The Insanity Of Wasteful Political Greed

By James Donahue

It has long been known that everything the federal government buys is overpriced to the extreme. There are two general reasons for this.

When the government orders something manufactured it sets specifications to such detail that any company taking the contract might sweat bullets just meeting them. I once knew a plastic plant that went through inspection turmoil because it contracted to make plastic dog whistles for mail carriers.

The second factor behind government waste has been pure greed. Companies seek these contracts because there are big profits to be earned. For example, there is no good reason for the Pentagon to be paying hundreds of dollars for toilet seats or to be spending billions contracting for a privatized military to fight unnecessary wars.

What is bothering us most these days is a movement among a batch of radical Republicans, who now have taken control of the Congress and the Supreme Court. They seek to shift the wealth of the nation to the hands of the money changers and strip federal assistance, welfare, public medicine and Social Security from the poor and working class.

It has been a blatant robbery of the people through forced taxation. We haven’t seen that kind of cold hearted plundering since the time of the Kings in Europe. It was their action, and the ravaging by the Roman Catholic Church, that drove the settlers to the new American frontier in search of religious freedoms and freedom from unfair taxation by the crowns.

We all had a glimpse of the extreme wealth and overindulgence during the recent wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton that was calculated to have cost the UK people a whopping $9.8 billion. This is the kind of thinking that has prevailed among the kings of the Earth since the beginning of royalty.

America was founded on the promise of equality for all. Indeed our Declaration of Independence strikes us between the eyes with these burning words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

So why do our politicians and elected leaders in Washington and so many of our state capitals act as though some men are more equal than others?

We are living in strange times when we are watching the two sides of this age-old conflict between the haves and the have-nots come to a boiling point. The old “kings” of the long established monarchies are being challenged by the masses. And the war has been between the common people using ideology and stones and the powers who are using guns and bullets, tanks and every form of advanced weaponry they can get their hands on. It is shocking to watch the people continue their protest marches in places like Syria, Libya, Egypt, and even out-of-the-way places in Africa even as they are being murdered by soldiers firing real bullets into the crowds.

In the United States people are gathering by the thousands at state capitals to protest plans by elected Republican leadership to cut spending for schools, unemployment and food stamps while approving tax increases for the low and moderate income workers to feed the hungry pockets of big corporate interests. Mixed within all of this legislation is a master plan to break what is left of the backs of labor unions. Recall petitions are getting passed around. Rebellion is in the air here as it is overseas.

What is stirring this global emotion? Some might say the people are being driven by hunger, unemployment and a desire for fairness. That is part of it, indeed. But we believe there also is occurring an awakening among the youth of the world. There are a lot of people out in those streets who are showing that they are willing to risk the possibility of death rather than spend their lives living under suppression.

We believe the class warfare that is happening before our eyes can be resolved quickly if those elected “leaders” will just return to those beautifully expressed documents on which our nation was founded. There is a crying need for fairness in all things.

What is needed in the United States is for this nation to shut down its wars in the Middle East, to dramatically reduce its war machine to only what is needed for defense of the borders, establish new and fair tax laws that put the burden of paying down the national debt on everyone, not just the working class, shutting down the War on Drugs and along with that closing down those privately run prisons that house mostly people charged with possession and sale of marijuana, break up the Department of Homeland Security and close down the Federal Reserve.

While we are at it, there is a crying need for new laws making it possible for the people to petition for impeaching high officials, especially members of the U. S. Supreme Court who now enjoy lifetime tenure. When it is only a majority vote of the Congress that can launch impeachment hearings, the die is cast making it impossible to clean house once slanted thinkers like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia get on that bench.

America needs desperately to return to the old, tried and true method of voting on paper ballots instead of using computerized machines that can and have been tampered with.

There also is a desperate need for legislation to bring back anti-trust laws or bring on strict enforcement of the anti-trust laws that are already on the books. It should be illegal for companies like AT&T and Microsoft to hold such ultimate control over the manufacture and provision of public services.

The elected leadership also needs to restore laws that placed federal control on the banking and lending institutions so that they can never again bilk the people out of the very wealth of the nation.

This is our formula for bringing sanity back to the United States and making our nation prosperous once again. The wealth has not been lost. It has simply been stolen by a few greedy people who have locked it all in vaults. There seems to be a plan to bring down our nation and to replace it with something that assures that the rich and powerful maintain their position of authority over the rest of us.

As candidates pare off to gain our votes in the 2012 elections, listen closely to what they personally have to say and pick people who are willing to strive for fairness. Do NOT pay attention to those costly televised and radio ads that will be financed by the big corporations that the Supreme Court wants to treat as equal with the rest of us. They aren’t.