The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
December 11th
FINANCING RENAISSANCE!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
Folks held this benefit
concert for Orange County, somewhiles back. Former
Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn rocked the Ice House
in Fullerton, coupla miles north of Disneyland. So
did DFL, FYP and Nonsense (that last bein' a punk
rock group, not editorial comment). Warn't for
Commander Cuatro nor Cody... nor Gaza, Kiev, Darfur,
or Haiti though... not even a comrade busted for kat or
gobbing on public sidewalks, not even them Greeks as
went broke and got occupied by Germany… again!... the beneficiary was the local
gumment! Proud and prosperous Orange Country, you may
remember, bankrupted itself after its $1.5 billion treasury disappeared as a
result of disastrous investments, then came the downsizing and the drought, the
fires, the plague and the Mexicans. Dada happens!
Gumment
is cheap... sometimes... but never inexpensive. Taxes, the song goes, are the price
we pay for a free society.
Used to be able to tell
the pocketbook issue difference between donkey boys and the elephant men...
yes, there was a smidgen... by the way they talked, or didn't, about paying for
societies as they intend to build over us.
Democrats would
mount the stump, wave arms some, promise cradle-to-the-grave healthcare, social
security, free college, lunch, breakfasts and suppers. Maybe a
pony, too, under all the crap! Liberals!... as they were… vowing to tax the rich, but never doing
so. Republicans would vote against the taxes on Wall Street, banks and other
termites as do business behind closed doors, fire up the voters on keeping the
nwords and dusky immigrants down, so we called them "conservative" and,
come November, there existed a choice to choose between.
Both, of course,
groped their interns and financed jails - lots and lots of jails. Consider the liberal bastion of San Francisco,
where high rents and NIMBY squeamishness ousted their District Attorney (well, to
be sure, he was the son of 60’s Weatherterrorist Kathy
Boudin!) in favor of a conservative who promised to round
up, beat up and lock up the thousands of homeless evictees cluttering the streets
of a city unfortunate enough that people could sleep on the sidewalks in winter
and not freeze to death.
And if they resisted
– send in the robots with machine guns and hand grenades to kill them.
Some of those get a
little “uppity” – and we might have a rehash of the one six, many rehashes in
fact.
Things started changing
around 1980 when the center fell away... as Mr. Yeats remarks... and both
institutional parties rolled into that middle of the bed together, tangled up
in silk sheets of delusion. Cut taxes like Ronzo promised,
but keep the spending, just as Tip O’Neill wanted, and you have the bipartisan Valhalla,
‘cept for the building up of deficits that were and
are maintained by our good new friends from Red China. That global Ponzi scam
called the Dot Con revolution enabled this dope from Hope to at least stop increasing
deficits awhile, so George III after him, then Obama and The Donald after them,
cut taxes on the one-percenters some more and threw the middle class some old
car and funny mortgage rebates, then went round starting wars until the dollar
dropped to less than half a euro and rose only after that sort of money
devalued iself... to which Mr. Pettigrew and the guy
as came after the guy and the gal who came after Greenspan, but before him,
ganged up with the Tea Party/Alt-Right to promoted a magical cure: the flat tax
or, as the black pizza guy briefly floated, ought-twelve, the nine-nine-nine.
When I brought up this
amendment in the Congress to replace their flat tax with a poll tax, like over in England during Maggie Thatcher’s regime,
they voted it down five hundred something to six, but
more than a few elephant men took me aside to say, more or less: "just
give us a little more time on this!" Sure enuff
- Senator Boortz' national food tax sailed through
committee last March with more Dimmycrats votin' yea than nay thanks to the Immortalist
lobbies (and Mister Bloomberg’s money) who got certified organic produce
exempted. Hey... poor kids eat too much mac and
cheese already; too many Ding Dongs. Let
‘em munch radicchio!
And both parties kept
throwing money at failed corporations and foreign dictators through laundry
machines like Ex-Im or the International Monetary
Fund... dollars as get stashed in Belgian banks, promote outsourcing corporations
and buy guns that, more often than not, get pointed against our troops when we
finally have to invade and settle scores.
Dobe
Lockett, as used to tend the Senator's lawn at Miller's Ridge before marrying
down, raised up one boy, Tyrone, on his pay from the magnetic
tape people in the next county West. When we reunited, after the Senator's
funeral, the tape people had moved on to Malaysia, Tyrone to the Silicon Sahara
west of Austin and Dobe was doing odd jobs, besides
night shifts at the Gasway off Interstate 75. He's 55
and prematurely retired from the world of money, if not work... one eye put out
by a punk with a knife last year, bullet in his rib doctors say costs too much
to dig out. So I keep paying him to cut grass twice a month in summers, and he
comes to work in the truck his boy bought with stock options from that smart
burglar alarm company in Texas. Doesn't talk much now, that Dobe, as used to jaw on about charity-sucking nwords, just
a "mornin'!" by the mornings and a "night!"
by nights. He's a PROL now... Prematurely Retired,
Overqualified, Livin'-off-the-kids. Still one
hundred two percent for President Trump in twenty four, tho’!
Orwell would be right proud.
Having no money, at least
he don't have to fret about this Savings Tax, now, just them Russian mobsters
as run most privatized Social Security and Medicare Part D accounts with an
insolence to make even Bill Archer, the privatization man, himself, keep mantracizing that he never wanted more than a ten percent
privatization for fear of "mischief, political favoritism and less money
for Social Security recipients."
