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<p class="style27">(from counterpunch.com)<br>
</p>
<h1 class="style27"><font color="#990000" size="+2">Let Them Eat Cake </font></h1>
<p class="style27"><font size="+1">By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS<br>
</font></p>
<small><font size="+1"><small>(PC Roberts frequently appears in Max
Keiser's videos, and is a former assistant Sec'y of the Treasury)</small></font></small><br>
<p class="style2"><span class="style34">I</span>t is not unusual for
members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or
$30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t
cover the wedding dress or the flowers. </p>
<p class="style2">When country music star Keith Urban married actress
Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum
hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate
mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was
$1,000,000.</p>
<p class="style2">The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy
Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and
Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5
million.</p>
<p class="style2">Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to
$2,000,000.</p>
<p class="style2">Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity.
According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment
banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000.
According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about
$5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on
US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president
Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France
and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among
the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg,
Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich,
wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.</p>
<p class="style2">Before we attend to the poor political judgment of
such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us
wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and
president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow
$3,000,000 on a wedding.</p>
<p class="style2">The American people did not take up a collection to
reward him for his service to them.<br>
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his
eight years in office?</p>
<p class="style2">How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with
an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million
dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?</p>
<p class="style2">These are not polite questions, and they are
infrequently asked.</p>
<p class="style2">While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding
cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is
struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed
3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by
investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The
Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans
and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in
as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in
Ohio.</p>
<p class="style2">The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’
food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to
have something for everyone who needed it.” </p>
<p class="style2">Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had
the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates
to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to
squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose
whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and
its shareholders.</p>
<p class="style2">The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US
government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry,
while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars
killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.</p>
<p class="style2">The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government
report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50
million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to
afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.</p>
<p class="style2">US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack
said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the
survey for 2010 is released.</p>
<p class="style2">Today in the American Superpower, one of every six
Americans is living on food stamps.<br>
The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in
pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and
almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay
alive.</p>
<p class="style2">The world has not witnessed such total failure of
government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of
American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the
country goes down the drain.</p>
<p class="style2">And the American sheeple remain acquiescent. </p>
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