Taxation & "Texas Tea"

"And up from the ground came a bubbling crude... black gold... Texas tea..."


First thing you know ol' Jeb's a millionaire and Poppy and sonny George, too, without much merit or even sweat - just the real back door gold - CONNECTIONS, payoffs, shelters and bailouts, all the way from the Permian Basin to the CIA to the White House. (George, since when is buying a baseball team and the land for a new stadium by imminent domain a viable bailout for the rest of us broke folk?) Seems the 'gumment' likes little oil companies gone bust a lot more than it like most anybody else gone bust. Gotta hock the family farm if it's sorghum or corn or cantaloupes, but if it's oil, why by golly, surely there's a tax shelter for you....

And there's the rub these days. Dwight Eisenhower warned us about all this over 40 years ago: beware the military-industrial machine. Makes me smile to be reminded that a kindly old-fashioned Republican said that, when at last he dared to speak the truth (on his way out of public office in his farewell address just before the dashing, daring and ill-fated John Kennedy swept the "best and brightest" into Washington. And it seems most every administration since has further muddied the waters, crossing the bounds between public and private, thinking that what's good for GM and IBM and Dow and Exxon is good for the country.

Well, two generations later, we're really in a mess, leveraged to the hilt and pushing the empire to new bounds - with pipeline dreams from Alaska to Azerbaijan.

The bottom line is: once again, like New England's tea drinkers of yore, we're getting taxation without representation. Sure, we've got the vote (speaking of muddied waters INDEED), but it's really the corporations and their elected scoundrels who have the representation. Why buy a few votes illegally when you can legally buy a lobbyist? Why grovel in the trenches of populist democracy when you can enjoy canapés in the hollowed halls of the Lobbytocracy?

Let's face it: ours is not really a civilly/citizen-driven democracy. It's a capital/company/corporation-driven empire. We the people are getting short shrift and a big bill. And while we're at it, we're not getting a healthy (read: truly populist and representative) democracy so much as a high and mighty oligarchy - make that "OILigarchy", why don't you?

Would any healthy nation really want to borrow that much money to run this show? Apparently, healthy or not, the powers that be are going for it while they still can, selling us a "Beverly Hillbillies" bill of goods. Guess we can't all afford (and don't deserve) the fancy tax shelters on which the lives of the rich and famous depend. They're getting Hollywood while we're getting horse hockey.

Me, I'm thinking the future looks a lot less like "90210" and a lot more like Arkansas and "Dukes of Hazzard."