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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They are somewhat right, but, as usual, wrong on the most important aspect of what Americans want. The fact is that there are a number of reasons why health care reform is urgent right now. Costs are out of control, premiums and denials are particularly egregious to the average American family. And while the numbers have gone down, it is incorrect to say that Americans do not want health care reform. But it is true that they have been confused about it and are not as enthusiastic as they had been.

So here are some questions asked by a NEWSWEEK poll recently that reflect what Americans think of health care reform right now in late February 2010.

Do you approve or disapprove of the way health care reform is being handled?

40% approve of the way the President is handling health care reform.
27% approve of what the Democrats in Congress are doing and only
21% approve of what Republicans in Congress are doing.

Wow. What a change in one year. After all the Republican lies, the Newt Gingrich participation, the health industry lobbyists, the Fox News and America’s Health Insurance Plans and FreedomWorks sponsored health scare campaigns about “death panels” and “government takeover” the American People now say, the following.

What is your overall opinion of Obama health care plan?

40% of All Americans favor it
15% of Republicans
72% of Democrats
26% of Independents

Now – How about the specifics….we’ll just do the Favorable percentages.

Insurance Exchanges 81% Favor it
Cover Pre-existing conditions 76% “
Require businesses to cover 75% “
Can’t drop coverage 59% “
Government option 50% “

Taxes on expensive existing plans and fines on people who don’t have health care were not popular. They were in the 20%+ range.

Finally, when asked…after seeing what is in the bill an average of 48%, still fewer than 50% say that they are in favor of it….but….that may be the result of the fact that only 18% of Republicans favor the bill. The Democrats are naturally heavily in favor–83%. Independents go up somewhat but are still skeptical—34% saying that they are in favor.

Now it should be said that while only 48% of all those surveyed favored the plan, fewer, only 43%, said that they opposed it.

So, it would appear that two things are present in this NEWSWEEK survey. First, when some people hear the details they are moderately more interested. The Democrats are probably less affluent and therefore more concerned about having the ability to get health care. But also Republicans are probably more influenced by the media, which in the case of Republicans is often media like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and others on conservative radio and Fox News.

So, the question becomes, should we have health care reform? The answer seems to be a modified “yes.” The problem is we cannot simply let those have health care reform who want it and then let others not opt for health insurance. We have to have a vote for health care. The majority will rule. Some people will keep their health care. Others will get new insurance. But some reforms seem almost inevitable now.

Remember, many Republicans need health care but they have been sold a bill of goods by Right Wing commentators. Given the fact that the Republicans are skewed by propaganda against health care, the $400 million in lobbying money and the lobbyist campaigns, like the FreedomWorks tea parties and the organized misstatement of facts, it should not be surprising that they poll at less than 50%. According to the Right Wing commentators and Right Wing politicians like Michelle Bachmann and John Boehner, this is a program that is a government takeover of health care that will kill your grandmother and raise taxes through the roof. If those things were true, Democrats would not vote for it either. .

This bill will do good things. The health insurance industry is against it. They are now making hundreds of billions of dollars a year in the monopolistic, arbitrary, profit-oriented system where top executives, dozens of them are making a million dollars a year or more while many Americans

Another Poll, the Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, in its most recent polling says that a total of 43% either strongly or somewhat support the health care reform bill while 43% either strongly or somewhat oppose it. This tracking poll has been back and forth sometimes supporting and sometimes opposing by a point or two for some time.

On the other hand, when people are asked: “Do you think the country would be better off or worse off, if Congress passed health care, the numbers are a little better for health care reform. For example in early February 2010, it was 45% Better Off, versus 34% Worse Off. And it goes like that….42-37, 45-31, 54-27 going back through 2009. So, clearly people think that things would be better off with health care, but many still think that things could be worse.

The Kaiser Foundation poll clearly indicates that people suggest that the Congress pass the legislation that has already passed the House and Senate. No one wanted to wait for a perfect bill or put it off until next year or stop working on it for now. 32% said to pass it now, which was much higher that the other options.

