[Peace-discuss] Wall Street versus the Poor and the Middle Class

[E. Wayne Johnson]

/Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the 
United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who 
have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime./

Wall Street versus the Poor and the Middle Class: Obama's FY 2012 Budget 
Is A Tool Of Class War
by Paul Craig Roberts

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23265 
<http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23265>

Obama's new budget is a continuation of Wall Street's class war against 
the poor and middle class.

Wall Street wasn't through with us when the banksters sold their 
fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans' job 
prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at 
taxpayers' expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of 
Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve's balance sheet with 
several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly 
created money to shore up the banks' balance sheets.

The effect of the Federal Reserve's "quantitative easing" on inflation, 
interest rates, and the dollar's foreign exchange value are yet to hit.  
When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.

Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the 
federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security 
budget.  It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world 
combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for 
the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration 
forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves 
only one purpose--the enrichment of the private companies that serve the 
military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall 
Street, are who elect the U.S. government.

The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing 
and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and 
installing American puppets in their place.

China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the 
U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China's coast. Russia does 
not mass troops on Europe's borders, but the U.S. places missiles on 
Russia's borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as 
possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to 
feed the ravenous military/security complex.

The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 
million,  in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and 
sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security 
Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning 
equipment.

With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security 
complex's desire for profits, the real cause of America's enormous 
budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.

The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: "We shrink 
from our global security responsibilities at our peril." The military 
brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, 
two functionaries for its Middle East "policy."

But what are "our" global security responsibilities?  Where did they 
come from?  Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and 
invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs?  The 
perils America faces are all self-created.

The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be 
murdered in our beds by "the worldwide communist conspiracy."  Today the 
answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and 
shopping centers by "Muslim terrorists" and by a newly created imaginary 
threat--"domestic extremists," that is, war protesters and 
environmentalists.

The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of 
false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public 
whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and 
football games.

So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal 
Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later 
will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world 
reserve currency.  When the dollar goes, American power goes.

For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.

Their answer is: make the people pay.

And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.

With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great 
recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have 
said is deepening, the "Obama budget" takes aim at support programs for 
the poor and out-of-work.  The American elites are transforming 
themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the 
conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites 
in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments 
elsewhere.

All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in 
order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America.

With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American 
revolution would have the best chance of success.

American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in 
campaign contributions.

The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be 
any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American 
puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the 
Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.

These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell 
Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean 
water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance 
program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to 
Israel).

There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health 
programs over the next five years.

Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a 
pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing 
needs.  They will put no breaks on the Federal Reserve's need to print 
money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.

These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party's myth 
that America is in economic trouble because of the poor:  The poor are 
shiftless. They won't work. The only reason unemployment is high is that 
the poor had rather be on welfare.

A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college 
graduates won't take the jobs offered them, because their parents have 
too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do 
anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any 
job that doesn't start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company.  The reason 
that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not 
want them.

What all this leads to is an assault on "entitlements", which means 
Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their 
control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those 
who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate  "entitlements" 
with welfare.  America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that 
serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15% of 
their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, 
want "handouts" in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people 
think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to 
pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees?  Why didn't the 
retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?

The elite's line, and that of their hired spokespersons in "think tanks" 
and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.

Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in 
trouble because of its poor and its retirees.  America is not in trouble 
because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the 
military/security complex's enormous profits, American puppet 
governments abroad, and Israel.

The American elite's solution for America's problems is not merely to 
foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but 
to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the 
sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who 
cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine and India.

Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the 
United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who 
have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.
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