Of Wealth and Woes

[Stinky The Clown]

Wealth concentration is not a good thing.

The world's economies make this clearer and clearer. In the US, wages are down, personal debt is up, and personal wealth is on the decline. The middle class ought to be on the endangered species list.

In Europe, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, if not other nations, are on the verge of bankruptcy. In the US, Los Angeles sits on the same cliff edge.

Has the world's wealth been reduced?

Not really. To be sure, there has been some decrease in on-paper fortunes, but intrinsic value - wealth - is pretty much stable. The problem is, it is increasingly concentrated in an increasingly smaller group of private interests. Private companies and individuals hold more and more of the wealth that was actually created by real, live, "average" people. Real, live, "average" people who have not shared in this creation of wealth. Government wealth, incredibly, is losing ground to private wealth.

Think about that. Government - actually, the people who are governed - is losing wealth to an increasingly privileged increasing few.

George Bush famously called for an "Ownership Society". Unsaid was the fact that what was owned was We The People. We The People are owned by those special people who won the sperm lottery or are overcompensated for creating means by which We The People are separated from wealth created by our toils.

This is repeated on even grander scales around the world.

I think it IS long past time for a class war to be acknowledged and engaged. I suspect that most everyone who reads this on DU already knows this. I suspect it will never make it to the public consciousness because those who hold the wealth hold the power to control what becomes part of the world dialogue and own the world's media.

Today's world makes the Gilded Age look positively egalitarian by contrast.

And We The People sit, silent and compliant as a frog swimming is an increasingly heating pot of water.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

1. I an neither quiet, nor compliant,

But I am frustrated that so many of the people, in so many nations, are so willing to continue along the path... espousing the propaganda fed to them.

[Waiting For Everyman]

2. This is why a 99% top tax rate is both practical and moral.

It needs to be the first shot across the bow. That would put a screeching halt to these overblown top salaries. And if it was a global treaty, all the whining about it would end pretty quickly.

That would end the over-compensation problem once and for all, it would fix the deficit, it would remove the incentive to do stupid things to plunder the rest of us, it would make lots of things affordable again... the list of benefits is long.

It's a no-brainer.

Then, we re-regulate. Just bring out the old laws that were deleted, update (as little as possible), and pass it again any way we have to.

Just as this concentration of wealth was done, it can be undone.

[Stinky The Clown]

3. "Just as this concentration of wealth was done, it can be undone."

Would that that were true. I truly fear we are beyond the fixing. Money controls too much. We the People are at best pawns, at worst, meaningless.

[Romulox]

4. Our President's first priority in office was recapitalizing this same group.

FML