Americans have been watching protests against oppressive 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.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
May 2011
THE FAT AND THE FURIOUS The top 1 percent may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles, says the author, but “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.â€
It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.†In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses†that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses†(even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.
First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.
Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective actionâ€â€”it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.
None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.
Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role: laborsaving technologies have reduced the demand for many “good†middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance, the decline of unions, which once represented a third of American workers and now represent about 12 percent.
But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.
When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,†he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.
America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer†army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core†labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.
Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurityâ€)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down†from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.
In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.
As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.
Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.†The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood†is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, 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.
The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil Disobedience is the only tool we have left.
We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis. The bankers and their lobbyists crafted tax havens that account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade. They rewrote tax laws so the nation’s most profitable corporations, including Bank of America, could avoid paying any federal taxes. They engaged in massive fraud and deception that wiped out an estimated $40 trillion in global wealth. The banks are the ones that should be made to pay for the financial collapse. Not us. And for this reason at 11 a.m. April 15 I will join protesters in Union Square in New York City in front of the Bank of America.
“The political process no longer works,†Kevin Zeese, the director of Prosperity Agenda and one of the organizers of the April 15 event, told me. “The economy is controlled by a handful of economic elites. The necessities of most Americans are no longer being met. The only way to change this is to shift the power to a culture of resistance. This will be the first in a series of events we will organize to help give people control of their economic and political life.â€
If you are among the one in six workers in this country who does not have a job, if you are among the some 6 million people who have lost their homes to repossessions, if you are among the many hundreds of thousands of people who went bankrupt last year because they could not pay their medical bills or if you have simply had enough of the current kleptocracy, join us in Union Square Park for the “Sounds of Resistance Concert,†which will feature political hip-hop/rock powerhouse Junkyard Empire with Broadcast Live and Sketch the Cataclysm. The organizers have set up a website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.
We will picket the Union Square branch of Bank of America, one of the major financial institutions responsible for the theft of roughly $17 trillion in wages, savings and retirement benefits taken from ordinary citizens. We will build a miniature cardboard community that will include what we should have—good public libraries, free health clinics, banks that have been converted into credit unions, free and well-funded public schools and public universities, and shuttered recruiting centers (young men and women should not have to go to Iraq and Afghanistan as soldiers or Marines to find a job with health care). We will call for an end to all foreclosures and bank repossessions, a breaking up of the huge banking monopolies, a fair system of taxation and a government that is accountable to the people.
The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated the sooner we will become free.
Bank of America is one of the worst. It did not pay any federal taxes last year or the year before. It is currently one of the most aggressive banks in seizing homes, at times using private security teams that carry out brutal home invasions to toss families into the street. The bank refuses to lend small business people and consumers the billions in government money it was handed. It has returned with a vengeance to the flagrant criminal activity and speculation that created the meltdown, behavior made possible because the government refuses to institute effective sanctions or control from regulators, legislators or the courts. Bank of America, like most of the banks that peddled garbage to small shareholders, routinely hid its massive losses through a creative accounting device it called “repurchase agreements.†It used these “repos†during the financial collapse to temporarily erase losses from the books by transferring toxic debt to dummy firms before public filings had to be made. It is called fraud. And Bank of America is very good at it.
US Uncut, which will be involved in the April 15 demonstration in New York, carried out 50 protests outside Bank of America branches and offices on Feb. 26. UK Uncut, a British version of the group, produced this video guide to launching a “bail-in†in your neighborhood.
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Civil disobedience, such as that described in the bail-in video or the upcoming protest in Union Square, is the only tool we have left. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. Bank of America was handed $45 billion—that is billion with a B—in federal bailout funds. Bank of America takes this money—money you and I paid in taxes—and hides it along with its profits in some 115 offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. One assumes the bank’s legions of accountants are busy making sure the corporation will not pay federal taxes again this year. Imagine if you or I tried that.
“If Bank of America paid their fair share of taxes, planned cuts of $1.7 billion in early childhood education, including Head Start & Title 1, would not be needed,†Zeese pointed out. “Bank of America avoids paying taxes by using subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. To eliminate their taxes, they reinvest proceeds overseas, instead of bringing the dollars home, thereby undermining the U.S. economy and avoiding federal taxes. Big Finance, like Bank of America, contributes to record deficits that are resulting in massive cuts to basic services in federal and state governments.â€
The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.
We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.
The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
We must embrace, and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem—especially the climate—or we will all be holding on to life by our fingertips. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.
Adequate food, clean water and basic security are already beyond the reach of perhaps half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of 5 percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be inevitable. But it will not necessarily mean more democracy.
The refusal by all of our liberal institutions, including the press, universities, labor and the Democratic Party, to challenge the utopian assumptions that the marketplace should determine human behavior permits corporations and investment firms to continue their assault, including speculating on commodities to drive up food prices. It permits coal, oil and natural gas corporations to stymie alternative energy and emit deadly levels of greenhouse gases. It permits agribusinesses to divert corn and soybeans to ethanol production and crush systems of local, sustainable agriculture. It permits the war industry to drain half of all state expenditures, generate trillions in deficits, and profit from conflicts in the Middle East we have no chance of winning. It permits corporations to evade the most basic controls and regulations to cement into place a global neo-feudalism. The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the Democratic Party, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear—fear of secular humanism or fear of Christian fascists—to turn the population into passive accomplices. As long as we remain afraid nothing will change.
Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, two of the major architects for unregulated capitalism, should never have been taken seriously. But the wonders of corporate propaganda and corporate funding turned these fringe figures into revered prophets in our universities, think tanks, the press, legislative bodies, courts and corporate boardrooms. We still endure the cant of their discredited economic theories even as Wall Street sucks the U.S. Treasury dry and engages once again in the speculation that has to date evaporated some $40 trillion in global wealth. We are taught by all systems of information to chant the mantra that the market knows best.
