What Do Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the USA Have in Common?

[RedEarth]

What do Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the USA have in common?

A rapidly expanding billionaire class.
Rampant poverty.
And a distressed middle class.

That’s the take of Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in a soon to be released book - Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill) (Portfolio, December 2007).

In it, Johnston seeks to afflict the comfortable top one tenth of one percent of Americans — the 300,000 men, women and children who last year made more money than the bottom 150 million Americans.

Yes, we all have the right to vote and change this unbalanced state of affairs. But political power in the United States is exercised by this narrow, rich segment of the population.

Much of the wealth transfer upstairs has come at the hands of corporate welfare artists who have shifted billions from the middle class to the billionaire class.

Some politician could take the central political issue of Free Lunch — wealth inequality — and run on it to the White House in 2008. But the current crop of corporate candidates will likely ignore it so as to not offend the funding class.

While Johnston focuses on the perfectly legal schemes that bloat the richest of the richest at the expense of the rest of us, much of the thievery he documents is the result of pure un-prosecuted or under-prosecuted corporate criminality.

“One of the new rules has been to make sure there are far too few cops on the beat on Wall Street to even write down all the legitimate complaints, much less pursue more than a handful of evildoers,” Johnston writes. “More importantly, the actions of Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers and the others were just part of a massive shift in practices and policies that continue. The Wall Street scandals are not over. The conduct they revealed is just becoming institutionalized.”

“Thousands of executives at hundreds of companies took money from shareholders through deliberate actions that distinguish them from bandits only because they wielded pens instead of pistols,” Johnston writes. “The techniques are subtler and less overtly violent, but the results are worse, for they undermine the legitimacy of society in ways that street bandits do not. The rules allow this.”



http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/10/17/4627/print/

[Glorfindel]

1. "The rules allow this"?

Very well, then, the rules allow this. Maybe some day we will decide to change the rules. Until such time, let the repulsive, bloated birds preen themselves, strut, and display their pretty feathers. The French in 1789 discovered a way to trim their peacocks. Perhaps we Americans will make such a discovery of our own. It can't come soon enough to suit me. :evilgrin:

[Voltaire]

2. INDEED!

I loves me some guillotine!!

[Sam Ervin jret]

3. You didn't give me a chance to guess. I was going to say...

growing numbers of alcoholics and mental health issues

increase in militarism/police state qualities

and all the names of the countries contain all the vowels (except y)

But I like yours better.