CONSERVATIVE PLAN TO INCREASE POVERTY STYMIED IN CONGRESS

From an AP report in the Spokesman Review, July 1, 2004: “Conservatives say cutting taxes will force lawmakers to make government smaller.”

That’s the plan, folks (as I’ve pointed out four or five times in this blog), from Reagan onward with his smaller military adventures to the current Bush with his huge one. When Republicans mean small government, they mean large military but smaller social programs. After they’ve destroyed Roosevelt’s democracy and increased poverty to the point that it puts downward pressure on wages, then they’ll cut back on military spending.

Thank goodness the Republicans can’t pass a budget plan. It remains their purpose to return America to the days of the late Nineteenth Century when economic inequality was rampant. Their best hope of course is to make Bush’s tax cuts for the rich permanent while they fritter away money on military adventures. That will definitely shrink the money being redistributed for social parity.

In the town of Spokane in eastern Washington their plan is bearing some fruit. In that small town of about 200,000 psyches, 8000 are homeless and 22 percent of the population lives beneath the national poverty level. The Republicans hope to duplicate that success nation wide, if not increase those numbers in the long run.


From this week’s Inlander comes, “If the world’s richest economy can’t give people adequate time for their lives, I have to ask, ‘What’s an economy for?’” —John De Graaf, founder of Take Back Your Time


DEATH WISH SWELLING IN AMERICAN PSYCHE

Evel Kneivel (spelling?) is returning to the American consciousness. We can expect a movie, based on his exploits, out this month on TNT. And no wonder. We have a huge increase in the numbers of mindless men who want to go watch roaring machines run in circles until they crash, so that they can talk for days about, “Hey, man, did you see that wreck?” Evil was said to have a death wish. When we became a more peaceful nation during the hippy daze, of course, death wishes went out of favor for awhile.

Both these phenomena are accelerated by the Christian resurgence. Christian people have a strong death wish or a death hope. They pray for the second coming constantly. Many of them want to get out of this world they consider so evil and bad. Who could live at peace with a psyche out of which all creative imagination had been crushed in youth by fear that the devil lives there, waiting to snatch up the souls of the carelessly and sensually happy? When Christianity swells up like a boil in humanity’s skin so does the death wish well up in its psyche. Like skin pustules indicated the Black Plague.