The Crazy Factor

Don't Forget to Pack Your Gun

Gail Collins recently offered a salient insight into American politics: There has always been and likely always will be a significant crazy factor among the men and women who offer themselves and their beliefs for "public service." So every Congress, every state legislature has some really certifiable members, but the rest of the group simply ignores and tolerates them. The problem becomes when the critical mass of crazy gets big enough to actually change the direction of the legislative process.

She was commenting on the current kerfuffle in Texas about the plans of the United States Army for war games in Texas, Utah and other arid states where there is desert which might resemble places the Army may find itself fighting soon.   But the Republican lunatic fringe (now more than a fringe) saw more nefarious things afoot--like the North Koreans, who always see war games as a prelude to actual war, they saw these "exercises" as transparent ruses for an actual invasion by Obamamen aimed at stripping Texans of their guns, liberty and maybe even part of the plan to unleash those Hispanic Muslims who have been dying to charge across the Rio Grande and rape white Christian women, who Texas has plenty of, and which we all know have been tempting those H.M.'s for some time now. 

Says Obama is Hitler Redux 

Sees Hispanic Muslim Rapists Massing on the Southern Border

If Democracy is designed to represent "The People" then it will represent the crazy members of society as well as the sane. 

But this has also meant Adolph Hitler was elected with a majority vote, not because people did not know what he thought--he had written Mein Kampf and made no secret of his beliefs.  Somehow though, when a politician says something really, really crazy many of the people who vote for him may say, "Well, that's just hyperbole. He's just making a point." 

The other issue is who has the time and the inclination to seek political power: For many Congressmen a seat in the House of Representatives with the nearly $200,000 pay package is the best paying job by several orders of magnitude they can ever hope to get. This is not true for the state of New Hampshire, which virtually does not pay its state legislators, so one might ask, who would sign up for that job?

Really? Just Look at the Man

Retired, unemployable or simply crazy people with a lot of time on their hands perhaps. 

We have a Hampton rep who claims that building a motorway along the abandoned railroad path from Hamton to Portsmouth,  rather than a bicycle path, would be a greener option;he argues  a roadway would improve air quality more than a bicycle path. That would be Fred Rice. 

Clean Air/Build Roads

We have Warren Groen, who looks at grade school kids trying to get the Red Tail Hawk named a state bird and he links that to killing babies at Planned Parenthood clinics.  

Vicious Birds Remind Him of Abortions

We have a group, or maybe it qualifies as a movement, called the Free Staters who want to move enough lunatics to New Hampshire to establish a libertarian utopia where every child will carry a gun and no government will exert its will to restrain the energies of The People. 

My current favorite is Kyle Tasker, who once dropped one of his two guns on the floor during a hearing. He was not disturbed, because he had the other gun secured, in case anyone was thinking of acting on the opportunity.  He also opposed his own bill about mental health on the grounds that "crazy people ought to know they face consequences."  Mr. Tasker, far as I can tell does not actually fit into the "Crazy" box. He just sounds like it. He fits snugly in the "stupid" box.  Who actually voted for this yo-yo?

Mr. Tasker Doing the People's Work

Over time, the crazies just seem to wash up in one place and collect, and fertilize each other and eventually who knows what will grow in that miasma?

In Concord, we are approaching the time when the lunatics will be running the asylum.

What Renny Saw

If ever there was a voice in the wilderness, it has to be Renny Cushing. The only Democratic representative among many Seacoast towns, he spoke recently at a meeting of local Democrats, detailing the prevarications, depredations and other slimy moves by New Hamsphire Republican state representatives as they raid stable parts of the state budget and systematically eviscerate the workings of good government. 

Funding for higher education, lower education, any program which might benefit the dispossessed or disadvantaged has been gutted. Basically, everything of any importance to running the state, providing services for its citizens has been stricken. Only the cigarette tax survives unscathed--no raising that because it is thought to attract Massachusetts smokers across the border. New Hampshire aims to export lung cancer to its neighbors.

It has finally dawned on Renny the primary motivating idea of the Republicans in Concord is that government is bad, and if they defund the government, it will stop the government from working and when that happens people will say, "Government is bad. Government is dysfunctional. Let's get rid of government."

The Republicans have a solid point: When Republicans are in charge of government, government is BAD.

