So, Bush The Younger is going all Socialist on us now. He's nationalized a bunch of banks, but being Bush The Younger, he picked the ones that were losing big money. It's costing you and I a trillion bucks too, or about $3,300 apiece before interest. But wait, not everybody pays taxes around here, like disabled people, children and the wealthy, so your share is probably double or triple that amount. Why couldn't he nationalize something profitable like an oil company or Microsoft or something? That way we could collect dividends instead of paying for rich guys' greed and blunders. What's next, Ford Motors? They certainly qualify, having lost $15 billion in three months time.

With the election coming, electing a smart guy doesn't seem like such a bad idea anymore. And what exactly was the problem with electing the smartest guy in the room like we used to? People that used to keep an eye on things? In retrospect, that whole free-market non-regulating mentality doesn't seem like such a brainstorm now that the our entire financial industry is going kablooey. That trillion dollars could have come in handy to provide healthcare for every American like most other advanced nations. The trillion could also have paid for a lot new schools and great teachers. Instead, it's paying for the bad habits of greedy executives.

What else does a trillion buy? A trillion lottery tickets, for one thing. About 125 billion packs of cigarettes. 90 billion 6-packs of beer. 67 billion pizzas. 50 million cars. 5 million houses. 12 1/2 billion pairs of shoes, 2 pairs for everybody on earth. 10 billion steak dinners, complete with appetizer, salad, a couple of drinks, coffee and desert plus a tip. 450 billion subway rides. 200 billion foot-long Subway sandwiches. 280 billion Big Macs. About 350 million diamond rings. 100 million deluxe hot tub spas. 17 billion bottles of good whiskey. 5 billion visits to a high class hooker. 2 trillion newspapers. 3 trillion packs of chewing gum. 1 trillion, 333 billion candy bars. 4 billion pistols. 750 sky scrapers or football stadiums, take your pick.

That's a lot of buying power, $1,000,000,000,000. Look at all those zeros! And for our trillion, the U.S. taxpayer is getting pretty much a bunch of those zeros. Doesn't seem fair. Could we at least get a refrigerator magnet or a pen or something? The executives who screwed up these giant companies all got millions and millions of dollars before they got fired, and then they got millions more to go away quietly. Nice work if you can get it: burning through a trillion dollars worth of wealth like a bunch of drunken sailors. They must have had a lot of fun doing that. You have to figure that yachts, casinos, fur coats for hookers, champagne and lots and lots of recreational drugs had to be involved in there somewhere. You don't burn a trillion bucks doing regular stuff, you had to have been really out there trying your damnedest. It's amazing these guys lived through it.

So now we pay for their fun, having had no taste of the high life these guys enjoyed for years and years. We don't get to ride in the back of a spacious limousine with expensive girls or fly to St. Tropez for a weekend rendezvous with our mistresses. No personal trainers for us, or luxury boxes at sporting events. No adrenaline rushes as a result of gambling billions of somebody else's dollars. Nothing but another sizable bill to pay for the failure of our government to keep an eye on these decadent clowns. Which will be a neat trick at the rate our jobs are disappearing.

If you want to know how somebody feels when something terrible happens to them or is done to them, just remember how you felt when bad things happened to you. That's how they feel. They might seem different to you, maybe they're the opposite sex, maybe their skin tone is different, or the clothes they wear seem odd to you or they practice a different religion than the ones you're used to. Maybe they live in a nation far away and seemingly completely very different from the place where you live. How can you possibly know how such a person would feel?

Simple. People are people, and they haven't introduced any new models lately. What you feel, they feel. What you want, they want. How you would react in any given situation, they react the same. In many respects they are just like you. The differences between any set of human beings anywhere are minimal, our similarities far greater. When we forget that, then it is easy to hurt others or to do nothing when they are suffering. That is how we justify war and that is how it came to be on this bountiful planet that 36,000 people die every single day from starvation.

Every 2.4 seconds somebody somewhere on this earth succumbs to starvation, a slow and agonizingly painful death. By contrast, the brutal act of warfare is merciful, death coming swiftly and without prolonged suffering. Yet when we wail and gnash our teeth about man's inhumanity to man, it is almost always warfare we are talking about. While war is a horrible state of affairs, there has never been one in all of our history that has killed 36,000 people every single day, not even World War 2 with its forty million killed in six years. At 36,000 a day, in six years 80 million perish, without a single army mobilized, one bomb dropped or a shot being fired in anger and rage. This is passive warfare, and the death toll is 1,414,000 per year forever if we do nothing about it.

