We are spending an average of 19.3 million dollars an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to wage war. This is The War On Terror- a portable, pre-emptive war that ignores both domestic and international law, crosses borders of sovereign nations reigning death by drone and imposing occupation anywhere, at any time, for any reason. It is nebulous, indefinable and unwinnable.
Unwinnable because, by definition it will continue until any and all resistance to American policy and American interests has been laid to rest. Unwinnable because each time we move to crush resistance, we create martyrs and survivors who feed more resistance.
It is not meant to be won. It is meant to go on in perpetuity. There's profit to be made, tremendous profit.
We have given further billions upon billions to Corporations. The very people who created the economic crisis have been the ones to benefit from it. "Too big to fail' is a sort of short hand for "support the artificially inflated market.' Keynesian economics has created a boon by negating the zero sum total principle of economic models. Zero sum total is the combined value of all resource within a given economy. This figure represents the maximum growth to be had. On a chart it be the classic bell curve, with the peak representing the point where all available value- wealth- has been reached. The down slope represents the point where currency becomes ever more inflated , of less value because it's worth is derived from finite resource value after peak growth has been achieved.
Our current economic model derives value from debt. Debt is at it's heart a promise to pay over time for goods or services used today. We have attached the value of today's dollar to the value of promissory return in the future. Growth is achieved by the application of compound interest.
We are borrowing value from tomorrow. No one seems to be asking how many tomorrow's are available before the debt becomes a never to be paid sum. Not because the debt will be walked away from, but because the debt will exceed all value to be had from every resource available today and into the future. We're hovering at that point right now. But again, there's tremendous profit to be made right now.
American policy, American government, American legislation is now being dictated by a handful of wealthy people. Only the blind or the willfully ignorant are unaware of this.
This is what the unholy marriage of democracy and capitalism has brought us- corporate welfare, where the risks and losses are passed on to the tax payer while the profits are privatized.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power"-- Benito Mussolini. I will not argue the definition of fascism with one of it's modern day practitioners.
The numbers of poor grow on a daily basis. Despite government attempts to cook the books, and to redefine what poverty means, they admit that those in need are reaching historic proportions- but even then such admissions are hidden from most of us, buried, marginalized, lost, hidden in rhetoric, buried in diversion. Food stamp applications have risen dramatically, which in turn means that the available help is diminishing dramatically.
These people are lazy. It's astounding how many Americans buy into that, not openly, but in a hidden way. How many talk about the need to help, then do nothing? How many try to pass the ball along to a do nothing Congress? How many phone call actions, petitions, e-mails to Congress need to fail before this passive/aggressive approach is abandoned? I call it passive/ aggressive behavior- Recognizing the need, then passing it on to someone else to handle. Yes, okay, so these people need help- but I passed it on I let my government know I have other, more important things to deal with...
And thus we can deny their suffering even as we acknowledge it. Today, this very day, children will go to school hungry. Parents will skip meals to stretch what little food they have. Elderly people will go without medicine to buy oatmeal.
It is a Holocaust, but hidden.
The number of jobless grows on a daily basis. Corporations have outsourced, down sized, moved production to countries where labor costs are tallied in pennies a day. Our government has used our tax dollars to subsidize these profit producing moves. These are the newly poor, growing every day, I've seen estimates that for every job available there are between 5 to 7 unemployed seeking that position. This puts the Corporations in the position of being able to offer less pay, no benefits, and to expect full time output for part time work. These newly poor who now face an entirely new definition of disposable income. They face hard, impossible choices. And our government not only allows it, they promote, protect and defend it.
How many of us pass this along, too? On a daily basis I see repeated calls, repeated demands- We need jobs Then nothing happens, until the next day when the chorus begins again. Where once America felt it's place was to raise the barre, to lift third world people to our level of existence, now it has become a matter of lowering the barre so that the American people are willing to work for peanuts, less than minimum wage with no benefits. All to profit a handful.
This is a Holocaust, but hidden.
The homeless, a large percentage of whom are veterans of our illegal wars, will try to find a dry, warm place to sleep. The numbers grow on a daily basis; good, honest people, people who trusted those in power, are now living in hotels, cars, shelters or in the streets. When the crisis hit, our government's reaction was to pour billions of dollars into bailing out the Corporations. Meanwhile, the architects of this misery are enjoying record profits, historic bonuses, and we allow them to tell us how to fix the problem.
This is a Holocaust, but hidden.
There are people dying from lack of even minimal health care. People who have lost, or never had, health insurance. An estimated 46,000 Americans will die this year. In the richest country on Earth. We have Obamacare- formerly Romneycare- the result of a mutual capitulation to medical, pharmaceutical and insurance interests. The problem? People can't afford healthcare insurance. The solution? Pass legislation requiring them to buy it.
Holocaust.
There are veterans committing suicide in record numbers. These are the people who stepped up to place themselves in danger to protect what they believed America to be, and having been injured, damaged, having to do things no person of conscience should be called upon to do, are now abandoned. A resource, exploited and discarded.
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