A "working class hero," John Lennon told us in his song of that title, "is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you're so clever and classless and free/ But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."
The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations:
Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income -- an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
That is the harsh reality obscured by the media's focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side. The illusion of personal power substitutes consumer sovereignty -- which smartphone to purchase -- for real power over the decisions that affect our lives. Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will. But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much homeownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused.
Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.
It is a reality further obscured by the academic elite, led by economists who receive enormous payoffs from Wall Street in speaking and consulting fees, and their less privileged university colleagues who are so often dependent upon wealthy sponsors for their research funding. Then there are the media, which are indistinguishable parts of the corporate-owned culture and which with rare exception pretend that we are all in the same lifeboat while they fawn in their coverage of those who bilk us and also dispense fat fees to top pundits. Complementing all that is the dark distraction of the faux populists, led by tea party demagogues, who blame unions and immigrants for the crimes of Wall Street hustlers.
My book on the banking meltdown, The Great American Stickup, begins with the following words. "They did it. Yes, there is a 'they': the captains of finance, their lobbyists, and allies among leading politicians of both parties, who together destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning splendidly. ..." They got to rewrite the laws to enable their massive greed over everything from the tax codes to the sale of toxic derivatives over the past quarter century, smashing the American middle class and with it the nation's experiment in democracy.
The lobbyists are deliberately bipartisan in their bribery, and the authors of our demise are equally marked as Democrats and Republicans. Ronald Reagan first effectively sang the siren song of ending government's role in corporate crime prevention, but it was Democrat Bill Clinton who accomplished much of that goal. It is the enduring conceit of the top Democratic leaders that they are valiantly holding back the forces of evil when they actually have continuously been complicit.
The veterans of the Clinton years, so prominent in the Obama administration, still deny their role in the disaster of the last 25 years. Yet the sad tale of income inequality that Stiglitz laments is as much a result of their policies as those of their Republican rivals. In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton's tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton's deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year.
And that was before the meltdown that wiped out the jobs and home values of so many tens of millions of American families. "The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles," Stiglitz concludes, "but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late."
Vote out every politician who has caused a sexual scandal, takes inordinate amounts of Corp money, refuses to help create jobs in the US, helps
I can agree with most of this, but I don't remember a time when the regulatory system "had been functioning splendidly". It was barely alive at all when Bush garroted it by cutting funding.
But I might have mis-read that.
The Left/Right political spectrum is starting to be revealed for the smoke and mirrors show that it is.. Each party would have us believe that its either big government or big business. They would have us believe that the two are mutually exclusive and that each is necessary to counter the other. But what we've gotten instead is the seemingly unstoppable growth of both in collusion with each other.
Its time to throw a monkey wrench into the govern from the top-down political system in this country. Maybe its time to start talking about third parties. And I don't mean any specific one.. Maybe we need an election where people go into the voting booth with a coin and vote for ANY third party; Communist, Libertarian, Green. . . IT DOESN'T MATTER. Its time to put a real fly in the ointment.
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/
Banking on Becoming President | OpenSecrets
And that was before the SCOTUS "Citizens United" decision.
The second problem is that ballot access laws have been rigged by the two-party duopoly to make it almost impossible for independent or third-party candidates to get on the ballots:
http://www.thelibertyvoice.com/ralph-nader-ron-paul-agree-ballot-access-laws-are-rigged-against-independent-third-party-candidates
Ralph Nader & Ron Paul Agree: Ballot Access Laws are Rigged Against Independent & Third Party Candidates | The Liberty Voice
http://www.freeandequal.org/videos/free-equal-ballot-access-movie/
Free & Equal Ballot Access Movie
http://rangevoting.org/Strangle.html
RangeVoting.org - Stranglehold of 2-party domination
There was more turnover in the Soviet Politburo than in the U.S. Congress
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/antal-feketes-open-letter-ron-paul-impeach-bernanke
The poorest 4 paid nothing, the 5th pd. $1, the 6th pd. $3, the 7th pd. $7, the 8th pd. $12, the 9th pd. $18, the 10th pd. $59.
One day the owner reduced the bill by $20 for such good customers. They couldn't split the reduction equally, because man #5 & #6 would then get paid to drink. So, they reduced it in proportion to their taxes. The poorest 4 still drank free, #5 now also paid nothing (100% savings), #6 now paid $2 (33% savings), #7 pd.$5 (28% savings), #8 pd. $9 (25% savings), #9 pd. $14 (22% savings), and #10 pd. $49 (16% savings).
Later, the 6th man complained that the 10th saved $10 but he only saved $1, saying, "He got 10 times more than me".
The 7th said, "Yeah I only got $2 off, the tab-cut benefits the rich”. The bottom 4 said, "We didn't get anything, the system exploits the poor".
Feeling taken advantage of, the 10th man went overseas to drink.
The remaining 9 men then found they didn't have enough between them all to cover half the bill. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly how our tax system works.
David Kamerschen, Ph.D., Professor of Economics
But the real fault lies with the voters. The Republicans are going to fight government intervention in the economy at every turn. Their inane "free market" philosophy demands it. The Democrats feel they have to go along or the voters will boot them out--and they have good reason to feel that way.
As long as the voters buy the "free market", government is bad snake oil from the Republicans the situation will only get worse. The Republicans tanked the economy during the bush residency and torpedoed any efforts to boost it, yet two years after the fact, the voters gave the Republicans control of the house again. The outlook isn't good. The peasants need to understand that they need pitchforks.
Too inflammatory?
Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections.
The bill would take effect only when enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes–that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). Then, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for president. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers, in 21 small, medium-small, medium, and large states, including one house in AR, CT, DE, DC, ME, MI, NV, NM, NY, NC, and OR, and both houses in CA, CO, HI, IL, NJ, MD, MA ,RI, VT, and WA . The bill has been enacted by DC, HI, IL, NJ, MD, MA, and WA. These 7 states possess 74 electoral votes — 27% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
http://wwww.NationalPopularVote.com
This is the kind of debate that should be everywhere: growing social inequality, and who's causing it.
Many that have fallen would have worked fine if it weren't for that.