Thy dead shall live, my dead bodies shall arise, awake and sing, ye that dwell in the dust, for thy dew is as the dew of light, and the earth shall bring to life the shades. (Isaiah 26:19)

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence. (Daniel 12:2).

Many people have heard that each cell in the human body is replaced every seven years. This is not quite true: Some cells, particularly in the brain, are never replaced—and other tissues renew themselves at different rates, ranging from 5 days for the lining of the gut to 15 years for some skeletal muscles. Nevertheless, it is true that there is nearly a complete turnover of our physical bodies every decade or so. We continually shed our constituent atoms into the world and acquire new ones in the process. Some of these elements eventually find their way in the bodies of other human beings. Parts of Alexander the Great, Edgar Allan Poe, and every other person you could name quite literally live on within us at this moment. How is God, in all His goodness and ingenuity, going to sort this out?

And at which stage of life will we be resurrected? If a man dies at age 90, hobbled by age, will he be condemned to live in this state for eternity? If a woman has lost a limb, will she be given a new one on the Day of Judgment? If a person dies as an infant, not yet able to speak, will he be resurrected in a tiny body but given adult faculties? St. Augustine—whom Hitch referred to in our debate as a “sadistic, North African, pseudo-intellectual”—purported to solve these many riddles for Christianity in his magnum opus, City of God. Apparently, the resurrected will look like themselves at age 30, which was the age of Jesus at the time of the crucifixion. Infants and children will be aged to appear as they would have looked, had they reached this sublime maturity in life. And those who make it to heaven will look better than they did on earth: The fat will be made thin. The skinny will be given a bit of muscle. All women will be extremely beautiful—but in such a way as to not inspire lust in the hearts of men. (Think Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) To give you at taste of just how loony Augustine’s theology is, consider:

19. That all bodily blemishes which mar human beauty in this life shall be removed in the resurrection, the natural substance of the body remaining, but the quality and quantity of it being altered so as to produce beauty.

What am I to say now about the hair and nails? Once it is understood that no part of the body shall so perish as to produce deformity in the body, it is at the same time understood that such things as would have produced a deformity by their excessive proportions shall be added to the total bulk of the body, not to parts in which the beauty of the proportion would thus be marred. Just as if, after making a vessel of clay, one wished to make it over again of the same clay, it would not be necessary that the same portion of the clay which had formed the handle should again form the new handle, or that what had formed the bottom should again do so, but only that the whole clay should go to make up the whole new vessel, and that no part of it should be left unused. “Wherefore, if the hair that has been cropped and the nails that have been cut would cause a deformity were they to be restored to their places, they shall not be restored; and yet no one will lose these parts at the resurrection, for they shall be changed into the same flesh, their substance being so altered as to preserve the proportion of the various parts of the body. However, what our Lord said, “Not a hair of your head shall perish,” might more suitably be interpreted of the number, and not of the length of the hairs, as He elsewhere says, “The hairs of your head are all numbered.” (City of God, book XXII)

That Augustine could furnish answers to such questions is impressive. It also shows that the man was either utterly dishonest or insane. How did he know any of these things? He didn’t, of course. Like all such theology, Augustine’s account of the Resurrection was simply a Dark Age confabulation. In other words, it was bullshit—a concept that has since been given a much need technical analysis by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his wonderful essay, On Bullshit. What is the difference between bullshit and lies? Bullshitting often entails lying, of course, but Frankfurt shows that they are not the same. When a person is merely lying, he must still keep the truth in view. He must at least give the appearance of intellectual honesty. The bullshitter knows no such constraints. He takes no notice of the truth, or of the reasonable expectations others might have about it. The bullshitter just keeps talking.

The blood and thunder (or is it thud and blunder?) of the American-led intervention in Libya has obscured one of the more revealing episodes of our times -- especially for those many millions who still cling to the idea that Barack Obama is somehow an improvement, however slight, over the ruthless, lawless, corroded souls who preceded him in the post of imperial manager.

