In an effort to reduce America’s deficit, President Obama introduced the Buffett Rule, a proposed tax increase for those earning annual incomes of $1 million or more. A Bloomberg Global Poll, “based on interviews with an elite group of decision makers in finance, markets and economics,” approved the president’s proposal “by a margin of 63 percent to 32 percent.”

How would this affect Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world? Buffett responds, “Our leaders have asked for ‘shared sacrifice.’ But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

“While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as ‘carried interest,’ thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.”

In the face of the 63% approval rating for the Buffett Rule by an “elite group” of financial decision makers, Republican VP pick Paul Ryan had the gall—while insulting the intelligence of the American people in the process—to call the Buffett Rule “class warfare.” Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Ryan said: “Class warfare might make for good politics, but it makes for bad economics.”

Funny that he would say that because on June 6, 1985, President Ronald Reagan, speaking at Northside High School in Atlanta, Georgia said, “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allowed some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing while a bus driver was paying 10 % of his salary and that’s crazy.” When President Reagan asked the crowd, “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?” They roared back “More!”

Not widely known outside of Wisconsin, Ryan is currently Chairman of the House Budget Committee and Romney’s choice for vice president. So you would think he would be good with numbers–especially on his tax forms. Not so: “Paul Ryan and his wife inherited between $1-5 million in 2010 and, whoopsie daisy, he forgot to disclose it for two years. You’d almost think it was on purpose, well, some people do think that, since Ryan didn’t remember it until he was being vetted by the Romney campaign.” One to five million dollars: one could easily overlook this when filing one’s tax forms, couldn’t one? But if his bookkeeping skills are so marginal, how much credibility does he deserve creating budgets or making tax policy for a country?

Better that we listen to a Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, who agrees that “such low taxes on the very rich are indefensible. The economic record certainly doesn’t support the notion that superlow taxes on the superrich are the key to prosperity.” He continues, The U.S. economy added “11.5 million jobs” during President Bill Clinton’s first term when the capital gains tax rate was over 29 percent, so “there’s no real reason to keep from raising the tax rate.”

Maybe this is the time to ask ourselves why we have so long suffered our nation’s economic affairs to be directed by people such as Paul Ryan who has been so subservient to the concerns of the rich and so cavalier about the welfare of ordinary Americans.

I think Philip K. Howard answers that question: “American government is a deviant subculture. Its leaders stand on soapboxes and polarize the public by pointing fingers while secretly doing the bidding of special interests. The professionals who interact with government—lawyers and lobbyists—make sure every issue is viewed through the blinders of a particular interest, not through the broader lens of the common good. Who’s in charge? It’s hard to say. The most powerful force in this subculture is inertia: Things happen a certain way because they happened that way yesterday. Nothing can get taken away, because that would offend a special interest.”

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Ignorance is a choice: Money is power—Knowledge is more powerful.

What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” That’s a famous quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, The Rich Boy. He had his reasons for writing that, and I have my reasons for believing it—the reasons being what I have observed of our Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

Being wealthy does not disqualify a person running for President of the United States. Wealth has advantages to attaining public office, especially if you’ve earned it yourself. But Mitt Romney’s wealth, and how he earned it, have raised legitimate questions at a time of economic distress for the poor and middle classes versus unprecedented gains for the wealthiest. The “bottom 50 percent of American households held just 1.1 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2010… while the top 10 percent of earners held a whopping 74.5 percent of the nation’s wealth during the same period.”

This issue becomes especially relevant when Mitt Romney makes a connection between his success in business and his fitness to run the country. On Sunday, July 27, GPS host Fareed Zakaria interviewed two world-class economists, Paul Krugman and Ken Rogoff on the subject of Romney and the economy. They are not impressed with Mitt Romney’s claims that his performance at Bain Capital qualifies him for the presidency.

Paul Krugman: “Romney does not have a coherent, comprehensive economic program. It’s very difficult to figure out what, if anything, he’s proposing aside from tax cuts for the rich—for people like himself. A lot of it has been ‘trust me. I’m a successful businessman. I know how to make things work.’

“And then the question is, ‘Well, exactly how did you get so rich?’ Those are legitimate questions…. We have always expected presidential candidates to be very forthcoming about their personal history, their personal financial history—about their business career, if they’ve had one. Romney is trying to keep everything he did in his life before 2010 under a shroud.”

And then Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff weighs in: “I think that the fact he paid a 14% tax rate is a real issue. It’s incredibly unfair. Now, he didn’t break the law. He didn’t make the law. But he ought to say, ‘My policies are going to change the law.’”

An editorial from The Iola Register provides some context: “Fundamental to the art of governing in a democracy is the ability to accommodate the views and convictions of others. Equally important is the ability to choose outstanding men and women to serve in the cabinet and then to work with those co-administrators in harmony.