It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has became concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class—the beating heart of any democracy—is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for life. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.
The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses, but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.
The ideological proponents of globalism—Thomas Friedman, Daniel Yergin, Ben Bernanke and Anthony Giddens—are stunted products of the self-satisfied, materialistic power elite. They use the utopian ideology of globalism as a moral justification for their own comfort, self-absorption and privilege. They do not question the imperial projects of the nation, the widening disparities in wealth and security between themselves as members of the world’s industrialized elite and the rest of the planet. They embrace globalism because it, like most philosophical and theological ideologies, justifies their privilege and power. They believe that globalism is not an ideology but an expression of an incontrovertible truth. And because the truth has been uncovered, all competing economic and political visions are dismissed from public debate before they are even heard.
The defense of globalism marks a disturbing rupture in American intellectual life. The collapse of the global economy in 1929 discredited the proponents of deregulated markets. It permitted alternative visions, many of them products of the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that once existed in the United States, to be heard. We adjusted to economic and political reality. The capacity to be critical of political and economic assumptions resulted in the New Deal, the dismantling of corporate monopolies and heavy government regulation of banks and corporations. But this time around, because corporations control the organs of mass communication, and because thousands of economists, business school professors, financial analysts, journalists and corporate managers have staked their credibility on the utopianism of globalism, we speak to each other in gibberish. We continue to heed the advice of Alan Greenspan, who believed the third-rate novelist Ayn Rand was an economic prophet, or Larry Summers, whose deregulation of our banks as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton helped snuff out some $17 trillion in wages, retirement benefits and personal savings. We are assured by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney that more tax breaks for corporations would entice them to move their overseas profits back to the United States to create new jobs. This idea comes from a former hedge fund manager whose personal fortune was amassed largely by firing workers, and only illustrates how rational political discourse has descended into mindless sound bites.
We are seduced by this childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but a disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of non-renewable resources and its profligate levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?
Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd. We invest our emotional life in reality shows that celebrate excess, hedonism and wealth. We are tempted by the opulent life enjoyed by the American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
The celebrities and reality television stars whose foibles we know intimately live indolent, self-centered lives in sprawling mansions or exclusive Manhattan apartments. They parade their sculpted and surgically enhanced bodies before us in designer clothes. They devote their lives to self-promotion and personal advancement, consumption, parties and the making of money. They celebrate the cult of the self. And when they have meltdowns we watch with gruesome fascination. This empty existence is the one we are taught to admire and emulate. This is the life, we are told, we can all have. The perversion of values has created a landscape where corporate management by sleazy figures like Donald Trump is confused with leadership and where the ability to accumulate vast sums of money is confused with intelligence. And when we do glimpse the poor or working class on our screens, they are ridiculed and taunted. They are objects of contempt, whether on “The Jerry Springer Show†or “Jersey Shore.â€
The incessant chasing after status, personal advancement and wealth has plunged most of the country into unmanageable debt. Families, whose real wages have dropped over the past three decades, live in oversized houses financed by mortgages they often cannot repay. They seek identity through products. They occupy their leisure time in malls buying things they do not need. Those of working age spend their weekdays in little cubicles, if they still have steady jobs, under the heels of corporations that have disempowered American workers and taken control of the state and can lay them off on a whim. It is a desperate scramble. No one wants to be left behind.
None of this is true. It is a message that defies human nature and human history. But it is what many desperately want to believe. And until we awake from our collective self-delusion, until we carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the corporate state and sever ourselves from the liberal institutions that serve the corporate juggernaut—especially the Democratic Party—we will continue to be rocketed toward a global catastrophe.
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.
There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.
Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.
The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.
This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.
A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.†Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.
As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.â€
G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.
Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.
New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.
This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.
The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.
The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,†“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.â€Â
Workers in this country paid for their rights by suffering brutal beatings, mass expulsions from company housing and jobs, crippling strikes, targeted assassinations of union leaders and armed battles with hired gun thugs and state militias. The Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Carnegies and the Morgans—the Koch Brothers Industries, Goldman Sachs and Wal-Mart of their day—never gave a damn about workers. All they cared about was profit. The eight-hour workday, the minimum wage, Social Security, pensions, job safety, paid vacations, retirement benefits and health insurance were achieved because hundreds of thousands of workers physically fought a system of capitalist exploitation. They rallied around radicals such as “Mother†Jones, United Mine Workers’ President John L. Lewis and “Big†Bill Haywood and his Wobblies as well as the socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.
Lewis said, “I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and from the public platform—not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.â€
Those who fought to achieve these rights endured tremendous suffering, pain and deprivation. It is they who made possible our middle class and opened up our democracy. The elite hired goons and criminal militias to evict striking miners from company houses, infiltrate fledgling union organizations and murder suspected union leaders and sympathizers. Federal marshals, state militias, sheriff’s deputies and at times Army troops, along with the courts and legislative bodies, were repeatedly used to crush and stymie worker revolts. Striking sugar cane workers were gunned down in Thibodaux, La., in 1887. Steel workers were shot to death in 1892 in Homestead, Pa. Railroad workers in the Pullman strike of 1894 were murdered. Coal miners at Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and at Matewan, W.Va., in 1920 were massacred. Our freedoms and rights were paid for with their courage and blood.
American democracy arose because those consciously locked out of the system put their bodies on the line and demanded justice. The exclusion of the poor and the working class from the systems of power in this country was deliberate. The Founding Fathers deeply feared popular democracy. They rigged the system to favor the elite from the start, something that has been largely whitewashed in public schools and by a corporate media that has effectively substituted myth for history. Europe’s poor, fleeing to America from squalid slums and workhouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, were viewed by the privileged as commodities to exploit. Slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, women, and men without property were not represented at the Constitutional Conventions. And American history, as Howard Zinn illustrated in “The People’s History of the United States,†is one long fight by the marginalized and disenfranchised for dignity and freedom. Those who fought understood the innate cruelty of capitalism.