We speak of course of the American rigging of the election in battered, helpless Haiti -- a brazen effort to disenfranchise the majority of the population and ensure the election of a vicious -- but acquiescent -- client to the presidency. This sordid episode comes complete with a personal intervention by the Nobel Peace Laureate himself to try to continue the exile and persecution of the democratically elected Haitian president overthrown by George W. Bush in a brutal coup.

Even as he was scheming with the CIA to put covert American "boots on the ground" in the Libyan civil war, Obama and his dream team have been maneuvering like mad to put one of a pair of right-wing fanatics into office in Haiti while excluding any other candidates from the running -- including those from Haiti's biggest political party. Obama also personally called South African President Jacob Zuma to ask to keep holding Bush-ousted former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Africa and prevent him from returning to his native land before the election.

With the sublime hypocrisy that has become the hallmark of this most mendacious militarist administration, an Obama spokesman said the Peace Laureate opposed Aristide's return due to "deep concerns that President Aristide's return to Haiti in the closing days of the election could be destabilising," adding that the defender of freedom and democracy believes "that the Haitian people deserve the chance to choose their government through peaceful, free and fair elections."

Even from Team Obama, this is pretty rich. After blocking the largest political party from running, then forcing a run-off between two former supporters of vicious coups, Obama said he didn't want Haiti's democratically elected former leader to return to the homeland he was trundled from at gunpoint by Bushist goons in order to give the Haitian people "a free, fair election."

The result has been a record-low turnout and run-off so riddled with corruption that it may be weeks before one of America's hand-picked stooges is declared the winner. Meanwhile, Aristide did return -- Zuma told Obama plainly that Astride was a free man, he had a passport from his home country, and "I cannot hold him hostage." He did not interfere with the election, he endorsed no candidate. Most of his supporter simply boycotted the election, because of its blatant illegitimacy.

So this is what Barack Obama and his partner in imperialism, the globe-trotting Hillary Clinton, have been up to on the side while they are killing children in Libya and bluntly declaring to Congress that Obama will not acknowledge any restriction on his imperial will to wage war where whenever and wherever he damn well pleases. As John Caruso notes in a blistering post:

In an episode that makes the importance of democracy subversion in Haiti eminently clear, even while the popular uprising in Egypt was peaking, our Secretary of State was dispatched to Haiti to ensure that Michel "Sweet Micky" Martelly advanced to the presidential runoff election rather than Jude Celestin (she flew there literally right after she'd finished putting out the administration's Egypt spin on the Sunday morning talk shows). So just who is this U.S. favorite?

Seven months after his inauguration, President Aristide was overthrown by a US-backed neo-Duvalierist military putsch on 30 September 1991. "Sweet Micky" was one of the principal cheerleaders of this three-year coup, which claimed some 5,000 lives, according to Amnesty International.

In the years following Aristide's restoration to power in 1994, Martelly became obsessed with hatred for the man. In a video from not too long ago, which can be seen on YouTube, the candidate threatens a patron in a bar where he has performed. "All those shits were Aristide's faggots," he says. "I would kill Aristide to stick a dick up your ass."

You can certainly see why Clinton made the trip. And if the Obama administration doesn't manage to get this homicidal homophobic Duvalierist into power, they'll still end up with the Secretary General of the right-wing RDNP party (and wife of a former right-wing "president" of Haiti). Win-win!

...As I've written before, anyone who feared that our first black president might not be sympathetic to the need to smash the democratic aspirations of the first free black nation in the hemisphere can rest assured: Obama will never let race—or anything else—stop him from doing the empire's dirty work.