Then there's the healthcare...
once the O-Bomb and the Mitt agreed on swag for the insurance lobby and jail
for the poor, this uppity Senator, John Kyl of
Arizona (which tends to breed Republicans as become interesting, well,
unless and until they aspire to higher office) suggested that elderly persons of
means pay out-of-pocket premiums to doctors for special treatment over that as
our still-busted Medicare and Medicaid allow. And then The Donald… well, he didn’t repeal the
insurance extortion parts of Obamacare, just the parts
as let the medical and insurance lobbies go back to not necessarily kicking the
old and sick off their rolls, just charging them thirty five hundred or so a
month. If middle-aged boomers have to
ship Ma and Pa off to Santo Domingo to avoid getting swept up in the MTRA dragnet and other old codgers prefer to languish in jail for smuggling
Lipitor, shootin' the mailman (if’n
they can find one) or mercy-killing their spouses 'cause healthcare in the
Graybar Hotel's better than anything they could find on the streets, well… ain't this just enlightened self-interest?
We say that other sort
of self-interest when the mess in ought-four was repeated at the height of the
Latvian Flu, last winter. A quarter-million Americans died because the drug companies
accidentally-on-purpose produced less than half the necessary vaccines, and
sold much of what they did make to resellers, as asked sixty dollars a shot (a
hundred in food stamps or small, negotiable electronics) in alleys behind
Senior Centers of Southside Chicago, East Los Angeles and the Bronx and the
baby formula people in Sturgis (Michigan, unfortunately, not South Dakota) churned
out such toxic baby brews that they had to be shut down, sending mothers to
brawling in the big box store aisles.
(Shoulda
set up in South Dakota instead – that way the biker baby formula brewers would
have elevated their product to the cleanliness of American meth... made for
lively kiddies too!)
Liberals,
predictably, wailed about a two-tier system with the best health care going to
the rich. Best imitate the Canadians and
have jackboot… or, north of Winnipeg… snowshoe thugs prevent those Kardashians
from enjoying the celebrity rhinoplasty. But rich people always have had
access to better healthcare than the poor! It's in the Bible, if not the
Constitution or Magna Carta... somewhere... we've been feuding over Medicare
for decades now, doing nothing, so why shouldn't those
as have the means protect their asses with gratuities to the Doc. Like as not he'll appreciate it... more money's going to HMO CEOs
with MBAs than to MDs with student IOUs these days, to turn a few initials.
Seeing as the
Catfish way is to ensure minimum standards of care, I don't think it's so
terrible at all. Americans tip taxi drivers, hotel maids and cocktail
waitresses based on care and service: why not allow their friendly, local
proctologist entry into what the smart fellows call a “concierge” system, as
requires that they wash their hands a’fore doin’ that thing they do?
If D-20/M-13
'Publicans and Democrat bootlickers can use an 1872 mining law to sell ten
billions in Nevada gold to the effin' Canadians for
$5,190 to finance their jackboots n’ snowshoes, us Catfish might as well also
cut-out the middlemen, like that Los Angeles County Coroner's Office does with
its little gift shop of horrors as sells coffee mugs and T-shirts, body tote
bags, even real, surplus personalized toe tags as sex toys, or Austin Tillerman's people have done, offering to de-privatize... publicize?...
their "Americas First" retail chain.
Catfish politics and
e-con'mics, remember, is about establishing floors,
not ceilings.
This French fellow, Tommy
Picketty, as wrote a long, long book that some people
were reading during their long, long layovers at the airplane security stations,
has an idea of paying off the deficit and the military without cutting
entitlements. He wants to tax the rich…
not their incomes, but their capital. In
other words, a savings tax as is actually applied to stock holdings, Caribbean
bank accounts and most of the ways in which the elites hide their wealth. An interesting idea… as is explained in
further detail in an old Don Jones Index lesson of goin’ on eight years ago, but
even Frenchy admits that it’s not likely to happen
even in Europe, let alone the U. S. of A. So, in order to finance cutting back on debt
and paying for the three, four hundred thousands of boots on the ground it’s
gonna take to wipe out Mad Vlad in occupied Ukraine,
Johnny Jihad in Yemen and Juan Valdez in Costa Rica, it’s back to tax increases for the rich… and (despite anything
Elizabeth Warren has to say) the middle class and poor… let’s say a ceiling on
the order of about 45 percent at over what me or one of them others would make
as President, as comes out to about a half million a year. Plus a ten percent Bush/Obama/Trump/Biden
surcharge until the national tab gets down to a maximum of ten trillion.
Slightly less than half what it is now..
Got a few other possibilities
about securing our national security, paying for the infrastructure maintenance
as will keep biting us in the form of trainwrecks and
collapsing bridges if’n we don’t… foreign investment
taxes for the rich Americans, gas taxes for the poor and death taxes for the
dead. My favorite, of the moment, would
be to tax profits on corporations as make stuff... real stuff that real people
u se... less than what we’d charge the slicksters who just move money around. We’re rounding up some e-con-mists as are
as-yet not beholden to the plutocrats and the vaporcrats
to lay out a few bare bones propositions as proposed in a DJI
of five-some years ago.
On the other hand,
we could implore
"One of Orange County's
best natural resources is teenage angst, anger and resentment," Pantle told the media. "That's a very valuable resource
that has yet to be tapped."
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