The failed experiment to create sustainable prosperity by cutting taxes to corporations and shareholders.

Record profits and record poverty in the same country are evidence of a broken economic system. In America, the evidence that today’s poverty is born of the Great Recession is indisputable. The gossip that it is due to an epidemic of laziness is ludicrous. And still, our Congress considers a budget that mocks the needs of recession victims and continues toinsure profit to those that caused it.  Now is the time to look to big money makers for tax revenue.

Image caption: Omayra Hernadez holds a sign reading, “Hey Congress Do Your Job” as she and others gather in front of the Florida office of Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) to protest against the partial government shutdown. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

Dear Congress: this is not Common Ground

Dear Congress:

I refuse to be grateful that you did not shut down the government – again. I refuse to be grateful for attacking military pensions, kicking the unemployed to the curb, or every other “pound of flesh” you cut so the wealthiest among us continue to be protected from the taxes they used to pay (that you call “new” taxes).

I will be grateful if ALL OF YOU stop using the currently fashionable term, “Common Ground”. You stole that phrase from the people. To US it means finding things we agree are out of whack and creating solutions based on the needs of us all. It implies a belief in this republic’s democratic process, the willingness to step over political labels, and freedom from “behind the curtain” puppet masters. It does not mean, “using money and political influence to support the few while marginalizing the beliefs and desires of the many”.

This year has been all about the latter, a tyranny of the minority. I suggest a new year’s resolution to actually seek the people’s common ground . Think coffee shop logic, not DC cocktail party logic. After all, this is what we elected you to do.

Respectfully,

Image: People for Care

We can agree. We can act.

My Unreasonable Rant as I Watch Congress Make a Mockery of America

The next time some guy in a suit that costs more than my last car tells me that sending millions of public employees home without pay is worth it… the next time some woman in shoes that cost more than last month’s rent tells me defaulting on American debt is a good idea… I am going to scream.

America deserves better than Political Fiscal Theatre from the cash-comfy.

I’m sick of lobbyists and legislators playing economic parlor games with my country’s sustainability. I actually know these folks are smart enough to create a win-win solution to anything America may face. And, it appears that you and I are not even game pieces on the board.

I am tired of being the airbag for these creepy people. They say they have the fate of We-the-People at heart, but all I see is cash flow and quarterly profits in their eyes. Their kind of reasoning might work on Wall Street but it does not work on my street. America is not a land of wealth builders, it is a land of idea havers, thing makers, and service providers. Apparently we don’t fit into the visions of globalization and world domination these fat cats dream about.

So here they go again, holding the national budget hostage so they can leverage something out of our hands that they could not take away democratically. Next stop, debt ceiling malarkey. Oh, they are great at inventing crisis and tragedy. Or fabricating enough confusion that we don’t know who to believe. This republic’s democracy is at the mercy of the new Gilded Age.

Shame on you all.

Now, any member of Congress who feels badly about this, go forth and do your job!

Image from: http://blog.wealthymen.com/preparing-yourself-to-date-wealthy-men-part-2/

Read NOW. Act NOW. Share.

Using bankruptcy as a tool for hostile takeover is right out of the predatory capitalism playbook. Wealth builders (not job creators) love to play this game.

The Congress is knee deep in this smarty pants biz strategy. The ongoing Political Fiscal Theater III is a manipulation of law, constitutional intent, and a media blitz that would have us believe we are in danger of some catastrophic financial event. Ironically, the economists I respect see this hostile takeover as just that. A disaster is being provoked and promoted as a means to an end game where monied interests have control of our government.

Even if you believe the government can do better, I respectfully request you contact your Representative in the House and tell them that America is not for sale. Make Congress work for US, not for campaign funders.

Find out how to contact your Representative at www.house.gov.  NOW. Thanks.

Image from laserbrain studios – http://laserbrainstudios.com/games/

Money-in-Politics down on the farm.

More DANCING for DOLLARS at the Expense of Women

More DANCING for DOLLARS in DC: yesterday’s House vote on the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” is nothing more than a cash cow. Have you had enough of this? I have.

There are millions of dollars worth of campaign contributions to be made by NOT resolving the issue of a woman’s right to choose when she will give birth. Both sides of the political drama benefit, but we, the people out here in reality land, become collateral damage.

Women who seek terminations at 20 weeks or beyond have serious medical conditions that are exacerbated to life threatening status by pregnancy. If an exception is actually given for such cases, all cases will end up as exceptions EXCEPT women without access to primary, let alone specialized, care. It should have been called the “Death to Poor Women With a Life Threatening Pregnancy Act.”

By the way, what about a Pain-Capable BORN Child Protection Act? No campaign contributions for that one?  Didn’t think so.

A Tale of Two….

On Memorial Day I saw Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) deliver a keynote address. She spoke of her two tours in Iraq and the powerful memory of her first “unanswered roll call ceremony” for a friend lost in combat. She shared that only one percent of our citizens have fought in these, the two longest wars in American history.

And then it occurred to me: another one percent of us have made obscene fortunes from these, the two most blatantly economically motivated wars in American history.

These two one percents could not be more different.

One, members of the super-minority, are making record profits quarter after quarter, and “investing” frightening amounts of money in campaign contributions and spendy lobbyists in order to keep things going their way: war profiteering, monopoly building, too-big-to-care, tax dodging, unregulated global capitalism.

The other are public servants, willing to do their duty until their last breath doing a job few dare face. Too often they leave our service broken or ill, only go become the collateral damage of a system being starved out of existence by tax cuts, tax loopholes, and tax subsidies even as we spend trillions of dollars on two wars with no war tax. The call for austerity is a mocking of this one percent by the other. “We will take care of the money, now you figure out how to take care of yourself.”

I am not a pacifist, but I am very against preemptive war. The idea that we systematically abuse so few for the gain of so few –  and leave 98% of us out of the game entirely – is not sitting well with me. Yellow magnets and 4th of July flags are not enough to count as skin in the game.

I will no longer humor the self centered profiteers only to neglect our selfless patriots.

If that means less war, OK. If that means proper care for returning troops, OK. If that means higher taxes on the prosperous one percent to finance our responsibility to the in-harms-way one percent, OK.

No big box store, no stock broker, no crony contractor, no wealth building “corporate-person” is going to take the metaphorical bullet for anyone. I prefer to support the people who would take a real bullet for me.

ANOTHER sad day in CLOWN TOWN.

This is not a budget, this is DANCING FOR DOLLARS, where the hired guns formerly known as our elected shoot it out until time runs out, pleasing their contributors and kicking their constituents to the curb. Fault? Ours. We have allowed our political system to become addicted to campaign cash. We need to restore publicly funded campaigns so our Congress works for US.

This isn’t funny anymore.

Poster by Jeanene Louden
Photo – “Sad Clown” by Onanymous