As firemen and cops are being fired across America, as teachers are being told they must accept austerity measures, the country is broke, after all, as public radio and television, with their supposed liberal bias, lay on the chopping block, as more homeless sprawl and tent cities spring up, as casinos, a sure sign of desperation, mushroom, the United States has entered another costly war without any fanfare or discussion whatsoever. Obama didn’t have to persuade anybody, no sending a Secretary of State to make a fool of herself in front of the United Nations’ General Assembly, no congressional vote, which, last time I checked, was supposed to be a Constitutional requirement, no media blitz. No lies even. He simply ordered more than a hundred Tomahawk missiles, so far, to rain down on Libya, with many more to come. In any case, this it not even a war, but merely a “kinetic military action,” according to an Obama aide. Such straight faced butchery of language, even as one butchers real people, shows that the United States has entered a deep psychotic state. Upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama himself declared, “I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence.” ... The President of the United States is a traveling salesman for the military industrial complex. In 2010, Obama came to India to visit the Mumbai home of Gandhi, a hero of his, someone he would most like to dine with, very touching, before announcing a mega arms deal of GE fighter jet engines and Boeing military transport planes. Now, as he bombs Libya, Obama tries to sell F-18 fighter planes to Brazil. According to an aide, “President Obama underscored that the F-18 is the best plane on offer” as he made a “strong pitch” to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

The President of the United States is also a spokesman for murderers and crooks. He doesn’t rule, but obeys. His main job is to deceive the masses as he serves his enablers. He can say anything at any time, and means none of it. The President of the United States is the world’s most visible actor, in short. Campaigning in 2007, Obama said, “If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself. I’ll walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States.” Quite a performance. This year, as Wisconsin teachers fight to retain their right to collectively bargain, Obama has said absolutely nothing. One would have to be a fool to think he would join them. ...

As Obama fizzles out, as he loses legitimacy, the power brokers will come up with other figureheads and slogans for American liberals and conservatives to become passionate about. These candidates will jabber, jab and insult each other. As in professional wrestling, the battle will appear fierce. Barack, meanwhile, can look forward to a lucrative memoir and six-figure speaking fees. Even that man of malapropisms and snafus, the much despised Bush, is getting $150,000 each time he opens his mouth these days.

Haiti has been a cursed nation throughout its existence. As I noted in a piece in 2004:

Exactly two hundred years ago, Haitian slaves overthrew their French masters -- the first successful national slave revolt in history. What Spartacus dreamed of doing, the Haitian slaves actually accomplished. It was a tremendous achievement -- and the white West has never forgiven them for it.

In order to win international recognition for their new country, Haiti was forced to pay "reparations" to the slaveowners - a crushing burden of debt they were still paying off at the end of the 19th century. The United States, which refused to recognize the country for more than 60 years, invaded Haiti in 1915, primarily to open it up to "foreign ownership of local concerns." After 19 years of occupation, the Americans backed a series of bloodthirsty dictatorships to protect these "foreign owners." And still it goes on.

It certainly does -- even under the "enlightened" foreign policy of Barack Obama. As John Caruso reports (in separate pieces in A Distant Ocean and A Tiny Revolution), Obama and his "superstar" secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, are loudly championing the latest egregious, brutal farce that Washington and the West have foisted upon the uppity natives of Haiti.

Senatorial elections held this month by the government imposed on Haiti after the U.S.-backed coup of 2004 (more on this below) produced a turnout of less than 10 percent of eligible voters: a result that mocks any notion of a popular, legitimate democracy. But this is not because the Haitians are so lazy and disinterested that they couldn't be bothered to vote. Nor that they are so satisfied with the benevolent, paternal care of their American-appointed masters that they saw no need to let silly electoral contests trouble their bucolic life.

No, the 90 percent refusal rate was in fact a massive protest action, driven chiefly by the fact that the American-backed government would not allow the most popular party -- the party of the government ousted by the 2004 coup -- to run a slate of candidates in the election. By clerkly hook and bureaucratic crook, Haiti's election overseers banned the Fanmi Lavalas slate back in February. At that moment, the April elections became a dead letter, a meaningless farce -- yet another cruel joke played on the people of Haiti.

NOTE: For more background, especially on the 2004 coup that led to the current crisis, see "Operation Continuing Sweatshop." Below is an excerpt:

This week, the Bush administration added another violent "regime change" notch to its gunbelt, toppling the democratically elected president of Haiti and replacing him with an unelected gang of convicted killers, death squad leaders, militarists, narcoterrorists, CIA operatives, hereditary elitists and corporate predators - a bit like Team Bush itself, in other words.

