"ABCNNBBCBSFOX, The Public Message Is NOT Mixed!
As I write these words, the corporate media talking heads are shoving polls at their audience which indicate that Americans want the budget balanced, taxes to be held where they are, no increase in the debt ceiling, and do not want to see cuts to social services. The talking heads and the politicians are screaming that the public is sending "mixed messages" which means Congress and Obama "just have to" do what they think is best.
But nothing could be further from the truth. The message is not mixed at all; the corporate media is simply refusing to see the message for what it is. They are ignoring the real message by We The People to the US Government
So let's go over the message, both the acknowledged and the ignored, step by step.
1. Yes, the American people want a balanced budget. We The People have to live within our incomes. Common sense says the same must apply to the government. Of course, it is very easy to yield to the temptation to overspend when you have a pocket full of credit cards underwritten by the taxpayers. But that is no excuse.
2. It is true the American people do not want any more taxes. We are all taxed way too much and receive way too little compared to other nations. Other nations with equivalent taxation provide higher education and health care to the people. They have good roads, good schools, good hospitals. In the United States, We The People surrender an aggregate total of more than half of our productivity in taxes, then are expected to fund our own higher education and medical care, often incurring heavy debts to do so. Meanwhile the roads crumble, the bridges collapse, the schools and hospitals close. In short we have all the tax burdens of a modern nation, but few of the benefits.
3. Off course we do not want cuts to Social Services. Programs like Social Security are not gifts by the government to the people. We The People paid into Social Security with every single paycheck. That money is ours, borrowed by the Federal Government from the Social Security Trust Fund, and now that the US Government cannot repay the loans, they speak of cuts as if it is our patriotic duty to forget about the retirement we all worked our entire lives for. If a business CEO were to embezzle his employee pension fund the way the US Government has done to the Social Security trust fund, they would go to prison.
Social services are NOT gifts. They are NOT charity. Every penny that the government has came from the wallets of the American people. The contract with America and simple common decency should compel the US Government to spend the people's money on the people and nothing else. It is ours by default and we demand the US Government not short-change the American people.
These are the messages the corporate media says their polls are showing, and they call them mixed. But I argue that the messages are very consistent when you take into account those questions not asked by the media pollsters, and the likely answers from the American people.
4. The way to balance the budget, lower taxes, and start to pay down the debt is to shut down the Department of Let's Go Around The World Murdering Brown People, and end these costly and pointless wars of conquest against nations which have done no wrong other than (as in the case of Libya) prefer a state-issued currency to a private central bank's notes. The United States spends more of the people's wealth on the machinery of mass death than Russia, China, and all of NATO combined. The United States has spent more of the people's wealth on the machinery of mass death than any other nation in the history of the human race. The human race can be grateful that so much of what the United States buys with the people's tax money is useless junk incapable of mass murder. As I type these words, the entire US Air Force fleet of F-22s is grounded because the system that is supposed to send oxygen for the pilots to breath is actually sending them carbon monoxide. The USS San Antonio, although delivered in 2005, has been deployed at sea only once., and as I type these words is out of service again with major problems in all four of its engines. Two other U.S. Navy ships, the USNS Bejamin Isherwood and the USNS Henry Eckford, built 25 years ago at a cost of $300 million, are headed to the scrap yard without ever serving an actual day of service. The Army's $2.7 billion Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) crashes all the time and the search engine doesn't work very well, when it works at all, which means it is often directing strikes against innocent targets.
What the media failed to ask in their polls is whether Americans are tired of living lives of poverty and debt-servitude, to suffer on what President Eisenhower called the "Cross of Iron", to pay for the deaths visited capriciously on the rest of the world by the US Government. Had the corporate media included that in their polls, there would be no confusion about the message the people are sending.
5. One way this debt crisis could have been avoided was to not loot the people to bail Wall Street out of the Mortgage-Backed Securities Fraud; the biggest financial fraud in history and of such a scale it may yet bring down the entire United States Government. Dylan Ratigan estimates the total costs of keeping the Wall Street criminals out of prison by buying back the fraudulent investments at $27 trillion, a figure which dwarfs the $2 trillion Obama is desperate to borrow to keep the US Government going. What the total losses are is yet to be revealed as the Federal Reserve, which has admitted to $16 trillion spent (on the public tab) to repurchase the fraudulent mortgage-backed securities and clearing up the credit default swaps, is still keeping much of their dealings secret from the American people. Had We The People emulated Iceland's example; had we jailed the criminal bankers and fired the government that helped them loot the public, we would even now be rising up out of our economic woes, even as Iceland is now doing.
It is important to recall that We The People did not give our consent for this use of our money. Indeed when the first of the too-many-to-count bailouts, TARP, was debated in Congress, public opposition ran 90% against using the people's money to save Wall Street from their own reckless behavior, but Congress voted TARP through anyway, at least in part because their own personal fortunes are tied up with those Wall Street companies that engaged in the fraud (the reason Congress also passed the First Time Homebuyer Credit to lure more people into the mortgage scam).
What the media failed to include in the polls was whether Americans want the budget balanced by cutting off all bailouts to Wall Street and demanding back the trillions already poured into that bottomless pit.
6. Last week I drove up the Leeward side of Oahu and passed over a mile of homeless encampments. The US Government has no business sending a single penny of the people's tax money to foreign governments while Americans sleep in alleys and eat out of trash dumpsters. As of this writing, the United States no longer has a manned space program on the claim we can no longer afford it. Yet the US Government, which has sent to Israel four times the entire cost of the Apollo Moon Program, continues to send the people's tax money to Israel without any reductions at all.
The media polls didn't ask how We The People felt about that, either. Personally, I think it is sick. No government can serve two masters and a government that serves Israel cannot and does not serve the American people.
7. Why are we talking about raising the debt ceiling and borrowing at interest more money from the privately owned Federal Reserve bankers, when Article 1 Section 8 of the United States Constitution allows the US Government to issue its own currency interest free, as many Presidents including John F. Kennedy have done?
The media polls didn't ask how We The People feel about paying interest to a private bank for the currency the US Government is supposed to issue for free.
Abraham Lincoln said that the proper role of government is to do for the community that which the community needs and wants but cannot do for itself. That the US Government has exceeded that role by a huge margin is obvious, and what is equally obvious is that the corporate media is guilty of the sin of omissions in that it did not ask the really pertinent questions in their polls, in order to manufacture an artificial sense of confusion behind which the US Government can do what it wants while pretending not to be able to deduce the will of the people.
The will of the people is obvious, and simple. The money you take from the people must be spent on the people, for those things that the people want and need, and for nothing else. Certainly not for saving Wall Street's criminals, buying weapons that will not work, and waging pointless wars with the few that do.
If you, the elected government of the United States, cannot understand that message, then it is time to do the honorable thing and resign.
--MORE--"