How can this change? Do the huge numbers involved numb our senses to this disaster? Are we somewhere in the back of our minds convinced that the people who are dying are somehow "different" and thus not worth saving? Well, you and I are different too, from somebody. Does that mean you're not worth saving? Most starvation victims are children under the age of 5. How different are they from our own children? Don't they like to run around and play and tease each other like other kids? Don't they look to their parents for love and protection? Don't their eyes light up at every new discovery in this fascinating world like children everywhere? Isn't the death of even one of our magical children a tragedy beyond words? To allow it to happen 36,000 times a day is far beyond cruel, it is simply monstrous.

And yet we are not monsters, we are people, the great majority of us good and decent and loving people who would never intentionally do harm to another human being, nor would we stand idly by while one among us withers and dies for lack of food. And in America, that simply never happens anymore. It used to, though. Before President Lyndon Johnson introduced Food Stamps and other social programs to help our nation's poor, there actually were starvation deaths in the United States of America, as hard as that is to fathom in a nation so blessed with nature's bounty. But before we could share this bounty with our poor people, we had to change our perceptions of who they ware. It turned out they were us; our brothers, our sisters, our precious children. We changed our hearts and changed lives.

So one way to change the fate of the world's starving masses is to change our attitude towards them. They are our brothers and sisters and children no less than our immediate neighbors. And we have, and many other nations have, plenty of food to go around. But America has to lead by example, start sending in the Peace Corp instead of the Marine Corps to troubled lands. Huge swaths of Africa is the American Midwest waiting to happen when it comes to farming. They have the climate, the water and the fertile land. The Peace Corps can teach them how to farm that land and feed their people, this year and every year.

In India and China, where half the world's starvation victims live, the same help should be offered, no matter how repellent we consider their governments. Trade with these nations should be tied to the how well they treat our fellow humans within their borders. They have the resources to feed them, but their governments have other priorities. Both of these nations export food while millions of their citizens starve until they die horribly.

When a government puts other priorities above their own starving children, they are no government at all, merely a power structure in place to benefit the powerful few. The international community needs to recognize this and treat those governments accordingly. If everyone is a citizen of the world who just happens to be living with one nation or another, that changes our perception of who those people are and forces us to insist that their governments take proper care of "our" people. There should be no "internal matters" or inviolate sovereignty when it comes to nations killing their own citizens either actively or passively.

The United Nations needs to stop breaking the balls of Western Democracies and instead start picking their brains. It's no accident that Western nations have no starving people in them. It took hard work, planning, insight and caring deeply about the welfare of their citizens to build societies that don't bury a large percentage of their populations every single day because no one would feed them. These are the nations that must show the staving countries generosity, not only with food but with education, expertise and training. There's wisdom in the cliche: "Feed a man a fish, feed him once. Teach him to fish, feed him for life."

Donate to one of the thousands of charities who fight starvation and its root causes. Investigate their track record for effectiveness first, of course, so you're not throwing your money away on a fraudulent charity. Go to www.CharityNaqvigator.org to see which ones do what they say they will do. Also, let our American government know that America needs to do more to end this passive genocide. We need to fight no more wars, gain no territory or global advantages. America is in good shape food and money wise, even with all the failures of the past 8 years. We are still America, and we still stand for something good and beautiful in this world. And if anyone should understand "different" peoples, it is Americans, since our nation was built on people from every other nation. If we want to lead the world again, let it be in an area everyone can respect; feeding the starving, giving life where there has been so much death and defending the defenseless. Let's feed those hungry kids and let their smiles and their wonder-filled eyes be our reward.

When the day's news is all bad, immediately check your freezer. Locate the ice cream, eat some and you will soon feel much better. For severe mental trauma, apply chocolate syrup. A regular check on these emergency provisions is essential. Be prepared.

"Full name?"

"August Dumont Chucklebottom, the 4th."

"Three other guys had that name? Jeeze…"

"Excuse me?"

"Sorry. Former Occupation?"

"CEO, Megabank Worldstraddle."

"Weekly salary?"

"Weekly? How quaint. Let me see… hmm… approximately three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, exclusive of bonus and stock options."

"I said weekly, not the whole time you worked there."

"My dear sir, my compensation package was over $18 million per annum."

"Per annum?"

"Per year."

"And you're applying for unemployment insurance?"

"I am currently unemployed, sir. Isn't that what one does at times like these?"

"Yes, they do. But not guys who made 350K a week, pal."

