush tax breaks to the wealthy. So, we would have about $120 billion back fairly quickly.

And before we go further, recall that Ben Bernanke has loaned $7 trillion over the last several years to banks and financial institutions, even before Obama took office, and before the crash, and he has not said and legally does not have to tell us the name of one bank or financial institution receiving funds. So how many jobs did that create?

An investment of $400 billion is not small but more attractive at currently minus-interest rates to “Emerging Enterprise” to create millions of jobs and re-start our economy. Remember that, if we were compartmentalizing budgets in the federal government, this $400 billion would be $40 billion a year for ten years. We obviously have more than enough to retire that loan from existing and future taxes on those who become employed from this investment and do so in less than ten years. Not from the taxes of Emerging Energy workers, who have only one year to contribute. They will pay for the first year, and the second, as many of them go into private businesses, and others come in to use the balance of the entire amount. The payoff really comes from all the other workers and firms whose taxes would provide much more than necessary to repay that investment.

The size of the investment, remember, is the key to re-starting everything because it shocks the rest of the private sector into action. Once the effects of ten million employees and their impact on the economy is felt, many companies will not be left behind. Let’s do the math here to see if this all makes sense. If it does, then we’ll talk about why it is not happening and why tea party members are chasing their tails.

Remember we said that we have almost 15 million people out of work. But what we didn’t say was that we have about 147 million working. So Emerging Enterprise will only add 10 million. The key factor, however, is that it will begin to move those other corporations employing the 147 million to add employment before the number of available top people begins to thin out.

It’s like the NFL draft. You want to get the best players for the least amount of money. So you go into the draft and find great players and hope that they will contribute to your team for a long time, thus amortizing their costs. But the key thing, the goal, is to win. So you need to get in early, up high in the draft, to get those players. The same is true of industry when it becomes productive. Things get tight.

Next we must put the country back on a solvent basis. Before the crash, the Bush Administration had created about 7 million jobs. Since the crash we have lost that many jobs. So not only did they leave us a huge recession but they also left us with no new net jobs. We are back to where we were in 2000, only now we have more people who need to work, and we have a gap of between 10-15% between high employment and recession-era level employment. Clinton created 22 million jobs in his two terms, and even if you discount 2 or 3 million for a recession that certainly was brewing after the dot-com bubble fell off. Nineteen or twenty million jobs is still 3 times pre recession Bush totals and…what…ten times current post-recession levels? It is staggering.

And what do the Neocon Republicans offer as a solution? Tax cuts, which, although they are for everyone, in the Republican versions are primarily for the very wealthy. It is exactly the opposite of what we need to do. We have transferred about 20% of the entire wealth of the country to the top one-half-of one percent of Americans since 1980, so that they now own about half of everything. The problem is that, unlike other countries, they have never set up systems in this country, such as health care, such as pension funds that cannot be looted, such as large financial firms that cannot run roughshod over society, or credit card companies and oil companies who can simply charge whatever they please.

We have so secure social safety net. We have no reliable way to care for ourselves or loved ones when we become seriously ill. We are scammed and cheated and then lied to by Neocon Republicans about rectifying the situation. The two Senators Bunning and Kyl proved, as if it were necessary, where Neocon loyalties lie. Not with the average citizen. That we now know conclusively.

No, the answer is not more tax cuts for the wealthy. We need to institute a top tax rate of about 50%, at least, among those with incomes of $500,000 and more. The tax rate must be scaled down and everyone share in it. But as those making $1,000,000 per year and more benefited most from previous tax cuts, it is only proper that they should return to paying some of the $43,000 per million that they earned every year of the Bush Administration back to the Treasury in our time of need. Or we could go back to the 74% top marginal rates that were in effect for 20 very comfortable years before Reagan.

We can do this, of course, without touching Social Security or Medicare, given the fact that these funds…are your money, remember…your money? Even though the funds have been looted by Neocon Republicans since 1981 and continue to pay for the tax cuts for the rich. Now the Neocons want to scale back the Social Security and Medicare programs, saying that there is no alternative. That is preposterous. There is an alternative, an alternative in several parts, all of which are written down here. Change the employment situation to substantially increase domestic manufacturing. Increase the tax base to reflect the real needs of the country. Change mild tariffs on products across the board being made for American firms elsewhere and brought in here for sale to Americans. If we do these things, we will pay down substantially on the debt and become the most substantially sound nation in the world and our society will be the envy of the world.

Before the recession at the end of the indebted portion of the Clinton years…before he had surpluses…we were short about $250 billion a year, plus or minus a few tens of billions. Here’s how you fix that equitably and with a look towards the future. Cut the military budget by 10%. It is now greater than all the military budgets of all the countries in the entire world, including Russia, China, the Middle East and all the terrorist groups huddled in caves in Afghanistan. Then…

Remove the Bush tax cuts = + $100 billion a year. Cutting military budget only 10% (maybe by finally bringing troops home from Iraq and closing some of the 700 bases around the world!) = + $60 billion/yr. Pass health care reform. = + $20 billion/yr. Tax increases, as described, over and above the Bush tax rescissions. = + $40 billion/yr. Change the tariffs on products using this market. = + $25 billion/yr. Cut all other non-defense, non-social services, non-research and non-essential programs by 10%. = + $20 billion/yr. Total: $265 billion. Budget balanced. Next, use the expanded economy…and it will be expanded greatly, if we take back the domestic economy for American workers, to write down the national debt. It can be completely eliminated over 20 years. As it is eliminated, both Social Security and Medicare, (under a reformed health care system) will be solidified.

One more thing. This is a great country if it is not run for the personal entertainment of a few very wealthy individuals, who number a million or fewer. We can use the growth of the economy to partially fund real, strong, well-managed retirement program that will can not only replace Social Security but guarantee every worker a much more comfortable retirement with a combination insurance and 401K program.

This would be nothing like the scam that the Bush Administration tried to foist on the American people and, thankfully, failed. Certainly with a stock market at currently lowered levels, with new companies coming into the domestic market, we can invest wisely for our citizens. Once we no longer give our markets away to foreign investors and wealthy Americans who own two-thirds of all business equity in the country, there will be enough left over to increase Social Security, not cut it. A smaller part would be insurance, a larger part, a portable 401K program, handled like the government pension programs.

There is life after Bush. But it will require strong effort by concerned Americans. One need only to look at the enormous battle the health insurance industry has waged to continue the fiscal enslavement of 40 or 50 million Americans to see the kind of fight we are talking about to return this government to the American people.

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Roskam’s emerging career (he’s only been in national politics for two terms) is typical of so many Neocons these days. Say one thing to get elected and then do the opposite and look for cover from the vast reservoir of media outlets and organizations paid off by pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, natural gas companies, manufacturing companies, mining, timber, health insurance, media…big international corporations making billions while the people suffer.

Neocon Roskam says he is for fiscal responsibility and in favor of two big wars and continuing to keep taxes very low for the rich. He is also in favor of denying anything to citizens, like reasonably priced health care (except tax cuts) but in favor of supporting more oil drilling in this country as opposed to promoting alternative sources of energy. He is in favor of higher gas prices, maintaining low-mileage cars, and not in favor of stimulating the economy to create more jobs.

Roskam is a protégé of his former boss, Tom DeLay, the former leader of the Right Wing from Texas, who along with Dick Armey and the Bush Administration brought us $7 trillion of the current $12 trillion in debt. DeLay, many people will remember, was the man who led the effort to gerrymander the districts of House Members in Texas, which he eventually did. It has been pointed out that there is not one Democratic district left in Texas that is not either Hispanic or African-American.

We don’t know how or whether Roskam helped him plan this redistricting and gerrymandering at the time he worked for DeLay. But we know that Roskam, like Jack Abramoff, another associate of DeLay’s worked for and learned politics from DeLay. Abramoff went to jail for illegal matters having to do with lobbying and $66 million dollars from Native Americans and gambling. As yet, Roskam has not been indicted for anything.

Tom DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury in 2005, after having already been rebuked officially several times by the Senate ethics committee in 2004 and having also been investigated for several trips abroad on whether or not those trips were legal. The 2005 indictment was for allegedly funneling national campaign funds into local Texas elections. Whether or not any funds were alleged to have been funneled into Illinois where Mr. Roskam was a House member in the Illinois State Legislature does not appear in the 2005 DeLay indictment.

