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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/27/12

Paranoid-A Rock and Roll Epistle

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  • The Wall Street crash (which destroyed 8 million jobs in six months) led to a total of $350 billion a year in lost tax revenues and increased expenditures for the unemployed.

  • The bailout/stimulus rescue of the economy cost an additional $300 million a year for two years.

  • As the bottom black line on the graph below shows, instead of our current trillion dollar deficit, we'd be very close to a balanced budget were it not for Wall Street's reckless greed, the unnecessary wars, and tax cuts for the rich. And we'd get there without shrinking social programs."

Mr. President: End the outrageous tax cuts for the top 2% implemented under George W. Bush, even if it means having to end the tax cuts for our middle class. This, together with our finally leaving Afghanistan in 2014, will reduce our budget deficit from around one trillion dollars per year, to a mere 300 billion, which can be eliminated if we will just use some Keynesian economics to get ourselves out of the Great Recession.

I would also strongly recommend that you make the FICA tax (which pays for our social insurance programs, Social Security and Medicare) include all forms of income, not just wages and salary, as well as progressive. You can keep your promise to not raise taxes to those making less than $250,000 by making it a tiered progressive system. Let's lower the current percentage for the FICA tax withheld for those making less than $110,000, maintain the current percentage for those making between $110,000 and $250,000, and require those individuals who make over $250,000 per year to pay the highest percentage in FICA taxes, enough to make up the difference for the slightly lower taxes on the bottom tier. This would, together with negotiated prices on Medicare fees and prescriptions, insure the survival of both Social Security and Medicare for the foreseeable future.

"Make a joke and I will sigh

And you will laugh and I will cry,

Happiness I cannot feel

And love to me is so unreal."

"Paranoid," Paranoid

Black Sabbath, 1971


A win by Romney-Ryan would almost certainly insure the end to the right of privacy for the majority of the American People. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has already stated that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a "right of privacy." Justice Scalia knows that our right of privacy is the basis for a number of legal precedents that he finds reprehensible, including abortion, contraception, women's and gay rights, medicinal marijuana laws, and the Supreme Court decision that " when police execute a search warrant, they are required to knock and announce their arrival prior to entering a house, except in those cases where law enforcement has a 'reasonable' expectation of the' imminent threat of violence or destruction of evidence." Justice Scalia was joined, in whole or in part, by Justices Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy, and Sotomayor in the most recent test of privacy decided by the Supreme Court, regarding the use of a GPS tracker on the wife of a suspected drug dealer's vehicle .

The elimination of the right of privacy is a stepping stone to the emasculation of the Fourth Amendment. For those of you who slept through your high school civics class, the Fourth Amendment states:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

For anyone who is reading this who is an ardent supporter of the Second Amendment: do not believe a word Scalia or any of the Reactionary Right politicians tell you about supporting the Second Amendment. Their last step in establishing their oligarchic system--probably in the guise of a religious theocracy--will be to take your guns away, using the private mercenary shock troops (such as Blackwater/Xe) that they have been creating over the last thirty years, as their preferred instruments of repression, not the American police or military. But first, the oligarchs have to neuter that pesky Fourth Amendment, before they can establish their capitalist utopia, and worker's Hell, as they attempted in Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, Russia, etc. They have as their perfect model, believe it not, in the new market economy of the People's Republic of China. PS -- do not be surprised when the Romney and the oligarchs use the NRA membership lists to accomplish the first stage of their confiscation of your weapons.

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Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to (more...)
 

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