"We are not pals, sir, and why not someone in my position?"

"We don't get a lot of calls for CEO jobs here, Mr. Chuckleface."

"It's Chucklebottom, and I didn't expect you to. I'm here to claim my insurance payments to tide me over until something comes up. I understand it will be three quarters of my salary, a tight squeeze, but I'll just have to tighten the old belt buckle…"

"Three quarters of your pay? Yeah, it sure is, up to a maximum of people making $600 bucks a week."

"Nobody makes $600 dollars a week!"

"Some make less…"

"Impossible! Do you mean to tell me that I'll be allowed only 400 dollars a week?"

"No, I didn't say that. You haven't qualified yet. If you quit your job it's a no-go. You had to have been fired or laid off, and not for just cause, either. Did you leave your position voluntarily?"

"Hardly, sir. One doesn't voluntarily leave the CEO position of a company such as Mega…"

"So you were fired, then?"

"Fired is a very strong word, sir. The company was heading in a different direction, you see…"

"I'll just put down fired. These forms have only so much space per category. Hey, wait a minute… ain't you the guy that the Feds kicked out after you almost put your company into bankruptcy and they bailed you out?"

"That certainly was not my fault! I was only there for six years…"

"Six years? If I screwed up for 6 years you think I'd still have this lousy job?"

"… you have to understand, sir, there were market forces at work here, unforeseen risk factors…"

"I'll just put down 'fired' and let you explain all that to job interviewers."

"Excuse me? Job interviewers?"

"Job interviewers. In order to qualify for your 400 bucks a week you have to prove you've been interviewing. I have here a couple of prospects for managerial positions you might want to check out…"

"What's the compensation package? Length of contract? Options? How big a parachute?"

"Here's one for a Burger King manager…"

"The chair of Burger King is open? That's exciting…"

"Yeah, the chair at the Jackson Heights Branch, $17.47 an hour to start, no benefits until after 6 months, night shift, midnight to eight in the morning. Don't know how exciting it is, but it's a job…"

"Impossible!"

"Well, after that hatchet job you did on your bank, you may be right. Let's see… maybe I have something less challenging here.."

"I mean the whole idea of me interviewing for jobs that pay less than eight figures…"

"Listen, pal, the payroll of everybody in this office doesn't add up to eight figures! Besides, no interviews, no unemployment check. Also, you might want to consider a retraining program, for workers whose jobs are obsolete, or people like yourself who have no prospects of a job in their own field."

"Absurd!"

"What, retraining? I can get you into a computer tech class, and that would extend your benefits until you graduate."

"Computer tech? A man of my experience?"

"Okay, maybe you're right. You'd probably be in over your head. You any good with tools? There's some handyman classes open…."

"I don't think you know who you're dealing with, sir!"

"Can't say as I do, but with so many people losing their jobs it's kind of hard to get to know everybody personally. Maybe you want to come back another day when you decide whether or not you're going to go with the program here. There's a lot of people on line behind you, and it looks like some of them recognize you. The security guard is having a heck of a time calming them down."

"Oh, so they blame me?"

"I would if I was them. The guy who I interviewed before you worked for your bank. Lost his pension, too."

"If he'd have done his job properly maybe none of this would have happened."

"So now it's your employees' fault? That guy worked there 30 years, impeccable record. Now he's on the street, no health insurance, no job, and his pension gone. That's okay by you?"

"We were trying to save the company, you see. Those pension funds could have tided us over until…"

"Those pension funds were not your money to play with, Chucklehead."

"It's Chucklebottom, and what could you possibly know about the world of high finance?"

"Not much, pal, I only deal with the casualties. Seems like you've left a whole lot of them in your wake. Did you lose your pension?"

"No, well, that is to say, my IRA and my 401k plans are thankfully intact, and that's really none of your business."

"You're the one applying for benefits, Chuckleface, not me."

"It's Chucklebottom! How dare you speak to me this way?"

"About time somebody did. I'm just going to put you down as 'fired for just cause' and turn you down flat. You can appeal my decision if you like."

"That's not fair!"

"Welcome back to reality, sir. And good day to you"

"Have you nothing else to say?"

"Sure do. Next!"

"I'll have your job, sir!"

"What, so you can screw up the Unemployment Office too, Chucklewart?"

"It's Chucklebottom, and I'm not going anywhere until I get my benefits. What do you say to that, sir?"

" Security!Security! Please escort this man to the curb. He ought to be used to it by now. Next!"