Roskam ran for the 13th District of Illinois House seat, and lost to the “dynamic” Judy Biggert, who is supposedly more “moderate” than Roskam. Example: she voted against State Children’s Health Insurance Program that would offer lower-cost insurance to children of the working poor. Of course, once Roskam was elected to the 6th District House seat…he did also. Apparently, she is not as strongly against forcing other women to have abortions, which must be the issue on which she is more moderate. Roskam is not only against abortions, he wants all women to be prohibited from having an abortion. In that case, from a purely politically philosophical view, he would seem to be closer to Hitler than to Biggert.

After he lost to Biggert in 1997, he must have moved. He now represents the 6th District of Illinois. He followed, Henry Hyde, who also favored laws making all American women follow his rules on abortion. His rule said that all women be kept from having abortions with federal funds in legislation called the “Hyde Amendment.”

Now, we do not know if Hyde applied that rule in his four-year affair with a married woman, which in turn was before he led impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton for doing the same thing, only for a much shorter period of time. Hyde was a Catholic, a graduate of Georgetown and Loyola Law School, and—it would appear—a hypocrite.

Roskam supported going into Iraq and later voted against legislation to begin to bring troops home from Iraq. Roskam has never been in the military, never having served the country himself. We can probably all agree that borrowing huge sums of money to have yourself elected to a job paying over $150,000 a year, with more than that in perks and enormous name recognition, and—if a Neocon—with a job waiting in a lobbying firm, post-politics is not really “serving your country.” As we’ll see…serving lobbyists may be more like it.

Roskam voted 14 times to cut taxes for the wealthy while he was in the now highly-in-debt Illinois legislature (I wonder why?) and also voted against human rights for homosexuals and against legislation on stem cell research.

He has initiated legislation in the Illinois legislature to allow concealed handguns and to stop the registration of weapons and to allow gun sales to be much freer of regulation and registration. He is in favor of much more domestic oil drilling and supports large-scale oil shale development in the shale areas…which are for the most part the national parks and other wilderness areas of the West.

Although he had never been to war or even in the military, in 2006 he used his lack of wartime experience somehow to defeat in the election for the House a former Army helicopter pilot, PhD. candidate in international relations, and double amputee, Major Tammy Duckworth.

Duckworth was endorsed in Illinois by the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Daily Herald of DuPage County (where the 6th District resides) and by the Pioneer Press which publishes numerous other papers in the area, including the Wheaton and the Elmhurst local newspapers. Duckworth had lost both legs when the helicopter she was piloting was shot down in Iraq, a war with which she did not agree, but in which she served with dedication and distinction. She was later appointed Assistant Secretary of the Veterans’ Administration. Roskam went to Washington and voted to continue the war in Iraq. The people of the 6th District felt that they knew better. They elected a guy working for lobbyists against them.

Roskam says that he is in favor of cutting domestic spending to reduce the deficit. But he both encouraged and praised $5.5 million of spending for his district. He says that it was for renewable energy, but it was basically a stipend to GTI, a natural gas industry affiliated company. As far as energy efficiency and freeing ourselves from the Arabs, Roskam has voted against legislation raising mileage standards and developing alternative energy. But he has voted to both increase domestic drilling and against penalizing oil companies for price gouging.

Who does this sound like, this maintaining one position that most people support and then actually voting for a position that would best help a private industry? Sound like a Neoconservative Republican? He says he is for it, like health care made available to all. Then he votes against it. He has voted against every health care initiative. Every one.

Roskam says that he wants the President to return to bi-partisanship, which he says Obama displayed when they served together in the Illinois State Legislature. But President Obama held a televised event recently, an open event, to give the opposition a chance to offer suggestions. It has, after all, been over a year since this started. Roskam was there. He was called on to offer suggestions. But his comment was and is the same as it has been–no, let’s start over.

It is always the same. Say yes, we are for green energy and the jobs that will come with it. Then the bill is started. The Republicans offer no amendments or simply offer stalling amendments put forward by their lobbyist friends that they know will not be acceptable. Then they filibuster as long as they can…they currently hold up 70 pieces of legislation in the Senate that are vital to get millions of jobs to the unemployed…then they vote no. All of them, just like Roskam. The Party of No.

Roskam and Judy Biggert of the 13th district in Illinois are the same. They both vote no on everything that will help the middle class and yes on anything that will help their constituents…the huge corporations, especially the financial segment, Wall Street and the big insurance companies.

Now, on a daily basis, they cry poverty…reduce the debt…while they, the Neoconservative Republicans, which all the Republicans now are, spent $7 trillion dollars more in the last 8 years than the country received in revenues. Now we are $12 trillion in debt, thanks to Neocon Republicans. We have been delivered such a crushing economic blow by their inattentiveness to the economy that even the Democrats, trying to rescue the country, are looking for any way possible to build up the economy that can be paid for. The Republican spending and economic crash has tied the hands of the Democrats. It is never about the People with the Neocons and all about politics.

As Senators Jim Bunning and John Kyl proved, Neocons simply do not care that 15 million people are out of work, that 35 million have no health care, that 1 million a year are going bankrupt, that 3 million will likely lose their homes this year and that 14,000 people a day who have health care are losing it. And they say that they, the Neocons, the ones who caused all this suffering, are against big government? They are big government and they have been since 1980.

Roskam is no different from all the rest of the Neocon Republicans. They are all the very essence of hypocrisy. They want us to believe that they are for fiscal responsibility? Jim Bunning in his stupid protest against paying for….unemployment insurance?

It’s insurance! It’s called unemployment insurance. People pay for it. You can’t just cut it off at the whim of some hick, moron Senator from the backwoods of Kentucky. It’s their money, not Jim Bunning’s. He even admitted in his speech that he and other Republicans…perhaps…should have been more fiscally conscious, in previous years. So suddenly he has remorse for spending the country into the poorhouse? But he is not worried at all about causing people to lose health insurance or be late on rent or delicate mortgage payment arrangements. Don’t they know how serious this is to those unemployed for a long time?

These guys are not kidding anyone…Senator Bunning, Senator Kyl, Rep. Roskam and Rep. Biggert…and all the others from Texas to Alabama to Minnesota. They caused the problem. When Senator Kent Conrad and Rep. John Spratt, Democrats on their respective budget committees, said repeatedly over the last 8 years that we are in deep, deep trouble…long before the crash…they all ignored the warnings. It was arrogance.

When “Paygo” was reinstituted by the Democrats in 2007, so that whatever would be spent from then forward must be paid for by spending cuts, the Republicans voted no. Then, after the crash, when, faced with over a trillion dollars of debt in one year, the Democrats had to make an exception in order to keep the country afloat. The Republicans, knowing that the Democrats could and would do it alone to save the country–ALL voted NO.

What did they think that they were a part of over the last 8 years? Or over the period of George Bush the First when they increased the debt by over a trillion in just 4 years? Or under Reagan where they cut the income of the country by 50% and increased military contractor spending by four times what it had been? These things quadrupled the national debt to $2.14 trillion by 1989. It is clear what they knew. They knew they would score political points by cutting taxes…everybody, almost, likes a tax cut. They wanted to reduce the government size, from lack of revenues, until, as one Neocon said, they could “drown it in a bathtub.”

What they succeeded in doing was to reduce government effectiveness. They created a large private industry…the war industry, where demand is king. You make it. Then you blow it up and come back for a new and better one. It never ends. It is half our budget and more than all other military budgets of the world including China and Russia–combined! Are we safer by a factor of, say, 50 than any other country? Ask the relatives of the 3,000 people who died during the very first year of George W. Bush’s Presidency. Did we in 8 years handle the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and come home? That’s a pretty obvious answer.

Roskam, Biggert, Bunning, Kyl…and so many more…McConnell, McCain and Sessions and Bachmann and Gomert and King and Boehner…and others—the Neocons put us in our current position. They initiated and voted for all the same things that Roskam did. Only some did them for ten, twenty years. And they are still at it. Only now they vote in a block to obstruct.

