Going Once! Going Twice! Sold!

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
In the year 2000, 10 percent of middle-class Americans thought their children would have a lower standard of living in the future. Now 25 percent believe it.  The thirty years between WW II and 1975 are considered to be the “golden years” of the U.S. economy. Each year the amount of income went up three percent and every income level from the poor to the rich earned its share.The top 10 percent took home less than a third of the nation’s income.

But since 1975, households making more than $110,000 (adjusted for inflation) have hogged all of the benefits and income. Now the top one percent of wage earners take in 23.7 percent of all income.  In 1976 they took in 8.9 percent. The top 10 percent now own 70 percent of America’s wealth.

The middle-class continues to dissipate and evaporate.  One wag recently suggested that in 20 years there would be 3,000 Nieman-Marcuses and five million thrift stores. It may be fairly close to the truth. We are in an economic recession, even though economists say it ended in June 2009. Over 25 percent of the homes in the country are “underwater” (worth less than the mortgage).

But the Forbes 400, the richest people in the U.S., gained 8 percent more wealth in 2010, and now possess $1.37 trillion in assets. The rich-poor gap in the industrialized world has become the widest in history.
Of Paradise and Excrement
At the moment The leading symbols of the rich-poor gap in the world reside in India. India’s richest person, at $27 billion, has built Antilia, a 27-story skyscraper home in Mumbai valued at about $1 billion. The Mukesh Ambani family of five has a home of 400,000 sq.ft., nine elevators, a grand ballroom, three helipads at different levels, a six-level parking garage, several swimming pools, terraces piled on terraces, a 50-seat theater, and hanging gardens, presumably patterned after Babylon. The home and family is served by hundreds of servants.

At the other end of the scale India has about 850 million people who live on less than $2 a day. The poorest of the poor are the Dalits, the lowest caste in what according to law is supposed to be a classless society. Most of the Dalits collect and carry human excrement from home latrines in the countryside. Many of the Dalits, rejected by the rest of society because they smell and often spill the excrement from pans and buckets on themselves and in the streets, are doomed by caste to do this horrible job for their entire lives. Most of the carriers are women who are the sole support of large families.
Handouts for the Rich Exceed Handouts to the Poor
We never hear how much our government aids the rich. Actually our rich get subsidies of over $384 billion. We always hear about how much government aid goes to the poor. Food stamps, Medicaid, welfare, and other programs for the poor eat up $365 billion. Over half of that government handout to the superrich of $384 billion went to the top 5 percent. The top one percent each got a $95,000 federal handout.

Each upper middle class household making $100,000 got a paltry $1,600. Each poor family got $5. But in 2007 hedge fund manager John Paulson personally banked $10 million a day, often with the help of “his” government. His tax rate? A whopping 15 percent. If the Bush tax cuts for the rich are approved, the richest 0.1 percent will get a $370,000 check.
So What About the American Dream?
I’m sorry about this, grandchildren, but I see no evidence the American Dream will survive either of the political parties. They are corporate-bought men and women and frankly could be all hanged in a Bonsai tree forest they are so small.

The purpose of a democratic government is to ensure that all policies are for the common good. At times its most important purpose is to support an economic system that works for all citizens while at the same time creating wealth that makes charity and generosity a hallmark of the society. The chief goal is to provide equal opportunity for all through the support of superior community educational systems.

Government is not intrinsically evil. It is the great balancer, the umpire and referee, the judge that selects the jury, the provider of roads, bridges, traffic lights, postal services, the guardian of our borders and our lives, all hopefully tempered by a smidgen or skosh of universal morality. It is our collective effort to make our society better for those who follow. We should be able to reject bridges to nowhere and accept paying supervisors to run midnight basketball programs if the majority thinks they are necessary.
If One Vote Equals Another, Does Bill Gates Have 58 Billion Reasons to Listen to Him?
But that is not the government we have today. The Republican Supreme Court has decided that money equals free speech so that the more unfettered money we have in politics the more unfettered truth will come out.

Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch spent billions this year buying Congress, supporting the crazies among the angry Tea Partiers, and fighting any aspect of climate change to perpetuate their oil interests.

Although the hospitals, the health insurance industry, and the doctors looked President Obama in the eye and told him they were all for health care reform, they went behind his back and sneaked $86.2 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose new healthcare policy—and the Chamber spent $150 million to fight what has become known as Obamacare.

