I found this on the internet and thought I would share it with you.
Many on the radical right claim that the US government and economy is "socialist." I disagree.
I think the US government and economy is currently very right-wing, pro-corporate, and pro-wealthy.
It is also strongly anti-union and anti-labor. It has consistently been this way since the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
What happens when you have this sort of an imbalance between worker and CEO pay?
Democracy invariably suffers.
An imbalance of pay leads to an imbalance of wealth, over time. And this, over time, leads to a massive imbalance of political power that is detrimental to the principal of proportional representation, where the needs of the many (the poor and the middle class) should ideally transcend the mercurial desires of the wealthy and privileged few.
In the America of today, the ideal principles of democracy have been reversed and turned on their head. It is up to the youth of this nation to rectify these wrongs and save our civilization from those who are actively working to betray it, those "malefactors of great wealth" who sacrifice our rights upon an alter of predatory greed and a butcher's block of unregulated, unrestrained, unaccountable international finance.
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Gerald Andersen
Frank Apisa
Tom King
Kathy Peacock
Ben Sen
Natsuki Kimura
Salon.com
Comments
I dunno, but the thought of it all certainly makes me want to change from agnosticism to outright atheism.
Only 185 - that's so much better. Not so much better that I was willing to fight off the alternating paralyzing depression and hysterical laughter, though.
Most of those economies are probably healthier than ours, too, aren't they?
My very first post on OS was about income polarization, because I thought and continue to think it's the most important issue I can raise. One of the things I've worked on over time is to come up with ways to express just how extreme this polarization is. This is great in terms of comparative polarization, which isn't something I've looked at.
I don't think most Republicans get just how polarized we are. (Democrats either, but Republicans still generally vote for people who support polarization more, though now both parties do.) It's so much more extreme than most people realize. As of 2007, the last year I've seen data from, and it's probably worse now, the bottom 80% of the US population had 15% of the wealth. It's not a question of individual distribution vs. collective distribution any more, where the rich had more money individually but the general population had more collectively. Now, the general population has hardly anything in comparison.
Typical wealth in the US for an individual is to the least rich billionaire like a few days (probably a generous estimate - low six figures) is to 31 1/2 years. That's at one billion. The richest couple of Americans surpass 1 1/2 millenia on this scale.
We all know (or damned well should) that education in the U.S. has always been nothing more than a product of the industrial revolution, preparing the 99% for conformity and production to the benefit of the 1% within those corporations and now that we’re producing very little in relation to the rest of the world, education is no longer a priority, even as a means of entrenching conformity. Consequently, education is now receiving very little funding, so access to higher education has become extremely limited. Students are being denied access across the country at very alarming rates, the results of which will be manifest in an insurmountable gap between the elite and the rest of us.
And that my friend, will take us far beyond pre-industrialization, perhaps back to the 18th and 19th century European caste system.
This is the type of thing that is rarely presented in the Mass Media which is way to busy giv3ing us corporate propaganda; on the rare occasions where they do mention it they present it with spin from a demagogue like Ed Schultz who is presenting himself as the representative of the common folks but will only go within the parameters that his corporate puppet masters think they can allow to appease the public.
Thanks.
For more on the subject, I highly recommend a book published in 1977 that exposed this outrage, a book that was eerily prophetic. In Search of Excess by Graef Crystal..