In the classic Russian film, Alexander Nevsky, the merchant princes of Novgorod think they can buy their freedom by paying tribute to the advancing forces of the Teutonic Knights. Turns out, they can’t, and the rest of the film is about Alexander Nevsky leading the stout-hearted Russians in defense of what they held dear: land, family, and community.

In professional terms, that’s what economists call a market failure – and what free-market ideologues say can’t exist. That’s the problem with ideology: it blinds a person to the truth. This morning, I saw a news piece about how the military is finding it difficult to get enough healthy recruits. The blame for this national defense problem belongs to the unregulated markets that allow people to shove just about anything they’re addicted to into their bodies. Food, alcohol, tobacco: it’s all a mess.

I find it ironic that the biggest boosters for national defense are also the biggest proponents for not regulating diddly squat. Seems like you can’t have both. It’s further ironic that this lesson is brought home quite effectively in a 1938 Soviet Union propaganda piece. The problem with unregulated capitalism and free markets is that anything can be bought or sold, including poisons that destroy the youth of a nation and leave it unfit to defend itself.

Greed is not good: it undermines the soul of a nation. Forced collectivization is a horror, as well: nations must resist the extremes of any ideology if they wish to survive, let alone prosper. Markets have failed, are failing now, and will fail in the future. It is the role of a just government to address those failures with appropriate legislation.

Bloomberg has obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act that show guys like the Bank of America executive lying through their teeth. The banks were telling customers and investors that they were sound and solvent and doing just fine while they were, collectively, desperately borrowing trillions to cling to life. And, you guessed it, the execs kept their bonuses coming with those dollars.

The Federal Reserve is supposed to help provide liquidity in distressed financial markets. I get that. But these documents show that the Fed was picking winners and losers as they made their loans. They kept some firms solvent just long enough to complete buyouts – Wachovia and Bear Stearns were two such Fed-sustained comatose corporations. The Fed and the banks kept the loans a secret during the crisis and only released their information under a FOIA request.

The question is if these revelations will result in real regulation for the branch of organized crime we euphemistically refer to as “the banking industry.” Given the fact that the banks still have loads of cash to pay armies of lobbyists and you don’t, I’m not very optimistic about this leading to changes.

Both these men sit on opposite sides of the political divide. Yet, they’ve made the same call about Social Security. Perry called it “a Ponzi scheme.” Krugman said, “In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).” That was in 1997, even.

Technically, it’s not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme involves an intent to defraud. We’re really not intending to defraud people paying into Social Security, but it’s Ponzi in every other way. It needs more people paying in than those collecting benefits. As originally structured, most people would die – losing what they paid in – before being eligible to collect. Now, changing aging in the USA means more people don’t die before collecting, so the system is drawing down rapidly.

As people discuss benefits, the overall consensus is to cut them for younger folks and preserve them for people already receiving them and who are about to receive them. Worse, there is no discussion of what should be done in the place of cutting those benefits, which act as a lifeline for so many people. Even if people never receive the benefits of Social Security, there are a lot of folks that would need to have those benefits in order to keep going.

As a nation, as a people, we have failed in our duty to preserve our vision for what it means to be an American. Our soldiers in our movies and on the battlefield never leave a man behind: why do we lose that camaraderie for the poor, the aged, and the infirm?

We need a plan. We need one that works and that is sustainable. Simply saying, “*I* plan to take care of my family” isn’t enough. There are enough resources in the USA so that nobody would have to go hungry or homeless. We need to figure out how to make it so we don’t have any hungry or homeless.

Or do you prefer images like this?

There are 400 Americans that have $1.57 trillion between them, which is as much as 50% of the US population. That’s one group of 400 with $1,570,000,000,000, or $3.92500 billion apiece and 153,503,275 Americans with $0.00001 billion apiece. Somehow, the PR firms hired by the top 400 and their ilk have managed to make this fact seem to be a justification for taxing the people with $0.00001 billion more and the ones with $3.92500 billion less. That’s not right.

In the game of divide and rule, the minority at the top must fracture the majority in as many ways as possible, so that it does not unite and topple the minority. With wealth, this is easily done. The pattern is repeatable: mercenary security forces provide muscle and a few of the majority are invited to partake of a crumb or two so that they become boosters for the supposed prosperity afforded by going easy on the people with wealth and power. Meanwhile, racial, religious, and gender divides are exploited with opportunistic propaganda fomented by agents provocateurs in the pay of the rich. They just have to start the ball rolling. They don’t have to go along for the ride.

When I see emails that try and make it sound that the rich are victims, I become angry. It’s a lie. How can a person that buys and sells congressmen and judges and regulatory agencies be a victim? These guys will avoid taxes however possible just so they can keep a bigger pile of goodies for themselves. They probably don’t know what people who have to have a pan card seva go through to earn money and did they earn their pile on their own? Not likely. Inheritance is the number one way to make money in the USA, followed by interest earnings. Of course, for every dollar collected in interest, a dollar is paid in interest, and the poor pay those dollars. Even when a rich man borrows from another rich man, his interest payments are passed on to the poor as part of the prices of the goods and services he provides. A poor man with zero debt will still be paying interest. Interest is money made off of someone else’s labor. Kinda like what a vampire does, only with money and only in real life.

For every “Top x% of earners pay y% of our taxes” I see, I want to shout that that x% is earning more than y% of the national income. They’re not paying their fair share in a straight proportional scale and when you consider how much tax is already claimed in the form of widow’s mites, it’s revolting to see people try to paint the rich as victims.

Cherry-picked statistics are some of the most effective propaganda out there. Watch out.