Why cutting entitlements isn’t the answer

Number one, America isn’t broke. The problem is that the top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income. If you want a 90 percent figure, here it is. The top 1 percent owns 42.7 percent of all wealth, while the next 19 percent owns 48.4 percent of the wealth. This means the top 20 percent owns 93 percent of the wealth pie and leaves the remaining 80 percent of the population to fight over the remaining 7 percent of the crumbs.

Literally, a handful of families enjoy all the benefits of life, liberty and happiness. But the rest of us, the middle class, the poor, the retired, the infirm, are being strangled by the 800-pound gorillas in the room: the wars (in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Libya, etc.). These efforts of mass destruction cost trillions of dollars. Back that up with the missing taxes that millionaires and billionaires don’t pay, and you’ve got your national debt and the money to pay for the raised ceiling, which must be paid.

What we don’t need is a Congress of Republicans dicking around with cutting entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicare and Medicaid. They should be collecting, not cutting taxes from millionaires and billionaires as with every other wage earner. The tax system should return to being progressive not regressive. The more you make thanks to this great economic system, the more you pay. The less you make, the less you pay. If you make little or nothing, you don’t pay, period. It’s not freaking rocket science as the congressional dorks and their Alan Greenspans would have you believe. Their Wizard of Oz is full of lies.

What’s more, Repugs don’t have to go out and strangle the voice of collective bargaining to have a solvent flow of cash, liquidity where and when you need it. The cash is there in bundles, mostly in the safes and banks of the rich, uber rich and filthy rich, and ill-gotten. Ask Lloyd Blankfein if he’s hurting “doing God’s work?” Ask the Morgans or the Rockefellers or their heirs if they’re having problems making ends meet. Ask Warren Buffet, probably the most honest of them all, why his secretary pays more taxes than he does.

Given all the loopholes built into the tax codes by George Bush, and others going back to Ronald Reagan, we ended up with a deficit larger than all the presidents before them. Reagan began by firing nearly 13,000 air controllers on August 5, 1981, busting their union for not playing ball with his efforts to crush them. His deficit came from repeatedly cutting taxes for the upper echelons and, in turn, spending tons of cash on Star Wars and other expensive military projects that we needed like a hole in the head. In fact, he was our hole in our national pocket.

But Reagan’s Republican orthodoxy is being pounded into people’s heads to this day: rich people shouldn’t pay more taxes on income. And no inheritance taxes for the Walton (Wal-Mart) family. And no taxes, period, for oil companies and General Electric. Despite their corporate contacts, their families’ abilities to lift phones and get their sons and daughters jobs, to send them to all the tony schools, getting them on the right tracks, and fixing it so they win at life, not lose.

And those same progeny will come up knowing what’s theirs is theirs and what’s yours is theirs, too, you used peon who wants his/her Social Security. Forget you actually worked all your life to pay for it, every damn paycheck. And to pay for Medicare once you couldn’t work anymore, often because somebody younger or could do your job for less and they canned you and/or gave your job away to China and all points east to keep more people slave laborers, including our own. And by the way you also pay for a Medicare supplementary or Medigap program to pick up all the elements Medicare didn’t pay for, co-pays, seeing your own doctors, getting timely check-ups to keep you healthy and Plan-D to make your drugs affordable.

No, all those young Republicans you hear and see mouthing off in the Congress about cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid; cutting the pay of their municipal workers, cutting teachers from their schools (along with closing the physical schools), they don’t have to worry. They’ve been bought already, the installments on their future have been promised if not paid for by wealthy donors, friendly corporations, local businessmen that would like some favorable legislation or tax break for a price.

Yes sir, wealth is about having it, if not stealing it if you don’t have it. But the money is there, scads of it being used or misused to conquer the world, sending the sons and daughters of those who can’t afford college to sign on for an Army bonus to go to college, that is, if they don’t get shot on the battlefields of the Empire before using it. The game is rigged, fixed by the rich and their minions.

Being an Empire apparatchik is where the money is. That’s where G.E. is, and Halliburton, now R2 (Reflex Response), a private army ready to work for some prince in the Arab Emirates to keep his people down, like they’re keeping our U.S. people down, raising the prices of food, fuel, clean air, speculating through stock markets to keep prices high, to starve the people until they’re so hungry, so angry, they will go out in the streets, like they are all over Europe, as well as in the Middle East to fight to their death for more, more of the good life, the chance to raise their kids with a better shot than they had.

Those people are us, our people, and their leaders, their generals, their Mubaraks, who want to pocket it all for themselves, are our leaders (who know who they are). Screw the people is their outlook. They’re dogs. Kick ’em. Move along or we’ll bust your heads. See this baton? It could cut your entitlement to life for good. So shut up! Not! Be in their faces! Let’s not be good little boys and girls saluting the flag. Let’s kick the dust in their eyes. Let’s Taser their asses and see how they like it. X-ray their crotches for explosives.

