I believe ALL of this could have been avoided ....

[Trajan]

If corporate America would have provided workers with wage increases that matched the increase in profits they enjoyed ...

They wanted it all .... They didn't want to share the positive gains with the very people who make an economy work: consumers ....

We have been financially strangled ....

Imagine if workers DID receive decent wage promotions: Would they have paid their mortgages ? .... Would they buy more cars and washing machines ? .... Absolutely ....

This tragic breakdown of the market place has ONE cause, in my view: Corporate greed ....

There is a bottom line: If you don't pay workers enough money, they will not create a wealthy class ...

I hear NOTHING from anyone about the corrosion of worker wages ...

[rucky]

1. If the New Deal were intact, we wouldn't even be talking about bailout.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. Wages go up, so go housing prices and commodities prices.

The solution is to regulate this damned mess in a way that makes some kind of sense. You don't see European investment houses failing all over the place for these reasons, except due to their exposure to failed US institutions. People outside the US are pissed off that this has been allowed to happen, and is now having a secondary impact on their economies.

[Trajan]

3. We watched housing prices skyrocket ...

While wages stagnated .... I don't see a direct correlation between increased wages and increased real estate and commodity prices ... It is obvious some other cause is at play ....

[pwb]

4. I hear you.

A living wage is hard to find these days. Corporations distribute too much profit to shareholders. very little retained earnings for plant and equipment needed to create jobs.

[Trajan]

5. That is my view ....

Yet it is us workers who 'buy stuff' ....

When we don't have enough money, we don't buy stuff, and sales volume decreases for producers ...

Really ... it doesn't take a rocket scientist ....

[stillcool]

6. I think we'd have to go back a long, long, way..

From the book
THE RICH AND THE SUPER-RICH. Copyright 1968 by Ferdinand Lundberg.
available for free download at the following site due to it's copyright expiration

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.html

Policy-Making Power of Wealth

First, the present concentration of wealth confers self-arrogated and defaulted political policy-making power at home and abroad in a grossly disproportionate degree on a small and not especially qualified mainly hereditary group; secondly, this group allocates vast economic resources in narrow, self-serving directions, both at home and abroad, rather than in socially and humanly needed public directions.

When, through its agents, it cannot enlist the government in support of its various plans at home and abroad it can, and does, frustrate the government in various proceedings that have full public endorsement. It involves the nation in cycles of ferocious wars that are to the interest of asset preservation and asset expansion but are contrary to the interest of the nation and the world. It can and does establish connections all over the world that covertly involve American power in all sorts of ways unknown until some last-minute denouement even to Congress and the president.

It doesn't do any of this maliciously, to be sure, any more than an elephant feels malice when it rubs against a sapling and breaks it in two. An elephant must behave like an elephant, beyond any moral stricture. And power of any kind must exert itself. Historically it has invariably exerted itself in its own self-visualized interests.

So, concentrated asset-wealth not only brings in large personal incomes, but confers on the owners and their deputies a disproportionately large voice in economic, political and cultural affairs. Thus the owners may make or frustrate public policy, at home and abroad.
--------------------------

Deficit in Public Services

The converse of the great concentration of personal wealth is the great deficit in needed public social services. On the corporation front, the country is obviously extremely lusty. But in education and medicine, to cite merely two areas, everything suddenly becomes extremely meager, scrounging and hand-to-mouth. This disparity is curious in a wealthy country and forcefully reminds one of Benjamin Disraeli's allusion to two nations, the rich and the poor. But the deficits in these areas, the dialecticians will be quick to point out, are gradually being met now by government out of taxes. As we shall see later, however, the contribution of the top wealth-holders to taxes is disproportionately low. The wealthy, like everyone else, dislike to pay taxes and, unlike most other people, they know how to minimize them through the exercise of political influence. This is one of the nice differences between being wealthy and being poor.

The Constitution of the United States bars the bestowal of titles of nobility. But in many ways it would clear up much that is now obscure if titles were allowed. Not only would they show, automatically, to whom deference was due as a right but they would publicly distinguish those who held continuing hereditary power from people who are merely temporarily voted in or appointed for limited terms. The chroniclers of High Society-that is, the circles of wealth--recognize this need and, in order to show hereditary status and family position, they allude to males in the line of descent by number, as in the case of royal dynasties. Thus in the English branch of the Astor family there is a John Jacob Astor VII.45 But there are also George F. Baker III, August Belmont IV, William Bird III, Joseph H. Choate III, Irénée and Pierre du Pont III, Marshall Field V, Potter Palmer III, John D. Rockefeller IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt V and so on.46

[wvbygod]

7. That and lack of health coverage

Corp criminals and Americans being starved and ripped off with the state of healthcare in America.
Two simple things that can be fixed by a good admin.