The civic leaders of the Heart of America are presently engaged in a typical bulging-belly bourgeois budget tussle, and we have no doubt who will win under the prevailing might-is-right political philosophy. It appears that the one-billion dollar ($1,000,000,000) budget is forty-millions ($40,000,000) short, therefore, say the editors of The Kansas City Star, the City Manager and elected officials must "face harsh realities," they "must pursue general cost-cutting, hiring freezes, consolidating departments and eliminating some middle-management positions."

City Manager Wayne Cauthen's first move was against the poor of the city: his budget would have cut $8,400,000 from indigent health-care funding to local hospitals and clinics - millions have already been cut over the last four years. Enter Yael T. Abouhalkah in the editorial ring on March 7. He has served the Kansas City Star and its interests well from time to time as a cheerleader for $500,000,000 in taxpayer-funded inducements to big business to build downtown: H&R Block, for instance, is moving its headquarters thirty blocks down Main Street to the downtown core - no additional employees are foreseen as a result of the relocation. Mr. Abouhalkah took time out from weighing those alleged positives in his pro and con scale, to kindly protest against the cut to indigent health care funding. Wayne Cauthen, on the opposite side of the editorial ring, complained that it was awfully difficult to maintain a city six times the size of San Francisco but with only half the population - several more little burgs are being added as burbs to the greater metropolitan area as we speak. He noted that we must provide dissatisfied citizens with services matching their expectations. Wherefore he wanted to cut public funding for indigent sick people.

"It is time for the city and the philanthropic community to look at alternative ways to provide health care to the neediest population. A health levy property tax increase election would let voters determine the city's future level of funding for indigent health care," propounded the City Manager.

Mr. Cauthen is the prime mover behind the realization of Mayor Kay Barnes' revitalization visions for "our" community - the mayor is the City Council's prime council member - the City Manager is appointed by the council to administer its policies. Civic leaders in league have managed to assembly and approve revitalization projects for the downtown area amounting to more than a half-billion dollars, of which around eighty-percent will be reimbursed to the big corporate developers out of future tax revenues, which are expected to increase along with the growth in business. The big businesses themselves and their investors and banks would not fund such risky real estate speculations, hence the city is glad to provide prodigious incentives on the taxpayers' behalf.

The nature of the current downtown revitalization projects are described elsewhere in this journal, under the title, Mystical Real Estate Development. In fine, here's the deal: when office buildings, hotels, convention centers, food courts, and the like are half-empty, build more of the same next to them, and make sure to build an entertainment district including a basketball arena. People will come. In any case, change is inevitable, so here we go again. Almost everyone agrees that the downtown is deader than a doornail, and that any building whatsoever would be better than nothing at all. New construction will create some jobs, at least in the short run, and the developers and contractors will profit. Others beg to differ with the tax incremental financing approach, and wonder when Kansas City will realize that it is not New York. The city's auditor has sounded the alarm about the uncontrolled growth of this sort of cheque on the future.

As for indigent health care funding and the like, we are familiar with the same old story ever since Reagan cut taxes and ran up the defense budget to arrive at a huge deficit, then said that horrid "socialist" programs would have to be cut as part of the war on poor people. While funding corporate welfare, Reagan and Bush neglected to say that militarism is a form of national socialism. Given the current pseudo-conservative (neoconservative) brainwash sloshing around even in democratic brains, we are not surprised that Wayne Cauthen's first proposal to balance his budget was to cut $8,500,000 of the $1,000,000,000 budget from indigent health care funding, and to refer the hospitals and clinics to the "philanthropic community." We wonder not why he did not recommend that taxes be raised on the assets and income of the wealthy, so that a greater share of surpluses reaped from the laboring community be diverted to altruistic purposes before they reach the Philanthropic Community. After all, the top few members of the Philanthropic Community at present have over $4,000,000,000 in assets.

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation alone had $1,687,000,000 in assets in 2002. The foundation has been officially chided recently for not paying enough attention to Kansas City; the Kauffman Board was advised that it had a duty to improve - attorneys however say it has no legal obligation to comply. Star reporter Yael T. Abouhalkah referred his good readers to a report by Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon questioning executive decisions and a disturbing lack of board oversight.

The Kaufmann foundation granted $48,200,000 in 2002. Why, then, does it not help Kansas City out, and cover the budget shortfall this year? Because that would be antithetical to the hoarding philosophy of the guardians of the surplus derived from the exploitation of society. As a matter of fact, the Kauffman foundation's explicit mission is not to "share" the wealth but to get poor people to "create" wealth, not that they can enjoy the life of the rich and famous behind the Philanthropic Community, but so they can become "economically independent individuals," that is, "enterpreneurs." We are familiar with the 'American System' that is surrounded by monied interests and successful people who assume that because they have made it or inherited it that individuals are impoverished because they are of inferior stock or have acquired character flaws in poor neighborhoods and inadequately funded school districts. We might say more on that elsewhere, and, since Herbert Hoover stayed at Kansas City's historic President Hotel, we might even stoop to quoting the trite maxims on self-help and rugged individualism that he mouthed over steak dinner when confronted with the spectre of socialism during the Great Depression.

