Halloween Comes For the GOP!

Hey, all you crackers and other crooks,

"something wicked this way comes...!"*

*Something Wicked This Way Comes is a Ray Bradbury title and a GREAT book!

Everyone has been patiently listening to their wholly-owned Senators and the Congressional hill-billies squealing about socialism while they're dithering around, doing the business of their masters, but this Halloween season is bringing another little something to put in their bag of ill gotten goodies. Now, that "goodies" bag is usually just chock full of tax money they've looted during their "free market" Congressional rounds, but Halloween 2009 style may be something of a disappointing surprise for them.

Of course, all their complaints about the health care bill "traveling way too fast" through the Congress are only the latest masquerade they bring to the festival. Any bill moving as fast as this one is, simply put, moving too fast to be properly looted on its transit through the Senate. The looters find it rather troubling that Obama has no intention of slowing anything down.

Having made that now, road weary note concerning health care, we can move effortlessly to the point of this MeanMesa posting. Day by day it becomes more inescapably clear that the real complaint of the health care bill's detractors deals with an old, very traditional, Republican talking point. That would be "The Redistribution of Wealth." The Anti-Health Care Senators, sitting with massive $1,000,000 per day campaign contributions flowing into their all white war chests, are trying their best to protect their, uh, contributors from any possibility of having to "redistribute" their wealth.

The health insurance parasites are becoming unmanageably nervous. We see this in their desperate and pathetic, half-baked public relations adventures. The issue of "The Redistribution of Wealth" is, actually, precisely what is frightening them so much. Their idea of a good time has always been a nice monopolistic, non-competitive, forced labor camp world where they can set insurance prices freely -- that is, set premium rates with only the single reason being the fact that they just simply decide to increase their profits.

The Halloween problem for them, however, is that "The Redistribution of Wealth" is actually a two way street!

After all these prosperous decades of "redistributing" the wealth of anyone who might need health insurance (that is, everyone) into their bloated pockets, they are now facing the unpleasant possibility of having to compete for their corporate profits. Although this appears to be no less than "outrageous fate" when viewed from their eyes, for the rest of us it looks, just as simply, as an economic correction. Our wealth is about to be "redistributed" back to us!

This alone causes a new apoplexy behind all the gates of all those gated communities. And well it should. The flow of money historically flowing into those pockets of theirs amounts to roughly one sixth of the national gross domestic product (NGDP). Now, a sizable chunk of that money is going to be "redistributed" to the people who actually earned it in the form of reduced health insurance costs. The incredibly rich and prosperous are aghast that all the expensive Senators whose souls they have perpetually rented seem unable to stop this unfortunate development.

But MeanMesa's Halloween turns out to have more than one costume. Obscured behind the tea-bagging chaos of the health care debate, rests an even more ominous -- at least, ominous for the billionaires -- horizon. A horizon which seems to be drawing closer with every sunrise.

The stimulus money is about to reach reality. That is, the stimulus money is about to reach the reality of main street. We need to take a closer look at this. It has many incredibly spooky, yet beautiful masks.

First, we can set out a few observations concerning the mental state of those who are watching this miracle of democracy unfold. What had, up to this point, been a theoretical recession -- albeit a recession of immense proportions -- is now materializing in every city and village of the realm. It isn't going away, and it isn't getting any better. It is getting worse.

Americans who were previously "deeply troubled" by the monster are now becoming Americans who are being deeply wounded by the monster. It is no longer theoretical. It has arrived at the door of every home in the country, at least, every home in the country with an adjusted taxable income of less than, say, $1 million a year. There are bankruptcies, foreclosures, uncertain job securities and functional businesses closing their doors from lack of credit.

Most likely, all this is little more than a light breakfast for the monster. The billionaires are waiting in the shadows with their purses bulging, full of Paulsen dollars. They are waiting for the approaching moment where lower wages will look like a Godsend to American labor. They are waiting for the moment when previously successful businesses, starved into submission by a well engineered lack of credit, can be purchased for a dime on the dollar. They are waiting for that new skyscraper they have always secretly wanted, but couldn't, until now that is, afford.

What exactly could be the bright side of something like this?

That bright side is best seen in the faces of the younger Americans who are surfing through this calamity with all the lassez faire optimism of youth. This 2009 Halloween is bringing something out into the light which they have not seen before in their young lives. They are about to see the actual wealth of our country emerge in repaired roads, schools, clinics and libraries right in their hometown!

Money which had always previously disappeared as it wound its way through the Congress is now actually going to survive that gauntlet. Tax money which used to simply vaporize into dollar gobbling ghosts such as the Reagan and Bush Tax Cuts for Millionaires, is now going to resurface to pay for local projects!

Young Americans have never seen anything like this. American prosperity, so far as they have been concerned, has always been for others, the well connected, the tax welfare corporate elite. The young ones have watched the country slip into a place riddled with broken bridges, war profiteering and corporate tax dodging, but, absent any functional civics classes in their high schools, they have remained accepting and complacent. They have never been provided an alternative reality with which to judge their actual prosperity compared to their theoretical prosperity!

The fact is that the nation has been continuously slipping into a third world status under the constant looting of our national treasure by neo-con puppets and their fat cat masters. At the moment, 10% of our population has "redistributed" 80% of all national wealth into their own coffers. But the prospects of this Halloween herald something a bit different. This Halloween there will be a glimpse of American wealth -- spelled tax money -- arriving at a thousand places to make a down payment on the neglect made so seemingly necessary by the avarice of the fat purse crowd.

The spell has been broken.

Once the young -- and the not so young -- among us see the material wealth we constantly pour into the treasury of the country return in a way which actually supports and maintains the country, they are going to be, well, pissed. Any fleeting chance that this new demographic of observers will somehow drift mindlessly back to the Republican Party in the next election has just received a death blow, a real Halloween surprise!

Hooray! It's not scary at all! (unless you're a billionaire...)