No matter that the American people are stupid enough to pay twice as much for health care than any other civilized country. No matter that the U.S. is the only industrialized country without universal care. No matter that: “We have the best health care in the world!” And this liar is going to be Speaker of the House?
“Gold Is the Visible God, Money Is the Solder Holding Things Together, and Is the Common Whore of Mankind”
Shakespeare did not mince words about money in his play “Timon of Athens,” so when I wanted to put Wall Street into the equation of the fading American Dream, I thought of these three quotes. 

There is no question that gold is God and money is the common Wall Street “whore.”  Wall Street never questions how it can be that CEOs are worth hundreds of millions while 22 million are unemployed. Wall Street searches for loopholes so they can send profits and jobs to other countries and bank on little “nowhere” islands.  They purchase politicians who will give them free reign in the marketplace.

Corporate America can no longer be trusted to conduct business without manipulation, cheating, and fraud. The Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street want all the benefits of capitalism without any responsibilities to the community and country they live in. They have shattered the idea that a man’s home is his castle where he can enjoy the American Dream.

Every person who has a mortgage should ask the banker who loaned the money where his mortgage paper is. Chances are they have no clue. As of November there were 4.2 million homes in or very near foreclosure. By the end of 2012, 3.5 million homes will be lost – on top of the 6.2 million already lost. The Census Bureau has determined that there are 19 million homes vacant in America, many of them just waiting to be foreclosed on. Real estate experts estimate that each foreclosed home drains $4,000 in equity from neighboring homes. The Census Bureau also tells us that we have 7.5 million children living with grandparents instead of parents because of the economy. That’s 10 percent of the children under 18.

Government efforts to modify loans in an anti-foreclosure program have altered only about 500,000 mortgages. For example, the biggest banks in the country have tried to foreclose on homes with mortgage documents approved and authenticated by, as one former banker put it, “Burger King” kids.

While George W. Bush’s Wall Street regulators looked the other way, winked, or slept, the greedy bastards in Wall Street casinos created the financial garbage of roulette derivatives, crap credit default swaps, blackjack “CDOs,” lottery “securitization,” and poker subprime mortgages.

Consequently, California has 35 percent of its homes “underwater,’” half of the homeowners in Florida and Arizona are also drowning, and in Vegas, where “what happens there, stays there,” over 70 percent of the homes are underwater. 

They will “stay there” submerged for a long time.  We now have homeowners taking out second mortgages on their soon-to-be-foreclosed homes to pay for lawyers to work on getting them out of foreclosure! How bizarre! The American Dream? Fuggetaboutit!
Other Reasons for the Death of the American Dream
 
The Christian Science Monitor reports the following:

** Over 55 percent of Americans in the work force have lost a job, taken a pay cut, and have had cutbacks in hours worked since 2007.

** Over 32 percent of adults have been unemployed for some period since 2007.

** Among employed workers, 28 percent have had hours reduced, 23 percent have suffered pay cuts, and 11 percent have been forced to go part-time.

** Over 60 percent of adult workers have reduced spending since 2007.

** 60 percent of workers in their 50s say they will have to delay retirement.

** Half say the value of their home has gone down during the recession, and 39 percent say it will take six years or longer for their home’s value to recover to its former level.

Even foreign countries are beginning to recognize the end of the American Dream. The headline in the 1 Nov. 1 issue of the German newspaper Der Spiegel was: “Superpower in Decline: Is The American Dream Over?” 

In an article in USA Today about “Boomers,” two-thirds of them are less optimistic about the future of the USA than when they turned 21, and less optimistic about retirement than they were just 10 years ago.

We seem to have lost any idea of shared sacrifice. Such evil thoughts could be “socialistic.” Over 50 percent of Wall Streeters are expecting a bigger bonus than last year’s. Three dozen Wall Street banks and firms are going to pay salaries and bonuses of over $144 billion, 4 percent higher than in 2009. We have a winner-take-all society of greedy bastards who have no clue about the common good. So far the American people have lost $17 trillion in value in three years. Not a single Wall Street banker has gone to jail for fraud except for Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.
A Corporate Vision Good for Business and Its Employees
In 1760 a young man named Arthur Guinness started a brewery in Dublin, Ireland.  Guinness was a supporter of John Wesley who spoke often on the obligations of wealth.

Guinness, who said: “You cannot make money from people unless you are willing for people to make money from you,” started a corporate program that still exists in part today. He provided medical care, home and health workers, dentists, reading rooms, savings banks, pensions, paid funeral expenses, paid for “country” vacations–and supplied each worker with two pints of good beer a day. Workers who fought in WW I had their jobs waiting for them when it was over -– and the Guinness Company paid the families half-salary until the men came back to work.

The Guinness legacy is based on character, morals, and ethics, qualities totally absent on Wall Street and in members of the National Chamber of Commerce.

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