Paradox

Austerity” is just a con to further enrich the nationless capital markets and the super-rich. Nothing more. The very rich have no interest in the history of America from the 1940s through the 1970s, when a rising and secure middle class, and 90-percent tax rates on top earners, still supported fine lifestyles for the wealthy as well as the world’s greatest economy and society. Now we have to lose so they can win yet more. But austerity and tax cuts are the watchword, the intellectual fraud that has taken the day. Somehow the boobs indoctrinated by Fox “News” and rightwing talk radio never think it applies to them. To their 4,000-square-foot exurban houses for a family of four, multiple gas guzzlers and “consuming” from the mall and Wal-Mart — all on credit. Why, that’s the American dream. Talk about an unsustainable entitlement program. Nor can they grasp that their economic insecurity has nothing to do with the federal deficit or debt. Those are products of the Bush tax cuts to the rich; two wars and the creation of a national security state with some 200 new agencies; the lost tax revenues of the Great Recession, and the cost of bailing out the big banks. There’s your dreaded deficit and debt. Our economic problems are caused by those big banks and the entire financialization of the economy as our productive enterprises were hollowed out by bad trade deals, offshoring and anti-competitive mergers. Then the swindles and frauds reached such a scale that the Ponzi scheme collapsed. The capital markets and major companies are doing great, but they’re not creating jobs. American wages have been slowing in their growth for years and now are stagnant, while the richest have their greatest share of income since the 1920s. None of this is about Washington earmarks or the usual Tea Party villains.

How can I get by on one house? I need five houses, ten houses! I need three jet planes to take me all over the world! Sorry, American people. We’ve got the money, we’ve got the power, we’ve got the lobbyists here and on Wall Street. Tough luck. That’s the world, get used to it. Rich get richer. Middle-class shrinks…

So these crybabies, the multimillionaires and billionaires, these people who are making out like bandits, they are crying and crying and crying, but their effective tax rates for the top 400 income earners in America was cut almost in half from 1992 to 2007. The point that needs to be made is when is enough enough? That really is the essence of what we are talking about. When does greed—and greed is, in my view, it’s like a sickness, it’s like an addiction. We know people on heroin, they can’t stop, they need more and more.

I would hope that for these people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, they will look around them and say, “There is something more important in life than the richest people becoming richer when we have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.” Maybe they will understand that they are Americans, part of a great nation which is in trouble today. Maybe they’ve got to go back to the Bible or whatever they believe in understanding that there is virtue in sharing, in reaching out, that you can’t get it all.

How can anybody be proud to say that I am an multimillionaire and I’ve been getting a huge tax break and one-quarter of the kids in this country is on food stamps?