“When you sell your product, you retain your person,†said a tract published in the 1880s during the Lowell, Mass., mill strikes. “But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.â€
As Noam Chomsky points out, the sentiment expressed by the Lowell millworkers predated Marxism.
“At one time in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, a hundred and fifty years ago, working for wage labor was considered not very different from chattel slavery,†Chomsky told David Barsamian. “That was not an unusual position. That was the slogan of the Republican Party, the banner under which Northern workers went to fight in the Civil War. We’re against chattel slavery and wage slavery. Free people do not rent themselves to others. Maybe you’re forced to do it temporarily, but that’s only on the way to becoming a free person, a free man, to put it in the rhetoric of the day. You become a free man when you’re not compelled to take orders from others. That’s an Enlightenment ideal. Incidentally, this was not coming from European radicalism. There were workers in Lowell, Mass., a couple of miles from where we are. You could even read editorials in the New York Times saying this around that time. It took a long time to drive into people’s heads the idea that it is legitimate to rent yourself. Now that’s unfortunately pretty much accepted. So that’s internalizing oppression. Anyone who thinks it’s legitimate to be a wage laborer is internalizing oppression in a way which would have seemed intolerable to people in the mills, let’s say, a hundred and fifty years ago. … [I]t’s an [unfortunate] achievement [of indoctrination in our culture].â€
Our consumer society and celebrity culture foster a frightening historical amnesia. We chatter mindlessly about something called the “American Dream.†And now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all levers of power, and that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax, we are being shoved back into the cage. There will be hell to pay to get back to where we were.
Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education—nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semiliterate—and the rise of amoral politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who posed as liberals while they sold their souls for corporate money, have left us largely defenseless. The last vestiges of unionized workers in the public sector are reduced to protesting in Wisconsin for collective bargaining—in short, the ability to ask employers for decent working conditions. That shows how far the country has deteriorated. And it looks as though even this basic right to ask, as well as raise money through union dues, has been successfully revoked in Madison. The only hope now is more concerted and militant disruptions of the systems of power.
The public debate, dominated by corporate-controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent mounting corporate fraud and abuse. The airwaves are saturated with corporate apologists. They ask us why public-sector employees have benefits—sneeringly called “entitlementsâ€â€”which nonunionized working- and middle-class people are denied. This argument is ingenious. It pits worker against worker in a mad scramble for scraps. And until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping, as those who went before us did, that the rich will always protect themselves at our expense, we are doomed to a 21st century serfdom.Â
The pillars of the liberal establishment, which once made incremental and piecemeal reform possible, have collapsed. The liberal church forgot that heretics exist. It forgot that the scum of society—look at the new Newt Gingrich—always wrap themselves in the flag and clutch the Christian cross to promote programs that mock the core teachings of Jesus Christ. And, for all their years of seminary training and Bible study, these liberal clergy have stood by mutely as televangelists betrayed and exploited the Gospel to promote bigotry, hatred and greed. What was the point, I wonder, of ordination? Did they think the radical message of the Gospel was something they would never have to fight for? Schools and universities, on their knees for corporate dollars and their boards dominated by hedge fund and investment managers, have deformed education into the acquisition of narrow vocational skills that serve specialized corporate interests and create classes of drone-like systems managers. They make little attempt to equip students to make moral choices, stand up for civic virtues and seek a life of meaning. These moral and ethical questions are never even asked. Humanities departments are vanishing as swiftly as the ocean’s fish stocks.
The electronic and much of the print press has become a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate advertising. It makes little effort to give a platform to those who without them cannot be heard, instead diverting us with celebrity meltdowns, lavish lifestyle reports and gossip. Legitimate news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, are left cringing and apologizing before the beast—right-wing groups that hate “liberal†news organizations not because of any bias, but because they center public discussion on verifiable fact. And verifiable fact is not convenient to ideologues whose goal is the harnessing of inchoate rage and hatred.
Artists, who once had something to say, have retreated into elite enclaves, preoccupied themselves with abstract, self-referential garbage, frivolous entertainment and spectacle. Celebrities, working for advertising agencies and publicists, provide our daily mini-dramas and flood the airwaves with lies on behalf of corporate sponsors. The Democratic Party has sold out working men and women for corporate money. It has permitted the state apparatus to be turned over to corporate interests. There is no liberal institution left—the press, labor, culture, public education, the church or the Democratic Party—that makes any effort to hold back the corporate juggernaut. It is up to us.
We have tolerated the intolerant—from propaganda outlets such as Fox News to Christian fascists to lunatics in the Republican Party to Wall Street and corporations—and we are paying the price. The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes. The powerful, with no check left on their greed and criminality, are gorging on money while they busily foreclose our homes, bust the last of our unions, drive up our health care costs and cement into place a permanent underclass of the broken and the poor. They are slashing our most essential and basic services—including budgets for schools, firefighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly—so we can pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out $14 trillion of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings. All we have left is the capacity to say “no.†And if enough of us say “no,†if enough of us refuse to cooperate, the despots are in trouble.
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reforms,†Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “The whole history of the progress of human history shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle. … If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. …â€Â
Remember your first job? Probably at a fast food joint, or maybe working retail somewhere. If you’re like me, you thought $5.65 an hour was a fortune. I mean, working part time could bring in a paycheck upwards of $200!
Now imagine you’re Lebron James. Your first paycheck from your first job clocked in a cool $12.96 million for three years. That’s $4.32 million a year, $52,682 a game, or nearly $1,100 per minute. Suddenly, $5.65 an hour doesn’t sounds all that great, does it?
