“Austerity” is just a con to further enrich the nationless capital markets and the super-rich. Nothing more. The very rich have no interest in the history of America from the 1940s through the 1970s, when a rising and secure middle class, and 90-percent tax rates on top earners, still supported fine lifestyles for the wealthy as well as the world’s greatest economy and society. Now we have to lose so they can win yet more. But austerity and tax cuts are the watchword, the intellectual fraud that has taken the day.

Boy, you’d think Rogue Columnist was upset! This is his latest column.

The slogan under his masthead is “A Pen Warmed In Hell.”

Like him, I’m astonished to live in a country where you can’t raise taxes.

Ahh! you say with outrage. I’m a member of the middle class. I have no more to give!

You’re quite right. I’m not interested in you. I know you don’t have any more money. Since the mid-70’s the tax burden has been off loaded on you. The corporations (about 40 percent of which pay no taxes at all) evade their taxes and the wealthy want their taxes reset at 22% about a 1/3 less than now.

This is an incredibly wealthy country. A fair tax system could pay to fix our infrastructure, could pay to have an education system second to none, could pay to reestablish our industrial base, and could pay to invest in research, development and our fellow Americans so we regain our place as number one in standard of living, as number one in upward mobility.

Upward mobility? What’s that? That is where you or your children have the same shot as some gazillionaire’s child at making it. A country, a nation, where you are measured not by who your friends are, who your family was, but by what you can do.

That’s America!

James Pilant