It is the old story of the person who murders both his parents and then asks the judge for leniency on the grounds he is now an orphan.

I'm not sure I can spell it, but I can recognized it when I see it: "Chutzpah." 

Elizabeth Warren: The Real Deal

 I will vote for the Democratic nominee for President in 2016. If that is Hillary Clinton, I will go into that voting booth and place a black mark in the space next to her name and I will carry that ballot to the man behind the scanner machine and I will have done my patriotic duty to try to save the country from whomever the Republicans are running--knowing that candidate could be the Messiah himself, but if he's a Republican he will bring with him an army of frothing self styled Patriots who believe government is the problem and the Constitution means a gun in every home and waistband. 

 But if the Democratic nominee is Elizabeth Warren I will feel the way I once did about casting a vote for Barack Obama--I will be smiling.

Despite all the candidates' books and the TV interviews and New Yorker profiles (see the New Yorker piece on Ms. Warren 5/4/15) and opinions from pundits, the plain fact is we can never really know these people who live in the public eye.  They all keep significant parts of themselves private and they must.

 But we can know something of their history, that history they will each try to control and shape for us. 

And Elizabeth Warren, whatever else may be true, had a tough road through life, where Hillary had a privileged road. Hillary had to work very hard and she had to fight, but those battles were like the sweaty and bruising battles of the high school wrestler--intense but controlled. Nobody dies in those battles. Nobody goes broke. For Ms. Warren, there was always the threat of a real abyss, bankruptcy, divorce, indigence. 

She has been accused of being a bit of a drama queen. But I have to say, a  little feel for drama is not a bad thing in a woman. Oh, yes, I'm being sexist. Why is it okay to have a little drama in a woman, but not in a man?

Because women are trained to restrain expressions of emotion, especially in the setting of work and career, but when that becomes a governing principle of behavior, it does more than simply eviscerate their public presentation of self, it does something to their internal mechanisms.  I would offer Hillary Clinton as an example of what this sort of emphasis on control does. 

I cannot claim to know Ms. Clinton personally, but the few "inside" stories I know from people who knew her at Yale Law School and from people who had to deal with her at various events, consistently portray a woman whose main emotional drive is toward opprobrium  and control as opposed to sympathy and real passion.

Ms. Warren opposed Timothy Geithner and other candidates for posts in Mr. Obama's government because they were creatures of Wall Street, beholden and in love with the Wall Street power brokers to whom they knew they would one day return. Ms. Clinton simply made deals with Wall Street types because she represented Wall Street as a US Senator and she knew she needed to trade favors with the powerful.
I cannot know, but I would guess the stridency which Warren Buffett sees in Ms. Warren comes from the anger for someone who has seen the bad stuff which rolls downhill to all the under privileged in this country and that's what fuels her resentment and willingness to do battle. 

It is hard to imagine there was a time in the not distant past when most people and pundits believed bankruptcy happened to people who deserved it, who went bankrupt through profligacy and heedlessness. But Ms. Warren had an inkling this was not true: She thought people might get into trouble because of illness and loss of health insurance and loss of jobs owing to illness. Ms. Warren did the grunt work to show this  true and the prevailing notion that people who go bankrupt are feckless and deserve it is commonly wrong.Ms. Warren did her years of research, did the academic thing. The questions she asked came from somewhere, from her own experience, clawing her way toward financial security. 

Ms. Clinton fought her battles in safer arenas. She learned to clamp down on her inner feelings, I am guessing, to the point those feelings got snuffed out before they could take fire. 

Here's a really dumb tidbit full of possibly spurious imagery, likely signifying nothing, but I can't get past it: Friends who live in her neighborhood in Cambridge see Ms. Warren walking her dog there.  She still walks her own dog, her own self. I cannot somehow imagine Hillary does that. In my imagining of Hillary, she would have some intern doing that. Hillary would pose for publicity photos with the dog, not walk the dog. I know that is unfair. How politicians treat dogs should not become a test of character.  Hitler loved his dog. (Of course, his dog was a German Shepard who had worked chasing down inmates at concentration camps.)  But, any way, the dog walking thing brings to mind the image of one woman connected to the ordinary pleasures in life and another who is planning her next move. 

