It's a very tense situation here in the Philippines. The supermarkets are running out of stocks due to people panic buying either for themselves or for donations. Another storm coming that's said to be stronger. Let's hope it changes its course.

commenter from Manila UK Daily Mail news story 10/2/09

The second typhoon in a week is headed for the Philippines; the first one killed 400 people.  My husband lives there.  Though he is not in Manila and lives on higher ground, he will still suffer the effects of this lightening-strikes-twice disaster. 

(What am I saying!  Lighting, torrential rain, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanos and military coups - all frequently occur in the area he now resides. )

He manages an outsourced office there  - international background checking -  for his brother. Their staff makes $10 a day instead of $10 an hour. They are folding their Tampa office and moving all the activity to the Philippines, and hoping it saves the company. 

While STBX husband lives in an American enclave, his employees don’t have it so good. With one disaster after another, at some point, that cheap labor is going to disappear, since the country doesn’t have (or more likely, won’t spend) the funds to rebuild houses (shacks) and roads (dirt trails) after two catastrophic storms. With the roads washed out and no public transit, not to mention dead or injured family members, will his employees show up on schedule to do the company business? The Philippines is an oligarchy - the very rich make and keep all the money and the very poor are ignored and left to fend for themselves. There is no middle class to pay taxes to support the infrastructure. 

Sound familiar? What Bush and the Republicans have been successfully molding our country into is a third world oligarchy, cutting taxes and moving government  money to the banks, insurance companies and Halliburton.  Katrina proved that to be true, and now that the Senate is killing any move towards healthcare for the masses, we can see the way it’s going - take a lesson from the Philippines, where life is cheap if you aren’t in one of the 5 or 8 families that run the country. 

What I think about my husband moving to Southeast Asia with his company doesn’t matter to him - he asked for a divorce and we are informally separated. I’ve told him numerous times how I thought it was disgraceful to take the business elsewhere when we need the jobs so badly in this country. I hate the whole concept of outsourcing, and am angry with his brother who is a cheap son-of-a-bitch. (He hired me to design his website for $100 and then sent it to Pakistanis to produce. He hired Russian expatriates in the Philippines to do their database system for half what a US programmer would charge. Now - who in the audience is applauding his business sense and who is cringing along with me?)

On the other hand, I benefit from his brother’s stinginess, since I am being supported by my husband’s income. If they were in the US, would they still be in business? Would I be able to call myself a full-time artist and afford insurance? Doubtful. I’d be competing with the rest of the unemployed for that grill-job at Hardees and would be writing this post from the library since I couldn’t afford Internet service. 

And the hypocrisy bothers me. I am as lefty liberal as they come, and I hate being supported by what I think of as traitorous corporate ethics. But it’s gotten worse still. STBX (I call him Stutbux now) has discovered that as a full-time resident of another country, he doesn’t have to pay income tax on most of his income.  He is thrilled because that frees up $2000 a month, basically covering my support money. 

So that means that I don’t pay taxes either. (I do pay property tax on my house.) I don’t make enough money with my artwork to pay taxes; all that happens is that my losses defray some of his income, one of the reasons we are still legally married. I’m a financial asset, at least til now.  

This really pisses me off, since both jobs and income have disappeared from the US and I feel somehow responsible.  When I was making money, I always paid my taxes scrupulously (even if they arrived at the IRS a little late) and never cheated. I didn’t go out of my way to pay more than I should, but I didn’t cheat. I have never, ever felt like it wasn’t my civic duty as an American to pay taxes. 

How would we manage to pay for first responders, roads and bridges, security, public health, and education without taxes? Taxes make our country civilized, make us able to get to work and back safely, provide the safety net for our parents as they age and more. Yes, we pay for bad wars and stupid waste, but overall, our high standard of living is due to the taxes we pay. 

My sister lives in a resort town in Colorado that has been taken over by the wealthy. The town council represents those who have their vacation homes on the ski mountain, and no one else. Since they dominate the local government, all property and town taxes were abolished, other than sales tax. My sister, who cleans condos for a living, tells me that one of her rich clients owned a house that caught fire while the family was elsewhere. Because there had been no taxes to build roads up the mountain, and because the fire department was operating on a shoestring, the house burnt to the ground. Interestingly, the house wasn’t insured either. 

This, then is what the Teabaggers are agitating for, a country without taxes, without a safety net for us or for them. Katrina was a greater disaster because of this mentality - no money for infrastructure, no money for support, no money for rescue. We will be on our own. Life has already become a cheap commodity for the poor and dispossessed, because the Republicans are too greedy to see beyond tomorrow’s impulse buy and the Teabaggers are too dumb to question Glenn Beck. We will all be suffering, we will all lose without the government support that is required of a First World Nation. 

So when the corporations succeed in defeating science, when floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes strike, we’ll all be floating down main street on pieces of trash. And remember what America used to be. Until then, please people, pay your taxes gladly. And I promise, as soon as I get into the black, I will do the same.