This is one very small example of the ridiculousness surrounding athletes and their paychecks. In a society where jobs are disappearing, people are cutting back left and right, and families are losing their houses, athletes are signing record-breaking contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, while their fans just look on adoringly.
In 2009, the average salary for basketball player was $5.84 million. An average baseball player made $3.26 million. A hockey player, $2.4 million. Football players made an average of $770,000, a relatively small chunk of change, but still over the top.
Let’s put this in perspective. The average brain surgeon makes $450,000 a year. A social worker makes around $46,000. A teacher, even in Connecticut, the highest paying state, only makes an average of $63,000. So, a person who saves lives, a person who protects and serves struggling families, and a person who shapes and molds young minds make a mere fraction of what sports stars make.
Look at Kobe Bryant. In 2010, Kobe pulled in $23 million from playing basketball alone. That doesn’t even include the tens of millions he earned through endorsement deals.
Matthew Stafford, the rookie quarterback of the Detroit Lions, inked a $26.6 million contract for his first season. Despite putting up a record 5 touchdown passes in one game in November, he was unable to stay healthy and didn’t even play out the season. In other words, he got most of his paycheck by sitting on the bench.
And how about Alex Rodriguez? A-Rod’s latest contract brought him $33 million dollars last season. THIRTY THREE MILLION DOLLARS. To swing a bat and field ground balls six months out of the year. For argument’s sake, pretend he played every regular season game (162) and every possible playoff game (17) for a total of 189. (He didn’t, just so you know.) If that were true, it would mean he earned $184,357 per game, or $20,484 per inning. With approximately 4 at bats per game, that’s $46,064 every time he stepped up to the plate. Is it just me, or does your wallet feel painfully light right now?
Not only do these athletes get paid tens of millions of dollars to run, jump, and catch, they’re treated as demigods in the process. Their morals and decisions seem to be above reproach or judgment. How many athletes, regardless of their sport, have been involved in scandals (usually sexual in nature), only to be forgiven by both the judicial system and the public at large?
Kobe Bryant, the golden boy of basketball (especially now that Lebron James has turned himself into The Villain), was accused of sexual assault back in 2003. The charges were eventually dropped when his accuser refused to testify, but Bryant still admitted a sexual relationship with the woman. (She won a handsome settlement in civil court.) Bryant wouldn’t be in the dog house for long though. A diamond ring big enough to take down the Titanic for his wife and multiple NBA championships helped win back his fans.
Green Bay Packer tight end Mark Chmura took his children’s 17 year old babysitter to an after prom party in 2001, where he proceeded to have sex with her. Although he was found not quilty of statutory rape, Chmura admitted two days after the trial ended that what happened at that party “wasn’t something a married man should doâ€. He now hosts a Sunday morning Packers pre-game show in Milwaukee.
In 1991, Mike Tyson was accused of rape and convicted one year later. After serving only three years of his six year sentence, Tyson was released and came out swinging. He made his way back into the boxing ring and into the hearts of his fans. (Come on, admit it. Who didn’t love him in The Hangover?)
And in the latest sports scandal, Brett Favre was accused of sending cell phone pictures of his Little Viking to Jets’ sideline reporter Jenn Sterger. After a lengthy investigation, the charges were dropped when it couldn’t be proven that the pictures were send from Favre’s cellphone. However, Farve WAS fined $50,000 for not cooperating with the investigation. To put that in perspective, that’s like a person making $50,000 a year being fined about $10. Yeah, I’m sure he’s tightening his budget to absorb a financial hit like that.
So many things about the system need to change. But it starts with the fans. Players certainly aren’t going to turn down their mega-contracts. Would YOU say no to $30 million? And teams aren’t going to stop paying their stars. Huge contacts equal happy stars, happy stars equal exciting games, and exciting games equal lots of fans. More fans leads to more revenue.
Fans need to take a stand. We need to stop paying $80 to sit in the top row of some gargantuan sport arena to squint at ant-sized players. We need to stop paying $75 for a jersey that will be out of date in two years anyway because the team will update the logo. And most of all, we need to stop forgiving sports stars so readily just because they can sink a tough off-balance shot.
Would you forgive your husband if he dragged your name through the media in a highly publicized sex scandal and then admitted to the world that he had cheated? Would you want your daughter watching a man on TV who had a sexual relationship with a 17 year old girl? Would you want to spend time with a guy who had been convicted of rape?
Of course not. But because these men have above average athletic skills, it’s easier and more entertaining to forgive them and enjoy watching them play. Now, I know that this doesn’t apply to all athletes, or even most. Many of them are upstanding citizens who don’t get involved in criminal activity. But regardless of their behavior, they’re still making tens or even hundreds of times more more money than most of us. Us, the ones who are supplying their paychecks.
Wake up, people. Take a stand. Not only against athletes’ astronomical paychecks, but against their behavior. Maybe earning $60,000 in a year instead of $15 million will help them realize that while having extreme athletic skill is pretty awesome, it’s not nearly as cool as making a real difference in someone’s life.
The cost of college has skyrocketed and a four-year degree has become an ever more essential cornerstone to a middle-class standard of living. But what are America’s kids actually learning in college?
For an awful lot of students, the answer appears to be not much.
A provocative new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,†makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation’s seemingly successful undergraduates the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.
Intellectual effort and academic rigor, in the minds of many of the nation’s college students, is becoming increasingly less important. According to the authors, Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia: “Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with attitudes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.â€
Students are hitting the books less and partying more. Easier courses and easier majors have become more and more popular. Perhaps more now than ever, the point of the college experience is to have a good time and walk away with a valuable credential after putting in the least effort possible.
What many of those students are not walking away with is something that has long been recognized as invaluable — higher order thinking and reasoning skills. They can get their degrees without putting in more of an effort because in far too many instances the colleges and universities are not demanding more of them.