Ms. Warren still knows how to feel things. Call her a drama queen. I can respond to that. 

Let's Just Ignore the 14th Amendment

Defending America Against the 14th Amendment

Amendment XIV

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
--United States Constitution, 14th Amendment

"The question of whether our forefathers meant for birthright citizenship in all circumstances to be the law of the land is far from settled," Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) said at the hearing. "In any event, we must still determine if it is the right policy for America today."

Steve King (R-Iowa) was the most adamant that it was not the right policy. He questioned what would happen "to the demographics of America if this policy is not reversed," and implied that Democrats may support birthright citizenship because they want to win elections.

--Huffington Post

One thing about the 14th Amendment, among all the amendments, it has a ringing clarity. You're born in in the United States, even if you were just passing through on a horse from Mexico on your way to Canada, you are a natural born citizen of the USA.

Republicans, every last one of them, take their responsibility to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States very seriously. They begin almost every discussion with an affirmation that whatever they are about to say, it's all part of their ardent desire to defend the Constitution against  frontal attacks or  back stabbing assaults launched by Democrats, or, as they say, "That DemocRAT" party.

But for some Republicans, it's a case of we are for the Constitution, except when we are not,  which is when that Constitution would drive this country in the direction of the wrong "demographics" which is to say, not white, not Christian, and you know what we are talking about--all those Hispanic Muslims massing on our Southern border trying to swim the Rio Grande and rape our white, Christian women. 

I've just got to get Texas Senator Louie Gohmert on the phone and hear what he thinks about this.  You remember Louie. When those kids were flooding across the border it was he who stood up for American womanhood.

“And they’ve committed at least 7,695 sexual assaults,” Gohmert insisted. “You want to talk about a war on women? This administration will not defend the women of America from criminal aliens! By the thousands, and hundreds of thousands!”

Actually, it may be a good idea for American women to practice an escape route North. The Canadians are not rapists, ordinarily. And, in any case, they tend to be, well: White.  I think we ought to practice evacuation from Hampton, say along Route 89 to that lake and north from there. 

Be prepared, that's my motto.

Baltimore: When Fiction is More Real than the News. The Wire Instructs

Inner Harbor, Baltimore, Maryland 

Okay, you knew it was coming.  Baltimore is burning. How do we understand it? This is not what you had in New York or Missouri--the mayor in Baltimore is Black  and the police in Baltimore are predominantly Black. 
NPR interviewed local citizens and they all said the hatred of the police has nothing to do with race. They said, in their own way, the cops are seen not as people who protect and serve but as men who harass and abuse. and David Simon, who did the most thorough and insightful study ever done of an American city, "The Wire," says the troubles stem not from race but from the "Drug War," which has given full license to any Baltimore cop to do anything he wants, and a lot of those cops have, to put it mildly, a "mean streak," or, to put it more bluntly, they became cops because they are sadists and wanted a free hand to abuse people. 
           Police are now driven by "statistics" and what that means is the old cop who walked a beat on a street and stop to chat with people in his neighborhood, who could then go back to his friends in the neighborhood when someone got shot and expect to be told by his local friends what actually happened--that cop no longer exists. The cops out there now do not walk among the citizens--they drive by in their cars with the windows up, with the computer going and they have to write a certain number of summons a day and that means they have to dream up some crimes and pin those on locals. 
          They do not stop and chat; they stop and frisk.
          Police careers are now built on statistics not community relations. As Howard Colvin, the quintessential good cop, says, "These statistics, these numbers, they just ruined this job."
          They ruined more than that.

Street Cred

Anyone who watched all five seasons of "The Wire" knows exactly what is happening in Baltimore right now and why and understands all the forces and dynamics of psychology, personality, anthropology and sociology driving the otherwise incomprehensible scenes you see on the nightly news. 

You can also see what fools the news media types are, as they hardly bother to ask the people on the other end of the microphones actual questions, but simply state their own, ignorant assumptions about what the story ought to be rather than what it is.  The evening news: the clueless instructing the uncomprehending.

They are asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. 

