WE NEED A WILLIE SUTTON NATIONAL HOLIDAY

by R J Shulman

GRAYSON, New Mexico - (PTSD News) - Willie who? Willie Sutton, the prolific bank robber of the last century. Why, you might ask. While there may be some guilty pleasure in honoring a man who made a career of stealing from the institutions that have stolen from the pubic for so long, but that is not the reason. It's because he may have had the answer to our financial and economic woes.

When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton said, "because that is where the money is." The reason this is so important today is because we have a obscene deficit and an economic crisis not seen since Willile was holding up banks in the 30's. We need his wisdom because to many people (and all lock step Republicans say that the solution to solving our current financial crisis is to give tax breaks to the ultra rich and try and get the money instead from punishing underpaid government workers, the unemployed and those trying to get by on social security that they already paid for. In Willie's day, that would be the equivaltent of the bank robber needing cash and trying to get it from hobos and bums.

So what is so sacred about rich people's tax rates that they must be protected at all costs, even shutting down the government to preserve their great fortune? Can you beleive that the very idea of returning the Decider's 5% tax break gift to his friends the mega-rich has proven to be more repugnant to so many Americans than whether their neighbors die because they can't get health insurance, or havig a leader who invades unarmed countries and tortures people because he thinks they don't like us or that American children will be thrown into the street at Christmas because their parent's unemployment insurance that they paid for runs out? A Bizarro world for sure.

This fat sacred cow of tax gifts to the rich needs to be Bar-B-Qued and Bar-B-Qued fast. Oh, cry the politicians bought by the money saved by mondo-rich by these very same tax breaks, that this is class warfare, a plan to redistribute wealth and must be stopped at all costs. Wake up, America. This war on class has been going on full steam since Reagan began his War on Wages thirty years ago and the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the ulta greedy rich has already happened. And unlike the utter failure of the War of Poverty, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror whatever that is, the War on Wages has been very successful.

American wages have been stagnant for three decades, but even that is not enough for those of plenty. To them, wages were still too high, so began the successful quest to find the lowest wages in the world. For proof, just call your American computer company's customer serivice number and you will get someone on the phone calling themselves Bob Smith, but who sounds like he knows more about Shiva and Kali than he does about Jesus.

It's time to have the common sense and courage to return to the tax sharing formulas in place in the 1950's and 60s when the American economy was the envy of the world. Of course, the spending needs to decrease as well, but that is another whole discussion. What we need to stop is the massive and continuous Robin Hood in reverse that now has produced the greatest discrepancy between the rich and the rest of us.

And I have a question for all of you non-filthy rich who support the fat cats' greed over your own interests - do you do it because you think if you lick the bottoms of enough expensive hand-made boots and designer clothed buttocks that some of the wealth will trickle down to you or is it because the peoople in the media you listen to who tell you who to hate have told you to take this position? And please stop repeating the mantra that the filthy rich need this money to create jobs. They had their chance with these rates and if they created any jobs they were in China.

So lets all stop what we are doing for a day, a day named after Willie Sutton, so that we can remember that we need to get the money from where the money is, the ultra rich and giant corporations who use more of the resources and have more protected by the very government they want you to hate and the government of the people they wish to continue to short change instead of trying to solve our economic woes by reaching into the shallow pockets of the unemployed, the underemployed, the underemployed in two jobs or three jobs at once and anyone else working hard to stay above the poverty line.