And finally, when people were asked if they would be more or less likely to vote for a candidate who had supported health care, the answer was clearly that they would be more likely to vote for a person who supported health care reform and less likely to vote for someone who had not. To be fair an equal number of people said that it would not make much difference.

In the Kaiser ongoing poll, the other issues, denial of coverage for prior conditions, subsidies for low income taxpayers, closing the prescription drug bill’s “donut hole”, or expanding Medicaid all those numbers were substantially higher, i.e., either extremely important or very important to those polled.

So what do we know? From these polls at least, we discover that when people go deeper into the bill, they understand its value and the more in favor of health care reform they become. And, at the very least, because this bill has been worked on for so long, by so many and addresses problems that they can recognize, they want it passed.

In other words, the American people do want health care passed…this health care plan….and they want it done now.

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If we are not in a depression, then certainly we are in a condition that closely mirrors the conditions coming out of our Great Depression. We have about 15% effective unemployment. As the country came out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, it also had 14-to-15% unemployment. Now we are in a situation where people who had unemployment and COBRA protection are coming to the end. And the Republicans do not want to extend it. It has to be done soon to extend unemployment benefits for another period beginning on March 1st.

That is causing anxieties but so is the housing situation. The housing market is down drastically. An anticipated 3.5% increase, that economists thought would result from the extension of the $8,000 new homes tax credit to April 2010 did not materialize. Instead the numbers fell by 11.2% in January to the lowest number since these kinds of records have been kept. Overall, since home prices began to fall in 2007, they have dropped by 36%.

When home prices fall and the value of the mortgage exceeds the home’s price, there is often trouble for the homeowner. There were 2.8 million foreclosures in 2009, and another 3 million are on track to foreclose this year. That means a lot of people out of their homes. That has caused another problem.

Tent cities have grown up in many areas of the country. They have sprung up in Columbus, Ohio and Springfield, IL. They have been around a while in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chattanooga and Portland. Outside Disneyland people have set up tent cities in the woods in several counties with 8,000 adults and 1,500 children living there. In Reno an area recently opened that has about 150 people.

A report by the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization—yes we do have one—published early February 2010, says that about 5.7 million people receive food each week from a food pantry. This is an increase of about 54% over the last survey of this kind. In all, about 37 million people—one in eight Americans, including 14 million children–received food from a private hunger-relief service last year.

If Congress does not act in time, although they are expected to, there will be 1.2 million people whose unemployment and COBRA benefits will expire. With only a week to go, it is the worst kind of anxiety-ridden “chicken” that the government is playing with 90% tax-paying, law abiding citizens who need and should have every expectation of that assistance….without having the additional burden of wondering if it will expire.

To top it all off, Alan Greenspan who has sat at the head of the table on economic affairs for the last 30 years, studied conditions and been more agreeable to let both public and private economics play themselves out…this most qualified observer…now says that this is the most serious financial crisis in our history.
But, frankly, we hear much less about it than we should.

While much of American media simply ignores the seriousness of the economy, another group is actively trying to diminish its effects. An unintended consequence of a decision made by President Clinton in the mid 1990s, meant to expand media into new areas resulted in the control of large segments of our media by small groups of people. Some of those people already had a political agenda. Some were ultra-conservative oil men from Texas. Others were simply large corporations.

And finally there was one man, Rupert Murdoch, who decided to not only control a large commercial television network, Fox Broadcasting, but also many other Right Wing media. He began a cable news network which has little to recommend it from a news standpoint, but he hired the former head of the Republican Party, an extremely Right Wing, Conservative, partisan and propagandistic individual, Roger Ailes, to run it. It became the unofficial media arm of the Republican Party.