Although the Haiti coup was widely portrayed as an irresistible upsurge of popular discontent, it was of course the result of years of hard work by Bush's dedicated corrupters of democracy, as William Bowles of Information Clearinghouse reports. Bushist bagmen funded the political opposition to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, smuggled guns to exiled Haitian warlords, and carried out a relentless strangulation of the county, cutting off long-promised financial and structural aid to one of the poorest nations on earth until food prices were soaring, unemployment spiked to 70 percent, and the broken-backed government lost control of society to armed gangs of criminals, fanatics and the merely desperate.

Meanwhile, Haiti was forced to pay $2 million a month on debts run up by the murderous U.S.-backed dictatorships that had ruled the island since the American military occupation of 1915-1934. The Haitian press, controlled by cronies of the former dictators, supplied the lazy American media with reams of stories about Aristide's "tyranny." These were swiftly followed by thunderous denunciations from the Bush Regime. Wholesale murders of government officials and Aristide partisans by Bush-backed opposition gangs were, of course, demurely ignored -- as were Aristide's own condemnations of violence by his supporters. The old reliable "madman" trope was also brought out for an airing, with constant press drumbeats about Aristide's "mental instability." (America's designated targets are always "deranged monsters," although sometimes, when they prove politically useful again, they miraculously recover their wits, like Libya's Moamar Gadafy.)

The US government lies. Sure looks like most Americans gobble up false and misleading information that is nothing less than political propaganda. Take the highly hyped unemployment number for March, 2011 of 8.8 percent that moved like a tornado through the media and was praised by Democrat politicians and the White House. As if that number is accurate, as if it fairly describes unemployment. It does not. What is called by experts, such as Leo Hindery, as the real unemployment number was actually 17.7 percent, which is remarkably higher. To appreciate that much higher number is to throw a large bucket of cold water on all the political spin on the economic recovery.

The official government unemployment figure has been carefully crafted to intentionally underestimate actual unemployment. The way the data are collected through a survey of homes intentionally ignores a number of unemployed and underemployed Americans. The latter includes those who have stopped looking for a job because it has become crystal clear to them that there are no jobs for them, as well as those working part-time when what they really want is a good full time job.

Similarly, Gallup polling which takes into account these other factors found the total number for March up slightly to 20.3 percent of the US workforce.

As if this sham game is not bad enough, what the government also does not reveal with hard information is that most new jobs being created now are low wage ones often without any good benefits. Another reason to see how delusional the economic recovery is.

To get back to a low unemployment level characteristic of a good economy could take up to ten years. The federal lie includes 13.5 million unemployed workers but the real number is more like 28.2 million. That means a lot more hardship and suffering in the fictional recovery than the government wants the public to know about. The number of real unemployed workers has increased by 11.5 million since the start of the Great Recession, and just since December 2008 by 3.7 million.

The economy must add 13 million private sector jobs over the next three years-360,000 each month-to bring unemployment down to 6 percent. There is no possible or imaginable way for this to happen. So real unemployment will remain terrible.

All this plus the fact that real wages have stagnated for many years means that the middle class in the US is in dire shape. The most important implication of this is that there is no good reason to think that the deeply depressed housing market stands any chance of recovery for many years. There are not enough people with enough money and financial security to buy even low priced houses. There simply are too many empty houses and even more coming from millions more foreclosures. Without a healthy housing market it is inconceivable that a true economic recovery and meaningful growth are possible.

In other words, contrary to all the blabber from politicians and pundits, the current recovery is largely delusional as far as the vast majority of Americans are concerned. Of course, the rich Upper Class is doing just fine. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The richest 20 percent of Americans own 84 percent of all wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively hold just 12.8 percent. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Odds are that you, dear reader, are in the bottom 80 percent, which means you should have the good sense to see how delusional the current economic recovery is and that you should have little hope for doing well in the future. Remember also that state and local governments facing budget shortfalls will surely layoff many more people and those congressional attempts to address the horrendous national debt and deficit will surely mean cuts in many government programs that many in the bottom 80 percent depend on.

