Why are times so hard?
Why do times seem tough for so many people across the country and right here in Big Horn County? We keep hearing about more and more young families who are unable to earn enough money to support themselves and their children. It seems like even small financial setbacks are bankrupting more of us, who consider ourselves middle class. We're losing the equity in our homes and our retirement funds are drying up. That's before we start factoring in the devastation of medical costs (even for those of us with high quality health insurance coverage).
Listening to the news of the day, you'd think all of this economic turmoil was being caused by people in our society who choose not to work hard. These are the folks who receive public subsidies or "entitlements" in the form of TANF, Medicaid, or Medicare. The theory is that these moochers keep our tax rates too high, which keeps us from being able to save and invest in our own futures. Yet, I can't help noticing that a lot of mooching seems to be going on at the other end of the wealth spectrum.
They are the ones who sold us on the idea that our problem is excessive government spending, not their revenue withholding. Here's a link to research sources proving a simple observation: ending tax evasion and tax havens for the moochers would be enough to bury our trillion-dollar deficit: http://www.nationofchange.org/add-it-taxes-avoided-rich-could-pay-deficit-1346074084
This source includes several logical ways to approach this one big elephant-in-the-Republican-room problem no politicians seems to want to talk about.
It reminds me of a situation we had out on the farm not too long ago. We were troubled with varmints stealing into our chicken coop and dining on our chickens here on the Back 40. I fastened chicken wire over, under and around every square inch of that coop to stop our chicken meat disappearing. One morning, a few weeks after the chicken wire intervention, one of the chickens didn't exit the coop when it was opened. My granddaughter noticed it struggling to stand up on one leg and sitting right back down. I crawled in, picked the bird up and found it only had one leg, and was still bleeding from the cavity of the missing leg. It took a while to find the blood stained chicken wire hole through which that leg was yanked and gnawed off.
My simple solution had looked so perfect. I trusted chicken wire. It was obvious no varmint could slip through those holes. While I was busy shoring up the chicken wire, those smart thieves were just waiting for a chicken leg to emerge from my carefully constructed security system. They had all night to watch and wait, while I was busy taking care of farm business. It makes me think of those wealthy varmints in our country. These are the people who are increasing their own entitlement income while conspiring to replace Medicare and Obamacare with something to raise our own health care costs and their profits. They only need to get one big bite out of each of us to make their fortunes. We're left disabled, while they walk away with full bellies. They're busy out in Washington D.C. setting up a budget that will require raising taxes on all but the richest citizens, in order to fund special interests and continue corporate welfare. In the meantime, we're worried about keeping those indigent people out of our chicken coops.
The problem is that we lose to the moochers, regardless of whether they have more or fewer resources than us. We become easy targets for those who exploit us by raising prices, sending jobs overseas, or lowering wages for higher short-term profits. After getting their payout, CEOs have little compunction about bankrupting the companies they run, thereby devaluing our mutual fund portfolios (a.k.a. retirement accounts).
Most of us simply don't discuss the divided economics and politics of why any more. It has become too contentious to speak of these things in public. Our voice from Big Horn County may not represent many of the moochers at the top, whose voice is heard all over the media loudly denying the charges of, say, the Occupy Wall Street crowd. More of us are near the bottom of our economic ladder, dropped from the significant middle class of the 80's. We resent being even remotely associated with living off the labors of others. This may keep us from really thinking about what's happening to the middle class and how we are going to protect our own self-sufficiency in the coming decades.
The national adversarial conversation promoted by the media victimizes us to blindness to any but one side of the answer: ours. News is no longer "The News," representing a variety of points of view rather than just one, like decades ago with David Brinkley or Chet Huntley. Now "News" on TV, radio, on line or cable is tailored to conform to a particular bias. It gives us ready answers, conservative or liberal answers decided by its perception of our point of view, with plenty of counterpunch ideas on why the other point of view is wrong, dangerous, unpatriotic, or totally stupid. Even in our families, we seldom listen to each other on issues that divide us, each with a different "totally right" answer to why the current state of the world, our nation, and Big Horn County is so dismal.
In my previous column I asserted that big government and big business have so mixed themselves up with each other we the people can't any longer tell them apart. The corrupt conflicts of interest have made our arguments over blaming one or the other irrelevant. This week I am unveiling two kinds of moochers in our economy. The one at the bottom is featured in the media and highlighted by Ayn Rand and the Republicans, especially the Tea Party. The other is denied and justified, but its control of our national conversation over our economy are the reasons why we the people have given up even talking about the economic stress our families know today. This highlights the need to restore the legal structure of a fair economy built after our Great Depression and dismantled over the last half century. If we don't, the class warfare between the two grand moochers of our economy will spill out of our prison system into our streets, and racial conflict and revolution will attack our nation.
Some examples
Why in New York City are there more empty homes than homeless people? Is it only because these homes were foreclosed and are now owned by banks?
Last week, the Justice Department announced it wasn't going to prosecute Goldman Sachs or its employees for its shady activities during the mortgage crisis. The same day, Goldman disclosed in a regulatory filing that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had dropped an investigation into a troubled $1.3 billion residential mortgage-backed securities deal launched in 2006.
For more on this and other info on Banks: http://www.alternet.org/economy/uncle-sam-needs-you-bailout-6-reasons-another-big-banking-crisis-coming-our-way
Why does Jamie Diamond lose $9billion placing bad bets with money borrowed from his Chase Morgan bank, and get bailed out? Is in only because he regulates his own bank as a powerful member of the Federal Security and Exchange Commission, which gives him the power to grab taxpayer moneys to cover his losses? Who regulates such regulators? Why don't they do their job?
Why did Obama bail out mortgage banks to the tune of $700billion and not bail out the individual citizens losing their homes through mortgage default? More important, why did the subsequent $7trillion bailout subsidy of the financial sector get passed by congress with barely a whimper?
Why is BP in charge of the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill, and doing the job of the government program responsible for monitoring potential environmental disasters from our national fossil fuel appetite? http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2012/03/bps_oil_spill_cleanup_isnt_don.html
Why has our government abdicated its responsibility to us and turned over regulation to the interests needing the regulation? Doe self-regulation work? Can children nurture and raise themselves into responsible adulthood? Can foxes monitor the safety of hens in the hen house? Can chickens be safe from chicken moochers when the chicken wire doesn't work right?
http://gadfly.igc.org/progressive/corp-reg.htm
David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
graberdb@gmail.com
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