They are running a constant guerilla attack on government by the military-industrial complex of this country and by the big, multi-national corporations. Keep cutting taxes, cutting government revenues. Try to kill Social Security and Medicare one more time. (Paul Ryan of Wisconsin) These are the old, the reactionary, Right Wing, Conservative arguments of an earlier century. Thirty years ago, we tried Reaganomics, even though it seemed like voodoo economics. We’ve spent 30 years putting more money in the hands of the very rich. It is literally the greatest shift in wealth in the history of the world. That’s not even in dispute.

What have we learned? We know now that permitting tax codes so that some can amass great wealth does not result in a broader and stronger economy. It does not trickle down in the form of new jobs and an expanded economy. In fact, it has meant fewer jobs, with more going overseas.

It has meant deficit spending, every year of the 1980s, almost every year in the 1990s and then in the 2000s, under Bush, reckless tax cutting and equally wild spending. The economy absorbed $3 trillion in lost revenue from cuts to the tax bills of the wealthy. The wealthy don’t let it trickle down, we discovered. They just buy more yachts and houses, like the 9 homes of John McCain.

At this point, the Neocons don’t understand how serious the crisis is for average citizens. And many citizens—like the tea baggers are hit with so much propaganda that they don’t understand either–that when they attack the government, they are attacking themselves. The government is not the problem. If the government were allowed to work, it could very easily be the solution. The biggest cause of our current deficit is unemployment which has led to severely reduced tax revenues. That is causing the biggest spread in the deficit.

The government could easily jump-start the economy and recover all the money it would take to do so in a couple of years through increased revenues. And it could be done primarily through business loans that are not being made now by the private financial sector. But the Neocons are making it almost impossible for the economy to recover.

Very soon, unless the Neocons stop obstructing and join in to solve problems, the only thing between the American People and disaster will be the government. In fact, we’re probably there already.

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When are you a citizen of a country? If I move to France to live, am I automatically a citizen of France? If I come across the border from Mexico or if, God forbid, one of those Socialist Canadians, with their despotic and radical national health care ideas, should come across that border…are they citizens? The answer: no. Because you live somewhere does not make you a citizen.

They can become American citizens, not always something that everyone who stays here for some time wants to do, especially when we are killing people in Asia or the Middle East. They don’t always want to become U.S. citizens. Many times they simply want to have the American experience and then return to Great Britain, or Sweden or Canada.

Some people come temporarily. But if you already have economic opportunity and enough space in which to live comfortably, the United States is not always some kind of Paradise. In Friedman’s crowded and flat world, good personal economics can provide some pretty entertaining lifestyles in many, many places around the globe. Switzerland or the south of France can be…yes, it’s true…more enjoyable than New Jersey or Delaware. It really has to do with economic factors.

So most of the Neocons who were born in this country take our lifestyles for granted. Guys like John Kyl, who thinks that unemployment payments are a negative influence and a drag on society. Or John McCain, the son and grandson of socially prominent Admirals, who could keep him from being booted from the “academy.” Life would always be good for John McCain, treating U.S. airplanes as if they were his own, reputedly crashing five multi-million dollar jets. They were. He was a privileged American citizen.

Many of us used to feel that way. Maybe not the same way as John McCain, but we did feel that we were better off than other people. After all, if one looked around the world, or better yet, traveled around the world, we had a much better life in most ways. Maybe the food wasn’t as good as France or Germany or the women as beautiful as in Scandinavia or the attitude as convivial as in Italy, or the mystery as great as Morocco, but we had a better life.

And Mr. Lincoln need not have worried. God was on our side. Or so it seemed.

But then, as some of us so often say with ominous portent…then came Ronald Wilson Reagan. How often do you hear the term…”a great American” associated with him? He was a great American in that he was a “great guy” who not only was a man’s man but was considerate of women personally, which not all “great guys” are. Maybe that was because of Nancy. She was a tough cookie behind closed doors. She got that from her mother. But Ronald Reagan seemed genuinely nice.

Even after having been governor of California, he was still a political neophyte. On the other hand, he was no dummy and he was no innocent. By the time he had sat in the board room of GE on Lexington Avenue a few times, he knew what General Electric expected of him. As with anyone who is not only paying your salary but giving you lifetime security, he was as good at looking the other way as any other political or social hypocrite. That is why, when we think of Ronald Reagan, we always think “BR” and “AR.” Before Reagan and After Reagan.

After Reagan, everything changed. Reagan’s charisma masked a huge swing in government from progressive, liberal ideas and policies that had been in place since the 1930s. We have had great leaders…Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ, Clinton and perhaps Obama. But Reagan, despite being there at a time when he was needed, and acting courageously once, was not one of them.

In the latter part of the 1970s, both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to bring down inflation, which was growing and accelerating dangerously. We were finding that inflation brought down neither employment nor wages, contradicting the Phillips curve. Towards the end of Carter’s term, interest rates and inflation were killing the economy. The evils of inflation were finally overwhelming everything else and they might have become disastrous, if something were not done.

Carter appointed Paul Volcker to head the Fed and he short-circuited the money supply, causing a recession and ended inflation. When Reagan came in, partly because Volcker had begun to cool inflation with higher interest rates, Reagan stood by him under tough political pressure, as Carter had. The rest is history. But not all good history, because Reagan’s Presidency saw the beginnings of what people like Volcker and most other good economists recognized as a bunch of ideological and confused economists making wrong decisions.

Volcker’s actions seemed to prove that a zero-based target for inflation was a good idea. But voodoo, Laffer economics and Friedman free-fall economics caused untold unnecessary pain. Reaganomics spent more than it earned and led to nearly thirty straight years of budget deficits and our current disastrous $12 trillion debt. The problem with this is not only that these economists were wrong, but that Reagan did not know it. Consequently, if Reagan endorsed it, many Americans felt that it could not be wrong.

That was a mistake. Using Reagan as cover, economists spent entire careers creating idiotic scenarios to explain why ever increasing national debt was a good thing. They continued to maintain that, this time, tax cuts would actually bring in more revenues than the trillions that were going out the door. But it never happened. It was, in fact, a Right Wing “big lie,” the first of many. The Conservatives used Reagan’s name to create a Party of false prophets and deficits as far as the eye could see.

There is no free lunch. You can have tax cuts to the point that you are more than comfortable, especially if you are already wealthy. Or you can have Social Security and Medicare and an army and veterans’ benefits. But you can’t it all. Before you say, “OK, no Social Security and no Medicare” take a look around. About half the country would be bankrupt within about 24 months. Not to mention the fact that Baby Boomers, about to retire, are going to need Social Security to survive, especially now that many of them have lost up to 100% of the equity in their homes and huge amounts of their 401Ks.

We can solve all our problems right now. Here’s one way, a tough recipe. Cut Social Security by 5%, which would take a lot of people from $2,000 to $1900, top end. Increase taxes across the board by a straight 10%. The middle class would feel some real pain, but survive. The top end, however, at 10% more would pay off the national debt in about ten years and put the country on top of the world economically in the process.

But there’s more. We would need to pass health care reform. That will draw tons of money from Medicare and make it much more efficient, and make it solvent for the next 50 years. We will then also be able to control the health insurance premium costs which will begin to bring down health care costs for everyone. Eventually health insurance will be private but non-profit and be a huge benefit to the economy. It will basically pay for the tax increases and then some. You would actually have more money in your pocket over the next ten years—plus have guaranteed, affordable health care.

To get everything fixed we need to cut military spending. Two things are very clear. One, we need only to maintain our current level of technological research and maintain a targeted approach to terrorism. We dominate the world in military technology and if we keep that up, we are in good shape. We need to prepare for only one major war, do the training, prepare the staffing and mobilization plans. That means we can begin to close some of the 700 military bases we have around the world, from Japan to Germany to Latin America. We spend more, literally more, than the rest of the world combined, including Russia and China.

We need to use “paygo” to spend money on infrastructure and stop spending money on frivolous politically-driven expenditures. We have national parks. We don’t need to spend money on grants for every state park in the country. That is an example, not a specific measure. States need to begin to cut back, become more efficient and either tax people at the levels that are necessary or cut back on things other than roads, streets, safety and security, and poverty programs that help voluntary organizations cope with homelessness and hunger more easily.