Companies will continue to make huge profits, pay little in taxes and continue to manipulate government policies through lobbying and campaign contributions so that they keep getting away with murder of the middle class. Corporate bigwigs and Wall Street fat cats will continue to grab incredible amounts of money. And hardly any of the corporate crooks that have screwed most of us will get prosecuted or jailed, as they should. Nor will there be any true, badly needed reforms of the financial sector. Banks will continue to financially rape Americans.

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

The deniers’ response was both predictable and revealing; more on that shortly. But first, let’s talk a bit more about that list of witnesses, which raised the same question I and others have had about a number of committee hearings held since the G.O.P. retook control of the House — namely, where do they find these people?

My favorite, still, was Ron Paul’s first hearing on monetary policy, in which the lead witness was someone best known for writing a book denouncing Abraham Lincoln as a “horrific tyrant” — and for advocating a new secessionist movement as the appropriate response to the “new American fascialistic state.”

The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making this up.

Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental regulation.

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change until catastrophe is already upon us.

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.

“The political process no longer works,” Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.”

If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,” which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated the sooner we will become free.

Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.” It used these “repos” during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.

US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in” in your neighborhood.

Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.

“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,” Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.”

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

Imagine you were a pig.

As a pig, you would care about nothing besides getting fat.

If you could get fat by eating the food shares of other animals, you would readily do so.

If you could get fat by eating up your own little piglet children’s future, you would do so.

If you could get fat by eating your whole farm into ruin, you’d munch right through it without another thought.

Indeed, if you could get fat by scarfing up so much food that you literally imperiled the entire planet, you would not only do so, but you would criticize and mock those who had the temerity merely to point out the consequences of your actions and thereby interfere with the conquering of your global comestible empire.

For those of you, like me, who too often find themselves aghast at the state of our nation, jaws dropped to the floor in wonder at the astonishing capacity for American self-destruction, befuddled by the acquiescence of the victims of this pillaging, there’s your answer: If you can imagine what it would be like to be an amoral, sociopathic, singularly focused, devoted consumption machine – that is, to be a pig – then you get it. And then you get our America, too.

I can’t tell you how it pains me to write these words.

It pains me in two senses, in fact. First, as a matter of personal character and conduct. I think it’s fair to say that the people who know me would report that I am a fairly gentle soul. I don’t prefer conflict, I almost never seek it out, and I will even sometimes avoid it when it’s stuck in my face – at least under certain conditions and in the short term. I’m not, that is, the kind of person who feels at all comfortable referring to other people as pigs.

But I do so because I believe emphatically that it needs to be done. I do so because of the second sense of how I am pained – for my country and for the world. I do so, with regret for having to, and yet with even more regret that we all aren’t doing the same thing, and doing it with a fierce urgency. For, is there any question of what has become of us? Is there any question that the pigs now rule?

No, there is not. Indeed, the only serious question is why we are so severely detached from reality that this society is really not even conscious of what has happened in any serious respect. But happened it has.

The top one percent in this country used to, before the regressive onslaught that began with the Reagan election thirty years ago, account for twelve percent of all national income. Today, they pull down more than twice that, 25 percent. They used to control a third of all national wealth. Today they control forty percent. That’s just one percent of us, one person out of one hundred.

How could this have happened? Is it possible, for example, that the wealthiest amongst us are working twice as hard as they used to? Is it possible that all the rest of us have grown vastly lazier over the course of this past generation? Yeah, it’s possible. Just like it’s possible that Newt Gingrich is not a sick sociopath, or that Sarah Palin speaks for Jesus. It’s possible, in the technical sense of the term, it’s just – how can one say this gently? – um, not real, real probable.

What is far more likely – and, indeed, what is precisely the case – is that the rich bought off lawmakers to make laws that favored their interests. At precisely the same time that the rich got infinitely richer and the rest of us got steadily poorer, darned if a whole boatload of regressive-backed public policies didn’t change in exactly the way that would lead to just that outcome. Tax burdens have been shifted from rich to poor. Services provided by the government have been slashed. Trade policies that undermine the bargaining power of American workers have been adopted. Labor relations policies have decimated unions, such that where a third of workers used to be represented by organized labor, now about seven percent are. Privatization has given away publicly-owned assets. The well-connected have written into law gigantic subsidies, creating corporate welfare on a massive scale. Wars based on lies have enriched the few while saddling the rest of us with trillions of dollars in debt. Deregulation followed by taxpayer-financed bailouts have allowed any plugged-in economic actor to do just about anything, including crash the global economy in the raw pursuit of unfathomable greed, and never pay a penalty for their actions.

