Representation Without Taxation: Demockracy Inaction.

Winning the Future: Tomorrow Belongs to ME.

As the NYT advocates higher taxes on everyone, it makes me wonder why they don't also advocate prosecution of the Bush administration's war crimes, and a fund, and maybe a 'lockbox' in which to deposit fines therefrom, for the crimes not only perpetrated by the Bush syndicate, but by those who benefited, and in fact, conspired with them, to commit said crimes. Instead, our so-called journalists never take the time and energy required to investigate and report to the people they suggest should pay for the boondoggles of miscreants in high places, just exactly what the reasons were for incurring such onerous and unpayable debt in the first place.

Because although there were many reasons the Bush regime gave for attacking Iraq, not one of them was real. Not one was believable. Not a single one was substantiated by events. Bringing another war to the world, and doing it under false pretenses, in order to hide the crimes committed by your father in attacking the country in question in the first place, are, or at least one would hope they are, War Crimes. Never mind the illegal rendition, the torture, the use of phosphorous bombs and of depleted uranium bombs, the willful destruction of the country's power plants, road, bridges, dams, and hospitals, in order to bring about the stated desire of the Cheney cohort to 'bomb the country back to the stone-age'.

Instead, we are supposed to just concentrate on "winning the future" (Tomorrow Belongs, Tomorrow Belongs, Tomorrow Belongs to Me), and forget the crimes committed in the past. But, as anyone who has prepared and given a huge banquet to which they've invited a horde of guests, there is no way forward until you've cleaned up the mess you've made in the past. By pretending that everything is hunky dory, and that what's done is done, the ramifications of those deeds on the economy, our finances, and therefore, the rest of the electorate that, far from reaping any of the benefits that the merchants of death raked in, are being asked, as per the NYT article cited above, to 'pay their fair share' of the crushing burden that the war, and the resulting economic collapse the financial malfeasance it encouraged, engendered.

But this blatant, in-your-face criminality was encouraged and abetted by the Bush administration in order to obfuscate the true costs his wars were incurring, and the current administration's dismissal of them as just something that happened, makes it, if there were truly anything resembling Justice in the world, an accessory after the fact to mass murder for fun and profit. And the reason for it is that the financial community, the Defence Department, Oil industry, arms merchants, and dozens of other industries benefited so handsomely from the mayhem so wantonly engaged in.

In nothing short of a disaster, the Bush administration embroiled us in a horrendous policy that economically, culturally, and militarily set a new standard for creative destruction of all that is egalitarian and just. The debt the Republicans under Bush amassed, morally, environmentally and economically, started demanding payment far earlier than they bargained for, and yet, because they were allowed to  get away with it unscathed, unprosecuted, and unimprisoned, Mitch McConnell,  the Senate minority leader, can today state that, “The tax issue is finished, over, completed,”  and the NYT can, more or less, agree.

The genesis of the terrible burden of debt, having been forgotten, can now be blamed on the policies of the Left that think that citizens who now are forced to work without hope of vacations, holidays, or sick time, in an environment of constant fear of being fired, should at least have a retirement that they can contribute to and hope to look forward to after a lifetime of work. Instead, disparaging and mocking Al Gore's 2000 campaign idea of a lockbox for social security funds, the Republicans spent them all, claiming (much as industry spends its workers' retirement funds for expansion, supposedly to enable then to pay for promises they have no wherewithal to keep), as per MR. BUSH:  "No. There's enough money to pay seniors today and the current affairs of Social Security. The trillion comes from the surplus. Surplus is more -- is money, more money than needed."

This was the justification for diverting monies that were flowing into the Social Security fund, enabling it to pay its own way without the necessity of borrowing. So they trashed the idea that Al Gore suggested of putting the SS funds in "lock box" to keep greedy and incompetent politicians from spending them and replaced it with the Bush and the Repubs' concept of not only spending the entire Social Security surplus, but of spending $420 billion per year on top of the SS fund without a thought of raising revenues to fund their "programs".

