AMERICA, WELCOME TO THE THIRD WORLD

Imagine, for a moment, that you're sitting around a table with nine other people. In the middle of the table is a large pizza that's sliced into ten pieces - enough for each person at the table to have one piece. Ten people, ten slices of pizza - seems simple enough. 
But then, the biggest, baddest person at the table takes five pieces for himself. He takes half the pizza for himself, while the other nine people have to share the remaining five pieces. Now, the second biggest and baddest person at the table grabs two pieces for himself, leaving three pieces for the other eight. The third biggest, baddest person grabs one piece for himself, leaving just two pieces for the remaining seven. And so it goes, until the tenth person, the smallest and weakest of them all, gets a few crumbs - perhaps a bit of a mushroom or a thin slice of pepperoni, at the very most. Just think of how you would feel if you were that tenth person, or even the fifth person down the line, when you get maybe a third of a piece. 

Here's the analogy. The pizza represents the total wealth of all Americans, and the individual people at the table represent those occupying each of the ten deciles of the American population controlling all the wealth. This is the America that we have today. The top 1% richest people in the country control a quarter of all the wealth. The next nine percentiles control the next 25%, which leaves the other ninety percent of Americans trying to share the remaining half of the wealth. The farther down the line you go, the less there is to share. Let me say this again:

1% of Americans own 24% of all the private assets.
10% of Americans own about 50% of all private assets.

That's right. Half of the total assets in the United States of America are controlled by ten percent of the people.
This is banana republic stuff. Such plutocracies as Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Guyana have less of an asset disparity than the US. In each of these countries the top 1% owns a paltry 20% of the assets in their respective countries. So we've got those countries and their plutocrats beat by a long shot.

This accumulation of wealth by the super rich has been going on for decades - three decades to be exact. There are over 400 billionaires in the US alone, according to the Forbes 400 list. There were none in 1980. So how did we get from then to now? Massive tax breaks for the rich, wide open loopholes exploited by armies of well-paid accountants on behalf of the plutocrats - that's how we got into this mess. Republican-sponsored legislation has rewarded businesses for outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries by means of gaping tax loopholes. Such policies have fattened their bottom lines and enriched their shareholders, and has been very beneficial to the cigar-and-wine-bar business. Meanwhile, many of these companies have slashed the wages of those workers here in the U.S. they haven't yet fired, thus putting them under financial duress. 
And these plutocrats want more! The elected politicians in the House of Representatives and the Senate are literally owned by these people. It's no secret. Everyone knows it - everyone who is paying any attention to the situation, that is. This is pure, unadulterated, shameless greed.

Currently the US Senate is debating giving more tax breaks for the rich, which will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt, which is already out of control. Republicans in the Senate are holding unemployment insurance for the jobless hostage - they're saying "give us the tax breaks for the rich or we'll block unemployment insurance to the people who are struggling to survive". It's part of a strategy for defeating President Obama in 2012 and sweeping in large majorities into both houses of Congress. Giving further tax cuts to the rich is guaranteed to further balloon the deficit while doing nothing to address the chronic job shortages in this country. It will certainly result in the acceleration of the income disparity President Reagan started in 1981 with the first round of tax-cutting for the rich. So when 2012 rolls around the Republicans will say "See, nothing has improved, and it's all Obama's fault". And the rather dim bulbs who make up the voting public will fall for this vomitus in 2012 just as they did this past November. And once the Republicans get full power they'll see to it that the wealth disparity accelerates. They'll decimate Social Security and limit or eliminate unemployment insurance under the false pretext that these are "welfare" programs benefiting deadbeats and slackers. And get this - the Social Security Trust Fund, which is supposed to be adequately funded for the next thirty years, has been drained by the re-direction of revenue into the pockets of  the upper crust by way of massive tax cuts. These are the people who have far more than they'll ever need, and now they're dictating to their stooges in Congress to give them even more, and screw the middle class and the poor. It's a sorry state of affairs. It should be obvious to most people who are paying attention, but unfortunately, not that many people are paying attention, or else they've been brainwashed by the political boilerplate being dumped on them by Republicans and their Tea Party minions.

So, as our infrastructure crumbles all around us, and as more and more jobs get farmed out to other countries, and as people who worked all their lives and paid taxes into the Social Security Trust Fund see their benefits slashed or eliminated, and as more and more people are forced into poverty, the rich and super rich will live even larger than they do now. It's disgusting.

America is not a rich country. It is a country with a few very rich people living in it, and that's pretty much what the outside world sees. What the outside world doesn't see are the legions of poor and homeless. They don't see the millions of people who are struggling to survive. They don't see the millions of people losing their homes to foreclosure because their jobs have been outsourced to other countries, and they can't find another job because there aren't any. They don't see thousands of crumbling bridges that are in dire danger of collapsing, or roads pitted with potholes so large that cars are totaled when they hit them. Meanwhile, programs to help the poor and jobless are being cut to the bone because the funding isn't there. All that money that would ordinarily go towards infrastructure and help for the jobless, invalids, and poor, is instead lining the pockets of the rich. 

America is a country in decline. Quality of life is way down. We're far down, almost to the bottom, on a list of civilized countries - largely because proper healthcare is out of reach for a large portion of the population. This decline started in the mid to late 1990s and has been gaining steam ever since. Opportunities for getting ahead are getting increasingly scarce. It's not a pretty picture.



Within a few years the biggest, baddest guy at the table will grab all the pieces of the pizza for himself while leaving, at most, a few crumbs for the other nine. This is an ongoing theft of the aggregate wealth from the many to a concentrated few privileged and politically connected plutocrats. These people litteraly own the machinery of government. They control the senators and representatives much as a puppeteer controls his puppets. They finance the politicians' campaigns with the expectation that if they are elected they will do their (the plutocrats) bidding. The plutocrats are the ruling class. They rule this country through their stooges in Congress. It's your classic quid pro quo setup. And the way it looks, it's not going to get any better. It's only going to get worse.