Pressure has been building up and my adviser on mental health says it's time for a rant. Here it is.

It’s over six months now since the earthquake hit Haiti and there are still over a million people living in tents with no hope of better conditions. And this is because the poor don’t have the money to buy land to build new homes. The rich own the land. The government daren’t antagonize the rich because the political parties rely on the rich for their finances. A headline today says that machete wielding landlords are evicting people from their homes in the early hours of the morning. A realization of this started me thinking about how dangerous some of the very rich are to most of us and how this fact is camouflaged by the media and the authorities.

This Haiti pattern of power is also present in this country although it is skillfully disguised under various mythologies of democracy and freedoms, both quite illusory in the current situation in America.

Let’s look first at unchallengeable facts. Politicians are quite unable to do so since their corporate sponsors and individual contributors are the trough at which they all feed.

In 2009 there were 11 million millionaires worldwide. The Boston Consulting Group reports that though they are less than 1% of all households they owned about 38 percent of the world's wealth or 111 trillion dollars. That was an increase of about 36 % over 2008,

So, those people own over a third of the world’s wealth. How do American millionaires stack up to these figures. America has some 4.7 million millionaires, over a third of the millionaires in the world, and that 4.7 million is about 4% of the American population.

Japan and China are next on the list of numbers of millionaires.

Right now in America more than 15 million people in the U.S. are unemployed and looking for work, and another eight million are just scraping along with one or more part-time jobs. Those are official figures from the well fed, employed bureaucrats of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are at least two million who have given up looking, so they don’t appear in the unemployment statistics.

In this land of plenty, land of the free, bring me your poor etc., etc., there are about 39 million people in the U.S. are chronically poor and do not have enough food to eat, according to the employed and well fed bureaucrats of the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Agriculture. That doesn’t include the recently fired who may have been one pay check ahead of big problems.

The really rich however, those with over $30 million are considered ‘really’ rich, are in great shape. Merrill Lynch you know about and they combine with Capgemini to report on world wealth. Their most recent world market report says that spending on luxury goods has shown an increase among this group and that this increase is expected to continue throughout 2010.

They say that spending on so-called "passion investments" increased during the second half of last year and is expected to continue to rise. In 2009 multi-millionaires were again indulging in their passions and spending on cars, yachts and high-end jewelry and artifacts.

German automakers like BMW, Audi and VW reported a sharp increase in sales in China, where the American jobs have gone. The U.S. yacht sellers too, have reported a 30 percent increase in sales compared with a year earlier, according to the report.

Auctions too reported increase in sales and demands for high end items like rare coins, jewelry and memorabilia. The fine art market here is yet to see an increase in demand; too many barbarians here maybe but China was a market where the demand for fine art showed a sharp increase of 25% in auction revenues.

Wealthy investors are also holding an increasing portion of their passion investments as jewelry, gems and watches. I have seen advertisements for special watch cabinets, that ‘house your collection and even keep those watches wound up’ that need movements of the wrist to wind them. Some of the watches advertised as bargains in the same catalogs cost about as much as this house did in the 50’s.

Mike Lapham is the director of the Responsible Wealth Project at United for a Fair Economy, an NGO ( Non-Governmental Organization) in Boston. He says the obvious fact that the recession isn't hitting those at the top as it has workers. He points out, also obvious, that many very wealthy people benefited from the stock market's ups and downs, "Folks at the top have a cushion, a disposable income to fall back on. Maybe their portfolios took a hit but they didn't lose their jobs and their homes. If they had losses, they can deduct them from their taxes," Lapham told IPS. (Institute for Policy Stndies)

The unawareness of the rich was fully shown in the Katrina disaster where the poor blacks with no cars were left totally on their own because ‘EVERYBODY has a car.’ “They were just too stubborn to move out.” And like the rich who left London in droves as the Blitz began, the rich here have multiple homes and somewhere to go in emergencies. The poor in London had to stay and be bombed. The poor in Katrina were even disarmed by the authorities so that they could not protect their homes from looters. When self defense and home defense isn’t a right of the people who can talk about land of the free?

As to homes, you may recall that John McCain didn’t know how many homes he possessed when asked questions during the last Presidential campaign. How can he possibly represent thousands of people under foreclosure, who also pay more for their ‘health care’ than any other nation.

At the moment the OFFICIAL. average national unemployment rate here is 9.7 percent. Only those who are actively looking for work are included in this statistic so the true rate is much higher. For African Americans, the rate is 15.5 percent and for Latinos, 12.4 percent, according to the employed in air conditioned offices bureaucrats of The Bureau of Labor Statistics. And of course the illegal Latinos are yet another story.

