SITREP - Following the Historical Trail to a Disaster

In my novel, “Jonatha’s Truth,” Fidel Castro observes, “The yanquis seem to have no trouble with socialism during a disaster, but once the socialism has dealt successfully with the trouble, they go back to letting the strong devour the weak.”

In the last several days, we have the Cuban leader’s fictional observation corroborated by events, and the mask ripped from the face of corporate U.S. capitalism. What could be more socialistic – more socialistic in the manner of the now defunct Soviet Union – than the “bailout” of corporate Wall Street and the Shylocks of American finance. The greatest capitalists of history want seven hundred billion dollars worth of socialism.

“Our entire economy is in danger,” says a sleaze on the Potomac lawmaker. Well, now – does that mean somebody will be punished? Sure. Does it mean that everyone’s business will be saved from the mess they made of it? Sure it does – when those proverbial pigs fly. Does it mean that all those CEO demigods of finance will be out in the street, living off the land – as I once was when Internal Revenue Service made me bankrupt (of course, the difference here was that everything I owned was seized, not frittered away on bad loans and investments)?

The history of this new form of socialism, of course, leaves a trail easier to follow than that a buffalo herd. It begins in the drugs-bewildered and mentally-deranged sixties with feminism demanding privileges including loans to people qualified for credit only by their gender. Concomitantly, the Kennedy-ian coinage of “affirmative action” reared its ugly and unconstitutional head. Loans for minorities – at first Afro-Americans, then virtually anybody – became a matter of law. The nation’s dream of equality began, in other words, morphing into the first signs of the utter contempt for law that is now national policy socially.

The first dominos had fallen, and by 1979, and the 1.5 billion dollar loan to Chrysler Corporation – fomented by and argued on largely using all the same conditions, reasoning, and – of course - rhetoric as today’s travesty on government and finance – the productive taxpayer found himself somehow a contributor to corporate welfare.

Of course, the bait on the hook then was jobs – “saving all those jobs.”

Those protesting this then state-of-the art rip-off said all the same things being said by victims of Congressional and White House lawlessness today. They were shouted down then by the media and its “analysts” just as the same media and analysts are forecasting impending doomsday and urging haste this time.

“Our entire economy is in danger.” Translation: if you don’t give us what we want, we will make it very hard on you. Where have we heard that one before? When do we ever hear anything else?

One of the current presidential candidates says it’s time to start asking some hard questions. “It’s time?!” Now it’s time?

I’ve got some questions – first, that is leadership? Friends of mine – Ed, Bill, Rita, and others - and I have been expecting this very thing to happen for years, amazed that it didn’t happen sooner. Maybe we should “lead?”

Even filing pro se legal action in the effort, I have been protesting matters like the proposed Wall Street Bailout and related congressional and presidential mis-behavior for literally decades, and the day before yesterday, I forwarded the following letter to the senators who represent Texas:

Senator, my wife and I are appalled and furiously angry concerning the proposed "bailout" of Wall Street and people who made loans they had only marginal chance of paying. This is, in every sense of the word, an outrage.

It would certainly have been nice when IRS destroyed my businesses and took steps to assure that I would never again be gainfully employed, had Congress "bailed" me out. Why should the executive fat cats on Wall Street not have to go to the streets and wildernesses for sustenance as I once did? Why are they better under the law than I?

Should we ever meet, don't expect me to shake your hand. No matter what you in the Congress may do to me next, I will always be better than that. To Ron Paul, perhaps the only member of congress with the intelligence and integrity to have been decrying not only this latest example of colossal corporate swindle but the asininely humanistic and feministic practices that led to it, I wrote only a thank you for the superb way he represents us.

My letter to Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn will, of course, not even be read (a few years ago, when I wrote to the Senator Phil Gramm to include tape recorded proof of extortion to commit rape by an IRS employee, I received a response thanking me for my interest in the Savings and Loan crisis). With nearly sixty thousand lobbyists possessed of fat check books provided by the very people who are now after seven hundred billion dollars owned by people those same lobbyists disenfranchise to listen to, our “representatives” in government have scant time to read what we write or listen to what we say.

More, the Wall Street bankers latest, and – since the maneuvering that led to formation of the Federal Reserve – biggest swindle is being perpetrated so swiftly that I won’t even have time to draw up a Flast v. Cohen lawsuit aimed at stopping it. I can, however, point out, that Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968), was a United States Supreme Court case holding that a taxpayer has standing to sue the government to prevent an unconstitutional use of taxpayer funds.

