While Republicans cry poverty and demand tax and budget cuts from their own ragged employees, kept terrorized of a pink slink just around the corner, the GOP's ideological heartland and financial headquarters (the 0.000001% - folks who have never even wiped their own asses, let alone conceived of such an action) has been secretly stashing away upwards of 21 TRILLION dollars in tax havens in places such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, the Guardian reports. Although the story has already been diaried, I would like to focus on what it means: What that money would mean if brought down to Earth from the bank vaults in Valhalla where the self-abscribed Ubermenschen of the global elite have stashed it.
The GOP pirate ship raping and pillaging our Treasury loudly complains that food stamps now cost $78 billion per year to serve 45 million Americans. If that is taken as the going rate, rather than something inflated out of proportion by the GOP itself - they do tend to enjoy citing their own damage to justify doing more - then what would $21 trillion pay for it if it could all go to foodstamps? Since not all of it was stolen from American taxpayers - plenty was stolen out of Japan and Europe - let's be fair and just put the US share conservatively at $10 trillion. If all of US's recouped assets were devoted to food stamps, that would amount to...
Providing food stamps to every man, woman, and child every day of every year for the next 538 year.
Or we could just pay whatever we have to, for those Americans who need food stamps, and the rest goes to other priorities. Like, for instance, the 200 million miles of new rail, 5 million miles of new roads, 1,000,000 new hospitals, 20 million new schools, 5,000 deep space probes, 1,000 Lage Hadron Colliders or fewer but bigger collider, dozens of human landings on Mars even at the inflated cost projections of NASA's status quo, and hundreds of more human Moon landings. But hey, I'm sure the people who stole the money and left it to gather interest in offshore accounts need it for more important things - creating jobs in the accounting departments of Goldman Sachs, for instance.
You ever wonder why the future isn't what it used to be, what it was presumed to be? Why buildings are not stratostospheric, why cars are not self-navigating and perfectly safe, why aircraft don't fly through the stratosphere at Mach 6, where there are no space colonies, why energy isn't clean and renewable, why people are working longer and harder for less pay and fewer benefits despite being more profitable for their employers? Well, now you have the answer. Because the vast economic resources that would have driven those changes, innovations, infrastructure developments, and socioeconomic progress were all being siphoned off by the wealthy few. They've simply beeing robbing the joint all the while you've been building it, like the restaurant in goodfellas: Expensive booze and furniture going in the front door on the owner's credit, then going right out the back door into a truck and sold for chump change to profit the silent Mafia partner.
This all changes when we stop the game in its tracks, and especially when we start recouping our stolen wealth. This goes way beyond oursources: There are no factories or jobs to point to with which this money was created - it was simply sucked out of the economy and deposited behind some numbered account in case the douchebags behind them ever needed to grab a suitcase and flee to somewhere without extradition treaties. This is a major portion of the WORLD ECONOMY, just sitting there, piled and useless except to the thieves who've been using it for years to finance regulatory-capture insurgencies, election corruption, and legislature overthrow. More or less, it's our money, and I hope there are at least contingency plans being dusted off in the Pentagon to rescue it - plans that don't involve helping the bastards who put it there esape with it.
Some 4-foot unemployed granny gets her door busted down by a platoon of paramilitary repo men working for the bank to take the nth-generation family house they conned her out of, but that $21 trillion in stolen money - blood money, really, that has already taken countless lives in lost services and social tumult - just sits there as always, and the owners feel no heat on their collar. Maybe they should. Maybe there is as much if not more reason for NATO troops to surround these banks and disable their electronic systems before they can send the momey away as there was to intervene in Libya; maybe the Navy Seals have a greater duty before them than they had in killing one man to settle a grudge. Perhaps we should simply go get what is ours - what has been taken from us for so long, and whose denial is used by the their puppet-sycophants in Congress to claim we are deprived by our own fault rather than their own crime. I say - don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. We see you, motherfuckers.
In short, the money rotting in those banks buys a whole new America. And that's why it's being kept from us.