In order to do all these things, have a society that may finally realize its potential and be the lamp that lights the world, we only need do one thing. It is not easy, but it is without question the most important, final thing. We need to vote out all Neoconservatives.

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Be assured of one thing. We are in no danger of becoming a totalitarian, either Fascist totalitarian or a Communist totalitarian state. First of all, only in situations where government is taken over completely by one or the other of these political philosophies does it become totalitarian. Totalitarian means that a state’s political leadership is seamlessly intertwined with its financial and industrial sectors.

Frankly, under President Bush, we were getting pretty close to that with the number of lobbyists in Washington that were actually brought into the departments of government. Now, with the Bush Supreme Court’s decision that corporations can literally come into any political campaign anywhere in the country and buy an election directly, corporations don’t need to go through any kind of political organization. They can go directly to Ohio, for example, and spend as much as they want to elect a Senator.

President Obama is unfortunately the last thing from a dictator. All you need to do is watch his constant pandering to the Right, trying to get their votes, which he never will. To Democrats and Progressives his ongoing and unsuccessful attempt to bring a totally obstructive Republican Party into the mix of legislative matters is weak. Especially, after they have filibustered over 200 bills, his approach, far from being dictatorial is not remotely aggressive enough for a Party anxious to move legislation that the people need.

But that is the Neocon game plan. If you are a propaganda organization like the Neocon Republicans, you need someone to demonize. In a normal society, where there are many different sources of news and information, it would be easy to shoot down all the Right Wing nonsense about our now being some kind of totalitarian society and Obama being some kind of Napoleon. But we have such a concentration of ownership of media by Right Wingers, that it is almost impossible to get the truth out.

Fox News panders to its major corporate advertisers in most cases. But even these relatively conservative organizations have limits and have been canceling some advertising. Fox, despite losing 40, 50, 60 advertisers on Glenn Becks’ program still keeps the truly emotionally disturbed Glenn Beck on the air. His little elementary school civics lessons or mini-history lessons always have a moral at the end, always the same. The little erroneously extrapolated moral is how afraid we should all be of Progressives or of the “big bad government.” Of course that is their message—corporations: good; government regulation: bad.

Big government is all that is between the American people and poisoned food, guns in schools, half of television time devoted to commercials, con-men on Wall Street with fake stock, banks that fail, jobs that will go completely overseas, unions made illegal, pension funds worthless, 10-hour days, 6-day weeks, and no appeal on anything. Progressives also prevent the Neocons from privatizing Social Security, killing Medicare, VA health care, or anything for veterans. (Remember Walter Reed) Of course they would have no taxes at all on corporations. Preventing that kind of social chaos is what big government can do and does right now.

When George W. Bush came to power, some people in various departments, even some Republicans that were still there from his father’s administration, said that they were astonished to see coming through the door to run the place, the very lobbyists who had been trying to shut down all the regulations! That’s who the Neocons work for. They want to get rid of a “totalitarian” government to end regulations we need for our protection from oil and gas companies, utilities, coal, pharmaceuticals, natural resources like copper and timber, as well as manufacturing,

So when someone gives you a tiny little Wikipedia civics lesson from the 18th Century and says that Communism and Fascism are on one end of the spectrum and “anarchy” no government at all is on the other end, that person is wrong. Any government that goes completely out of control in ways that harm the people is one end of the spectrum. On the opposite end is democracy. Democracy that is not tainted by lobbyists, or greedy legislators, democracy that works as it should for the people. That is the other end of the spectrum. It can be centralized or it can be diversified geographically but the key thing is that people learn the issues and decide by free vote.

Take the most pressing issue of the day, health care reform. What was the problem? Can’t get health care or it is cut off, or it doesn’t pay or it denies a legitimate claim or it won’t cover a procedure or prices go up beyond the average family’s ability to pay. 70% of people said…this is no good.

But after a year of propaganda by Fox News and by the 90% of radio talk show hosts who are subsidized by the Right Wing owners of radio networks, the propaganda of “scare and confuse” has worked to confuse many people. The health insurance industry poured $400 million into media and campaign funds to try to stop the health insurance bill. But Democracy worked. The People elected Barack Obama and just enough Democratic legislators to get the job done.

On one side you had all the usual suspects…Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Chamber of Commerce, Orrin Hatch, John McCain, Jim DeMint, Jeff Sessions, Joe Barton, Jeff Hensarling, Paul Ryan, Steven King, John Boehner, Michelle Bachmann…all the people who at one time or another have come out for one or another special interest, whether it be for war contractors or pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, Wall Street brokers, oil and gas companies or tobacco. So why would you trust them in a health care debate? Run the other way, fast.

On the other side are people like Keith Olberman and Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews and Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart and Barbara Boxer and John Kerry and Joe Biden and Tom Harken and Bernie Sanders and Henry Waxman and George Miller and Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean…people who spend their lives trying to help others. And their new leader is a guy who knows what it is like to be poor and knows how the poor live, and what they need, because he volunteered to live and work to better those communities…Barack Obama.

The more formidable your opponent, the more you must demonize him. You structure the message to deliver the opposite of what is true. While the Germans were being told, with what must have been some surprise, that the Jews were oppressing them on a daily basis, the Nazis were, in fact, oppressing the Jews. If you have a good humanitarian, bi-partisan, populist President, what you do…if you are Fox News and the Republican Party…is to demonize him as loudly and as often as you can with “the big lie.”

You call him a dictator, running a totalitarian state that is somehow composed of Communists and Socialists and Fascists. If you control the entire news cycle, and you are part of the Neocon propaganda machine, you need no evidence..just the same message repeated over and over again…the technique of the “big lie.”

The economy is helping the big lie when it comes to groups demonstrating against government. It is not unusual. The same things occurred in the 1930s, with all kinds of kooks coming out on the radio against Roosevelt. We know that the tea party organizers have made connections with a variety of extremist groups, successors to the old Aryan Nation gun-and-bomb toting anarchist militia. We know that the tea party groups have actually joined with many White Supremacist groups to hold their meetings and marches. Fox News both promotes and supports this type of violent, anti-American, anti-government rhetoric.

Fear of big government, the big lie again, has created fear on the part of many citizens and given a cause to others who were already upset, but were Republicans. You see, the tea party and similar movements are railing against the old ways. But like Senator Jim Bunning, who protested against big spending, he was protesting against himself. He was in fact one of the ringleaders of the big Republican deficit-spending spree from 2001 to 2008, resulting in $12 trillion in debt.

But the tea party people can’t rant against themselves. So they blame a man who was not in office when these things happened. They blame a man who was handed the deficit by his predecessor. The bail out of Wall Street happened in October of 2008 by George W. Bush because of policies of deregulation on his watch. Barack Obama did not take office until January of 2009.

This battle is not about health care or deficit spending or jobs. This is a battle by the Republican Party to show that they have some control over matters in Washington. They need to show that they still have some clout. If they do not, they will lose eventually. Their constituents are now the big corporations and Right Wing Think Tanks and their lobbyists. As Jim Bunning’s callous act and John Kyl and Jeff Sessions’ support for it show, they do not care whether a million Americans have the unemployment payments that were cut off through Bunning’s action.

But rather than criticizing all the time, it is important to note positive things. For example, there is a health care reform bill coming. The Democrats did eventually break the Bunning blockade and get unemployment benefits flowing again. The Democrats, the progressive party, are generating legislation that will pass in a whirlwind when the reconciliation process starts and the “super-majority” rules are suspended or disbanded. Jobs bills, green energy bills, union protection bills and more will all pass the Senate, where they have been sitting for months.

The Neocon Republicans will always, resist and complain and cry and despair and continue to use propaganda to try to scare the American people. The Progressives will continue to move forward for the American people.

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We all used to participate in the defense of our country. Now we have young people, mostly poor, trying to get ahead, who risk their lives for a college education while others, not risking their lives, go to college first.

We used to take pride in our benevolence. We see the remnants of that attitude in the remarkable outpouring of support by firemen and cops who traveled from all over the country to New York City and by all kinds of people who simply picked up and went to New Orleans, when they were needed. We all gave money to those efforts, to those areas where government wasn’t enough, and we did and still do the same for Haiti, and now Chile. But we have at least a dozen tent cities all over the country and one Republican Senator holds up unemployment benefits for 15 million Americans.