One of the most satisfying things about great literature--which "The Wire clearly" is--it allows you to look at the world and  see through the tangled woof of fact to the truth, to see a scene in a way which you could not possibly have seen it before the experience of assimilating that literature.  So, you read Animal Farm and you can never hear a Communist say, "all Workers are equal" without hearing in the back of your mind, "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."   Watching the police, the mayor, the governor, the deacons, all the institutional representatives speaking into the microphones before the cameras now  and you've seen and heard all this before, courtesy of David Simon and company and you know what it all really means. 

In one great scene, from the 5th Season, you are watching a City Hall press conference on TV in the offices of the Baltimore Sun and as the Mayor says something like, "We are first and foremost concerned about public safety, about protecting neighborhoods and ensuring the safety of all our great city's wonderful citizens," and an editor in the group narrates the subrosa, true translation, "We are first and foremost concerned about how this riot affects my job security and we wish to Hell we could beat these scumbags into a bloody pulp and dump their bodies where they'll never be found."

So, we are seeing played out in Baltimore exactly what David Simon showed us must happen, given the dysfunctional  institutions and the misapprehensions of elected officials and the alienation of private citizens. 

When you have children growing up without parents, or worse, with parents who prey on their own children to support their own dissolute lives, you've got Baltimore dystopia. You are watching some completely clueless white reporter giving you his  understanding of why these people are acting they way they are acting and predictably, he is simply making the story up as he goes along. 

 Many people have tried to watch "The Wire" but could simply not keep watching. It is pretty depressing and although it is one of the funniest series ever to appear on TV, the humor is very dark.  Truman Capote tried to write a "non fiction novel," In Cold Blood . David Simon succeeded in accomplishing that goal--using the freedom fiction affords, he gave us a clearer picture of the real world of Baltimore than any non fiction work has ever done. 

 Some Jeremiads are prophecy:It was all there, if only more people had listened. 

The War We Have Now: Mr. Obama vs Alberich the Craven Dwarf Nibelung

He's got to deal with the shooters.

"There are the adventure seekers--those who think this will enhance their masculinity, the gang members and the petty criminals too; and then, of course, the die hard radicals."
--From "Why Do They Go" NY Times Magazine article Mary Anne Weaver 4/19/15 about why there are more British Muslims fighting in Islamist groups than serving in Her Majesty's armed forces.

That description could describe the motivations of major groups of young men who left New Hampshire to fight in the Civil War. Wars are fought by young men for many reasons, but as Boris Pasternak observed, men do not leave home, voluntarily,  if they are happy at home. Men who go fight are looking for something. 

So now, we have left anthropology, sociology and political science behind and we are into that great wobbly netherworld: Psychology.

We are certainly not in economics: For the most part the Brits (and likely the American Muslims) who hop a plane to Turkey on their way to ISIS are in no way impoverished. They are typically high school graduates, often in college and they leave behind immigrant families pushing upward from the middle class in Michigan or London.

They are off to help establish the great Caliphate in the sky, earthly location: Syria, Iraq and wherever else in the fertile crescent ISIS can gain a foothold. They are excited by youtube videos of brave ISIS fighters chopping off heads of hapless captives, or burning a Jordanian pilot alive. How could you not want to be part of that?

Where does that sort of alienation come from? 

Intriguingly, there is the flip side of the coin: The girls. Girls are going to become concubines/wives/ baby makers of the brave killers in the Caliphate, in the great tradition of the Third Reich, where blonde, nubile German girls went happily off to camps to get impregnated by blonde, clean limbed, virile Aryan boys before they shipped out to the Eastern front to annihilate the Slavic hordes.

Alberich, the Craven Dwarf Nibelung

Really thrilling, such a mix of testosterone, masculinity, a desire for perfection--after all there is the strong narrative of wanting to join your fellow killers in paradise, where you great reward will be VIRGINS. 

(Personally, the prospect of virgins would not get me tying my shoe laces. But, maybe that's just me.)

I don't get it. Well, maybe I do. There is also the sense of grievance. Where could that come from? Well, from the immigrant experience, the problem of being the new arrival, scrambling to catch up, to gain acceptance and feeling put down by those already well established. 

After WWII, neighborhoods in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. were filling up with the families of all the government workers who would be part of the great expansion of the federal government.  Many of these neighborhoods were "red lined" which meant WASPs only. Sometimes Catholics were excluded, but certainly no Jews or Blacks allowed. You could never know if the Jones family you sold the house to was Catholic, but there was little question about the Rabinowitz's  and certainly, you had only to look to know about Blacks. 