If you were asked to predict, thirty years ago, just what the adoption of such policies would produce, the American political economy of 2011 is exactly what you would have predicted. It’s a complete no-brainer. Anyone could guess the effect from this cause. Throw a rock at a window. Toss a match on gasoline. Adopt these policies. You know what will happen.

People can think, if they want, that it’s all a random coincidence that all these policy changes just happened to happen at exactly the same time the rich were growing vastly richer and the rest of us have been struggling. I’m sure many do think that way, and that is precisely why so many fools also play their state lottos. But that don’t make it so.

Incomes for the top one percent have risen 18 percent over the last decade, while for all the rest of us, they’ve been falling. The United States today has a Gini coefficient – the standard measure of national income inequality, where zero is perfectly equal and 100 is perfectly unequal – clocking in at 40.8. That means we’re tied with Turkmenistan and Ghana when it comes to the inequality of the distribution of wealth in America. I’m not shitting you about this. These are real numbers. The good news is that we came in (just slightly) ahead of Senegal and Cambodia. Whew! There’s a relief! We wouldn’t want to be like some sort of banana republic or anything, would we? The bad news? There is less income inequality today in Mali, Malawi and Burkina Faso than in the good old US of A. Oh, and about 70 other countries in the world (out of about 195 or so, total), too. How’s that for your American exceptionalism, eh pal?!

I don’t know if the rich are working twice as much as than they used to (just a wild hunch, but I suspect not), but what I do know is that the non-rich are working a lot more than they used to. It takes two incomes today to support a middle class family that could be supported by one back when “Leave It To Beaver” was on the air. And many people are working more than forty hours a week – indeed, a lot of people, working a lot more hours – in an increasingly desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of their creditors, one step ahead of medical insolvency, one step ahead of (the new, draconian) bankruptcy laws, one step ahead of foreclosure, one step ahead of eviction, one step ahead of living out of their cars, presuming they’re lucky enough to be one step ahead of repossession, and one step ahead of all the damage these horrible strains do to marriages and families.

In short, there is a massive, protracted, patent crime taking place, right before our eyes. It’s the crime of the millennium, a crime that literally produces death and destruction on a grand scale, a crime with victims beyond count.

And no one in our political class is talking about it.

Certainly not the worst offenders on the right. We’d be shocked were that otherwise. Indeed, almost all of what defines them as the worst offenders on the right is precisely this issue. Don’t kid yourself, brother. John Boehner doesn’t give a shit about aborted fetuses. Dick “Dick” Cheney couldn’t care less about WMD. George W. Bush is no more a genuine Christian than I am, and I assure you that’s the last thing I am. No. It’s all about the freakin’ money, man.

But neither are the so-called liberals of the Democratic Party talking about this issue, nor our socialist president, who, according to Rush “Dick” Limbauchery and Glenn “Dick” Pecker, et al., is reportedly seeking to sneak up on poor unsuspecting America, in a foreigner sort of way, and drive it into the ruin that has befallen Western Europe. (Don’t worry that you can’t actually see that ruin in actual Western European places like Germany or France or Sweden. Our friends on the right are glad to assure us that it’s there – it’s just cleverly hiding under the peace, prosperity, extended longevity, world-class healthcare, and humane standards of living people have long enjoyed in these countries.)

No one in our political class is saying these things. You almost literally have to resort to comics like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart to hear this most urgent and fundamental critique. And, really, how screwed is your country when only the comedians tell the truth?

I am willing to use ugly words and to name names, not because I want to – far from it – but because I am sickened by the fact and the scale of this crime. The wonder is not that jerks like me are throwing around inflammatory terms. The wonder is that lots more people aren’t doing so. But the real wonder is that we’ve stood by, and continue to do so – watching this crime unfold, watching it crush our friends, family and neighbors, watching it harm us and our children personally, watching it produce the first generation of Americans to be worse off than their parents. And there we are just staring in silence.

