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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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