Let’s find the money bags salted away in the mansions, villas, the second homes, the third homes, the collections of art, the priceless wine cellars, the tasteful furniture, the cars, the vintage cars, the planes, the boats, the imaginary life of American advertising, fun families splashing in see-through waters of blood.

And those are just the assets, not the income, salted away in some shelter or other in the Caymans, Bermuda or some Swiss Bank, tax free. And if you make a big enough stink, they’ll call somebody at some Swiss bank, the off-the-books room, to pay someone enough bucks to kill you and yours. Yes, the Bilderbergers take their responsibilities seriously. They’re on a mission to keep your ass down to the ground. And if you get up and shout you’re free, you could be down for the count. But going at them is the only answer. There are still far more of us than them. And that is the only thing they fear. And rightfully should.

See the crowds along the Nile, the crowds in the squares of Spain, the activists bulging from the Acropolis in Greece, where democracy not fascism was invented. We started with the first and are ending with the second, in an ongoing bankruptcy by the wars, the Fed, Wall Street, the Illuminati, the Elites, the Skull and Boehners, the aristocrats, the Club of Rome, all those bought and paid for to level the masses, starve them, deny them, backseat them, paint them black, brown, yellow, red men, dead men. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that. Just look in the mirror and see how you’re doing. One look tells it all. You say you don’t know who’s oppressing you? If you don’t, you’re lost. If you do, you’re found.

Even if you’re the legitimate leader of your country and raise your voice for its sovereignty, expect the UN to greenlight airstriking you or to kill you at your protests, strangle you in the courtroom like the Newburgh Four, or like Ratko Mladic, now getting pilloried, for fighting for his people, in the UN court in the Hague, not the Euro-trash who want to balkanize the Balkans to smithereens, and walk away with all the expensive pieces.

You see, this is all of a piece. It is one story made up of many like a crazy quilt covering the planet. It’s made up of the haves and have-nots and those in between. Pull back and see the big picture, the banks in bed together to screw you. All those fancy names: Morgan, Rockefeller, Chase, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, crooked as three dollar bills. And the people you picked to keep them straight are just as crooked, Obama, Bush, Geithner, Rubin, Clinton, Summers et al. The world is upside down in corruption. Let’s shake it up and see who falls down and who falls up. See the People vs. Goldman Sachs, Matt Taibbi’s shattering look at the gang of financial criminals that should be behind bars.

Every conceivable scam to screw the little guy has and is being used to keep up the bad work, taxing your own currency through the Fed; Goldman Sachs betting two billion against its own toxic CDOs to fail while hawking it to their customers, claiming they invested six million in it, downgrading it, then upgrading it from a smaller pool, endless machinations to break the American banking system, to shake it out for every buck and the last penny. And where are the crusaders to take up the causes to lock these bums away for life as they yawn at the Congress?

Where are the shoguns to throw the Tokyo Electric Company in jail for pouring another Chernobyl-times-seven into the atmosphere because they and G.E. were going on the cheap from construction to meltdown at Fukushima? They didn’t even leave their people with a shot at simply raising their bowlful of rice to survive, poisoned it all, and the sea and the air with radiation. So pin each sheet of this story on a corkboard, then get your darts out and throw them at the pages. Wherever they hit, you can start there, cutting the stolen entitlements of the rich, the fat cats, the lobbyists, the crooked politicians. It’s that easy. Make the world as unsafe for them as they have for us. We are the many, they are the enemy. And it’s their turn to pay, not just their taxes, but the dues for their destruction of the world’s infrastructure, all that holds us together as conscious human beings on our journey into the future.

The austerity they seek to impose on our lives because they have stolen so much of our taxes and more, our natural resources, the environment, and bought out the institutions of democracy, like our voting system, as did the Koch Brothers with the help of the Supreme court; these are the things that should be cut from our budget, the viruses that deplete its strength and our lives, whether we live on Main Street, USA, some Baghdad side street, the mountains of Afghanistan, Madison, Wisconsin, or Abbottabad, where death can descend from the sky on the whim of a failing politician, we must rebut the lies or starve on them.

The assets that we have lost over our history are honesty, true patriotism to do the right thing, the responsibility to pay our share in running our system, to see the perspective of our runaway violence. That’s what our debt is. It’s a human debt, from farming out millions of our jobs to slave labor countries, leaving our own people unemployed to enrich various corporations who can do everything cheaper but their rapacious stealing.

So, I repeat, we are not broke, not financially, not in spirit, not in vision. It is the greed-stricken, the wealth-blind and the corruption-fattened among us who are the sickness bankrupting our health—and theirs as well—as they create a criminal America out of the revolutionary one our forefathers founded in the Constitution. We must heal ourselves as the world’s first man ‘functionally cured’ of HIV, as reported in the world’s media, and be as Lazarus back from the dead.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.