Silence is far too generous a label of contempt to apply to the Democratic Party. We are well past the point of acknowledging their complete complicity in the crime. Hardly anyone noticed in the 1990s, when New Democrats (a euphemism for old Republicans) stopped talking about the plight of the poor, even before Bill Clinton finished the job by killing welfare, reaching into the mouths of America’s impoverished and removing the food that was once there, all for purposes of guaranteeing his second term as president (and, boy wasn’t it worth it, too – look at all he achieved!). If you weren’t alive in the 1960s and 70s, you might never have realized that there was once a party in America that was rather seriously devoted to fighting a war against poverty. By the 1990s the poor became an embarrassment, and among slick New Democrats in Washington only gauche political retreads continued to remind us of their existence and plight, becoming every bit as welcome among the elites as Grandpa’s incessant flatulence at a formal dinner party.

Ah, but that was the golden age, when only the poor were forgotten about. And who cares about them, anyhow? Nowadays we’re not noticing as ‘the party of the people’ gives the same treatment to the middle class as well. I’m sorry, have I fallen through the looking glass, or are we not in the middle of an economic crisis of vast proportions? And where is the Democratic Party’s program for creating jobs? It would too generous to say that it is nowhere. More accurately, it just isn’t. The reason that you don’t know what the president’s plan to create jobs in America is, isn’t because you’re ignorant. It’s because he doesn’t have one. And no one seems to care or notice.

Instead, as usual, as is the case in all political ‘debates’ these days, the question is not will Republicans win on this issue, but rather merely by how much. Even that is not really the question, however, since that formulation presumes that Democrats are actually fighting Republicans, and since it conveniently omits mention of the fact that all such ‘debates’ always happen on Republican (more accurately, Republican/Democratic) turf. Our whores in Washington are not, for example, fighting right now over whether we should spend money to create jobs, versus slashing spending to reduce the deficit. No, rather, they are simply disagreeing over how much social spending should be slashed. The real ideological war over policy was lost before it was ever even engaged, because that’s precisely what Democrats do nowadays.

Since 1980 (or perhaps 1972), they retreat, they deceive, and they sell out their constituents. That is the case in almost every policy domain, from Middle East foreign policy to global warming to civil liberties to health care. If that latter claim sounds ridiculous, remember that Barack Obama’s much derided health care plan was essentially the same one proposed by Bob Dole in 1996, and virtually the same one implemented by Ken Doll “Dick” Romney in Massachusetts just a few years back. And remember that the president began the process by cutting a secret deal behind closed doors with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. And remember that that deal called for them to profit massively, for the president to renounce single payer, and for him to lie outright (as was documented by his pal, Tom Daschle) to his liberal base, pretending to favor a public option while actually scuttling it from the get-go.

And so our political class today is comprised of two types: vicious predatory marionettes, on the one hand, and vicious predatory marionettes who smile a bit more than the first batch, on the other. Really, increasingly, you can hardly tell the difference. New York is one of the bluest states to be found in the country. It has a Democratic governor. He is the son of a former Democratic governor, a man who could well have been president had he run, and one of the outstanding liberal figures of the twentieth century. And yet this governor is running a program that might make Ronald Reagan blush, for all its ugly draconian regressivism. The state has a fiscal problem. He is solving it by slashing funding to education and health care, and laying off state employees. He refuses to raise taxes. The wealthy in New York will actually be getting a tax cut next year under the terms of Governor Cuomo’s new budget.

Then there’s Barack Obama, the man hated by the right for his evil socialist policies. Newsweek magazine – not exactly widely known for its Trotskyist political commitments, is currently running an article entitled thusly: “Obama’s War on Schools: The No Child Left Behind Act has been deadly to public education. So why has the president embraced it?” I dunno, Newsweek. Because Bush was a socialist too, maybe?