“Captains of industry, in contrast, are by nature autocrats. They are accustomed to having their decisions carried out. They are not natural compromisers. They tend not to appoint co-workers who might become competitors for authority. When they are right, their companies succeed. When they are wrong, they are replaced and disappear, a process which happens much more abruptly in industry than can occur in the elected offices of our government.

“The point is that the United States of America is not a giant corporation that can be administered as though it were IBM or Google. The skills and personal attributes that lead to business success are not transferable to the presidency. That isn’t to say that a good business man cannot become a capable governor or president. But it is to argue that making a ton of money by reorganizing sick corporations is just as likely to give a man a false sense of his ability to solve America’s problems as it is to turn him into the next Abraham Lincoln—who, incidentally, never was much of a business success.”

As much as Romney the businessman proved successful in securing profits for his shareholders, we voters need to ask ourselves whether this brand of success would help him be a better president because of it. Or does it entirely unfit him to be the compassionate leader for our tumultuous time as Abraham Lincoln was to his?

The next four articles will deal with how well “We the People” are holding Congress, the Supreme Court and the President responsible for the discharge their Constitutional role of checks and balances among the three branches of government.

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Last Wednesday we saw political theater at its worst. The 112th Congress ended the least productive year since record keeping started in 1947—less than 10% of what that 80th Congress produced when President Truman dubbed it the “do nothing Congress.”

Perhaps this is good news, considering that the House of Representatives voted for the 33rd time on July 11 to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. However much this demonstrates their commitment to destroying health care, it doesn’t translate into traction with the American people?—they gave a 9% approval rating for being the worst Congress in history, putting them in the same league as Hugo Chavez, according to Ezra Klein in the Washington Post.

So what difference does it make to you?

The Senate on Wednesday (July 25) voted to extend tax cuts for most working Americans and end Bush-era tax breaks in 2013 for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples earning at least $250,000. Sen. Bernie Sanders said after the vote. “This is a step forward in ending the Bush-era tax breaks for the rich and asking the wealthiest Americans, who are doing phenomenally well, to do their fair share to bring down deficits. I hope our Republican friends in the House can overcome their support for tax breaks for the wealthy and support this common-sense approach to cutting deficits.”

If the Senate bill passed the House, the added tax dollars could go to providing jobs through investment in infrastructure and in providing excellent, affordable education for our youth. The House, however, has made it clear that they plan to extend the tax cuts for 2013 to taxpayers at all income levels, including individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and couples earning $250,000.

So if not to help the struggling middle class, students, and the poor, just what do the Republicans plan to do with our taxpayer money?

Perhaps, start another war? Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in attacking U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. Dempsey has asserted that a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities was “not prudent” but, rather, “destabilizing.” The three hawks insist that peace talks served the interests of the Iranians rather than the Israelis.

Israeli officials have stated that when they say ‘all options are on the table’ they mean it, and that should Iran approach the ‘immunity zone,’ they will not hesitate to act.

Siding with Netanyahu, McCain stated, “There should be no daylight between America and Israel in our assessment of the [Iranian] threat.”

Raghida Dergham, in her article The Costs of the Third Russian Veto at the Security Council, asks “Has the new regional order [in the Middle East] set off at a faster pace, leaving behind an angry Russian Bear and the mullahs of Tehran on alert?”

Should the United States be foolish enough to take unilateral action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, I’m with General Dempsey—it would not be “prudent,” considering that we are dealing with an angry Russian Bear and the mullahs of Tehran.

What more serious and timely advice could we get than from President Eisenhower in his final address to the American people in 1961: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Congressmen aligned with McCain and Graham would rather spend our tax dollars waging war with our young men and women rather than educating them for a better life. This is not only a “do nothing Congress”—if they allow this to happen, it’s a murderous Congress.

So to add insult to injury, if House Speaker John Boehner tries to derail these middle-class tax cuts on arcane procedural grounds, he’s still in the unenviable position of opposing tax cuts for the middle class in order to protect the military industrial complex and the most wealthy.

No wonder the 112th Congress has set a record for unpopularity! In February, only 10 percent of Americans said they approved of the job Congress was doing.

What should happen to a “do nothing” Congress?

If Americans care what happens to their country, they should “throw the bums out!”

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What can you do—you are only one person? True, but you are only “six degrees of separation,” on average, from any other person on Earth. You become powerful when you share information with your friends and ask them to share it with their friends—it becomes a global revolution. As Stephen King suggests in The Long Walk, when these “society-supported sociopaths” come, step aside, and find the strength to run…

Ignorance is a choice: Money is power—Knowledge is more powerful.