Helga's Antecedants

I grew up in one of the "mixed" (Non WASP) neighborhoods and at school I experienced what Alberich the crave dwarf Nibelung had. You remember Alberich, the dwarf who comes across the beautiful, naked, voluptuous Rhinemaidens, who tease him:  invite him then reject him and taunt him for being, well, a Nibelung, short, dark, not at all Siegfried.   Alberich does not take it well. If he had had ISIS to run off and join, I'm sure he would have, but he seeks revenge in his own way.

But I digress. I was trying to get inside the mind of the British son of a Pakistani merchant, the Michigan son of a Somali Ford worker, who goes off to school and something happens and, poof, he's off to Syria to join ISIS.

It's dangerous to extrapolate, but I remember when I first beheld the girl I'll call Helga, all five feet seven inches of blonde, pale blue eyed perfection: flawless skin, sparkling white teeth and boundless energy, and I knew, in an instant, I didn't stand a chance with her. The local Siegfried, captain of the basketball team got Helga. Then the captain of the football team, named "Trevor" or "Hunter" or "Biff" with a roman numeral III after his name, got Helga. I was never going to get Helga. 

Rhinemadens Not for Nibelung

My friends from the hood discussed all this and concluded we did not rate. Many years later, I saw a movie "Bread and Chocolate" about a man from Southern Italy who moves north, near the Swiss border and he is faced with the same thing--there is one indelible scene when he looks out from a chicken coup, with his fellow Southern Italians, at a group of tall, blonde, immaculate, gorgeous teenagers, as they strip off their clothes and plunge into a waterfall and its basin in a coed celebration of celestial beauty, and all the short people in the coop can do is adore them from afar and loathe themselves. 

Rhinemaidens in Switzerland

The View From the Chicken Coop

Can it all come down to this?  Aryan envy? Got to be more complicated than that. But when I look at the guy who shows up to the state legislature packing a gun, I have to think--this is a guy who does not feel his own, native, flesh and blood equipment is adequate.

Welfare, Charity and Virtue

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

One of the people I most admire recently revealed she was driving from her seacoast home to Manchester to teach English and life skills to  an immigrant who had never had the opportunity to go to any sort of  school where she grew up, in Africa.  To say this is a busy woman would be an understatement, so why does she add this effort to all the other things she does for her family (which are many) and for her town?  Because, she explained, the program  in Manchester serves those with the most profound needs.

After teasing her, calling her Major Barbara (George Bernard Shaw's Salvation Army heroine who was born to privilege but devoted herself to helping the underprivileged) I realized the problem was not with her, but was my own.

Home Base

I realized that when it comes to the central issue of what those of us lucky enough to have been born into circumstances which allow us to flower ought to do for those who are not, I am very parochial and limited in my perceptions.

Most of us, who live in the suburbs do not see impoverished people much. We do not walk past sidewalk panhandlers, do not come into contact with unemployed people, or at least people who are obviously unemployed. The most disadvantaged people we see are working behind the counters at McDonalds. We live in bubbles and we are insulated from seeing suffering here in small town New England or in suburbia. We form our impressions of the "undeserving poor" from very limited experience. 

For 13 years I ran a clinic in inner city Washinton, D.C. and that formed most of my attitudes about welfare and the impoverished.  I was struck by two things which I've mentioned on this site before:  
1. Immigrants from Africa--Nigeria, Liberia, Kenya and Zaire were the most common sources in our clinic--were typically very bright, very inquisitive, quick learners, very well spoken (especially when they had those cool British colonial accents) and they were hard working. They had strong families and all the virtues of the "ideal immigrants" which we typically attribute to  Asian immigrants. Nobody had ever told these Africans they were stupid or shouldn't ask questions or were incapable of learning. 

No Room for Girls in Their Hometown School

The other group visiting the clinic: 
 2. Immigrants from the American South (Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi) had a different typical profile. They were often nearly mute. It was difficult getting even the most basic information out of them, like, for instance, why are you here today?  One of the most common patients at the clinic would be a 12 year old pregnant girl. When I asked how she intended to support the child, she would shrug and reply with a single word, "Welfare." The social workers told me the newborns were typically handed off not to the 12 year old child's 24 year old mother but to her 36 year old grandmother, who collected all the government checks for dependent children, Medicaid and other programs. In fact, the family benefited financially in many ways with the arrival of this new source of revenue.