According to Patrick McLarney, a lawyer with Shook, Hardy and Bacon, philanthropy is Kansas City's greatest asset. "Think about it. In the last couple of years we have seen our state, local, and even federal governments' severe budget crises. Everything is being cut. But philanthropy just keeps on giving." (Ingrams December 2003). He did not mention that philanthropy has been giving less lately, or that tax-exempt trusts and foundations often exploit society to the advantage of the wealthy. Still, generosity is always deeply appreciated. We only regret that the citizens who are most concerned about philanthropy do not elect the trustees of the huge philanthropic institutions so that Wayne Cauthen and other city managers would not have to throw poor people to the wolves in sheep's clothing.

We have seen that Wayne Cauthen proposed a property tax increase election to raise funds for indigent health care. Such an increase would surely be opposed by the plutocracy ruling Kansas City and by the middle-class majority. Even the needy might vote against it. Strange as it might seem, people are notorious for voting against their own interest - only a few astute, dissident intellectuals seem to notice that.

The problem we face today is a certain kind of bad attitude, one often attributed to "human nature," an attitude particularly aggravated by the 'American System' of this great nation of ours, the leader of civilization upon whom an attack is an attack on civilization itself. Our society has made wealth a measure of worth even though most of us know better: many are the bad examples provided by wealthy people, and many are the good examples provided by poor folk. It is "human nature" to respect those who have, and to care little for those who have little. The absence of means is considered to be an absence of merit and moral virtue. If someone is down and out, surely he or she must have a defect in his character.

We often note a marked contrast between the unwillingness to help poor and disadvantaged people and the eagerness to help wealthy and powerful people, not only because of a possible quid pro quo, but because one thinks it is unwise to waste time and money on what appears to be worthless, and wise to give one's all to the worthy - again, possession of wealth is deemed the prime measure of wealth even thought we all know better.

Therefore "our" civic leaders prefer to serve the rich and powerful people; that is, the power elite, namely: themselves. They promote real estate speculation downtown, subsidizing combinations of huge corporations, empowering them with land and buildings downtown, most of the expense to be reimbursed down the line out of the taxpayers' pockets. A consumer tax, one of the most onerous of all taxes on the poor and a tax of least consequence to the rich, is often raised to fill the tax slush fund coffers. And when there is a budget crunch, the first thing thought of is to cut such things as indigent health care funding.

But do not worry about indigent health care, for, on second thought, it will not be cut in Kansas City, Missouri. The Budget and Audit Committee of the City Council "restored" it to the budget; but the restoration will have to be made up with other cuts to You Guessed It: the cuts must come out of Labor's hide. Employees must be furloughed. Middle managers must be laid off - no doubt the older and wiser ones will be terminated firstly because they cost more. The Police Department must suffer, further endangering public safety. The Fire Department does not think its share of the cut will hurt emergency services; those emergency services are, by the way, judging from my personal experience, superb.

That is all according to Baron Hoyle, is it not? Government is a necessary evil, and the less of it the better, right? People surely will not mind if public employees suffer for there is always too much government. Right?

Wrong. There is too much business in government. We do not vote for the controllers, directors and officers of anti-democratic, anti-liberal corporations, whose operations tend not to foster competition but to stifle competition and to establish an oligopoly controlled by a plutocracy. That is why we must have a good democratic government, a real democratic government sufficient to protect the weak from the strong, whose main motive in life is to accumulate as much wealth and power as they can, never mind the cost to society. In any case, we may rest assured that the government that fails to protect the weak devotes its energies to the strong.

Our society suffers from too much business government, from the lack of democratic government, for "our" government has failed to keep up with the self-seeking individualism and unbridled competition that established and bolstered scaffoldings and all sorts of artificial props that make strenuous exertion practically needless for the protected and kept class who flourish on something for nothing, who could easily wipe out the projected deficit with a stroke of the pen and still enjoy their customary way of living.

However that may be, Kansas Citians are getting wise to the scheming real estate developers, the powerful City Manager, the visionary Mayor, and their sycophantic newspaper whose box-headed editors and basketball-brained reporters have acted as trumpets for taxpayer largess to big corporations, including their very own. Which brings to mind what William T. Kemper, one of Kansas City's founding patriarchs said when he ran for mayor as a Democrat in 1904:

"The Star, as a political factor in our city, is death to whomsoever it smiles upon because of the fact that the taxpayers and people of our city have found through its record in past years it has not been their friend, but has ever fought the cause of the taxpayers of the city in behalf of invidious interests."

Kansas City certainly needs a truly independent press. The Kansas City Star is a fine establishment paper, perhaps one of the best of its kind, and every once in awhile it exposes a lot of facts about something if not the truth about the cause of those effects. For instance, it is current running a front-page series describing the circumstances of poor working folk and the like. Those sort of features usually do not appear until just before Christmas; perhaps charity will pick up soon. If it were not for this series, who would have known about the trials and tribulations of poor folk in Kansas City?