I have no right as a British national to come across as holier than thou in this matter. Britain has been screwing over other nations since before the United States of America was a gleam in the Founding Fathers' eyes.

My fundamental question is this:

Why, if democracy works, is a Congress with a 7% public approval rating not being vociferously opposed as and when it seeks re-election?

You know my position; I am a disenfranchised immigrant from your former colonial ruler. But it's time that the people of America called its government to account over the disgustingly imperialist policies since Yalta (at the end of World War II, when the current carve-ip was agreed).

Referring back to my opening point, I would also like to know why my fellow British citizens are not demonstrating in protest at the latest attempt to shed support of the least privileged.

I will lay it on the line for those who can ignore the (entirely untruthful) spectre of Senator McCarthy. I am a socialist. Socialism means equality of opportunity. I have invested twenty years in being (to some extent) American. It currently appears that the only difference between being American and being British is the recency of the atrocities visited upon the world by our countries.

Being socialist does not mean I hate the rich. I can best explain by echoing Aneurin Bevan (the instigator of the British National Health Service), who famously said there was nothing wrong with being a rich socialist - that simply meant you could be a better one.

Currently the whole idea of a "commons" is under threat. In a world where the chairman of Nestlé can seriously promote the idea that people have no inherent right to potable water one shudders to think what will next be claimed by the emotionless "sorry it's just business" world as something we should be expected to pay for. It seems like "the air we breathe" is the next logical candidate, so why should we be surprised that the industrial world continues, against the best scientific (not imagined, so please don't bother responding with denialist arguments) opinion? After all, the worse they screw up the atmosphere the more important it will be to be able to buy breathable air. And how better to lose the poor for ever than to deprive them of the right to breathe?

Of course the real tragedy of this scenario (to me, at least, the most realistic in predictive terms) is that only when the rich are left "unburdened" by the poor will they finally realize how necessary the poor are. It's like biodiversity; only when you've screwed it over do you realize ow vitally important it is to your well-bing.

This myth that all would be well if only the poor people would go away ignores firm statistical principles that undeniably assert that a normal distribution of incomes over a population of seven billion is bound to include a small number of obscenely rich people and a large number of people who are forced to live below any sensible assessment of "poverty level" in the 21st century.