This story originally appeared at Truthdig. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books). A “working class hero,” John Lennon told us in his song of that title, “is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you’re so clever and classless and free/ But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”
During his time at GE, Jeffrey Immelt led the company into a subprime mortgage hole so deep that it needed billions in government cash to get back out. That was before Obama made him a trusted adviser.
How long will the US and its allies ignore the elephant in the room posed by an alliance for human rights and anti-terrorism with regimes in the Middle East that stand for neither?
The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: “Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.”
That is the harsh reality obscured by the media’s focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side. The illusion of personal power substitutes consumer sovereignty—which smartphone to purchase—for real power over the decisions that affect our lives. Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will. But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much homeownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused.
Instead of taxing the superrich on the bonuses dispensed by top corporations such as Exxon, Bank of America, General Electric, Chevron and Boeing, all of which managed to avoid paying any federal corporate taxes last year, the politicians of both parties in Congress are about to accede to the Republican demand that programs that help ordinary folks be cut to pay for the programs that bailed out the banks.
It is a reality further obscured by the academic elite, led by economists who receive enormous payoffs from Wall Street in speaking and consulting fees, and their less privileged university colleagues who are so often dependent upon wealthy sponsors for their research funding. Then there are the media, which are indistinguishable parts of the corporate-owned culture and which with rare exception pretend that we are all in the same lifeboat while they fawn in their coverage of those who bilk us and also dispense fat fees to top pundits. Complementing all that is the dark distraction of the faux populists, led by tea party demagogues, who blame unions and immigrants for the crimes of Wall Street hustlers.
My book on the banking meltdown, “The Great American Stickup,” begins with the following words. “They did it. Yes, there is a ‘they’: the captains of finance, their lobbyists, and allies among leading politicians of both parties, who together destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning splendidly. …” They got to rewrite the laws to enable their massive greed over everything from the tax codes to the sale of toxic derivatives over the past quarter century, smashing the American middle class and with it the nation’s experiment in democracy.
The lobbyists are deliberately bipartisan in their bribery, and the authors of our demise are equally marked as Democrats and Republicans. Ronald Reagan first effectively sang the siren song of ending government’s role in corporate crime prevention, but it was Democrat Bill Clinton who accomplished much of that goal. It is the enduring conceit of the top Democratic leaders that they are valiantly holding back the forces of evil when they actually have continuously been complicit.
The veterans of the Clinton years, so prominent in the Obama administration, still deny their role in the disaster of the last 25 years. Yet the sad tale of income inequality that Stiglitz laments is as much a result of their policies as those of their Republican rivals. In one of the best studies of this growing gap in income, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that during Clinton’s tenure in the White House the income of the top 1 percent increased by 10.1 percent per year, while that of the other 99 percent of Americans increased by only 2.4 percent a year. Thanks to President Clinton’s deregulation and the save-the-rich policies of George W. Bush, the situation deteriorated further from 2002 to 2006, a period in which the top 1 percent increased its income 11 percent annually while the rest of Americans had a truly paltry gain of 1 percent per year.
And that was before the meltdown that wiped out the jobs and home values of so many tens of millions of American families. “The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles,” Stiglitz concludes, “but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”
Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street (Nation Books).
If you like this article, consider making a donation.
Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.
Indeed, history always repeats itself. It just seems like a shame this time because we are supposed to know better. Maybe knowing that it's coming is worse. I'm not sure it would ever help, nothing would have stopped the arrogance that Rome finally imploded from, for example. It all revolved around failures caused by wealth entitlements and station, they would never have digressed from their agendas. Interestingly, the English monarchs vouluntarily ceded power to maintain their positions. That doesn't exactly give me hope for the future, though.
The biggest hoax perpetrated on the American people evah! The rich are so far above us (so they think), that their air is rarefied. Makes me want to hurl.
Liberal in Kansas at 04/06/2011 @ 2:24pm
Problem is, it may take a while for the ship to sink and Our Masters will have long since taken all the life boats.
Great piece as usual, Mr. Sheer. Also, like Frank Zappa said, (somewhat paraphrased) "Soon the chairs will be put away, the screen will be lifted, the curtains will be opened and all people will see is the brick wall at the back of the theater."
Superb article, Robert.
And here's an appropriate repost from John Nichols' thread:
"Tea Party" Being Thrown Overboard
Good stuff happening in Wisconsin. The entire nation owes the activists there a tremendous debt of gratitude. Best form of gratitude? Join your local activists--they're out there and they're growing.
(Painfully funny) ironic side note: The Boston Tea Party was a protest against the corporate behemoth of its day, the British East India Company. Today's "Tea Party" is pretty much the EXACT opposite of what it is named for.
If our current Tea Partiers were transported back in time to the early 1770's, they'd be guarding the ships in Boston Harbor and railing against "left wing extremists" like John and Samuel Adams, and everyone else raising a stink against the King and the Company. When the actual Tea Party arrived, the modern day Tea Party would be attempting to "shoot them in the head"--actual words of Glenn Beck in reference to "liberals" like Pelosi (June, 2010).
Lucky thing that time travel is just a fantasy. Although, it would be poetic justice to send our modern day fantasists, the "Tea Party", back to the age of Dinosaurs so they could finally prove their "theory" that Dinosaurs and men walked the Earth together. [In an odd way, they've ALREADY proven it.]
;D
That's exactly correct. The fate of the one percent is indeed bound up with whatever happens to the other 99%.
Think of it like the Titanic. When that ship when down, the wealthy on the top decks died the same way as the poor in steerage did.
Great article and great opening quote.
Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware DC
Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana
Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland
Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana
Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York
North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania
Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah
Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Read Full Article »
