The Liberal Patriot

There Comes a Point

J.G. Schwam - March 6, 2007

Outrage just isn’t enough anymore. It just doesn’t seem strong enough a word to convey the message anymore. Getting sick to one’s stomach doesn’t seem enough either. But what good does flat out spitting mad anger do? Who in charge of dolling out the hundreds of billions of dollars forcibly wrested from our tightly strapped wallets, gives a darn at how disgusted we are. The feigned bromides of concern they feed us on the nightly news appear now as no more than the patently vacuous platitudes that they are.

They stand up at ten thousand dollar a plate dinners and tell us how much they honor the sacrifice of our brave men and women under arms. While outside the world of that rarified air hundreds of thousands of veterans of six wars aged 18 to 80 languish in a tangled bureaucratic morass of neglect and indifferent, inadequate care.

They tell us how they stand up for families and jobs while each quarter General Motors, Ford, Pfizer and dozens of other Fortune 100 companies layoff tens of thousands of workers, economically devastating thousands of families with each stroke of their unconcerned formulaic pens.

They tell us they are heartsick that families are forced into ruin and impossible debt for lack of health insurance when a parent or child falls ill from disease they cannot afford to treat. Yet they cut the taxes of CEO’s that earn enough in an hour to pay the annual health insurance cost of well more than 100 families who struggle to make ends meet, without healthcare they can afford and still put food on the table.

They tell us we must give up hundreds of billions to fight war after war for oil that is no longer cheap while our bridges rust from lack of funds for paint, our roads riddled with potholes from lack funds for maintenance, our food tainted with salmonella and e. coli from lack of funds for inspectors, our waters polluted with toxins from lack of funds for the enforcement of laws that prohibit the discharge of corporate effluence into our waters while our schools crumble and children’s education falls behind that of the Finish, Chinese, Swedish, the French and the children of many other nations.

They tell us the Saudi’s are our friends while dozens of it’s members are worth tens of billions of dollars each, earned on the backs of our labors while their corporate patrons, Exxon, BP/Amoco and others post sickening profits. And our Congress debates the matter of a dollar an hour increase in the minimum wage as if would devastate our economy.

They take hundreds millions of dollars in campaign donations from giant credit card and finance companies that hopelessly indebt millions of hard working families so they can keep up appearances and attempt to convince themselves that they, the middle class, the backbone of our great nation are not slowly descending into poverty. As daily more and more families fall deeper into the abyss of home refinancing, home equity loans, college loans and usurious credit cards they never be able to pay off. They pass laws they call bankruptcy reform that really benefit no one but the massive profits of some of the richest most predatory lenders. So called reform written by lobbyists for the same.

And we watch helpless, as they mortgage our future away with a national debt that spirals more and more out of control every day, with no power to do a darn thing. We watch as our precarious economy teeters, helpless to anything about it, on a growing mountain of leverage and funny money we call ironically call securities.

There comes a point that we must ask ourselves who do these people we call our president, our senators and representatives really represent?

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