We collect clothes and toys at Christmas and collected food in stores and businesses and schools to send to Ethiopia and other far off places. We have always done our best to respond, even to the quake victims in Iran. Yet 40 Republican Senators have held up millions of jobs in legislation they have blocked for their own political gain. They literally double-crossed many who sent them to Congress to support a legion of lobbyists who contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to their campaigns.

We have changed. A lot. And not for the better.

In small towns, in the heartland, in the south, and the dry, shadow-towns of the southwest, in those areas where we often looked for down-to-earth common sense, we now hear ridiculous comments from ignorant, polarized, often hate-filled citizens who stand up and shout and vote against their own best interests. You cannot have a daily diet in the media of lies and racist attacks, couched in propaganda and survive as a decent, caring community.

There is always…always…a grain of truth in propaganda. It is designed to make you think that…yes, those Jews do own all those stores…they do seem to get a lot of their students into university. Had you been a German in the 1930s, poor or working hard in a low paying job you didn’t like, you might, just might, have said–yes, that part makes sense. And you would be on the road to disaster, and never know it until it was too late. Remember, Hitler was not hated; he was loved. No one knew the truth. They only knew what they were told.

Before we go any further, we must stipulate that Barack Obama is not the anti-Christ, not Hitler, not Stalin or Pol-Pot. He’s not even Richard Nixon. In fact, Democrats want him to be a combination of TR and FDR, with a touch of LBJ and “Give-em-Hell” Harry Truman thrown in. He is far too mild, too pandering, too centrist for most of us. We don’t like lobbyist-led Obstructionist Neoconservatives. We don’t want to get along with them. We want legislation on health care, jobs, energy, transportation and unions. We voted. We won, and we want it now.

Many Americans are on that Right Wing propaganda path. We hear it every day, following the same old line. Not against the Jews this time, but that could come, probably would come eventually. These are the old segregationists who never got over integration and the affirmative-action people who resent Blacks and Hispanics.

Some of it is justified. There are some people who get ahead because they are black but they don’t stay that way unless they’re good. And there are Hispanics who are here because they snuck in, maybe got a leg up to become citizens. Both seem to get free stuff. They go to the free clinics or they go to the emergency room. And they may have a nice car.

The fact is that very few people gain the system. There aren’t a lot of people sitting around saying that they wished that could only find a $7 per hour job so that they could have the opportunity to get free health care by waiting 8 hours in an emergency room. Everyone, virtually everyone, wants a better job, a better place to live and a better lifestyle to live in it. We all know, or should know, that in this country it is all about wealth accumulation. You own things. That is the opposite of Communism.

People really need some facts. This is no Communist or Socialist society…not even close…never was…never will be, certainly never under this President. Anyone carrying a sign that says anything about this Administration trying to turn the country Socialist or Communist is stupid. We live in a country where 1% of the people have about 35% of the wealth, the top 20% have over 85% of the wealth, and that is up almost 4% since 1983.

In general, the distribution of wealth in this country looks something like this. About 1% of the people own about a third of all assets, actually about 35%. The rest of us, the bottom 99%, own about two-thirds, actually 65%. That has fluctuated up and down a few points over the years, but has not changed appreciably since 1922. Since 1983, however, the rich have been getting richer. The top 1% has gained about 6% of the country’s wealth over the last 30 or so years. That’s a lot.

So, if you think of Communist countries like Cuba or North Korea, I don’t think you get the picture of the United States. People don’t own anything in those countries. In the United States, capitalism flourishes with about 90% of the financial assets in the hands of about 10% of the people–very wealthy people. We have many governmental departments that provide valuable services from military to health care to national parks. But so does every other capitalist country in the world.

After WWII, we were trying to pay down huge debts from the war and tax rates were at 90% on the top incomes and later 74%. The share of wealth owned by the top 1% in income actually climbed from 27% up to 34% by 1965. In other words, from 1945 to 1965, the rich got richer right in the middle of the highest taxes we ever had. Millionaires and billionaires seem to find a way to make it. Perhaps because that is how they get to be millionaires and billionaires.

But how much power does this give the top 1%. Well, if the top 1% has 35% of the wealth, they have some multiple of political clout, and it could be as much as 35 times, as someone who has none. If the top 20% of Americans have roughly 85% of the wealth, which they do, including most, about 90% of the stocks and bonds and business ownership, it makes it very hard for someone in that bottom percentile to make waves. Yet we do.

So we are much, much more highly concentrated than any other country, and even a huge adjustment, which might be something like 20%, which would be immediately noticeable, would not even bring us down to the level of–one might say–benevolent capitalist countries. “Benevolent Capitalism” is what Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen the great Catholic philosopher and orator said that we should strive for. I doubt he was a Communist.

It isn’t merely an option between totalitarian capitalism and socialism. There are stops in between. For example, in Switzerland, which has many social services, wonderful national health care, a strong security system, the top 10% owns 71% of assets. In the United States the top 10% own only 68% of assets. In Sweden, hardly a country that the Right Wing would call, strongly capitalistic, the top 10% own 58% and in Denmark, 65%. So you can be a decent human being without hoarding billions of dollars. And you can be Capitalist and have health care.

What about our deficit problems? Well, actually, between the day Ronald Reagan walked through the door to the day George W. Bush walked out, the Republicans spent approximately $10 trillion more than we had in revenues, Bill Clinton probably dumped another $1 trillion before he could get surpluses going, which he did. And Barack Obama inherited a disastrous economy and a $1.3 trillion deficit from Bush. So, yes, we’re in trouble.

On the other hand, we probably have something like $75 trillion in assets lying around, in corporations, financial assets and all kinds of enterprises going on in this country. Yes, we do have obligations stretching far into the future, but those are like utility bills you budget for and you can cut those bills by conservation measures. We will all be paying more taxes, getting slightly less in services and cutting out excess in government.

Still, before we start talking about cutting meals for the homeless, let’s ask ourselves, do we need 49,000 troops in Japan, or do we need 700 military bases around the world? Do we need two wars to find and kill 19 people when we already have too many prisoners to indict and possibly convict? And should someone who has made $5 million a year since Bush came into office, had two tax cuts during that time, and is now a part of that top 1%, should that person think of contributing a little more now that we are in trouble?

Let’s suppose we did this, just as an example. What if we raised income taxes at the top level to 40%, on people making a million or more a year. And let’s say we kept it at 40% for the first $5 million. After $5,000,000 you would have an option. You could pay 75% on the rest, or you could invest it in a manufacturing business here in the U.S. and pay no tax this year on the amount you invest, and pay capital gains of 15% on the invested amount, just as with any other capital gains. Not real estate. Not stocks or bonds or derivatives. Manufacturing or, perhaps even services, like restaurants or dry cleaners. Your tax would go back down. You would pay nothing this year on that amount that you invest, but you would pay the other as a capital gains tax on the business, at 15%.

Confiscatory tax or investment planning and job builder? You decide. Communist plot or capitalist strategy? Well, who has been making out well in this society and who has not? It is still an after-tax income of between a minimum of $600,000 and $3,000,000 ($50,000 to $250,000 a month) which should be sufficient for most people.

If we only taxed anything over this at capital gains rates, it would be a great incentive for wealthy individuals to invest in jobs in this country. That would generate far more income than the 75% we would gain from the extra tax on this individual. Yes, some of these people would become vastly more wealthy as a result. But taxes are not meant to be some kind of punitive measure.

The economy needs, we know, 100,000 jobs per month just to keep pace with population growth. We now have 15,000,000 people out of work…hard, solid numbers. That’s a lot. This is much worse than anything since the Depression and is not a Depression only because we saved the financial institutions right away and infused about $300 billion right into the economy in the first year.

Here’s where a little Communism would come in handy right now. Since 2000, and really since the early 1980s, we have seen more and more corporations do several things. First, they are bought up by an investment group. That creates debt which the investment group wants to pay off so they can get their money back. So they automate. Then they send jobs to cheaper labor markets. Who is doing this? That top 1% of our Capitalist society. They are the same people, by the way, who are paying for all that propaganda on the radio and television that says that we should not burden the rich with taxes nor should we have Social Security or Medicare.