State governments provide small, weekly unemployment checks to the registered for 26 weeks and the federal government continues that help if need be for another 73 weeks.
A couple of weeks ago on July 1st The first group of unemployed to run through both benefits hit that 99 week point, and today about a million people are receiving no assistance at all. About nine million more are still receiving unemployment payments.

Congress is considering extending federal assistance for another 20 weeks. The House approved the legislation, but the Senate did not. Congress left town for its holiday break until mid-July without passing the legislation.

I will just point out for students of representative government that there are 435 members in the House of Representatives, all of them well fed and with free health care and a solid pension waiting them. Of those 435 there are 123 who earned at least one million dollars last year, according to recently released financial records made public each year. In the Senate one in three are millionaires.

These people do not give a rat’s ass for the state of the ‘little people who pay taxes.’ The Republican threat of a filibuster enables them to show that the government system is broken when a bunch of inhumane, unethical greed heads can obstruct anything the government tries to do for the people…unless it’s pouring billions into useless wars.

What are their ‘reasons’ for voting against extending benefits to people made homeless or unemployed by the Bush era government deregulation of the financial sector? They say that benefits create lay-abouts who enjoy spending every day watching cable, drinking six-packs and pulling in on an average $315 a week instead of looking for a job.

Do the arithmetic For a three-person family, that comes in at $16,380 a year, way below the poverty line. Hardly a comfortable or enjoyable way to live. Not at all the situation of someone with a Congressional pension and the ability to give himself a raise at any time. And with a thousand people looking for every hundred jobs people can hardly be blamed for not looking for jobs that aren't there.

Incidentally that unemployment pay is about three times my Social Security pension which is taxed to finance wars. The second excuse, which we've heard for weeks, is that America cannot afford another extension because of the federal deficit. Between now and November, the extension would cost $33 billion. For war funds there would be no opposition.

Last year Congress gave the Pentagon $92 billion for the Iraq war and $56 billion for Afghanistan, but then certain government members hold stocks and shares in the companies that bill the Pentagon. No profit for them from helping the unemployed, and no profit for them means no action from them.

When will the viewers of Fox television wake up to this law of their lives. The 2010 Pentagon budget is $693 billion, which surpasses all other discretionary spending programs combined, and we are cutting back on health, education, infrastructure, environment, everything that might help Americans live better lives. Killing thousands of civilians in foreign countries that pose no real threat to us is MUCH more profitable. Keep it up Halliburton!

The obvious reason these creeps have blocked the extension is to make life hard as possible for the voters who voted Democrat last time, until the November elections. They hope that the hungry and foreclosed will blame the Democrats for failing to do what the Republicans have prevented them from doing. Then they will be in power again and will complete the feudalism, slavery and fascism they have started.

The homeless may not have a vote because they have no address? Maybe a law would be passed very quickly to fix that problem. After all it only took a week to arrest the Russian spies, convict them, and deport them. All under court orders. We all know of other cases that have lasted for years and are still going on. The government can act quickly if it wants to. Lawyers get paid by the hour and most of the Senate and Congress are lawyers and have that system embedded in what passes for their souls.

There is of course a major problem connected with the handing out of ‘government’ money to the poor to keep them afloat. That money is printed by the Federal Reserve which was founded by political chicanery in 1913 to benefit international bankers. Despite the name it is a private institution and its members come from the biggest private banks.

The Feds print money, which constitutionally OUGHT to be under the control of Congress, and gives it to the top banks at 1% or less interest. These bankers then loan it to Americans at percentages ranging from 6% up through the 20’s. They also use the money to buy companies. That gives them a nice profit that they can make even larger by selling the technology of those companies to China and helping China open new factories while the American factories close down.

Since the banks get the money first they have all the benefits that accrue from it and avoid problems with inflation. Unemployed Americans are the ones with the problems with inflation while their jobs disappear to China and India. Looks like the banks are running a no lose game. But that isn’t all. By pressuring Congress they get laws changed so that they only have to keep a small fraction of their reserves and can use way more than 80% of the money they take in to gamble with. If you have looked recently at how much the bank is paying you for your deposits and savings you know it is next to nothing.

The working or unemployed public are too ignorant about what is going on to understand the true cause of their own problems. The Feds print money and the workers who have part time jobs earn a few dollars. They think that they are earning money, not paper. When the government gives the same worthless paper to the unemployed or disabled the propaganda machines of the wealthy go into high gear to convince the workers that those on ‘welfare’ are somehow swindling the workers.