The authors cite empirical work showing that the average amount of time spent studying by college students has dropped by more than 50 percent since the early 1960s. But a lack of academic focus has not had much of an effect on grade point averages or the ability of the undergraduates to obtain their degrees.
Thirty-six percent of the students said they studied alone less than five hours a week. Nevertheless, their transcripts showed a collective grade point average of 3.16. “Their G.P.A.’s are between a B and a B-plus,†said Professor Arum, “which says to me that it’s not the students, really — they share some of the blame — but the colleges and universities have set up a system so that there are ways to navigate through it without taking difficult courses and still get the credential.â€
The book is based on a study, led by Professor Arum, that followed more than 2,300 students at a broad range of schools from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009. The study (available at highered.ssrc.org) showed that in their first two years of college, 45 percent of the students made no significant improvement in skills related to critical thinking, complex reasoning and communication. After the full four years, 36 percent still had not substantially improved those skills.
The development of such skills is generally thought to be the core function of a college education. The students who don’t develop them may leave college with a degree and an expanded circle of friends, but little more. Many of these young men and women are unable to communicate effectively, solve simple intellectual tasks (such as distinguishing fact from opinion), or engage in effective problem-solving.
“This is a terrible disservice, not only to those students, but also to the larger society,†said Professor Arum. “I really think it’s important to get the word out about the lack of academic rigor and intellectual engagement that’s occurring at colleges and universities today.â€
While there are certainly plenty of students doing very well and learning a great deal in college, this large increase in the number of students just skating by should be of enormous concern in an era in which a college education plays such a crucial role in the lifetime potential of America’s young people. It can leave the U.S. at a disadvantage in the global marketplace. But, more important, the students are cheating themselves — and being cheated — of the richer, more satisfying lives that should be the real payoff of a four-year college experience.
“You have to ask what this means for a democratic society,†said Professor Arum. “This is the portion of the population that you would expect to demonstrate civic leadership in the future, civic engagement. They are the ones we would expect to be struggling to understand the world, to think critically about the rhetoric out there, and to make informed, reasoned decisions.
“If they’re not developing their higher order skills, it means they’re not developing the attitudes and dispositions that are needed to even understand that that’s important.â€
If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.
 In previous Revolution Roundups [22], before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.
 The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.
 Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.
 The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over — from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts.
 IMF imperial operations designed to extract wealth and suppress populations have been ongoing for decades. As anyone researching economic imperialism will know, a centrally planned Neo-Liberal aristocracy controls the global economy.
 I: Centrally Planned Economic Repression
 The IMF has a well-worn strategy that they use to conquer national economies. As I warned four months ago, we have now progressed into Step 3.5: World Wide IMF Riots. Back in October, in a TV interview [23] with Max Keiser, we discussed leaked World Bank documents that revealed the IMF’s strategy. I stated the following:
 They have a four-step strategy for destroying national economies…. We are about to enter what they would call Step Three. Step Three is when you’ve looted the economy and now food and basic necessities all of a sudden become more expensive, harder to get to. And then, Step 3.5 is when you get the riots. We are fastly approaching that….
We are headed to, as the IMF said, and as they plan, Step 3.5: IMF Riots. That’s what’s coming…â€
 Fast-forward four months to today, and now we see country after country rebelling against high food prices. Since our October interview, food prices have spiked 15%. According to new World Bank data, since June 2010, “Rising food have pushed about 44 million [24] people into poverty in developing countries.â€
Â
As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced another round of Quantitative Easing (QE2), those of us paying attention knew that the trigger had been pulled and Step Three had been executed. It was a declaration of economic war, an economic death sentence for tens of millions of people – deliberately devaluing the dollar and sparking inflation in commodities/basic necessities. It was a vicious policy that would impact people from Boston to Cairo.
 When QE2 was announced, I warned [25]: “Food and Gas Prices Will Skyrocket, The Federal Reserve Just Dropped An Economic Nuclear Bomb On Us.†I also wrote [26]: “The Federal Reserve is deliberately devaluing the dollar to enrich a small group of a global bankers, which will cause significant harm to the people of the United States and severe ramifications throughout the world…. The Federal Reserve’s actions are already causing the price of food and gas to increase and will cause hyperinflation on most basic necessities.â€
 To be clear, there are several significant factors contributing to rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel production and Wall Street speculation [27]; but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires. QE2 was another economic napalm bomb from the global banking cartel.
 In a recent McClathy news article entitled, “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, US Fed policy,†Kevin Hall reports [28]:
 “‘The truth of the matter is that when the Federal Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a lot of these emerging markets…. There’s no doubt that one of the side effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising commodity prices. It helped create this bullish environment for commodities. This is a very delicate balancing act.’
It’s a view shared by Ed Yardeni, a veteran financial market analyst, who reached a similar conclusion in a research note to investors…. He joked that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be added to a list of revolutionaries, since his quantitative easing policy, unveiled last year in Wyoming, has provoked unrest and change in the developing world.
 ‘Since he first indicated his support for such a revolutionary monetary change… the prices of corn, soybeans and wheat have risen 53 percent, 37 percent and 24.4 percent through Friday’s close,’ Yardeni noted. ‘The price of crude oil rose 19.8 percent over this period from $75.17 to $90.09 this (Monday) morning. Soaring food and fuel prices are compounding anger attributable to widespread unemployment in the countries currently experiencing riots.’â€
 The people throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa, on the fringe of the Neo-Liberal economic empire and most vulnerable to the Fed’s inflationary policies, are the first to rebel.
 Before analyzing the situation within the US, let’s take a closer look at the global Neo-Liberal economic policies that led to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts.
 II :: Economic Imperialism: IMF Plunder of Egypt and Tunisia
 In the Middle East and North Africa populations are rising against their local dictators. However, these “dictators†take orders from the IMF.