Let’s have a structured set of taxes. Tax at port of entry those products being imported by American companies who make products abroad with foreign labor. Those excess profits that corporations are now making from cheap Chinese labor can go to duties that can be reinvested in American manufacturing for American products by American workers.

We’re not talking about raising duties high enough to make American workers at $16 an hour compete with Chinese workers at 50 cents an hour. But we have the most profitable market in the world. It shouldn’t be free to enter. How about a small, say 2%, cover charge to get in. That would generate a minimum of $30 billion a year to invest in new businesses right here in the U.S.A. We’ll put some profits back into the pockets of that 99% who do the work yet own only 65% of the assets.

Here’s the final kicker. If we are talking about power, wealth is very important because it gives people the ability to own some of that 64% of business equity that the top 1% own. Think of that. The top 1% own 64% of the business equity, the asset value of businesses, all businesses. But income is also important. If you are in the top 1%, you determine the pay scale for much of the rest of the workforce. The top 20% makes 60% of the income. That means that the top 1% pays the next 19% very well. They pay them the same amount as they take, except that it is divided up among others in that 19%. That leaves 40% of all income to be distributed among the bottom 80%.

Ok, so that bottom 80% group is a lot more workers, and a lot less money, but that is the way that it works. Here’s the thing. Far from being Socialist, we know that when income advanced about 30% or a little less since 1979, the top 1% again got about a third of all that increased income. And only the top 5% saw any real increase in income. By 2004, the top 5% made about $150 for every $100 they made in 1979. But the rest of the workforce saw no gain. They actually had wage decreases. Except for one group. The top .1%, the very top, had more income than the bottom 120 million workers in the United States combined.

No. We’re not headed for Communism or Socialism. But if we don’t begin to change tax laws and income distribution, we will be forced to make cuts of 5 or 10% or even more to Social Security and Medicare. In Europe CEOs make approximately 25 times more than the average worker. In this country they make 340 times more than the average worker and pay far less in taxes.

I don’t think we need to worry about Communism in a country where between 1990 and 2005, CEO salaries increased by 300%, while profits went up only 100% over that time and production workers’ salaries increased by only 4.3%. And that does not include the additional costs of health insurance.

On the contrary, we are sinking under the weight of the wealth at the top, but the political power they wield to distort the truth, attack the vulnerable and promote their own agenda. When you consider that the average CEO makes $3.9 million and the average worker makes $36,000 you should be able to make at least some arithmetical calculation of the problem. Ronald Reagan cut revenues in half, quadrupled the military budget and threw the economy into imbalance, where it has been ever since.

The Neoconservatives, like Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich have found an issue by using the Right Wing propaganda machine to lie about health care reform. The Neoconservatives in the Senate have found a technique by filibustering 112 times to delay needed legislation and then blame Democrats. Think about it. The only people who can benefit from killing health care reform, or killing job generating bills or killing our independent energy program or replacing the electrical grid or developing electric transportation are the very rich. They like the fact that prices and wages go down in a Depression, which is where they want us to go.

Because we are so ill-educated in this country, so many people believe the propaganda. Fox News commentators, hate groups like the Tea Party people and CPAC, who make no effort to conceal their motives, are making the case for the 1% and the 5% who own and run this country. Some are paid. Some are simply too dumb to know they are being used.

The 19%, those who make up the rest of the top 20%, the ones who are working for the oligarchy to lower your wages, take your house and keep you from getting health insurance—they are the propagandists of the Right Wing media. The average person in the bottom 80% had better wake up before it is too late.

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You may not like everything about health care reform but it is not enough for Republicans to say that we will simply stop and start over. After all, some Republicans foolishly lost their heads and contributed some good amendments to it. So, why then, did they later come out with a health care plan that is deliberately and obviously written for two groups in particular….pharmaceutical companies and liability insurance companies?

There are many doctors…some are even surgeons who are the best in their field…who literally do not know that there is no relationship whatsoever between medical liability lawsuit payments and medical liability insurance rates. Some do not want to know. Do you know why? They have a vague sense that there is nothing they can do about these high rates anyway. Insurance companies are not covered by anti-trust legislation. So there are no competitors anyway in many cases.

These are doctors, for the most part pretty bright people. Their attorneys have probably explained to some of them that when the stock market goes down, there is suddenly a strange tendency for the liability insurance rates to go up. And suddenly campaigns come out of the woodwork trying to paint trial attorneys as the people actually instigating the lawsuits, not even the persons sitting in a wheelchair, or walking with a cane, or on life support. Or carrying a damaged child.

The fact is that less than one half of one percent of all health care costs are the result of health care claims. Two things you should know. First, that these statistics come from studies done by the national association of state insurance regulators. They say that there is no relationship between the awards to individuals from tort suits and liability insurance rates.

Second, you should know that the information on public and private awards is kept by a group, paid for by insurance companies to keep the actual records. So the information comes from the doctor and is not made unavailable to any outside person or media entity. We do know, however, that doctors win something like 62% of all lawsuits. Many are dismissed. And not long ago, the average amount paid was known to be $420,000. So much for huge multi-million dollar payouts.

So that covers the liability part of the Republican plan, which would devastate any ability by a citizen to be awarded money in sufficient amounts to recover from a serious mistake on the part of a physician or surgeon. The second part is very simple. The Republican plan spends a great deal of time protecting the pharmaceutical companies from competitive situations, from negotiating prices with government entities, and from having products re-imported into the United States.

The point is this. The Republicans used the filibuster to stall health care reform. Why would they do that, if they were serious? They had plenty of opportunities in the Senate to go over and over these issues for months. Now, if they lost those issues, well, welcome to the club. The Democrats lost on the Iraq war, on prescription drugs, on labor issues, and many other issues for 8 years. The size of the health care bill was in part because of the Republican inclusion, not their exclusion. If Democrats would have followed the key wishes of the Democratic majority, this would have been a single-payer plan like Canada or Germany or Switzerland.

The Republicans say that the reason that they are using the filibuster is because it is an old Senate rule and a tradition. But the fact is that the last time it was a point of contention was when Karl Rove and Dick Cheney were lining up any law graduate they could find from Liberty University or other barely accredited law schools to become judges and U.S. Attorneys. The news media reported on Federalist Society lawyers in offices in Washington poring over the qualifications, Right Wing attorneys and interviewing them, not to mention the records of local judges and others who might sit on Federal appeals courts and Federal district courts around the country.

The problem came to a head when, after passing so many of these ideologically Neoconservative candidates, the Bush Administration offered Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. Both were considered by many, based on their records, shills for the Neoconservatives. So the Democrats began to react with the filibuster or the threat of it.

We now see that was the Democrats trying to protect us, unsuccessfully, against the kinds of things that eventually happened…for example, the Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to buy electoral offices of candidates for national, regional and local offices. But the Republicans threatened to change the rules of the Senate completely and ram through any kind of legislation they wanted.

Now, after 112 uses of that filibuster, as opposed to the eight or nine that the Democrats used years ago to try to prevent the packing of the legal system with Karl Rove appointees, the Democrats have had enough. This is very important stuff. And there is very little reason, except for the opposition of the hugely profitable health insurance industry, that should keep Americans from having affordable health care as every other nation in the advanced world has today…and have had for an entire generation. We are not behind by two or three or five years. We are behind by twenty or thirty years at a minimum!

So it is time to end filibusters and to pass health care on reconciliation. And you need to tell your Senator and your House member that very thing. Today. We cannot let this opportunity pass to prevent another disaster like the recent Supreme Court decision. We may not even survive that one. We need to pass health care reform now.

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The danger comes from Washington. That is where the seat of power lies, where the levers will be pulled, the gears started in motion that will change America. There is a small group within that larger group. These are the people paid to implement the policy and make no mistake about it, they are coming for you. They want to establish a United States of America that is one-half forward-looking, hi-tech democracy, and one-half Latin-American plutocracy.

The first part is to continue a segmented manufacturing base, small but highly technological, where the United States can continue to dominate using its knowledge base. They want to continue to dominate the world economy for at least 50 and maybe 100 more years on a segment of patented export products. They also want to control a large segment of the world’s arms manufacture, and export those products. The same technological superiority that may give us an export advantage in industrial goods will give us, they realize, an edge in military hardware. We will have the latest and best military equipment with which to defend ourselves. Other countries will have military hardware that becomes obsolete for the American military.