Now, in Massachusetts,  I see a different population.  One group is the immigrant from the Dominican Republic, or El Salvador, and the patient typically comes from a family of twelve or more children.  Education typically stopped in grade school and the patient had gone to work in the D.R., but arriving in Lawrence, Massachusetts, prospects for employment became dim and Mass Health covers the doctors' bills. They work as landscapers, construction workers, jobs which require little English and little education.  Or they are unemployed.

At some level, especially when I'm having trouble with the "translator phone," which often squeaks and blips and runs out of power, nasty feelings bubble up from within. This person comes from a family of 14: How much effort could his mother and father have put  into raising, training, preparing this person to become self sufficient in life?  So now I'm stuck with trying to help him understand how to take care of his diabetes, because his parents just popped him out and set him lose to wander about the streets and fend for himself.  But then I get to know the person, and there is that amazing moment when he says, very sincerely, "Thank you, " in English, or in Spanish. There is such real gratitude. How many times a day do you get that in any line of work?  

From Africa: Europe or Bust

And it's not this guy's fault his parents had 14 children. He is now here, doing the best he can. 

So I have to work past my own frustration and resentment to a different place. My own parents put a great deal of effort into training and civilizing me. Their own parents did not speak English.  The best thing, by far, my grandparents ever did for me was to get on the boat to America. 

 Once I got into the idea of having children, once I found out how rewarding it could be, I wanted at least three, but had to stop at two because, doing the arithmetic, I realized there was no way I could afford college for more than two.  My good friend from medical school had four kids. How will you afford to send them to college? Oh, it's all in the financial aide system--you show your income and how many kids you have in school and you get financial aide. So this Ivy League educated surgeon anticipated his own version of welfare--welfare for the rich--in the form of college financial aide. It actually did work out for him--three kids went to Ivy League schools, and one to an Ivy League law school and one to an Ivy League medical school, and all this on a Navy salary. "Financial aide," he said. "It's all in the system."

The history of welfare since the 1970's is a discussion fraught with notions of the "other."  For the most part, white Americans thought of welfare as a system designed to give free hand outs to the Blacks, although 2/3 of those receiving benefits were actually white. Ronald Reagan slyly fed into this with his famous rant about the welfare queen from the South Side of Chicago--if she was from there, of course, she had to be Black.

But before Reagan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw what I was seeing in my inner city clinic:  Black girls and women getting pregnant with no plan for raising the children and a system which actually discouraged them from finding a job because once they started working at minimum wage jobs, they'd lose benefits and actually come out behind, financially.  His report on the damage welfare was doing to the Black family and community was seen by many liberals as "blaming the victim" as validating the impression that welfare served the "undeserving poor." Welfare from the early 20th century was designed to serve (white) widows who had no job skills and were left threatened when their husbands died. It was not typically available to Blacks. When it did become available to Blacks, it was portrayed as a free hand out to shiftless, lazy people.

When Clinton faced Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America Republicans, Clinton rejected the first Republican forays into stripping away benefits from poor Blacks, but he ultimately signed a law which required young mothers to go to work and limited the total number of years of benefits to 5. It was called, "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act."  Ah, doesn't that say it all?

Spending on welfare did decline.

But, as Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out this morning on CNN, the total outflow of dollars from welfare programs pales in comparison to the outflow of dollars in tax breaks to those owning private jets, to hedge fund managers whose tax rate is lower than that of most truck drivers--more welfare for the rich, an old Republican ploy.
As the good Senator from Rhode Island pointed out, the total number of dollars which leaks out the back door of our federal budget actually exceeds the number of dollars coming in the front door--and it's the Republicans keeping that back door open, all the while complaining about the deficit created by their own give aways to the rich.

We have corporate welfare in many forms--allowing American companies to open an office in Ireland and claim to be Irish companies not subject to American taxes. Make your money here in the USA and don't pay a dime for all the infrastructure and educated work force, just make the profit.  And welfare for the rich? Well, that's easy. Just keep everything you make--only small people pay taxes.