News & Articles

Talk of raising the nation’s debt ceiling, minus the hubbedy-do we saw last summer they say, stirred me into fiscal action. Dredging up an idea from that recent past seemed appropriate.

I just negotiated a restorative and holistic compromise raising my personal debt ceiling.

I will not default on my bills.

My compromise did include a cut in my domestic and defense spending but it also included a provision to raise needed revenues. My more progressive yin was able to convince my conservative yang that such a move was necessary, given the fact that my income levels have been in decline since the early 1980s and the shared responsibility between employer and employee was severed long ago with the onset of the 401K.

I also opted out of the “right to work” proposals and constitutional amendment efforts to balance my budget. I also refused to agree to the many riders attached to the proposal that would have decimated environmental protection. 

Shortly after that I was able to convince my conservative nature to get busy with more pressing matters regarding our loss of liberty and freedoms at the hands those who control the dials and levers behind the curtain of the so-called free market.

The economocracy, that artificial blending of monetary and democratic principles, was held accountable. My conservative side could no longer be ruled by marketing schemes and grossly inflated consumerism masked as freedom. We were getting screwed and somehow the corporate elites and the Chamber of Commerce had been able to point the finger elsewhere.

The jaded belief in supply side economics, in the “trickle down,” was finally unmasked. Cutting taxes on the rich and allowing corporations to loophole out of helping care for our society fueled the decline across my middle class. It became evident that such tax and monetary policy was flowing out of my pocket and into theirs. Companies did not invest in new workers across my American landscape. Companies and the rich were found to pray only at the alter of the bottom line and economic profit, even when it came at the expense of the larger national culture. 

Tax cuts for the wealthier parts of my life were eliminated and tax loopholes for the more lucrative of my business ventures were eliminated as well.

Shareholders, most of them wealthy, screamed for a little while but then settled down since they represent only 2-5 percent of the electorate and really have no bearing on the democracy when all things are said and done. 

If the rest of us stay on our toes they can’t elect representatives that argue for an economy that cuts its way to profitability at the expense of the working class.

Suddenly my bottom line was healthier when revenues were generated from across the top income earners and delayed payments to my educational instincts were ended. An unregulated marketplace had spent decades wiping out any likeness of a social contract between peoples in this nation, replacing it instead with selfishness and greed not seen since the Gilded Age of the robber barons.

The great difference between a century ago and our day has been an apathy across the population, sedated by cell phones and flat screen TVs and all the other gadgets, sedated and fattened by processed foods and empty celebrity worship.

Workers have become like cows being led to pasture. 

As long as the NFL season and stuffed crust pizza comes along to pacify the population we seem willing to engage in wars and a decline in wages without a peep. We celebrate “liberty” from social justice, “freedom” from income and educational equality.

We are willing to believe that multinational corporations that have fled our neighborhoods for cheaper labor elsewhere would actually create jobs back in those same neighborhoods.

Again I remind folks that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Well, our economocracy has been doing the same thing over and over for the past several decades, the supposed “trickle down” unfettered economy in action and this is where it’s gotten us. To continue to bang our heads against that failed theory is insanity. 

For a people of supposed independent nature we certainly are easily swayed into believing notions that fly against our own interests.

I will not default on my bills.

My compromise is restorative and holistic, pluralistic. My debt ceiling has been raised.