You could ask the same question, however, about Afghanistan, Iraq, defense spending, Guantánamo and civil liberties, tax policy, health care (yes, health care), global warming, government spending, Wall Street bailouts, and really just about anything government does. Like just about every other Democrat running around these days, Obama is almost entirely as regressive as the monsters of the Republican Party. There’s the answer to your question, Newsweek. It’s about time that you figured out what the rest of us have learned the hard way over the last two years: that, policy-wise, Barack Obama is George W. Bush.

The reduction of the American voter’s choices down to two options – catastrophic or catastrophic with nice words – has very real consequences. This game is played for keeps. People are not making it anymore. The middle class has been shrinking for three decades. Foreclosures are off the charts. People are literally dying from lack of health care. Children are literally dying from lack of health care. And every day, we in the richest polity that ever existed on the planet not only fail to address those crimes, we exacerbate them with the actions of the Walkers and Christies and Cuomos and Obamas of this country. It’s no longer a question of whether we’ll adopt the destructive policies of the regressive oligarchy, merely a question of how fast we do it.

A recent report entitled “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States” finds, according to the New York Times, that a single worker (no partner, no dependents) “needs an income of $30,012 a year – or just above $14 an hour – to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. ... [But] The most recent data from the Census Bureau found that 14.3 percent of Americans were living below the poverty line in 2009.” Imagine how many were living below the real minimum threshold three times higher than the official poverty level.

Fortunately, however, there is still some good news out there. The number of billionaires in the world grew by 199 in the past year, according to Forbes magazine's annual survey. Now there are 1,210 of them. And they possess a combined wealth of $4.5 trillion. Awesome, dude! The even better news is that that figure is up from $3.6 trillion – a mere 25 percent growth – in just one year’s time. And what a year, too! Who says there’s a massive, devastating, killer recession going on? Sounds to me like it’s nothing more than a boatload of whining from a bunch of lazy, low-achiever, can’t-cut-it, non-billionaires!

What amazes me the most about this disaster is that it is the biggest single political story of our era, and simultaneously the tiniest. Of course, that’s not a coincidence either. You hardly want the media or social critics covering you when you’re in the midst of committing the crime of the millennium. We have witnessed what is undoubtedly the greatest redistribution of wealth in all of human history. As importantly, the public face taken for the process facilitating this mass rape has been a lie. Oligarchs didn’t tell us they were buying our politicians in order to take our money. They told us instead that “free” trade is good, but that unions, queers and Middle Eastern bogeymen are bad. Very bad. They told us they were lowering our taxes, when in fact they were simply transferring their tax burden onto us and onto our children. They’re telling us now that it is fiscally irresponsible to properly fund public education, health care and pensions, yet humongous corporate subsidies and a military the size of the entire rest of the world combined are completely necessary.

You don’t dare call them out on it, either. If you mention any of this, you get accused of engaging in class warfare. Even though, as Warren Buffett has pointed out, that war is already over, and his side won. And even though such an accusation is tantamount to accusing Martin Luther King of having engaged in race warfare for pointing out the perfectly obvious moral crimes that whites had long been committing against blacks, with the full blessing of the law, no less.

Telling the truth is the worst crime you can commit, as an incident in New Hampshire this week well proves. The Catholic church has, by all appearances, been little short of a rape factory for decades if not centuries now, and yet conservatives can hardly run fast enough to defend it against the slightest attempt by its victims to gain some meager measure of justice in compensation for the damage done to them. They’ll defend it, that is, unless anyone in the church should make the foolish mistake of speaking truthfully about the effects of regressive policymaking upon the poor and downtrodden. Bishop John McCormack did just that with respect to draconian Republican-proposed state budget cuts in New Hampshire. That caused D.J. Bettencourt, the House Majority Leader there, to call the good bishop a “pedophile pimp”.

Which is probably precisely what he is, but just the same – wow. In case you were wondering what’s really sacred amongst regressives, now you know, pal. Ca-ching, ca-ching.

We must face it. These are the pigs in our society, and they are doing what pigs do. They grow fatter each day, and they do so by nothing less than removing food from the mouths of babes and stuffing it into their own, even though it can hardly fit there anymore, so overflowingly full have those orifices and bellies become.

This is a crime against humanity, and it will not end.