If George Bush is so simple-minded, how is he getting away with it?

Most of us old enough to have watched a couple of wars have at some time been brainwashed about the bad guys who would redistribute the wealth, take from the hardworking man of God and give it to the slacker who would sell drugs to your kids if you weren't constantly vigilant.

Dredged up memory, dusty but potent: My strongly Republican mother sitting across the table from me, staring, unable to comprehend what I had just said. "I'm not a Republican," I told her, instantly hoarse.

Finally, she got her words out: "Do you know what the Democrats want to do?" I didn't (still don't). "They want to take our house from us and give it to the maid," she said, just as hoarse.

Wow. What do you say? It's your mother, and you're only a kid. Insecure, idealistic, green, hopeful, unsure. Fortunately for McGovern, Dukakis et al, who needed my one vote, I didn't swallow it. Not back then, when we knew what the Democrats stood for, could see the chasm that lay between them and the opposing party. In those days we could study the "redistribution of wealth" as a method whereby a united people sought to lift all boats, rowboat and yacht alike. We could believe in a compassion able to create a free and just world. That was a long time ago, under Eisenhower and JFK, a world closer to the Ice Age than to today.

At some point, things changed; we didn't yet fathom the far right, so many of whom had their "let them eat cake" responses to instances like Katrina's slam into New Orleans. The warriors of semantics worked overtime. First, "redistribution of wealth" joined the other words made slimy by the far right's touch, running it through the brainwash machine until it joined all the words used to scare us -- socialist, leftist, liberal, death tax. Then, within the past 25 or so years, the concept, if not the term, has come back into being, turned totally on its ear, Robin Hood out robbing the poor and middle class to sustain an excessive lifestyle of the rich. You say it, and you're a proponent of class warfare; you don't say it, and you contribute to the slow death of our middle class.

This new kind of distribution, taking from the neediest and giving it to those for whom it will be overflow, is what it is all about. Everything -- taxes, wars, the media, religion, the new world as extracted from "the new world order," everything.

Is this then what the story of the earthlings is about: taking what you can from the majority so that you can join the exclusive minority on the top of the hill, keeping the masses either fooled or content with a trinket now and then? Telling them their real reward is in heaven? Has it really worked for centuries?

Writer Holly Sklar, in a recent piece in Information Clearing House, tells us that since 2000, America's billionaire club has gained 76 more members while the typical household has lost income and the poverty count has grown by more than 5 million people. Further, she tells us that the Forbes 400 wealth totals more than $1.1 trillion -- an amount greater than the gross domestic product of Spain or Canada, the world's eighth and ninth largest economies.

We're slowly getting the numbers down pat. The top 1 percent of earners in this country hold about 40 percent of the country's wealth, having doubled that percentage in the past 25 years. Business Week magazine, which isn't likely to show favoritism to the little people, reports that the CEOs of the largest 50 companies had an average total compensation of $12.4 million last year, up from $1.95 million at the start of the decade. Do we begin to see in which direction the money flows? Is it made of helium?

Here's one for those "making it," whatever that means. If the current $5.15 minimum wage had risen comparably to other incomes, it would now be about $24 an hour. How about an embrace from the other side? J. P. Morgan once said that the bosses shouldn't be making more than twentyfold what the workers make. Today's top CEOs are making 400times what the average workers make. I've never minded seeing the boss earn a higher wage than a clerk in the company. But 400 times the fulltime clerk's paycheck?

The numbers go on and on. If the numbers themselves are boring, the phenomenon is intriguing. And unfathomable in a world that claims compassion and fairness. Trickle-down and voodoo economics have been in the shadows for a long time now, grown fat off the complacency of those who should have fortified the gates that ever let them in. And yet, to this day, the country is filled with people who truly believe that rewarding those at the top of the economic ladder, even while denying the poor the care they get in most other industrialized nations, will eventually drift back down and share the material bliss with all.

How is it happening, so effortlessly, all around us? Pervasively. And as the strongest methods, we might list natural disasters, war, and taxes.

Natural Disasters

Last August I participated in collecting donations to take straight to evacuees from New Orleans. As our government stumbled all over itself to recognize the seriousness of Katrina, and as large agencies made their necessarily bureaucratic preparations for the monstrous undertaking they faced, it fell to individuals to offer a hand to our citizens who needed help that very day. Most people know by now that the victims of Katrina, those unable to evacuate, had been the poorest in the city. Further, despite the sometimes-good, sometimes-belated work of the Red Cross, the caring people who went immediately to their aid by passing 10 or 20 dollars to those of us taking it straight to the victims, not through an agency, could often not afford it. I noticed personally that it seemed the largest donations were made by the people who would have to sacrifice the most.