If there was ever an example of an “unconstitutional use” of taxpayer funds, this is it.

But I have some more of the questions to which I referred a minute ago here: Why, for instance, is it that not one of the vaunted political pundits and analysts foisted upon the public by today’s media has mentioned Flast v. Cohen? Is the Fourth Estate, while babbling mindlessly and endlessly about what is euphemistically and obliquely being called a “bailout,” apparently totally ignorant of so obviously pertinent a Supreme Court ruling?

Why has no one (other, apparently, than one Robert Schultz of an organization called “We, the People” http://www.givemeliberty.org/revolution/) filed a legal action to stop this outrage of constitutional law?

It is all thunderously reminiscent of the way this same national media avoided like plague mention of Keyhole Satellite reconnaissance technology during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and has steadfastly refused to breath a word concerning it even now. These giants of journalism didn’t know about satellite reconnaissance? They didn’t want to know what satellites perched over Iraq had reported, were reporting, and are reporting to the president? Keyhole satellites (guess why they’re called “keyhole”) capable of reading a motor vehicle license plate didn’t know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? A decade of relentlessly flying over Iraq, snooping with the latest technological wizardry, didn’t know?

No one in the media thought to ask about inconsistencies and “smelled rats” like these?

More questions: If the journalists didn’t know about the Keyhole technology, why weren’t they informed by our representatives in congress? If there is so little communication between the media and members of congress, why should the public trust anything either of them say about purported financial conditions on Wall Street?

The questions, questions like these, go on and on and on. Specifically, why should the poor and middle class taxpayer “bail out” people who often pay no taxes whatever? Why, during all the years that IRS rampaged about the nation like the Frankenstein Monster, destroying individuals and small businesses alike, was the nation of Brobdingnagian corporations left unscathed, utterly sacrosanct?

The fact is that one purpose of incorporation is to insure that none of the people responsible for what has happened in any instance will actually lose a dime. The CEOs and other persons who are “incorporated,” in other words, have legally created a straw man who will assume responsibility and liability for whatever has occurred and been done. When the fat cat CEO has been caught in the swindling chicanery and conniving characteristic of his ilk, it is the straw man corporation that will answer and pay – nothing – while the CEO goes on his merry, rapacious, reiver way.

Successful in their appeal for seven hundred billion dollars, they will in all likelihood give themselves a congratulatory pay raise, and begin planning ways to steal as much of the new funding as possible.

How in the name of reason was a nation of people talked into committing a “hurry up and break you damned fool neck,” head-long rush like the invasion of Iraq? How did the already unconstitutional War Powers Act (purportedly intended, let’s remember, to forestall imminent danger to the nation) justify invasion, and why did no one in the media utter so much as a word of protest on that ground?

If the media was so untrustworthy regarding Iraq – what kind of moron believes supposed “troop surge” success means anything meaningful for progress in the Iraq war? – why should any reasonable person believe anything they say now? Why, moreover, should any source of information as abysmally erroneous and incompetent as the U.S. media has shown itself to be, be trusted about anything – much less seven hundred billions dollars?

Just having to do with Iraq alone, and ignoring hundreds of similar “stories,” have you ever looked at the media’s record of data, factual, and outcome error? – it is astonishing. These people “report” in a manner similar to the way one might expect a basketball team of the blind to play the game.

Why should a congress with the disingenuous, often criminal, and abysmal record where personal or group integrity is concerned of the U.S. congress be trusted with twenty dollars, much less seven hundred billion? Why should anyone pay taxes, when the persons charged with protection and defense of the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. public feel free to appropriate – create out of thin air – money the productive people of the nation will have to do without (and therefore, pay by means other than directly monetary)?

Why should anyone willingly support – with taxes or by any other means - those embezzling from his children and grandchildren, and condemning them to lives of virtual servitude to not only domestic enemies, but foreign ones?

Why should a citizen be required to pay for the ruin of his progeny’s lives? Why would any person of any kind of integrity expect that he do that?

Years, decades ago, I remember basketball great Bill Russell having noted that “Welfare for some little black kid isn’t your problem; welfare for the fat cat corporations is your problem.”

Amen, Bill Russell!