Today there are almost no Liberal or Progressive radio commentators on the air. There are almost no radio stations or networks, fewer than ten percent of all radio stations, owned by Liberals or Progressives. The 90% that are owned by Conservatives are hyper-political and spend as much as 24-hours attacking, literally attacking Progressive legislation and leaders. This means of course that they attack things like jobs and labor, health care reform, tariffs on imported products and people who object to sending jobs abroad.

Of course, now that Democrats are in power, and now that they have the American worker on the ropes, they object to higher deficits that would be caused temporarily by stimulating the economy. So to keep the American worker from regaining ground and keep them continually falling economically, they are hammering on all these media outlets about “fiscal conservatism.” They cannot scream loud enough or fast enough about how the stimulus (that created between 700,000 and 2 million jobs already) has failed, even though many have no problem standing for photos about the 10,000 jobs here or the 25,000 jobs there created by stimulus grants in their area. Then the next day they deny that any jobs were created.

So here’s the problem. Nationwide, 85% to 90% of the people are employed. We have 10 to 15% out of work and really hurting. But the media is owned by the corporations. Corporations fund their lobbyists on K-Street. The lobbyists, who were basically not allowed to hire any Democrats from 2000 on, fund both the Neoconservative members of Congress and the Neoconservative groups like Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute and untold others. They simply will not let the truth get out, or, if it does get out, they immediately run seminars and ad campaigns against it.

At least 70% of Americans, in the beginning, said that they were in favor of health care reform. The Republicans (and a few Democrats) took the $400 million that the health care industry put up to fight it. Newt Gingrich and Richard Armey left what they were doing to start two independent groups to fight health care with a variety of methods. Gingrich, who dedicated himself to defeating the Clinton health care bill, for purely commercial, lobbyist-pandering, campaign funding reasons, started a new group, called The Center for Health Transformation. It is much slicker and more subtle than his previous efforts and probably more secretive than necessary, given that we know he’s out to kill any kind of reform.

Dick Armey’s group FreedomWorks, funded by the Koch Family foundation, became the tea party groups. The idea that these were spontaneous groups is belied by the fact that their “convention” attracted only 600 attendees. The group that elected Scott Brown was the hard Right of the Republican Party, the hard core Neocons who went up there or put money into the campaign when they saw they had a chance because of the miserable job the Democratic candidate was doing. There has been a lot of pushing and shoving about who the tea baggers are and Americans for Prosperity claims a piece and others. But the fact is that they are by and large a bunch of Right Wing racists. You only have to go to YouTube and look at some video. You’ll get it in about 30 seconds.

We’re not hearing about some of the solutions because the opposition is running a counterattack on a steady basis in the media. Like the shortage of oil and gas and our dangerous dependency on foreign oil. The oil industry lobby is running a continuous campaign talking about how we must fund more drilling and how healthy it is for us to put more drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico or your backyard. And then they fund anti-conservation groups and members of Congress to kill alternative energy legislation. Everything that the big corporations do not want is referred to as that “job-killing” bill of whatever kind.

We know that the green energy jobs bill put forth by Senator Boxer and Senator Kerry will easily—easily—employ as many as five million Americans in jobs that simply cannot be outsourced. It will improve the atmosphere. It will enable electric and flex fuel vehicles. It will be the single biggest defense measure we could initiate because it will eliminate the power of the Arab cartel.

We need more wind, solar and other sources of electricity and a new grid to distribute it. It is a major investment that will pay dividends for fifty to one hundred years. So where are the jobs? Where is the investment? Until now, the Republicans have been holding up this kind of legislation in the Senate. On any given bill like these…health care, energy, etc…the Republicans use a technique to require the Democrats to put up 60 votes. Thus far they have been able to pick off certain Democratic Senators who are not fully committed to the people they represent, but certain interests who fund them.

Senators Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut have held up a lot of progressive legislation. So now the Democrats may try to abolish that rule and act on what is called “reconciliation” in the Senate but what most people would simply call a “simple majority.” All the Democrats will need is 50 Senators and the Vice President to vote on a bill and it passes.

