Let The Payback "Trickle Down." The Lie Of Our Times. There Will Be Blood. He Hopes We Fail.

If you want to understand where the anger comes from that fuels the GTL to blog away his beautiful Sunday morning, read this article in today's Boston Globe about the closing of a mental health clinic for the poorest, riskiest, sickest members of the community.

It will help you understand the murder of the American economy by ultra-rich sociopaths on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C. in its proper terms. For every sleek, oily, alpha-male piece of shit who scammed his way into a corner office in Manhattan and a McMansion in Westchester based on credit default swaps and esoteric derivatives, there's an army of human wreckage who pay the bill in blood when it finally comes due.

Maureen Dowd has the right idea about making these sick, twisted greed addicts return the spoils of the class war they have been winning since Ronald Reagan came along and told them we as a nation didn't have to take care of each other after all. Remember when he said, "there was a war on poverty, and poverty won"? It was somewhere between his other great sayings, "we begin bombing in five minutes," and "Contras? What are Contras?"

Reagan was by turns pithy, clever, racist, anti-worker, and catastrophically horrendous as president - unless you were rich and powerful at the beginning. If you were, you came out of Reaganomics with your fortunes not only intact but metastasized into monstrous private tax-sheltered permanent estates, tumors of the greed cancer upon our collective body that we now have little hope of surviving.

The filthy rich, the corporate insiders, whom W. would famously describe as his "base," came to believe that they could go on developing ever-cleverer schemes for redistributing wealth to the top of our economic ladder without any consequences at all. The benefits for the rest of us would "trickle down."

Trickle down. The lie of our times. The curse of our culture and a diseased philosophy even before it was ever put into practice. "The slaves are starving, so make the masters' portions bigger. Think of the abundance in table scraps!"

Soon people are going to be calling for the blood of the rich. The homeless and mentally ill, the penniless veterans and formerly middle-class poor are going to realize, as Malcom X did forty years ago, that waiting for your enemy to extend his hand in true support and friendship is no substitute for a genuine plan of action.

Make no mistake. People are going to die because of Phil Gramm, deregulation of financial institutions and banks. People will die without medicine or a place to live. People will die of shame at being unable to care for their children.

Maureen Dowd's plan, to force the evildoers of our blasted economy to give the booty back, will never work and would not help the economy one whit, except symbolically. However, when hedge-fund managers begin to fear for their children's lives, start worrying that their maids or drivers might slit their throats in their sleep, a new threshold will have been crossed.

It is right around the corner. I can feel it. Can you?

The GTL doesn't advocate violence. I would prefer by orders of magnitude a bloodless fix to our financial holocaust. But if the architects of the disaster have to 'fess up and seek forgiveness as a precursor to change, don't hold your breath. It won't happen. Even as we speak, Republicans are rallying not to their constituents' aid, but to the swarthy flanks of their philosophical and spiritual leader, Rush Limbaugh, who has come to feel so safe and secure in his own position that he can say out loud what his fellow billionaires are more wisely keeping to themselves:

"I hope he fails."

If Obama can stop the economic slide into oblivion, rescue the American people from the depths of poverty and despair, most of us would think of it as a good thing. Not so Mr. Limbaugh, and as it appears now, wheresover goeth Rush Limbaugh, there goeth the Republican Party. Listen here and make up your mind.

You have yourselves a beautiful shiny day, my friends. But remain vigilant, and as always, keep your powder dry. In the fight for good, for the people of our great land, and in the fight for economic and social justice, it's always high noon, always do-or-die.