This is because the right always wants Representation without Taxation, and they always get it: by buying it.  As Florent, in Emile Zola's, The Belly of Paris, remarks to himself when he's famishing, "It's a funny thing, but you can always find someone to buy you a drink but there is never anyone who will pay for something to eat", and as his temporary rescuer, Madame Francois, observes:

"Oh these Parisians! They'll bicker over a few sous and then empty their pockets drinking at the wine shop".

Just as the rich will deplete their savings to buy politicians, hire throngs of accountants to squeeze them through loopholes they've paid a mob of lobbyists to insert into the tax code, and spend millions on 'charities' for causes for which they have no real interest, simply to get the deductions that lower their tax burden. They empty their pockets to buy lobbyists and politicians all the cocktails they can slurp down, but not a penny for taxes. All the while ensuring that what expenditures the Government does make profit only them, and leaving the burden of the deficit for the rest of the population to bear.

By pretending no crime has been committed, and letting the perpetrators of it off scot-free, we have incurred the costs of those crimes, yet for the most part, that connection is never acknowledged, the true source of our intractable financial straits blamed on someone besides the criminals that are now extorting payment. And the journalists who should be pointing this out, instead claim that life expectancy is so long, that we should work 'til 70, even as the poor and low-paid workers, who are our competitors, the Chinese, retire at 60. This gives their younger generation a chance to work. Our solution is to saddle our youth with debt, and then retain the jobs at which they should be starting to work in order to free them from their onerous load, taken on under false promises.

The newspapers print garbage fed to them by the upper class that taxing their higher income will slow growth, even as that growth is killing everything on the planet (the auto sector is recovering in Europe, North America and across the developing world. And what’s the fastest-growing kind of vehicle? Electric cars? Hybrids? Natgas? Think again, the dirtiest: Diesel-powered).


By not calling the criminal acts of the last administration to account we destroy hope for our own country and for the world. Because it is tacitly assumed (one only has to look at the rhetoric concerning home values and housing starts) that a return to the halcyon days of "the Great Moderation", and "The Goldilocks Economy" will return us to the path of GDP growth such that we will then be able to at least continue pretending that the untenable nature of our burgeoning debt isn't exactly that: untenable. That there's actually a way in which we can continue functioning as we are. But we are not Japan. We  have no one to whom  we can export our surplus manufactured goods, if we had them (which we don't because as soon as we do, we move our factories to their countries, employing their citizens, increasing their tax revenues, thereby increasing our unemployment and putting further strain on our retiree's benefits, all while thinking, as per bEnron Bernanke, that the consumers will retrench, borrow more, and spend more.) But those consumers are people. They are our children, watching as the retirement savings of their parents disappear; watching their parents' plans turn to ashes; watching their pension promises rescinded; watching their capital either spent down, because it can no longer earn any return, or lost in squandered stock market 'investment' in a casino market they have no hope of profiting in; of watching their parents' health insurance, after paying extortionate premiums all their working lives, be pulled from under them once they actually have need of healthcare. Is this a population that is going to spend and borrow freely?

Once the trap's been sprung, once they see exactly what it is you have in store for them, maybe that plasma TV in their parents' living room that they've seen being repossessed by the bank doesn't appear so desirable. The war on terror was implemented to terrorize our own citizens into handing over their freedoms for security. First, deliberately, during the Bush and Cheney red alerts, yellow alerts, alert alerts, phony, phony phony. And then, by leaving a residue of fear. But fearful populations, populations paralyzed by a continuous campaign of shock and awe, do not respond well to exhortations to eat, drink, and be merry.

We have lost our way because we let evil men lead us down the road of destruction. If we do not bring these monsters to justice, we will not find our way out of the brambles they have purposely planted in our path. We cannot win the future, when we've completely blinded ourselves to the actions of the past that brought us to the dilemma that haunts our present .