If Democrats could begin to pass legislation with only the “reconciliation” numbers of 51 votes in the Senate, we could have five million energy jobs, work on the energy grid, social safety net in place for a year, SBA investment in jobs, health care available and costs coming down, and labor laws that would allow unions to come back into the marketplace again to take up job issues like denying corporations the complete ability to send jobs overseas at will or cut wages and benefits to the bone.

It is a grim picture right now, and that is before the fall elections when, thanks to the Supreme Court, elections will not be fought on television. Corporations can wipe out any attempt by the Democrats to compete in the media. They have from ten to one hundred times more money and can bring it right down to election eve, dumping ads in a market. They can buy any House member or Senate member who wants to be elected badly enough.

But there still is hope. Everyone, Republican or Democrat, who really is concerned for even the diminished middle-class existence that so many have experienced recently should be working towards one thing….encouraging, threatening, cajoling and supporting Democratic Senators to use reconciliation now to pass health care, jobs, energy and long-term fiscal planning programs. The people must see that the government can work for them. If they do, the corporations…Supreme Court or no Supreme Court…will not take over this country.

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Yes, indeed. It was the best of times for the health care industry in 2009. And the worst of times for their customers. And it continues in 2010.

Let’s get right to it.

Wellpoint, UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Aetna and Humana…the top five health insurers, earned a combined $12.2 billion last year, 2009. That was an increase of 56% over 2008, in what is likely to be the 2nd worst economic climate in our country’s history after the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Humana alone earned $452 million in the 4th quarter of 2009 from Medicare Advantage Plans. Now why is that significant? Because these are people on fixed incomes, many of them poor. But that is not the worst of it. As the economy tanked, Humana actually made more in 2009 than in 2008. In 2008 it earned $267 million in the 4th quarter. In 2009, $452 million…a 70% increase!

In 2009 there were at least 7 million more unemployed, several million foreclosures, over a thousand banks closed, $700 million in government money poured into Wall Street to save the financial system and an $800 billion stimulus bill that should have been large enough to say to the health insurance industry: enough already! But it wasn’t enough for the greedy CEOs of health insurance firms.

At the same time that seniors and others are suffering, CEOs of these companies are averaging more than $12 million a year. To pay for these big salaries, the health care companies are draining the household earnings of senior citizens. Californians saw their Anthem Blue Cross rates go up, and will go up 39 percent this year. Insurance premium increases of 56%, 24% and 23% have been posted in Michigan, Connecticut and Maine respectively.

And who are the Senators from those states? The two Michigan Senators, Levin and Stabenow are strong proponents of health care reform. But Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a Neocon who calls himself an Independent and both Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine voted against health care reform. Both are Neoconservative Republicans, who each receive substantial amounts of money from the health care industry.

A staggering and extremely troubling figure from Health and Human Services shows that their investigation uncovered an astonishing 250% profit for the health insurance industry’s ten top companies between 2008 and 2009. One year! A 250% increase in profits.

While individuals were struggling in the worst of times, trying simply to find health insurance, Ronald A. Williams was living the best of times. The CEO of Aetna health insurance made a total of $38,120,000 last year alone.
H. Edward Hanway of Cigna took a big hit last year. He made only $10,270,000, which was only half his average over the last five years during which period he has earned a total of $121,350,000.

Stephen J. Hemsley, CEO of UnitedHealth Group is not interested in letting you know how much he made last year or the year before. But you can come close enough. In 2007, he made $13,100,000. He has at least $56 million in stock. So if he gambled all his earnings in 2005 and 2006 and made no more in 2008 and 2009 than he did in 2007, over the last five years he still would have made $95,300,000. Not bad. No tag days for Mr. Hemsley. The same cannot be said for most of his customers.

In a relatively equal opportunity world of excess, Angela Braly of WellPoint did very well. She had compensation of $9,844, 212 in 2008 after earning $9,094,271 in 2007.