But the wealth of the wealthy is not bits of paper. They own the sea lanes and the merchant fleets that sail them, the land, the coal and oil under it, the timber growing on it, the crops grown on it under their supervision and patent laws. They own the media, the armed forces and mercenaries. They have control over every human survival necessity on the planet and are polluting and poisoning all of them while being beyond accountability.

When will the public realize what is going on when they give the bank collateral for a loan. The bank doesn’t give them money. It gives them a check that costs the bank nothing. In exchange for that piece of paper the bank has a hold on real things, a house or a car. Then the person who has borrowed the money increases the cash reserves of the bank by paying them more than the face value of the check.

Meanwhile…back at the ranch the Center for Responsive Politics has calculated that over 151 members of Congress have up to $195 million invested in major defense contractors that are earning profits from the US military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. No wonder we can always find money for war but seldom or never for peace.

As my insightful other half said years ago, “One reason these people are against gay marriage is because gay marriages don’t produce children to grow up and become soldiers.” Now we see how the price of education is now going up beyond the reach of those families where the bread winners are unemployed or have lost their life savings by financial chicanery.

The Armed Forces is all that is left for young people as an employment source. When I was young during the Great Depression of the 30’s, rapidly being moved into second place by the current situation, every single one of my nine uncles and four of my aunts were in the army or air force or one of the auxiliary services. That same system of ‘no other choice’ is being generated now. And it is the bankers and corporations that choose the wars, not the people who fight them.

The working man and woman know vaguely that something is wrong but can’t get their minds round it. The very wealthy are playing like the owners of a casino. The odds are always in their favor. Always remember that the wealthy investing and renting classes have created for themselves a game that they cannot lose! When the stock markets goes down, they sell short, or move their vast wealth to precious metals and make fabulous riches, when the stock market goes up, they sell long and make fabulous money. They absolutely cannot lose! But these activities produce nothing for the people, no services, no products.

And the money they use to do all this eventually comes from the labor power of the worker who does produce or make something. And he or she is often working in very dangerous circumstances because the plant owners don’t want to spend money on safety measures that could go into profit. Profit not people has been the motto of the wealthy for generations.

Remember the Utah and Virginia mine disasters and BP oil chicanery. In each case the safety precautions were not taken because they cost money and made no profit.

And as you know, the corporate owned media automatically praise the very rich for being energetic, and creative while the workers are called lazy or irresponsible or always looking for a handout. The very wealthy are often not innovative creators. They destroy jobs. They create nothing but money for themselves and their buddies and their projects.

They are leeches, or maybe vampires would be more familiar to the current working poor. Yet still the very wealthy are automatically praised as successes no matter how irresponsible in human terms has been the method by which they created their wealth.

With the huge disparity between the poor and the wealthy growing every year, how can we or anybody describe this country as a democracy. Someone on the Web whose name I missed but who is obviously a student of history quoted what happened when the Romans conquered the island of Crete. A representative of the people asked the Roman general "So where is our democracy?" And the Roman general truthfully replied, “Democracy for us, occupation for you!" Sounds like a pattern. Democracy for the wealthy, occupation for the rest of us.

My own take on it is that this country is headed down the road to serfdom using the well worn patterns of the fascist dictators. Since I am short sighted we may indeed be already there.

The system of voting for government candidates is a joke. I am astonished that anyone with a pulse takes it seriously. No candidate can get into the running unless he or she is vetted by the corporations, industrialists and the bankers. Every important office of government is out of the reach of anybody who might be really interested in serving the interests of the general public. Nobody can get into the election game in America without access to enormous sums of money. Corollary, the source of the money runs the candidate. What’s hard to see about that?

And yet the very rich made much of their wealth at the expense of the rest of us. The gap between the rich and poor is enormous and growing. One graphical analysis of the wealth of the top 1% compared with the rest of us came up with us as represented by a column of one hundred dollar bills about 18 inches high. The pile of the top 1% was 30 MILES high.

But as you have seen, both Republicans and Democrats are afraid to increase taxes on the wealthy, just like the government in Haiti, and for the same reason. Also, remember that it is the wealthy, and their corporations who benefit the most from government. The people have the collective power to do something about it, but they are too ignorant, too scared, or too complacent.

