OK, here's what I don't comprehend. The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than 155 million Americans combined. And had we taxed those 400 Americans at the same rate as they were taxed in 1995, an additional $18 billion would have come into the federal budget. I don't understand why we the people cannot grasp that the real war is the class war.
The Tea Baggers know on a gut level that we're all being screwed big time by the big boys that run the country. But they don't seem to grasp that behind the government, behind both political parties, there exists an ownership elite. They don't seem to understand that the government works for those 400 Americans and their friends.
Meanwhile, good, decent, liberal minded moderate folks have seemingly lost all capacity for emotional outrage. It's as if we've become just like those morally numb security guards that stood around while a girl was beaten, not interfering, not intervening, not even caring about the girl after the beating was over. It's like we are "la-de-da" throughout our whole life.
The problem, of course, is the consequences. Recently President Obama announced that deficit reduction was now about to take center stage in our financial priorities. It's time for a deficit diet. But the first thing our Nobel Peace Prize winning president did was take our war budget off the table. No cuts there, despite the well documented billion-dollar frauds that are constantly foisted upon the American people. Did you know that 96 of our major weapons programs have cost overruns of $295 billion? But if you try to track the waste you run into a perpetual problem: the Pentagon has never (I repeat NEVER) been able to pass an audit. Not that anybody with responsibility cares too much. Right there in the 2010 budget the ever-generous Congress granted $2.5 billion for 10 C-17 cargo planes that the Pentagon never even requested.
We won't touch the war budget. We will continue our global role as the military muscle for those 400 obese Americans who want to rule the world.
Instead we'll cut money for education, housing and food stamps. We'll put civil society and social stability on a massive weight loss plan. And no one, no politician, no major media, no religious leader, will cry out that we are being terrorized in a class war, we are being crucified on a vice-gripped cross of greed.
I don't comprehend our reluctance to name this wicked evil. I don't grasp why it is that churches will educate their kids with mission trips to Mexico but won't send their kids across the lake to Hunts Point or Medina to ask why foreclosures and unemployment aren't felt there. Why no homelessness there? And, what are all those surveillance cameras? Why are they so afraid?