But they managed, and the funds they sent worked wonders, as we met personally with evacuees and then went to the local Wal-Mart to buy the desperately needed underwear and socks they asked for. Even in this desperation, we were busy transferring money from the kind and compassionate donors to the corporate world, who -- in all the destruction -- made fortunes from New Orleans. Who benefited most from the purchase of all the needed material from money donated mostly from people who could barely afford to? How many dollars of how many single but generous mothers working two jobs ended up in corporate coffers?

But it went far beyond buying the goods that a million people needed. To begin with, funds that would have saved the poor of New Orleans by building up their levies as the Corps of Engineers requested went elsewhere. The next step, as soon as heckuva-job Brownie was replaced and a few hundred feet were put to the fire, was to rebuild.

Thousands of people from New Orleans were now without not only a home but a job as well. Many had skills that might have been used for cleanup and reconstruction. It would have been the kind of coming together that we like to believe exists. Instead, fat contracts to do the cleanup and rebuilding went to corporations headed by the CEOs listed in the obscene statistics above cited. It isn't hard to imagine who got the lion's share out of the contracts. Just as 9-11 brought (intended or accidental) fortunes to the "right" people, Katrina helped the government in its wealth redistribution by bringing windfall profits to Bush-supporting companies while, at the same time, the Bush government suspended regulations that shore up wages for workers. The fear was that a "nobody" at the bottom would get an extra dollar that the corporate war chests were grabbing for.

We must ask ourselves how many dollars of relief that could have been used to pay the now unemployed and homeless citizens of New Orleans to clean and rebuild themselves went instead to large corporations in no-bid contracts. No-bid. Simply put, local construction companies that might hire locals were shoved aside to transfer more millions to the corpocracy. Chillingly, it is a lot like the way things are done in Iraq.

Wars

Wars always make the rich richer. Wars generate a great need for items that make the owners of the factories increase their incomes beyond all expectations. Johnny Somebody may die in the desert, believing he is protecting his family. And his wife may get a few thousand to bury him, but it is the guy in charge of manufacturing all the desert tents who makes a few million.

Iraq is a big issue right now, but a side of it often overlooked is its role in redistributing the wealth. It costs uncounted (especially by Halliburton methods) millions to rebuild towns after the U.S. has bombed them into dust in the hope of nabbing some members of the resistance. Instead of passing the funds to unemployed Iraqis and dying Iraqi construction companies, the money goes in no-bid contracts to big donors to the U.S. Republican party -- Halliburton, Bechtel, et al. But as Bob Dylan used to sing, "Now ain't the time for your tears." In all financial matters, we might be wise to ask who pays for it and who reaps the reward. Who is paying for the supposed reconstruction of Iraqi villages, when and if it gets done at all?

It would be bad enough if the bill went to the American taxpayers for rebuilding a country devastated on the basis of what now appear to be endless lies. But it's even worse than that. Innocent Iraqis, who had little to begin with, have seen their homes blown up by U.S. forces in search of those who are trying to kick the U.S. out of Iraq. After the dust settles, in comes a multibillion dollar corporation like Halliburton to clean up the mess. Let's try to grapple with the bombs and Halliburton phenomenon. We go blow up a town, and after the dead are removed, there aren't a lot of jobs for those whom the bombs missed. The town needs to be rebuilt. Are the jobless Iraqis, still trying to find money to bury their parents or children, hired? The money paid to Halliburton is coming from Iraq's oil revenues. The oil belongs (or should belong) to the Iraqis, so the revenues should go to the Iraqis. No, that's not what happens. What happens is that it goes by the planeloads to pay Halliburton, who not only doesn't hire the local jobless to work and not only charges exorbitant prices and not only gets the job without having to bid on it, but then seems to lose the money or inadvertently overcharge, a million here, a million there. If someone makes a claim that the people hired to reconstruct are the best in the business, we should uniformly laugh in their faces. Bechtel got the no-bid contract for hurricane reconstruction despite a pattern of cost overruns and shoddy work from Iraq to Boston's leaky "Big Dig" tunnel/highway project.

Doubtful that the Iraqis could do the job better or for less than the Bush people? One American firm was contracted to build a cement factory in Iraq for $15 million. After too many delays prevented the American firm from beginning the project, an Iraqi firm, allowed to use Saddam's confiscated funds, built the same factory for $80,000. If your eyes believe they are just growing tired, the first figure is millions, and the second is thousands.

The whole thing's dirtier than oil itself. The poor Iraqi whose house was just in the wrong place is now one house short, one more victim of the big Uh-Oh. The poor serviceman who believed his commander-in-chief incapable of lies, now leaves a widow and children who will slip into the growing rolls of poverty, a group scorned by comfortable citizens.