 A report from the Center for Research on Globalization revealed some background and historical context:
 “The Alliance between Global Capitalism and Arab Dictators
It is paramount to understand that the Arab dictators and tyrants serve the interests of organized capital. This is their primary function. They are elements of the global system formed by organized capital.
Looking back, protests and riots started in 1977 against the regime of Mohammed Anwar Al-Sadat, Mubarak’s predecessor. The causes of these protests were the neo-liberal policies that the I.M.F. had handed down to Sadat. The I.M.F. policies ended government subsidies on basic daily commodities of life. Food prices jumped and Egyptians became hard-hit….
The Arab people grasp the fact that their ruling class and governments are not only corrupt regimes, but also comprador elites, namely the local representatives of foreign corporations, governments, and interests…. In Egypt, Gamal Mubarak (who was being groomed by his father for the presidency) worked for Bank of America.
In Tunisia, Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali was a military officer trained in French and American military schools who, once in power, served U.S. and French economic interests. In Lebanon, Fouad Siniora was a former Citibank official before he became prime minister…. Within the corrupt Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad worked for one of the banks forming the U.S. Federal Reserve and the World Bank….
Moreover, almost all Arab finance ministers are affiliated to the major global banking institutions. All of them also strictly adhere to the Washington Consensus of the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) and the World Bank…â€
Samer Shehata, professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, summed up [29] the situation in Egypt and Tunisia:
“Beginning in 2004… Egypt began implementing economic reforms called for by the IMF—or really forced on them by the IMF and the World Bank… a new government was appointed, new ministers were appointed, who believed wholeheartedly in the ideas of the IMF and the World Bank. And they quite vigorously pursued these policies. And there was at one level, at the level of macroeconomic indicators, statistics, GDP growth rates, foreign direct investment and so on—Egypt seemed to be a miracle. And this, of course, was the case with the Tunisian model earlier. You’ll remember that Jacques Chirac called it the ‘economic miracle,’ and it was the darling of the IMF and the World Bank, because it implemented these types of reforms earlier. Well, of course, we saw what happened in Tunisia. In Egypt, from 2004 until the present, the government and its reforms were applauded in Washington by World Bank, IMF and US officials…. Egypt received the top reformer award from the IMF and the World Bank…â€
Former Goldman Sachs executive Nomi Prins reveals more details [30]:
 The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism
“The revolution in Egypt is as much a rebellion against the painful deterioration of economic conditions as it is about opposing a dictator…. When people are facing a dim future, in a country hijacked by a corrupt regime that destabilized its economy through what the CIA termed, ‘aggressively pursuing economic reforms to attract foreign investment’ (in other words, the privatization and sale of its country’s financial system to international sharks), waiting doesn’t cut it….
Tunisia’s dismal economic environment was a direct result of its increasingly ‘liberal’ policy toward foreign speculators. Of the five countries covered by the World Bank’s, Investment Across Sectors Indicator, Tunisia had the fewest limits on foreign investment…. Egypt adopted a similar come-and-get-it policy, on steroids…. But, as we learned in the U.S., what goes up with artificial helium plummets under real gravity…. Not surprisingly, those foreign speculation strategies didn’t bring less poverty or more jobs either. Indeed, the insatiable hunt for great deals, whether by banks, hedge funds, or private equity funds, as it inevitably does, had the opposite effect….
Ironically, the [Egyptian Ministry of Investment] brochure touted the large college graduate population entering the job market each year — 325,000. The same graduates are the core of the current revolution. They failed to find adequate jobs and are faced with an official unemployment rate of just below 10 percent (though, similar to the U.S., that figure doesn’t account for underemployment, poor job quality or long-term prospects)…. Meanwhile, 20 percent of Egypt lives in poverty… For in the United States, economic statistics are no better. By certain measures, like income inequality, they are worse than in Egypt.â€
III :: US-Egypt Economic Parallels, Inequality & Poverty
 Comparable economic statistics between the US and Egypt are facts that US mainstream media propagandists are not reporting.
 Inequality of Wealth
 Income inequality has reached a record level within Egypt, as Pat Garofalo explained [31]:
 “One of the driving factors behind the protests is the… growing sense of inequality. ‘They’re all protesting about growing inequalities…. The top of the pyramid was getting richer and richer,’ said Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the Middle East.
As the US mainstream media references the “oppressive†and “corrupt†inequality of wealth throughout Egypt, the hypocrisy is shameful. The inequality of wealth in the United States is currently the most severe it has ever been. Gini coefficient ratings are a measure of a nation’s inequality – the higher a nation scores, the more unequal the society is. The US has a Gini coefficient rating of 45, compared to Egypt’s 34.4, Yemen’s 37 and Tunisia’s 40, making the US the most unequal, “oppressive†and “corrupt†of the four.
As John Dewey once said, “There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes.â€
Poverty
When well-paid “experts†in expensive suits sitting behind desks in state of the art studios discuss the hardships of the Egyptian people, something tells me that these pundits haven’t spent much time interacting with tens of millions of people living in inner city America – just because the mainstream media doesn’t cover them, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They exist in larger numbers in the US than they do in most rebelling countries.
The rising price of food has played a pivotal role in sparking the uprisings, food prices have a larger impact in countries like Egypt and Tunisia, as they represent a more significant percentage of total income. However, the overall costs of living in the US are significantly higher. When these costs are factored in — medical expenses, housing, transportation, education, etc. – the US poverty level of $22k per year, for a family of four, is comparable to the poverty rate measure in Egypt.
According to the CIA, the poverty rate [32] in Egypt is 20%. With a population size of 83 million people, this would put 16.6 million Egyptians living in poverty. In the US, the current poverty rate is 16.8% [33], with a population of 309 million, this puts 52 million Americans living below the poverty line.