The problem is that this relatively segmented manufacturing objective is probably not moral…creating an export industry out of weapons of war. Even if it were moral, it would not provide enough employment for the additional workers that we will have in that same 50 to 100-year period. Unless we change our policies, Americans will by and large exist on a consumer economy as it exists today.

Most Americans, therefore, will have lower wages from a small group of manufacturing firms and primarily from service jobs which they will use to buy cheaper goods imported from third-world manufacturing facilities around the world. American companies will continue to outsource manufacturing abroad to contractors who ignore human rights. Americans will have no choice but to buy cheap products from discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Target.

This is not new. Even with watchdog groups and the U.S. Department of Labor and the Justice Department involved, manufacturers get away with such practices every day. Sooner or later we must decide if we will become part of the plutocracy or opposed to it.

We already have the beginnings of a two-tiered society into which some people have already been grandfathered. This would be the owners and managers of the huge international corporations. Just as great wealth can be passed from generation to generation, a position in society can be passed on for a long time. In Europe, some positions in society exist that began nearly a thousand years ago and have survived war, revolution, economic devastation and even exile.

Today, we use the term “Neoconservative” or “Right Wing” to define a group of people whose philosophy generally relates to smaller government, more independence of action, if not thought, who want to be self-sufficient and resent mandates from government such as taxes, and social regulations. They are aligned with powerful financial and business interests and see their future as inexorably interwoven. They are less socially tolerant of others’ rights and are more religiously superstitious and dogmatic. As such, they demand more Party loyalty and less questioning of the validity of ideology established by the leaders.

The Neoconservatives have expanded from those who could well afford such a position, i.e., those who were affluent enough to be independent of most government services and regulations. The current Neoconservatives are more dependent on government services but substitute the Party for government. Consequently, they become more beholden to the Party for employment. It is self reinforcing.

Many of the line members of the Neoconservative Party have clearly been inspired by propaganda and conservative media and hold a very impractical vision of their lives. They are manipulated into believing somehow that the realities of American life will not apply to them, e.g., loss of health care insurance, loss of a job or home foreclosure.

The original Conservatives began as a sort of advocacy group for “Manifest Destiny” adherents. They basically espoused a political philosophy that put America first, expressed in military security, loyalty, diplomatic dominance, and economic superiority. In daily life, it was a philosophy that sought as much independence from government as possible. Shed government regulations and live life as freely as possible.

The Conservatives, even in the early days included a number of fringe groups that had other motives. One group, the John Birchers, went from being simply patriotic to becoming a thought police. Another, the Southern Wing went from being somewhat socially exclusive to being socially intolerant.

As America’s tolerance and social conscience grew, so did the inclusion of more different types and classes of people into Conservatism. Some popular national politicians, pundits and economists adapted some of their ideas into conservative politics. Others adapted some Conservative politics into their lives. The movement became more acceptable, if still considered somewhat radical.

Then, with the election of Ronald Reagan, everything changed. Facing dangerous and intractable inflation, and on the heels of a series of international challenges, the country saw in Reagan a strong leader. Not only was he elected, but his charisma and particularly his wholesome appearance carried into office many others in government. Strangely enough, his strongest leadership, on fighting inflation, saw some of his worst poll numbers.

Unfortunately, he also carried with his wave of popularity some of America’s least socially conscious legislators. Senators and Congressmen from the South, remnants of the old Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party, who had finally been marginalized by Lyndon Johnson and by the election of Jimmie Carter were suddenly thrust back into power as Republicans. They came in on the coat tails of this man who seemed like any tolerant, small-town, Midwestern politician. In fact, they came as in the belly of a Trojan horse.

Now we had a new group of Conservatives. They embodied the worst aspects of Richard Nixon and the worst aspects of old ante-bellum Southern politics. They integrated that intolerance, plus antinomian attitude of the Nixonites into the new arrogant, unrepentant, Neoconservative Party.

Because of the Reagan charisma, they grew in extraordinarily large numbers. But, also because of the Reagan charisma, average Party members went along, didn’t question and didn’t challenge. They accepted the Reagan dogma, “The nine most dangerous words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’” at face value without questioning or wondering if it was accurate.

The fact was that in 1980 more Americans were being helped by Social Security and by Medicare and Medicaid than at any time in our history. We had a society that had finally ended an unnecessary and costly Asian war, created civil rights and an affirmative action plan for the descendents of slaves and victims of Reconstruction and segregation, and were building a secondary and university educational system second to none in the world.

The country had been through a very challenging time and had come out the other side more tolerant, more prosperous and better prepared to face the future. We still made and bought more ugly, inefficient American cars here in the U.S. than anywhere. We still made shoes and furniture and some television sets and appliances here. We had about 19% of American workers who had good wages and inexpensive health care and some of whom are today, 2010, retired in Florida on the pensions that were negotiated by their unions.

By the way…yes, we can switch those pensions in future years to 401Ks and it will work out fine, but….we need guarantees by companies that they will not walk away from even those obligations, if the company decides to simply declare bankruptcy. Many have done just that. That is why we need unions more than ever, simply to protect workers rights.

But there was Reagan. First, he began the process that we see today. He challenged the American people to revive their faith in America. It was wonderful, except for one thing. We had not lost our faith in America. We simply had some pretty bad inflation and some damage done to our faith in the Presidency, damaged by Nixon and by some mistrust of Ford’s pardon of Nixon.

The Carter presidency, immediately preceding Reagan, was damaged by the same inflation that hit Ford’s short term, by early Arab energy shocks and by the beginnings of what we now know to be total, 24/7 media envelopment. Carter did not start the Iranian situation, nor would he ever have approved it, but it brought him down, and brought us Reagan.

And that put us on the one-way road to where we are today. As a country, we trusted Reagan. We relaxed and went to sleep on the job of monitoring him, and he apparently did the same thing. Several things were wrong but the mistakes were difficult to prove. The military buildup that cost us so much money, trillions of dollars was unnecessary.

Top military officials knew it as did the CIA, but they kept quiet. The military can be courageous in battle and fearful in politics. They are also subject to the whims of Congressional funding. So they are supportive of a President who wants to expand the military industrial complex. A very dangerous situation.

The Reagan tax cuts basically sliced U.S. revenues in half. Those tax rates not only have never been restored, but they have not even been raise to half of what they were before. Fixed costs of running government have been substantially reduced but never enough to balance the budget except for a few years under Clinton. Reagan cut the top rate 74% down to 28%. Just imagine that you went from $74,000 per year income to $28,000 income, even if you cut your household expenses by ten or even twenty percent. Could you survive? Not for very long and that is just exactly what happened to the United States treasury.

The government began to bleed red ink. By the end of Reagan’s term we were losing over $250 billion a year and had already amassed $2.14 trillion in debt. Ross Perot saw this and saw the inevitable result and he ran for President on a platform of reducing the debt, receiving 20% of the vote.

No one made the adjustments in government expenditures before the tax cuts and no one except Bill Clinton and to a lesser degree, the first President Bush, has been able to restore meaningful revenues. Bush I and Bush II both, for different reasons, increased the national debt to staggering amounts, Bush I to about $4 trillion and Bush II taking the roughly $5 trillion that Clinton left him and pushing it to $11 trillion with another $1.2 trillion left on President Obama’s doorstep.

That is why we are now $12 trillion in debt and why it is now a serious and unavoidable problem. Now, the Neoconservatives, the ones who want independence from government and “freedom” (although when asked many of them have no idea what specifically they want when they cry for more “freedom’)…these people want to cut your Social Security and Medicare benefits, among other things.

This means that they do not want health care reform, which they see as a new entitlement program. They see Medicare as costing them money. While they comprise a large segment of the middle class, which means that they represent for the most part the middle class or the lower middle class, they do not see that inevitably social services will have some influence on their lives.

So the Neoconservative middle class is being sold a bill of goods by the Neoconservative leadership that they do not need and will not need a social safety net. Forget for a minute that every other industrial nation in the world, many with as large a population as about half of ours, or Western Europe as large as ours or very small nations with as few as five million…which makes it harder to do large-scale social programs….have much more extensive programs than ours.