Whether we're talking about the hungry in Iraq or the jobless in the U.S. there is a fact that will eventually be reckoned with. Under U.S. stewardship at home and abroad, money is taken from the poor and middle class and given to the rich, and war is one of the primary avenues for this transfer. For a real education, look at the percentages of stock value growth posted for those companies since they began supplying and rebuilding Iraq, from Iraq's oil revenue. Without any heavy math we can see exactly what happens: the majority of the people, the poor and the shrinking middle class, get poorer and poorer as those at the top get richer. War may be good for the economy, but the latest Census Bureau's count of 37 million Americans who live below the poverty line matches the total, combined populations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas.

Numbers to support this are all over the place. War is the biggest business on the globe.

Taxes

Then there are the Bush tax cuts, possibly the most easily comprehended way of dividing the "haves" from the "have-nots."

Out of one side of Bush's mouth was the guarantee that these "across the board" tax cuts were going to benefit everyone, were going to increase jobs and -- here we go again -- have the trickle-down magic of lifting us all up.

We know now that it didn't work in the '80s. The majority of the breaks from "tax relief," another contender for top phrase of the Semantics War, went strictly to the top 2 percent in the country. The promised jobs didn't come. Clinton, trying to stop the flow of money upwards, created millions of jobs. Under Bush they've all been lost, along with a few extra.

We have an administration and possibly a public who seems to seriously believe that if you try something and it doesn't work once, then it needs a second chance. This is the only element I have found in neoconservative thinking that considers "second chances." Few have stepped forth to say only a tiny percentage of our people have gained from the huge tax cuts.

So we should have learned our lesson. Bush policies have fed his cronies and starved the poor, along with letting more and more middle class, stung with lack of health care and outsourcing of their jobs (a very easy way to redistribute wealth), move down into the "poor" group. When we see the number of people moving downward on the economic ladder, we might remember trickle-down. The 2003 cuts in capital gains and dividend taxes brought an average savings of $42,000 to each member of Bush's cabinet. Seventy-five percent of Americans were totally unaffected by this "tax relief." (In the middle of 2004, 87 percent of Americans said they had felt no impact whatsoever from any "tax relief.") How badly was the "relief" needed when our deficit is soaring? Bush's original 16-member cabinet appointees were worth an average of $10.9 million each. In 2003 the new tax cuts saved Mr. Bush himself an additional $30,858.

Enter the deficit. George Bush inherited a surplus when he was installed in office. Not a pittance either. There was a projected national surplus forecast for the end of the decade, giving us $5.6 trillion. By the middle of 2004 the surplus was completely gone, replaced by a debt of $7.22 trillion.

The neocons marched precariously closer and closer to having to do something, anything, about the deficit. While they were going to be gone by the time the sky fell in, it was starting to turn people against them to know they cared so little about what their kids would inherit. So what they did was cut social programs designed to help the poor survive. A month ago, finally listening to concerns over the explosive deficit that was putting more and more of our country into the hands of China, Congress decided to experiment with a little frugality. They passed a budget-cutting bill that would save $50 billion over five years by charging Medicaid recipients new fees. The bill also trimmed the food stamp rolls and cut spending on federal child support enforcement.

They were hailed (by themselves, at any rate) for attacking the budget problem. But as soon as the pats on the back subsided over the 50 billion trimmed from the deficit, they came back this week and passed 94 billion in tax cuts. So for 50 billion cut from spending, they also cut 94 billion from revenue. The cuts were proposed to appear to help the middle class, but that is not how Bush tax cuts work.

We owe over 7 trillion dollars, mostly to other countries. Bush's only defense of the wreck he has made of our economy is to remind us that we are "at war," (a gain for the super wealthy) and that we have to repair the damages of this year's hurricanes (windfalls for super wealthy corporations), and we have to cut social programs (the lifeblood for many of our neediest citizens).

We have a Congress who, with very few exceptions, does Bush's bidding. And they didn't hesitate to give themselves a new raise before their last break.

Abraham Lincoln warned us of exactly what we might fear: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

I can't read this without thinking of George Bush's friend, Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron, which went bankrupt, costing its stockholders $60 billion. And yet, "Kenny-Boy" Lay managed to make $101 million by selling his own shares immediately prior to declaring bankruptcy. Thirty months have passed and Kenneth Lay has not yet been charged with a crime. Shouldn't Martha Stewart, a Democrat, feel a bit cheated?

The final question is just how large the disparity between the very rich and the poor can be before someone picks up a pitchfork and walks toward Washington. Let us hope that this is figurative and that it will be done at the ballot box.

First, though, we must have a voting system that doesn't use machines manufactured by strong Bush supporters.

Originally published 12-09-05 in Leigh's column at My Town.