So, can we simply agree that there are a lot of costs being borne by the American People that we may be able to at least spread around to a large group of participants? We can add another 35 million, which will bring costs down. There are other incentives for states and insurance companies to bring down costs, like more competition, and having insurance pools that spread across state lines.

The Republicans have not been concerned with cost cutting. Perhaps that is because they are, on the whole, more affluent. Perhaps it is because they often move from Capitol Hill to K-Street seamlessly and K-Street probably does pretty well by the insurance firms for whom they lobby incessantly.

Even so, they cannot say that they had no chance to participate in the health care debate. They had to be forced into it. But, supporting their health insurance patrons and the status quo, they had few constructive ideas.

The President’s bill includes a number of ideas that the Neocons in Congress put forward. They were also put forward by the Democrats, as well as the bulk of reform. Nonetheless, the President has listed them as Republican ideas.

They pretend that their own “health care reform” bill, which has nothing new and as main provisions only guarantees for drug companies and medical liability for incompetent doctors, is the extent of their effort. But we can be pretty sure that the proposals that are included will be touted as Republican the closer we get to an actual vote.

Among them are:
Personal Responsibility Incentives through wellness programs.
Medical liability reform research
Extension of dependent coverage to age 26
Automatic enrollment or employee opt-out in employer health care programs
Health care providers database to monitor participation and potential fraud
New Medicare fraud safeguards
Monitoring of community mental health centers
Various proposals to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse

So Republicans cannot say that they were excluded. They proposed these very same ideas, whether in their own plans or as amendments to the plans that have become the final plan put forward by President Obama.
So what is the President’s proposed health care plan. Here it is, in very accurate terms but not legislative language.
It will improve affordability and accountability. A large tax cut, a subsidy, will be available so that everyone will be able to afford good, reliable health care. That is done also by mandating health care more competitive. So, with lower costs, and subsidies, everyone will be able to afford health care.

It will be paid for, not by government borrowing but by a combination of individual premiums, by substitution of some health care subsidies for other current government costs, and by some “sin” taxes.

The relatively small excise tax on health care plans over $27,500 for executives and those who were given them as tax-free perks will not take place until 2018, but, if necessary, will be used as an additional means of paying for the bill.

There will also be a shift of hundreds of thousands of people onto Medicare from Medicare Advantage. That will even save more because Medicare Advantage, a private system, like others, is raising its rates dramatically ahead of a possible public option. This will be a cost-savings to those people and a huge cost-saving for the government. It will also line up the system for future improvements in Medicare services and delivery. In addition, the prescription drug bill “donut hole” will be completely eliminated.

To insure that there will not be mishandling, new government regulations will set up severe guidelines for possible waste, fraud and abuse by hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and individuals. (Republicans like the part about individuals potentially being investigated.) Government regulations will also insure that individuals on private health care plans cannot be discriminated against for pre-existing conditions and cannot be denied care.

In addition to making health care available to everyone, a number of steps will be taken to improve quality of health care, within the health care system itself. Medicare and Medicaid will be substantially improved. More doctors will be educated, particularly in general practice. With the worry about denial of insurance removed, all medical records can now be shared among those responsible for health care. One day soon, hopefully, your medical records will be available to you anywhere in the world you may be.

A much stronger emphasis will be placed on wellness as both a quality of life and as a cost saving measure. Many more facilities will be created to address wellness and health at an early stage.

Despite Republican misinformation, medical panels will assess new and promising technologies so that a very large number of specialists can come to a much quicker consensus about new treatments and procedures. The more rapidly these can be integrated, the lower the costs and the much more successful the outcomes.

In short, this is a win-win-win situation. And if you are still not sure, go back to the beginning and read about the insurance premium increases already underway, think about your shrinking paycheck, and have some compassion for the literally 14,000 people who lose their health insurance, whether healthy or seriously ill…makes no difference…every single day in the United States of America.

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