But that is not all. The extremely rich are invisible in government surveys. The super rich, the less than 1 percent of the population who own the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth, go uncounted in most official income reports. For instance, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report in December 1997 showing that in the last two decades “incomes of the richest fifth increased by 30 percent or nearly $27,000 after adjusting for inflation.” The average income of the top 20 percent was $117,500, or almost 13 times larger than the $9,250 average income of the poorest 20 percent.

But we all know that $117,500 is an upper middle class income, nothing to compare with the super rich. Up till 1994 the Census Bureau in Washington never interviewed anyone with an income of over $300.000. The super rich were missing from their reports. In 1994 they raised the level of interviewing to people with $1 million. The really rich have just fallen off the computer.

By missing out the very rich and calling the top 20% of the remainder as the richest quintile the Census is including people who make the relatively small amount of $70,000. According to their figures if you make $100,000 you are in the top 4%. But that’s not a patch on the super rich. Remember Eisner the Disney CEO? He took in $565 MILLION in 1996. His income was not 13 times the $9,250 average income of the poorest 20% of the population. It was over 61,000 times greater, and that’s just one CEO.

When the top group is taken into consideration we have it on the authority of the economist Paul Krugman that not only have the real top 20 percent grown more affluent compared with everyone below, the top 5 percent have grown richer compared with the next 15 percent below them. The top one percent have become richer compared with the next 4 percent. And the top 0.25 percent have grown richer than the next 0.75 percent.

To put it simply, the higher up the wealth ladder they are the faster has been their increase in wealth. Like a snowball rolling down hill, the bigger it is the bigger it gets next revolution.

The top one quarter of one percent of the population owns more wealth than the other people combined.

That is the fact hidden by the method of interviewing in the National Census. As a graphic illustration of this situation it has been estimated that if children’s play blocks represented $1,000 each, the over 98 percent of us would have incomes represented by piles of blocks maybe a couple of yards off the ground, while the top one percent would stack higher than many Eiffel Towers piled on top of each other. The Eiffel Tower is 990 feet tall.

Karl Marx's prediction about the inevitability of a growing gap between rich and poor is still true. And not just in America. It’s true all over the world that the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands creates more poverty. As a few get ever richer, more people fall deeper into destitution, finding it more and more difficult to get out of it. On a world view the number of poor has been increasing at a rate even faster than the earth's population growth.

Do you remember the nonsense about ‘trickle down economics?’ Nothing trickles down. The people at the top grab and hang onto all they can. The government does not provide a situation for the growth of all society, only those who have much. Invert the trickle down theory. Whatever is put in at the bottom will, of necessity and practicality,find its way upward in a natural way, but what is put in at the top will create even greater inequality than the ‘system’ would create if left alone.

So what can be done about it all in a country where the rich have one set of laws, which they make for themselves, and the poor another? Bush and Cheney and others of the previous administration are war criminals under international law. They are immune from any consequences of their actions. If we used the American designed standards of the post WWII Nuremburg trial most of the American presidents since then are war criminals.

So what can be done about it? One interesting suggestion was to treat the factory and corporation hierarchy as we treat drunk drivers. If someone drinks a lot and then drives and hurts someone in an accident it is assumed that they are responsible because their action of over drinking was reckless and likely to cause an accident.

When mine owners consistently fail to employ known and expected safety precautions it is clear that sooner or later there will be an accident in which miners may be killed or injured. Since that cause and effect is as obvious as in the case of a drunk driver why not treat the CEO’s of such companies under the same laws.

The lawyers in the government are always soft on crime, if the perpetrators have white collars and came from the right schools and belong to the right clubs. But if the owners and CEO’s knew that reckless behavior would lead to a jail sentence, just maybe things would change.

Another suggestion I read, and wish I had thought of myself, is the obscenity laws. People can be charged with obscenity. When a man takes over a company and fires hundreds of workers, leaving them jobless in a high unemployment and foreclosure world, and then gets hundreds of millions of dollars bonus, that’s obscenity if anything is.

But since the top 1% can hire the top crooked lawyers and run anyone else into the ground by long drawn out law suits I don’t hold out much hope there.

And since V died in ridding England of its own brand of high class criminals there only seems one option. And that is undoubtedly illegal. So I can’t even suggest it, because it is unAmerican to like the French. It was the solution to the problem that the French people applied in 1789 because of the example of the American people in 1776. But they were passionate about freedom. The wimpy American people are passionate about safety, security and comfort. Not at all like their rugged ancestors.

But if we can’t find a way to get rid of the leeches and vampires of the body politic, that body will die, and many of us will die with it. A Chinese credit report has just changed the AAA rating of the U.S.A. as a credit risk to AA. Have a great summer.