Things are smelling even worse in Washington with this administration and the hypocrites in both parties on Capitol Hill.

And who will pay the price for the scams and schemes of these mostly millionaire elected officials controlled by corporate gazillionaires, ensuring that the rich get richer?  Regular Americans are already drowning in 22% unemployment, stagnant wages, unaffordable health care, bank fraudster mortgage foreclosures, etc.

Now, President Obama, phony Democrat that he is, plans to freeze federal employees pay.   Well, here's a question for this president who dances to the GOP's tune asked by Dave Johnson at Our Future: "Does this pay freeze also apply to the massive privatized federal contractor workforce, and the pay of the executives of companies who administer this workforce?"

It's the wage earners who are suffering and will continue to struggle for basic necessities as the super wealthy enrich themselves using elected government lackeys to work for their benefit.

As Michael Hudson writes at Counterpunch predicts: "Next up: a flat tax for the rich.  The danger the United States faces today is that the government debt crisis scheduled to hit Congress next spring (when Republicans are threatening to vote against raising the federal debt limit as the government deficit soars) will provide an opportunity for the wealthy to give a coup de grace on what is left of progressive taxation in this country. A flat tax on wage income and consumer sales would “free” the rentiers from taxes on their property.

"All governments have to levy taxes – that is, they have to tax somebody. Naturally,  the super-rich would like this tax to be shifted off their shoulders onto those who have to work for a living. In diametric opposition to Adam Smith and other putative “founding fathers” of “free market” neoliberalism, the super-rich want to shift taxes off “free lunch” economic rent – off interest, dividends, rents and capital gains – onto wage-earners.

"This tax shift already has been underway for the past thirty years. It has doubled the proportion of the returns to wealth (interest, dividends, rents and capital gains) enjoyed by the wealthiest 1 per cent, from a reported one-third in 1979 to an estimated two-thirds of the U.S. total today.

"The wealthy want just what bankers want: the entire economic surplus (followed by a foreclosure on property). They want all the disposable income over and above basic subsistence – and then, when this shrinks the economy, they want the government to sell off the public domain in “privatization” giveaways, and they want people to turn over their houses and any other property they have to the creditors. “Your money or your life” is not only what bank robbers demand. It is what banks themselves demand, and the wealthy 10 per cent of the population that owns most of the bank stock.  And of course, the wealthy classes want to free themselves from the share of taxes that they have not already shed. The flat-tax ploy is their godsend.

"Here’s how I think the plan is intended to work. Given the fact that voters have already rejected the flat tax in principle, it can only be introduced by fiatunder crisis conditions. Alan Simpson, President Obama’s designated co-chairman of the “Deficit Reduction Commission” (the euphemistic title  given to what is in reality a “Shift Taxes Off Wealth Onto Labor” commission) already has suggested that Republicans close down the government by refusing to increase the federal debt limit this spring. This would create a fiscal crisis and threat of government shutdown. It would be a fiscal 9/11, for the Republicans to trot out their “rescue plan” for the emergency breakdown of government.

"The result would cap the tax shift off finance and wealth onto wage earners. Supported by Blue Dog Democrats, President Obama would shed crocodile tears and sign off on the most right-wing, oligarchic, anti-labor, anti-black and anti-minority, anti-industrial tax that anyone has yet been able to think up. The notorious Flat Tax would fall only on wage income (paid by employees and employers alike) and on consumer goods (the value-added tax, VAT), while exempting returns that accrue to the wealthy in the form of interest and dividend income, rent and capital gains."

David Macaray at Counterpunch hits the nail on the head: "Why not declare class war and be done with it."

"Not only has the so-called “trickle-down” theory of economics been revealed to be a cruel hoax, but most of the good industrial jobs have left the country, the middle-class has been eviscerated, the wealthiest Americans (even in the wake of the recession) have quintupled their net worth, and polls show that upwards of 70 per cent of the American public feel the country is “headed in the wrong direction.”

"No jobs, no prospects, no leverage, no short-term solutions, no long-term plans, no big ideas to save us.  While the bottom four-fifths struggle to stay afloat, and the upper one-fifth cautiously tread water, the top one-percent continue to accumulate wealth at a staggering rate. 

"Thanks to the global engine, there are now hundreds of billionaires.  Oligarchies, “client-state” capitalism, wanton deregulation, CEOs earning monster salaries, corporations receiving taxpayer welfare, and half the U.S. Congress boasting of being millionaires.  Meanwhile, personal debt in the U.S. continues to soar, one in ten people are out of work, and food stamp usage sets new records every month.

"Yet, even with near-record unemployment, the Department of Commerce reported this week that U.S. companies just had their best quarter….ever.  Businesses recorded profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, which is the highest rate (in non-inflation-adjusted figures) since the government began keeping records, over 60 years ago.  Shrinking incomes, fewer jobs….but bigger corporate profits.  Not a good sign.

Yet when you broach the dreaded subject of “class warfare” you get blank stares.  When you try to demonstrate, through charts and graphs and scores of real-life examples, that the system is largely rigged to accommodate the wealthy and powerful—and that we face an unfortunate Us vs. Them dilemma—people back away. 

".....Reminding people that the rich are not only dedicated to hanging on to what they have but committed to accumulating more—and constantly trolling for additional ways to game the system—doesn’t elicit much more than a stifled yawn.  No one gets spooked.  “That’s always been true,” they grumble. 

"But what does spook them is the suggestion that this dynamic has become institutionalized, that the deadly trifecta of greed, globalization, and collusion between government and business has more or less rendered the American Dream unattainable for a large segment of the population, and that the country’s best days are clearly behind it.  This is where people balk.

"There’s an old joke: An Oxford professor meets a former student and asks what he’s been up to.  The student tells him he’s working on his doctoral thesis, whose topic is the survival of the class system in the U.S.  The prof expresses surprise. “I didn’t think there was a class system in the U.S.,” he says. “Nobody does,” the student replies.  “That’s how it survives.”

Unfortunately the joke is on regular Americans while the super rich and their puppets in the White House and Congress are laughing all the way to the banks they own, bailed out with taxpayers' monies.