When you consider that the US has 52 million people currently living in poverty, you realize, as shocking as it may sound, that we have a larger number of desperate people in the US than rebelling populations in countries throughout the Middle East and Europe. Overall, in comparison to Egypt, the US population is obviously more geographically spread out, but if you breakdown the demographics, many large US cities have a poverty rate higher than the 20 percent rate in Egypt.
Consider that, according to low-ball government statistics, nine major US cities have a poverty rate over 25%.
IV :: Debt Slavery: Unemployed, Underemployed, Underpaid, In Debt
 The unemployment rate in Egypt mirrors the unemployment rate in the US, currently fluctuating between nine and ten percent, according to government sources. The unemployment rate among recent graduates attempting to enter the workforce also mirrors the crisis in the US. The young unemployed and underemployed demographic has played a pivotal role in leading the rebellion. Reporting for the Financial Times in an article entitled, “At hand, an Arab awakening [34],†Roula Khalaf sums it up this way:
 “In Egypt, as in Tunisia, the young people who initiated the street campaigns were educated, internet-savvy activists with no political affiliation. [Sound familiar?] After watching the fervour unleashed in the past month, young Syrians, Bahrainis, Algerians and even the quiescent Libyans are turning to Facebook and Twitter to call for their own ‘day of rage’.
As Mr Khashoggi puts it: ‘The 25-year-old unemployed today has become the strong man.’â€
A report from Business Week entitled, “The Youth Unemployment Bomb [35],†provides more detail:
 “In Tunisia, the young people who helped bring down a dictator are called hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean against the wall. Their counterparts in Egypt… are the shabab atileen, unemployed youths… In Britain, they are NEETs – ‘not in education, employment, or training.’ In Japan, they are freeters: an amalgam of the English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker. Spaniards call them mileuristas, meaning they earn no more than 1,000 euros a month. In the U.S., they’re ‘boomerang’ kids who move back home after college because they can’t find work. Even fast-growing China… has its ‘ant tribe’ – recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap flats on the fringes of big cities because they can’t find well-paying work.
In each of these nations, an economy that can’t generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed—including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer….
More common is the quiet desperation of a generation in ‘waithood,’ suspended short of fully employed adulthood. At 26, Sandy Brown of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a college graduate and a mother of two who hasn’t worked in seven months. ‘I used to be a manager at a Duane Reade in Manhattan, but they laid me off. I’ve looked for work everywhere and I can’t find anything,’ she says. ‘It’s like I got my diploma for nothing.’â€
The collapsing job market, declining wages, loss of benefits and skyrocketing cost of education has created a “lost generation†of young college graduates with little options and massive debt. When millions of American students took out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to pay for an education which they assumed would give them the skills needed to make a good living, they never imagined that they would be either unemployed, working part-time, or making significantly less than people in their chosen profession have traditionally made. The majority of young workers in their twenties and early thirties have debt that they will spend most of their life trying to pay back. They’ve been sentenced to a life of…
 Debt Slavery
 Like Whitney recently interviewed Alan Nasser on CounterPunch for a piece entitled, “The Student Loan Swindle [36].†Here’s an excerpt:
“MW: Is it possible to ‘walk away’ from a student loan and declare bankruptcy?
Alan Nasser: No, it’s not possible for student debtors to escape financial devastation by declaring bankruptcy. This most fundamental of consumer protections would have been available to student debtors were it not for legislation explicitly designed to withhold a whole range of basic protections from student borrowers. I’m not talking only about bankruptcy protection, but also truth in lending requirements, statutes of limitations, refinancing rights and even state usury laws – Congress has rendered all these protections inapplicable to federally guaranteed student loans. The same legislation also gave collection agencies hitherto unimaginable powers, for example to garnish wages, tax returns, Social Security benefits and – believe it or not – Disability income.
Twisting the knife, legislators made the suspension of state-issued professional licenses, termination of public employment and denial of security clearances legitimate measures to enable collection companies to wring financial blood from bankrupt student-loan borrowers. Student loan debt is the most punishable of all forms of debt – most of those draconian measures are unavailable to credit card companies….
MW: Is it fair to say that the student loan industry is a scam that targets borrowers who will never be able to repay their debts? Are these students like the people who were seduced into taking out subprime loans? How much money is involved and how much of that money is either presently in default or headed for default?
Alan Nasser: It’s as fair as fair can be. First, the student loan industry is huge – a large majority of students from every type of school are in debt. Debt is held by 62 percent of students enrolled at public colleges and universities, 72 percent at private non-profit schools and 96 percent at private, for-profit (‘proprietary’) schools. It was announced last summer that total student loan debt, at $830 billion, now exceeds total US credit card debt, which is itself bloated to the bubble level of $827 billion. And student loan debt is growing at the rate of $90 billion a year.â€
These students weren’t expecting an economic crisis to occur, and, unlike the banks that lent them the money, they’re not getting a bailout. Also factor in that the overwhelming majority of new jobs, the few that are being added, are either part-time, temporary or in low paying fields without health or retirement benefits. Mix all of this together, and you have a vicious cycle with devastating consequences.
Given the size of this segment of the population, carrying this much debt, at such a young age, with limited prospects, you can feel the winds of revolution blowing.
 Contrary to all the propaganda you hear from the mainstream media and politicians, the economy is still shedding jobs at a staggering pace. ZeroHedge recently featured a report entitled, “Just How Ugly Is The Truth Of America’s Unemployment [37]†by economist David Rosenberg:
 “It is laughable that everyone believes the labor market in the U.S.A. is improving.… The data from the Household survey are truly insane. The labor force has plunged an epic 764k in the past two months. The level of unemployment has collapsed 1.2 million, which has never happened before. People not counted in the labor force soared 753k in the past two months.
These numbers are simply off the charts and likely reflect the throngs of unemployed people starting to lose their extended benefits and no longer continuing their job search (for the two-thirds of them not finding a new job). These folks either go on welfare or they rely on their spouse or other family members or friends for support….
