THE BITE

THE BITE: We’ll leave the unethical culture on Kaua`i on the back burner today as we take tongue to glue and mail off our fare share to sustain the U.S. bombing of brown people across the world until they hate us so much they’re willing to blow themselves up in our midst.

But demilitarization isn’t what’s on the minds of the handful ditto-heads and mindless, sociopathic, so-called “tea party” participants.

There was this fat Rush clone on CNN this morning who was bedecked with an “Obama is a fascist” poster with a photo-shopped Obama-as-Hitler mock-up and when the reporter asked three of four times “why is Obama a fascist” the guy kept screaming “because he’s a fascist”.

And he was the most articulate of the crowd.

What she should have asked was “how did you get here today?. Was it in a car subsidized by taxes or on the road taxes paid for. Perhaps you flew in to a tax-supported airport?”

He sure was standing on a taxpayer built sidewalk and the police presence that surrounded and protected them was paid for by... well, you get the point.

Funny you never hear that type complain about the tax money thrown down the rat hole of “defense”- a fancy ironically-opposite euphemism meaning violent imperialism.

Nope they complain about “welfare queens” and the waste of money on social programs and the safety net they are presumably one or two pay checks away from.

But at least most of these creeps are, if too dumb to live, consistently wrong about everything. What really bothers us when we hear normally rational people demand lower taxes saying “I’m a fiscal conservative and a social liberal”.

Oh, you mean you’re a thief. You want everything the government provides but don’t want to pay for it.

Actually through a strictly progressive taxation scheme the 90% of the people who have 10% of the money could go tax free if we properly taxed the 10% who have 90% of it.

But these folks aren’t talking progressive taxation. As a matter of fact they apparently have a stake in making the rich richer thinking in their own demented way that they will become one of the rich despite the telling sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of their world view.

But why single them out? Today’s news portends that the folks at the legislature aren’t exactly Einsteins or brave enough to progressively raise taxes more than a smidgeon and are apparently rather intent on passing tax increases that hurt the poor the most with increased taxes on goods like tobacco, alcohol and fireworks along with a proposed sales tax for the counties and even a raise in the state excise tax.

All this got us thinking about what exactly happened to the progressive taxation scheme and the social “safety net” the government provided with the taxes it collected until about 30 years ago.

It all started with the “privatization” of government services and the reign of the real fascists, by definition, under Ronald Regan, when the state and corporate worlds began to merge as never before.

Instead of spending money directly serving those who were in need they began to set up private corporations, many of them non profit, to take on these services- and they fully funded them.

The premise was that no one was giving the government money voluntarily so let’s leverage the money by giving it to an organization that can also fund-raise and thereby get more bang for the buck.

But what actually happened- something many of us foresaw at the time- was that that government funding was the first thing to be cut whenever the war machine and the service of corporate agendas demanded more and more and more.

In addition every time there was one of these “financial crises” the first place the corporate sycophants in office looked to for a cut was those now private non-profits who were by then taking on the lions share of social safety net programs.

After all- they could always raise more private funds.

Meanwhile the real wages of the working class were slashed to the point where, while one person working one job used to be enough to support a family, now two people working two jobs doesn’t cut it.

All the while, due to increased production with no recompense for the workers who produced the wealth, that 90%-10% ratio we mentioned above was pushed to more like a 95%-5%. Workers were seen by that 5%, not as essential to their business and the fiscal health of the economic system but as an expendable burden on their quest to move the ratio to 99%-1%

If we shirk off the chains of the fascist corporatization of government and cap the financial bottomless pit of an insatiable saber-rattling, war machine we’d have plenty left to provide living wages and even provide health care for all without paying another nickel in taxes.

And if we collected taxes only from those with the ability to pay we’d get that “free lunch” the “fiscal conservative yet social liberal” wants so badly.

Put that tea in your pipe and smoke it.