Our Broken Country

This directly from "Time Goes By - what it's really like to get older". It's titled "Our Broken Country" - please follow link to original
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Our Broken Country

Even while my critical faculties were in retreat for the past week, between naps I've read the news and opinion online, listened the officials and pundits on television, and now that I'm feeling less sick and just tired, it struck me more clearly than ever: we-the-people are completely screwed.

Everything we have learned in the past two years since the crash comes down to this: Corporations and the government are in collusion against the rest of us and having rigged the system in their favor, they are within an inch of winning it all.

Name one thing in the past two years that Congress or the president has done to improve the lives of anyone but the rich.

The FICA tax holiday, you say? That's just stealing from Social Security – one-sixth of its annual revenue. And it would be a sucker's bet to put money on the holiday expiring as planned at the end of this year.

The Affordable Health Care Act? Please. During the health care debate, 45 million people were without coverage; now 52 million are.

Millions have lost their homes to foreclosure, often on fraudulently created mortgages for which no one has been prosecuted.

For those who still own their homes, housing prices have dropped by an average of 30 percent, but my property tax bill – and undoubtedly yours too – has increased each year.

For the past week, innumerable news stories report that the largest corporations with billions in profits pay no taxes and often get refunds from the government too.

I just learned in the past couple of days that corporations are given subsidies from the government for sending jobs overseas.

In the endless budget battle in Washington, there is not a word from either side of the aisle about helping people in dire need - it is ONLY about cutting funds for programs that benefit average people and the poor: schools, health care, teachers, police, firemen. And, of course, cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

They call all these cuts “shared sacrifice,” but the only word about tax revenue is that cutting corporate taxes to zero will lead companies to hire again. Huh? They're sitting on $2 trillion in cash now and aren't hiring.

Meanwhile, as they insist the country is broke, we have started a third war in the Middle East. They can call it a “no-fly zone” all they want, but when it is Tomahawk missiles that are flying, I call that war – and so should you.

In defiance of a court order, the Wisconsin governor has implemented the new law destroying collective bargaining. How is that legal?

And someone – I've forgotten who – wants to deny food stamps to any family in which a member participates in a workers' strike.

In Maine, the tea party governor tore down a mural at the Department of Labor because it was, he said, not business-friendly. Hul-lo, LePage – it's called the Department of LABOR, not the Department of Business.

A whole lot of people who have participated in all these attacks, and some others who can't wait to go even further, want to be the next president:

Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour, Herman Cain and the rest. Every one of them is ignorant, racist, a freak or all three - and all are in bed with corporations.

Meanwhile, President Obama's top White House advisers are corporate titans busily securing their future. This from Chris Hedges yesterday:

”The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions.

“Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense.

“The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations.

“The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.”

Hedges is, of course, correct. The question is, how do we change it?