American Holocaust

American Holocaust

By Lee Burkett
OpEdNews.com
November 05, 2012

It's happening all around us, right before our eyes.

We are spending an average of 19.3 million dollars an hour,
24 hours a day, 7 days a week to wage war.

This is "The War On Terror" a portable, pre-emptive war that
ignores both domestic and international law, crosses borders
of sovereign nations reigning death by drone and imposing
occupation anywhere, at any time, for any reason.

It is nebulous, indefinable and unwinnable.

Unwinnable because, by definition it will continue until any and all
resistance to American policy and American interests has been laid
to rest.

Unwinnable because each time we move to crush resistance,
we create martyrs and survivors who feed more resistance.

It is not meant to be won. It is meant to go on in perpetuity.
There's profit to be made, tremendous profit.

We have given further billions upon billions to Corporations.

The very people who created the economic crisis have been
the ones to benefit from it.

"Too big to fail" is a sort of short hand for "support the artificially
inflated market."

Keynesian economics has created a boon by negating the zero sum
total principle of economic models. Zero sum total is the combined
value of all resource within a given economy.

This figure represents the maximum growth to be had.

On a chart it be the classic bell curve, with the peak representing
the point where all available value and wealth has been reached.

The down slope represents the point where currency becomes
ever more inflated, of less value because it's worth is derived
from finite resource value after peak growth has been achieved.

Our current economic model derives value from debt.

Debt is at it's heart a promise to pay over time for goods or
services used today.

We have attached the value of today's dollar to the value of
promissory return in the future. Growth is achieved by the
application of compound interest.

We are borrowing value from tomorrow.

No one seems to be asking how many tomorrow's are available
before the debt becomes a never to be paid sum.

Not because the debt will be walked away from, but because
the debt will exceed all value to be had from every resource
available today and into the future.

We're hovering at that point right now. But again, there's
tremendous profit to be made right now.

American policy, American government, American legislation
is now being dictated by a handful of wealthy people.

Only the blind or the willfully ignorant are unaware of this.

This is what the unholy marriage of democracy and capitalism
has brought us corporate welfare, where the risks and losses
are passed on to the tax payer while the profits are privatized.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because
it is a merger of state and corporate power" -- Benito Mussolini.

I will not argue the definition of fascism with one of it's modern
day practitioners.

While the corporate controlled media spoon feeds us
infotainment, while media legally makes up news out of
thin air, while consumerism is fueled by easy credit and
debt slavery becomes the norm, an American Holocaust
is being waged.

The numbers of poor grow on a daily basis.

Despite government attempts to cook the books, and to redefine
what poverty means, they admit that those in need are reaching
historic proportions, but even then such admissions are hidden
from most of us, buried, marginalized, lost, hidden in rhetoric,
buried in diversion.

Food stamp applications have risen dramatically, which in turn
means that the available help is diminishing dramatically.

These people are lazy. It's astounding how many Americans
buy into that, not openly, but in a hidden way.

How many talk about the need to help, then do nothing?

How many try to pass the ball along to a do nothing Congress?

How many phone call actions, petitions, e-mails to Congress need
to fail before this passive/aggressive approach is abandoned?

I call it passive/aggressive behavior, recognizing the need, then passing it on to someone else to handle.

Yes, okay, so these people need help, but I passed it on and I let
my government know because I have other, more important things
to deal with...

And thus we can deny their suffering even as we acknowledge it.

Today, this very day, children will go to school hungry. Parents will
skip meals to stretch what little food they have. Elderly people will
go without medicine to buy oatmeal.

It is a Holocaust, but hidden.

The number of jobless grows on a daily basis.

Corporations have outsourced, down sized, moved production to
countries where labor costs are tallied in pennies a day.

Our government has used our tax dollars to subsidize these profit
producing moves.

These are the newly poor, growing every day, I've seen estimates
that for every job available there are between 5 to 7 unemployed
seeking that position.

This puts the Corporations in the position of being able to offer less
pay, no benefits, and to expect full time output for part time work.

These newly poor who now face an entirely new definition of
disposable income.

They face hard, impossible choices, and our government not only
allows it, they promote, protect and defend it. How many of us
pass this along, too?

On a daily basis I see repeated calls, repeated demands "We Need
Jobs" then nothing happens, until the next day when the chorus
begins again.

Where once America felt it's place was to raise the barre, to lift
third world people to our level of existence, now it has become
a matter of lowering the barre so that the American people are
willing to work for peanuts, less than minimum wage with no
benefits, all to profit a handful.

This is a Holocaust, but hidden.

The homeless, a large percentage of whom are veterans of our
illegal wars, will try to find a dry, warm place to sleep.

The numbers grow on a daily basis; good, honest people, people
who trusted those in power, are now living in hotels, cars, shelters
or in the streets.

When the crisis hit, our government's reaction was to pour billions
of dollars into bailing out the Corporations.

Meanwhile, the architects of this misery are enjoying record
profits, historic bonuses, and we allow them to tell us how to
fix the problem.

This is a Holocaust, but hidden.

There are people dying from lack of even minimal health
care. People who have lost, or never had, health insurance.

An estimated 46,000 Americans will die this year, in the richest
country on earth.

We have Obamacare, formerly Romneycare, the result of a mutual
capitulation to medical, pharmaceutical and insurance interests.

The problem? People can't afford healthcare insurance.

The solution? Pass legislation requiring them to buy it.

Holocaust.

There are veterans committing suicide in record numbers.

These are the people who stepped up to place themselves
in danger to protect what they believed America to be,
and having been injured, damaged, having to do things no
person of conscience should be called upon to do, are now
abandoned.

A resource, exploited and discarded.

Holocaust.

The number of gay teen suicides is appalling. Conservative
Christian agenda, supported by Corporate millions, made real.

The purpose?

To further divide us, to give us yet another emotional knee-jerk
distraction.

Holocaust, not directed at race, or creed, or religion, but at the
poor, the sick, the homeless.

The great divide is now The Elite versus all the rest of us.

What is not so hidden is the Holocaust being waged on our
national psyche.

We have allowed our Constitution and Bill of Rights to be thrown
away with the passage of The National Defense Authorization Act,
and we have legitimately passed from Republic to Empire.

We have allowed Homeland Security to take away one civil liberty
after another.

We have allowed illegal wars to waged in our name, we have
allowed torture, and assassination to be used in our name. We
have allowed protest to be called terrorism.

It is a Holocaust on our own humanity.

We have been forced into a dark ghetto, where the bad news is
simply overwhelming, where we are forced to address immediate
needs, real or perceived, and we allow the larger questions to
remain unanswered.... Holocaust upon holocaust upon Holocaust.

The poor suffer, the homeless suffer, the sick, the homeless, the
damaged, all suffer in plain sight, but it is unaddressed, ignored,
brushed to the side, and passed on for others to handle.

What price Freedom? What price security?

The death of innocents, the suffering of many, the loss of civil
liberty.

Four hundred citizens of the United States now earn more in a
year than the bottom fifty percent of wage earners combined.

The benefits belong to them. The government belongs to them.
We belong to them.

It is time.

For every Holocaust we allow, we become less than human.

We all have a personal responsibility to create change.

If you do nothing, then you signal your approval.

Silence is consent.

Feed someone, give someone a blanket, share a little human
kindness.

Resist this society that allows all these Holocausts.

No act of resistance, no small bit of defiance is ever wasted.

It is time.

Rise to the call of what we should be.

Stop allowing what we have become.



Lee Burkett is a proud member of The Screen Actor's Guild and a
writer/activist.

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Burkett-121105-375.html