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October,1999
The Income, Wealth and Reality Gap
"The transmission from generation to generation
of vast fortunes
by inheritance or gift, is not consistent with
the ideals and sentiments of the American people."
Franklin Roosevelt might spin in his grave if he knew the size of the
present financial gap between America’s working majority and its
inheritor minority . In the more than sixty years since the New Deal
brought this nation to a state of near civility among its people, we
have descended to borderline madness in human relations, and absolute
injustice in the distribution of wealth.
When FDR spoke those words in 1935 he expressed an idea that most
could agree with, unless they were of the minority inheritor class.
That clan has grown in number, but even more in the wealth it controls
and the damage it causes our alleged democracy.
The richest 2.7 million Americans - 1% of the people - have as much
combined income as the bottom 100 million citizens. And the gap between
those groups has widened since 1977, when the top 1% had as much as the
bottom 49 million. Worse, as a percentage of gross income, 80% of
American families - 217 million people - are taking home less money now
than they did twenty years ago .
The political system is a sub-division of this unjust economic
arrangement, with parties and candidates operating at the behest of
their financial employers. Rhetoric about democracy should not be
confused with fact; while many use the term sincerely, the reality of
our political system has as much to do with democracy as a Nevada house
of prostitution has to do with love. Democratic theory is nice, but our
practice relates more to oligarchy .
We supposedly offer small business endeavors an opportunity to compete
in a free market place. But the economic distance between the Main
Street majority of small businesses, and the Wall Street minority of
corporate monopolies grows greater every day. Just as the income and
wealth gap has become an abyss, the business gap has become a chasm
between believers in the dream of competition, and the harsh reality
that is modern global capitalism.
Massive mergers are a daily occurrence, with gigantic conglomerates
first engulfing the small, then devouring the large, and finally buying
out or merging with the very large. This creates competition-free zones
in the economy , despite rhetoric of a free market which , like
democracy, exists only in a mental or metaphysical state, not in
reality.
With an ever smaller number of massive corporations dominating the
market system , a vast majority of hard working small businesses must
struggle to survive . As in the income battles between inheritors and
workers, they are at a serious disadvantage. In fact, small business
people are workers, though they are taught to think of themselves as
something closer to little, if puny , capitalists .
Just as the label “service worker” covers everyone from janitors to
lawyers, the label “business” is made to cover Nike, IBM, Walmart, and
family, franchise or other small enterprise. When janitors think they
are the economic equal of lawyers, they may have personal psychological
problems, but when small business people identify with their massive
corporate commisars, we have a more serious social problem.
The working majority is conditioned to respond to situations as though
it were the equal of the investor minority, and that is a critical
social problem. It leads to acceptance of inequity in work, wealth,
salary and taxes. This acceptance is based on a contradiction between
physical reality and conscious perception that is rooted in the
financial gap between the rich and the rest of us.
The distance between material and perceived reality is created by
corporate mind management, through its media channels of information.
These are operated in the interest of maintaining the status quo, even
when calling it revolutionary change. As when pundits metaphorically
drool over the great new world of globalization, which they interpret
as radically democratic , because their corporate employers are their
models for democracy.
And we hear endless claims of record-breaking economic boom on the Wall
Street side of the gap, countered by reports of Main Street sinking more
deeply into debt, working longer hours to stand still in the economic
progress game, and descending into pits of depression, divorce,
division, dysfunction and legal or illegal drug escape.
These gaps ,whether material or psychological, are based on economic
foundations on which the structure of political power is exercised by
minorities who have been selected and elected by money. They protect a
morally deaf,dumb and blind system of private profit accumulation which
hears, speaks and sees no evil in its ape-like pursuit of economic
gain.
Thus, Americans can be led to accept something called humanitarian war,
which destroys innocent people from foreign Main Streets, in order to
protect the profit margin for powerful forces from global Wall Street.
Environmental damage and climate changes that help cause floods,
droughts, hurricanes and heat waves are said to be acts of god or
nature. But what mindless pursuit of profit does to our planet should
not be blamed on invisible men, women or fairies. Corporate capital is
not god, but it might as well be, as long as the gap between our
thinking and its practice cause us to treat it uncritically .
Closing all the gaps between the Wall Street class minority and the
Main Street mass majority is part of the work of saving the social and
natural environment for everyone on earth. The second cannot happen
without the first. The unjust economy is the source from which all
other injustice flows. Face it, kids, or drown in it.
Copyright (c) 1999 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.
This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and
redistributed in electronic form, provided that the author is notified
and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or
republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the
consent of the author .
frank scott
http://www.marin.cc.ca.us/~frank/columns
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