Corruption Junction-What’s Your Function?

By TRB

There are 400 families in the U.S. whose combined wealth is greater than the combined wealth of 150 millon other U.S. families. Perhaps this is why it always seems so inappropriate for anyone to talk about the dangers of "class warfare" in America. Clearly, the class war is over and the wealthiest Americans are the victors. Further, this class war has been over for several decades. So there is no longer a class war in America. Just as there is no longer a war in Vietnam.

The unemployment numbers rose late Friday afternoon to 9.2 percent. That's the "good" number. The realistic number, which includes those who have just stopped looking for work and those who have accepted part-time work, is as high as 20 percent. But the Labor Dept., doesn't like to talk about that.

It does make you wonder though. All these people out of work. All of these people losing their homes, their cars, their marriages. The misery index is up there like a bank thermometer in the sun. And what is the government doing? Is it creating jobs? No. The government can not create jobs - only government jobs. And since two of every ten dollars Americans receive today already comes from the government, there isn't enough left over for any real job creation.

We could look into our banks and financial institutions, who were bailed out in 2008 to the tune of trillions of our hard-earned dollars. What did they do with all of our money? They won't loan any of it to us, they won't invest in any local growth projects. So where did the money go? It went overseas to be invested there. It went to nations like Brazil where the return on investment is better than it would be here. The banks and financial instiutions are sitting on the rest of our money. They give large amounts of it to politicians to keep them in office so those politicians won't ever bother the banks.

Then there's our trade probems, where we are being ripped off every day. There might be some job creation if the U.S. hadn't signed patently unfair trade agreements, some years ago that allow foreign nations to get their goods into this nation for just about nothing, while American-produced goods are expected to pay extremely high taxes to move their goods to market in virtually any nation. If the unfair trade agreements could be straightened out, there might be some incentive for job creation here.

The so-called new industries, high tech, energy conservation products, new medicines, etc. There are jobs there. Problem is those industries are also moving out of the U.S. for the lower taxes required by other nations. Of course that is not a totally honest answer. That is the American corporate answer, most of which they left out. You see, the taxes are not only lower, but the wages they have to pay are lower too, and the safety and quality-build regulations are also virtually non-existant. What U.S. corporations are saying is: no regulations, no money for workers, no real taxes. When the U.S. can outdo that situation, perhaps we'll come back.

You wonder what will happen when all this corruption-driven poverty blows up in their faces. It will. It always does, and not only in America. In every nation on earth where the leaders cozy up with the banks and steal from the people, eventually something snaps. People can take the weight of that foot on their necks for only so long.

Meanwhile Barack Obama, who must have promised not to change Social Security benefits over a thousand times during his campaign for the presidency is now rubbing elbows with the boys who created this mess with their foolish tax cut for America's most wealthy. And what is Barack Obama talking about? Social Security. He is talking about cutting benefits. He is talking about not allowing children to use Medicaid. He is talking about making Medicare more expensive for the working-class consumer.

All of this talk is centered around raising the debt ceiling, so the U.S. can print more funny money to pay its not-so-funny debts. So the Republicans and Democrats are not talking about unemployment or how to create more jobs. They are not talking about the rigged international trade system. They are not talking about the U.S. banks and financial system, which took trillions from America and gave it nothing in return. They are not talking about the broken health care monopoly that leads to more unnecessary deaths in America every year and has the U.S. ranked at 38th in the world in quality of medical care.

No, it is this debt ceiling. And to talk about raising the debt ceiling, first off all of these programs on which the diminishing middle class and the poor need, have to be put on the table and cut in some way. The poor have to pay for the extra tax-free wealth of the obscenely wealthy. And Pres. Barack Obama suddenly believes this is fair. Perhaps that is because he is now owned and operated by the banking industry.

The real mystery in all of this debt ceiling business is that Obama never had to sit down and speak to republicans about it in the first place. That is right, all of these compromises that Obama is making right now on the backs of the middle class and the poor during these so-called talks with republicans, who are more afraid of the 85 Tea Party members in Congress than they are of Obama, do not have to be made.

You see, there is a special provision in the Constitution that allows Obama to raise the debt ceiling without approval of Congress. If he deems it is an "emergency," he can simply raise it. So the question is, why didn't he opt out of these talks?

This all makes for very interesting theater. Obama, who just 10 years ago was walking the neighborhoods of Chicago, smoking a cigarette. A neighborhood organizer who took his job of helping the poor receive city services seriously. Perhaps you have seen those photos of the cool Obama in the leather jacket. Hell, I believe he and his wife just recently paid off their school loans.

Then you look at all the money he has accepted as political funding from the banking industry and you begin to see a vasty changed man. You wonder if that leather jacket still hangs in his closet or whether it has been thrown away.

On the other side of the stage, you have the republicans, still droning on with the mantra that lowering taxes will create jobs, when it has already been proven on numerous occasions that lowering taxes simply decreases revenue and leads to situations like the present, where, because Congress and the President have refused to make America's wealthy and it corporations pay their fair share of taxes, the middle class and the poor will be expected to pick up the slack and expect even less in lives already suffering from the chronic poverty created to support the very few super wealthy and the corrupt political process.

Obama is not the answer so many thought he was. His transformation into a mouthpiece for the money industry just adds more weight to the question: Can democracy survive in a chronically corrupt U.S.?