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.

AMERICA NEEDS A PAY RAISE

Would you ask your employer for a 30% cut in pay? You have a theory: If you request a 30% cut in pay then maybe your employer would more than make up for your lost income at year’s end with a large bonus, since he’d make more money than he used to. So your employer says: “Sure, that can certainly be arranged. Thanks for asking - that's a brilliant idea! You’re a good loyal employee looking out for the best interests of the company. I'll do you right - count on it!”
Now you know you won't have enough money to pay your bills, so you will have to borrow extensively to pay them and maintain your standard of living. But that’s OK, you will be able to pay all your bills, pay back your creditors with interest, and have a good chunk of cash left over when you get your big bonus at the end of the year. You'll actually come out ahead in the long run.

But alas, your employer doesn’t pay you the bonus you were hoping for. Not this year, not next year, not any year. You are now hopelessly in debt and your future is becoming increasingly uncertain. You consider going back to the boss and asking for your original salary to be reinstated because it’s just not working out for you. After all, your employer has gotten filthy rich as a consequence of your pay cut. He was already rich before, but now he’s mega-rich. He’s become a billionaire as a result of your pay cut. You want to ask him, but you have a sinking feeling he’ll say no and throw you in his doghouse. So you hint around at it without directly asking him, thinking he might come to understand your plight and make it right for you on his own volition. You send up a trial balloon. You lament your sorry situation and comment out loud about how your life is going down the toilet and hope he'll be sympathetic. Well, he picks up on the hint but is haughty and unsympathetic. He confronts you with this: “Hell No! I’m not giving you a raise! Are you nuts? Further, I will not allow you to quit. I want to keep exploiting your hard work and keep rolling in the cash like there’s no tomorrow. I’m not gonna stop until I become a multi-billionaire, and then I'll keep right on going until I become a trillionaire!”
So your employer gets richer and richer while you go down the toilet. According to your employer: “Tough Bananas, chump! It’s a cruel world, ain't it? There are winners and losers in life – I’m a winner and you’re a loser! So go eat cake!”
But you say: "I'm not asking for a raise. It would just be nice if you could pay me what you were paying me before I asked for the pay cut. I'm just asking for my original wage to be restored so I can live".
But here's the problem. Your boss arbitrarily chooses to consider your request a raise, not a restoration of your original pay. He's guilty of twisted, self-serving, pathological thinking. You know it, even if some of your more ignorant, simple-minded co-workers can't see the obvious. They think the bonuses will still come someday, and they'll be better off. They're hopeless idiots - they're not going to lend you any support, so you're on your own. You're powerless to fix your situation. The boss has you and your co-workers bending over a barrel for him. And you know that's a terrible thing, for you and everybody else. Everybody, that is, but the Evil Boss.

There’s a clear analogy here. The lost income is equivalent to dramatic tax cuts over the last three decades which decreased revenue. These tax cuts were the result of an experiment in trickle-down theory. Trickle-down theory held that by slashing taxes for the people, especially for the already rich – it would allow them to hire more workers, thus increasing the tax base. The prosperity achieved by the already prosperous could then be shared by the less prosperous and allow them to become prosperous too. But trickle-down theory backfired badly. Trickle-down economics turned out to be "tinkle-down" economics - with the less prosperous ending up getting peed on by the already prosperous. Those at the bottom didn't end up sharing in the prosperity - instead, as we now clearly see, this policy produced a trickle-up phenomenon. The rich got richer while everybody else, in real terms, got poorer. Real wages and salaries for the bottom three quintiles of the income distribution spectrum have declined and contine to decline. In fact, the decline in the average people’s standard of living seems to be accelerating. The annual median income in the U.S. fell from $52,059 in 2008 to $49,777 in 2009 – a 4.6% decline in just a year. Meanwhile there is an ongoing inflation problem that further decreases the people’s spending power. Incidently, the low inflation numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) do not reflect the real world since they don't reflect the rising prices of food and gasoline and diesel fuel. They do include falling housing values, which dramatically skews the numbers downward. Those who do not own their homes but still have to buy food to survive and gasoline to get to work are adversely affected. And even with those who can afford to buy a home, doing so is not something anyone outside of the housing investor/speculator community is likely go out and do on a regular basis, so housing has no effect on the bottom line of most people’s monthly household budgets. The upshot is this: decreasing housing values are arbitrarily counted in the inflation data while rising everyday living expenses such as energy and food are omitted. Hence, the artificially low inflation figures we see being published by the government.

Consider this: In 1978 there were a lot of rich people – industrialists, CEOs, and Wall Street types, but there were few, if any, billionaires. Now we have over 400 billionaires in this country alone – some worth tens of billions – with most of them beneficiarries of the government’s tax policies. There are hundreds more worldwide – almost all of them beneficiaries of business dealings with America that are often predicated on the importing of labor from America. These government taxation policies are driven by billionaire plutocrats and corporate oligarchs who are operating behind the scenes while surreptitiously using the government as a front. The business community that was supposed to hire more workers because of tax policies they promoted has shipped millions of jobs overseas instead. The corporate oligarchs are sitting on trillions of dollars in cash largely because of their job-slashing policies. This looks good on Wall Street - we see the stock market soaring while ordinary people keep losing jobs to other countries. There’s a profound disconnect there.

So the government (analogous to the employee) took a voluntary 30% pay cut by slashing taxes and creating loopholes that actually reward businesses for outsourcing jobs. There turned out to be no bonus for our hypothetical employee, (increased revenue and prosperity for everyone generated by trickle-down policies), we are drowning in debt (the deficit and National Debt), we can’t pay our bills, and the powers that be, the plutocrats and corporate oligarchs (the boss) that control the government (the company) won’t allow revenues to be increased (analogous to asking for original pay rate from the boss) because they want to become even richer and more powerful (like the boss). In fact, they want to reduce pay (cut taxes) even more for the employees (the government) so the boss can become obscenely rich.

As for our country, we the people must demand that the power be restored to us. This may sound like confused Tea-Publican/Palin rhetoric, but they've been duped into wanting the plutocrats to take it back, thinking the plutocrats will create jobs. This is the exact opposite of what will happen and needs to happen. The rich are already rich enough - it’s time to slow down their juggernaut and pay a little more attention to the plight of the poor and middle class who’ve been badly hurt by recent policies. They've seen their money drained away from them by means of this insideous trickle-up economic system practiced by the government at the behest of the plutocrats and corporate oligarchs who are really running the show.