Western Europeans, for example, as a whole have better guaranteed retirement, longer vacations, shorter working hours, better pay, free health care, better transportation, unemployment that is on average about 40% of pay and lasts for up to 3 or 4 years.

Under the current trend of the U.S. government revenues and spending, the middle to lower class Neoconservatives, whether they want to or not, will lose at least 25% of Social Security benefits when the funds run out, unless something is done. At the same time as Social Security is being cut, Medicare costs will be increased, for the same reason. So they will receive less money and have a higher cost of living.

It is generally accepted that most people cannot currently live on Social Security alone. Because of Bush’s Great Recession, fewer and fewer people have equity in their homes, 3 million a year are actually losing their homes and a very large number over a million a year are going into bankruptcy. Furthermore, as we head into the teeth of the Baby Boomer retirement, underway right now, more and more people are coming onto the Social Security and Medicare rolls, adding to the pressure.

We have a huge shortfall in revenues, thanks to the Reagan tax cuts and the Bush Jr. tax cuts and the two wars in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. We eventually raised the top rate…and that is where the bulk of the money is…back up to 35%, but that is still less than half of what it was when Reagan took over. Many people, because of those higher rates, had tax breaks. Today they still have them.

So there were several unintended consequences. Once you give tax breaks to one group, you have to give them to another group. So not only did the big boys get tax breaks, but everyone got tax breaks. Now, there are many more people who pay no taxes at all. And may who do, pay very little. And the tax breaks that the rich got when taxes were much higher are still there. Those who inherit assets, keep more and pay less. Farmers get more. Capital gains pays less. So our total bill to the people to run the country is much, much less than it used to be. And our tax revenues are disastrously lower.

So here is the crux of your problem. The Neoconservatives and their financial backers know this. The Neoconservative rank-and-file who are influenced by the media who in turn are influenced by “think tanks” like the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute and the Hudson Institute and the Chamber of Commerce…who are paid for by massively wealthy oil, mining and media conglomerates.

Now of course they are paid for also by the hospital, pharmaceutical and health care industries. They all have the same solution. Cut social services and raise your taxes. Cut Social Security or privatize it altogether. Reduce Medicare services while charging higher co-pays and capping what Medicare will pay for. You won’t hear anyone suggesting that we return to anything like the former tax rates on the wealthy that kept the country solvent.

You wonder why 40 Senators have voted against every health care reform bill suggested by anyone. They are paid, through campaign contributions, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to vote against any kind of health care plan that will change the status quo. You can check the contributions they get at Sourcewatch.org, or at Opensecrets.org or at the federal election commission (fec.org).

The point is this. You paid into Social Security your entire life. You paid a very high percentage of money into it so that it would be there. It is, in fact, insurance and you paid your premiums every time you received a paycheck. But the government, under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and probably under Obama, has used all that money in addition to all the money in the Treasury and even more money borrowed from Americans and Arabs and Chinese to pay for tax cuts. These were tax cuts that were begun under Reagan and were raised in very small amounts, a few percentage points by Bush I and Clinton (who actually was somehow able to balance the budget three years out of eight. Then, in 2001 and 2003, Bush II cut tax again for the wealthy and reduced taxes down the line for everyone. This made things immensely worse, especially during extremely expensive wars.

These tax cuts under Bush II and his wildly spending Republican Administrations, added the last $5 trillion of debt. These are the same Neoconservative Republicans who now—still working for those huge corporate “think tanks” and the huge numbers of lobbyists, over thirty thousand of them in Washington—want to raise your taxes and cut your social services. There is no reason that you should tolerate this. It is unfair in the extreme. Let’s see why.

First of all, corporations now pay almost no taxes. They pay about 7% of all taxes collected by the Federal government and that is down by about half from what they used to pay before Reagan, when U.S. manufacturing and corporations were the envy of the world. Are they now? Not even close.

A man who made a million dollars a year, and there are plenty who make more than a million a year…CEOs of health insurance companies alone average $12 million a year…got a tax break under George W. Bush of about $43,000 per million. So if the man had been asked to pay $350,000 on a million and keep $650,000 (35% tax rate without any deductions) he got another $43,000. Not a lot on $350,000 in taxes but it allowed him to keep almost $700,000 out of a million. Problem is very few people pay the entire 35% but they still got the $43,000. Bush and Cheney, both worth over $20,000,000, paid less than 25% effective taxes to the IRS on incomes that were in the $400,000 range.

Now let’s take your situation. Let’s say that you make $80,000. You pay income taxes, state taxes and FICA taxes. When you retire, let’s say that at age 67 you get $2,000 a month. But let’s say that it has to be cut to $1500 a month because we don’t have enough money to pay it. That’s one of our big crises…not enough money in Social Security trust funds. So one of the big crises that they are worried about is paying you your own money.

Well, one year of that millionaire’s tax bonus, which he got by borrowing from your Social Security, which the government got by borrowing from China, would have paid for that difference between $1500 and $2,000 which might—just might–be enough to live on…for 7 years! And if we assume that the multi-millionaire borrowed that $43,000 from Social Security for at least 5 of the 8 years of the Bush administration, it would pay that difference in your Social Security shortfall for 35 years!

So my question to you is this: are you a Neoconservative who is willing to give big tax breaks to the rich in order to reduce your monthly retirement income at a time when you may have no other income, or at the least, a fixed income and no job? Bush decided, as had Reagan, that he would under-fund the government. That meant, in effect, borrowing from your Social Security insurance. You paid into it. And your Medicare—you pay into it.

So how about a repayment of that loan? No more taxes on you after you retire, but now, let’s start collecting some of the money that multimillionaires who will not ever need Social Security to retire, borrowed from you. Do you think that the Neoconservative corporations, like the health insurance companies who fund Republican Senators who have no problem whatsoever shutting down this government will allow tax increases on their rich friends without a fight? If one Senator, as Senator Bunning of Kentucky did, does not mind holding up millions of unemployment checks from people who desperately need them, do you think that the Neoconservatives will voluntarily see you receive your full benefits? By taxing their wealthy friends and big corporations?

Not bloody likely. If you want your fair share of what you have paid in to your Social Security from a country that you may have, as many of us did, served in its time of need, you had better prepare for a fight. And the Neocons have big weapons, like Fox News and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck and their allies like Rush Limbaugh. They will make you seem like ungrateful, long-lost relatives, shiftless and dissolute.

You cannot merely vote any longer. You must get out and work and march and organize among any of your friends who are not convinced of the long-term plan of the Neoconservatives to eliminate the middle class. Watch C-SPAN. Listen to the remedies from the bankers and the Federal Reserve and the Peterson Group, the ones looking to stabilize the finances of the country. They send the same message…cut middle class benefits. We can no longer “sustain” these kinds of entitlement programs.

If the people who paid into them aren’t entitled to them—if people who pay insurance premiums aren’t entitled to the insurance they pay for—then who is entitled to it? The people who didn’t need it but borrowed it and spent it? The people who got rich on the unnecessary, tragic, war on Iraq? Halliburton? Blackwater? Who is entitled?

You. You are entitled to get back the money that was stolen and given to the rich. You can get it back and save this country if you vote for officials who will say that it is time to raise federal income taxes, particularly on the rich, to much higher levels, to 45 or 55% of income at the top margin. Then we need some other taxes as well. We need to raise our state taxes around the country until these states’ budgets are balanced. Then we need to make them build reserves so that they never again become unbalanced.

We need to put some taxes on imports coming from all the countries that got the jobs from people who should have made those products here. We need to cut our military budgets, shut down these wars and start to use more diplomacy. We need to use our intelligence resources, and they are much, much greater than you know, to find and kill terrorists, not make a complete war out of something that is an entirely different type of military action. We could save hundreds of billions a year and be more effective. Right now our military budget is about half of our discretionary budget. We spend more than all the other countries of the world…combined…on military and wars.

All these things and more can restore our solvency and insure that you do not have to borrow money to retire as these millionaires did to live the kinds of lives that they wanted. This was a sad era in our country’s history and it is not over. But you can make a difference. Do not accept what the Neoconservatives want you to think is the only option. It is not. It is time that they paid back the loans they took from the American People.

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