Of all the analysis we saw over the weekend, the only one that made any sense was the editorial by Bob Herbert:
 ‘The policy makers don’t tell us that most of the new jobs being created in such meager numbers are, in fact, poor ones, with lousy pay and few or no benefits. What we hear is what the data zealots pump out week after week, that the market is up, retail sales are strong, Wall Street salaries and bonuses are streaking, as always, to the moon, and that businesses are sitting on mountains of cash. So all must be right with the world.… the civilian population rose 1.872 million last year. At the same time, the labor force fell 167k. Those not in the labor force soared 2.094 million. Just in January, we saw 319,000 people drop out of the work force. These numbers are incredible. This is a highly dysfunctional labor market. People are falling through the cracks at an alarming rate as they come off their extended jobless benefits….â€
Jobs? Well, the less said the better.
 What’s really happening, of course, is the same thing that’s been happening in this country for the longest time — the folks at the top are doing fabulously well and they are not interested in the least in spreading the wealth around.
The people running the country — the ones with the real clout, whether Democrats or Republicans — are all part of this power elite. Ordinary people may be struggling, but both the Obama administration and the Republican Party leadership are down on their knees, slavishly kissing the rings of the financial and corporate kingpins.’
In the US, we have over six million people who have now been unemployed for over six months, the highest total we have ever had. Factoring long-term unemployed and part-time workers looking for full-time work in to the total unemployment count, we now have over 30 million Americans in need of employment.
 V :: The American Dream Foreclosed Upon
 The foreclosure crisis in the United States, which has already affected over seven million people since the crisis began, is not slowing down, it’s accelerating. Economist Joseph Stiglitz recently predicated another two million foreclosures in 2011 [38]. David Walsh sums up the growing crisis [39]:
 Nearly 30 percent of US homeowners now ‘underwater’
“Year over year, home values were down 5.9 percent nationally, and have fallen 27 percent since their peak in June 2006. The total value of US single-family homes fell a staggering $798 billion in 2010’s fourth quarter, and for the entire year, more than $2 trillion….
The number of US homeowners ‘underwater,’ i.e., owing more than their homes were worth, at the end of 2010, jumped to 27 percent, up from 23.2 percent in the third quarter…. ‘The rate of homes selling for a loss reached a new peak in December, with more than one-third (34.1 percent) selling for a loss. The rate of homes sold for a loss has increased steadily for the past six months.’ Some 15.7 million homeowners had negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter, in households home to more than 40 million people.
The massive number of those underwater will ‘surely lead to higher foreclosure rates soon,’ notes CNNMoney…. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, speaking at a conference in Mauritius February 9, predicted that another 2 million foreclosures would take place in the US in 2011, adding to the 7 million already recorded since the financial meltdown of 2008.
Banks repossessed 1 million homes in 2010, and this year is expected to be bleaker. Approximately 5 million borrowers are at least two months behind in their mortgage payments.â€
VI :: A Recipe For Revolution: Tax Breaks for the Rich, Budget Cuts for the Poor
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Let’s recap the statistics: we have 59 million people without healthcare, 52 million in poverty, 44 million on food stamps, 30 million in need of work, seven million foreclosed upon and five million homes over two months late in their mortgage payments. Meanwhile, all new political policies and proposals on the table, on the state and federal level, are committed to major cuts in social services. In a sign of what’s to come, Obama’s first disclosed spending cut targets the poor. As Salon recently reported [40]:
 New Obama strategy: Beat up poor people
“To prove it is ‘serious’ about the deficit, the White House proposes cutting a program that helps pay heating bills. The Obama administration… will propose big cuts to a program that provides energy assistance to poor people when it unveils its suggested 2012 budget. ‘The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP… would see funding drop by about $2.5 billion from an authorized 2009 total of $5.1 billion.’
The news is generating a lot of outrage… in large part because of a paragraph that suggests that the White House wants to gain political advantage from being seen as tough on the most vulnerable Americans — people who can’t afford heating oil during cold winters…. If the White House wants to convince Americans that it is serious about budget discipline, it should do so by ‘going after powerful vested interests rather than those least able to defend themselves within the political arena.’ The White House could redouble its efforts to cut oil company subsidies or repeal tax cuts for the rich, for example.â€
As The Independent reported [41], “Obama to set out painful budget plans for austerity in America. Americans are about to get a first glimpse of what tight-fisted federal government looks like with President Barack Obama releasing an austerity-tinged draft budget.â€
 In a report we featured on the AmpedStatus Hot List with the headline, “US Democracy Crushed By Economic Elite,†Bob Herbert sums it up [42]:
 “One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.â€
Austerity measures and draconian cuts to the social safety net are occurring just after passing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to multi-millionaires and billionaires. On the state level, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report [43] revealing, “Thirty-one states have released their initial budget proposals for fiscal year 2012 (which begins July 1 in most states), and, for the fourth year in a row, these budgets propose deep cuts in education, health care, and other important public services…â€
After committing trillions of dollars to bailing out the big banks, the Federal Reserve and government officials have now made it clear that the states will not receive the same treatment. In fact, the bailed out players on Wall Street, who have taken our tax dollars and given themselves all-time record-breaking bonuses, are looking to cash in on the suffering of states across the country. As Lynn Parramore recently put it [44]:
 Crank Up the Casino! Hedge Funds to Short American States and Cities
“The looming possibility of municipal defaults, which some say could total hundreds of billions of dollars, is causing grave concern. Hedge funds are also deeply concerned about America’s municipal debt crisis. They worry about how to best profit from it.
The Wizards of Wall Street have looked over the catastrophe of cash-strapped America and found it good for business. In their corporate laboratories, they are working furiously to whip up wondrous new financial products that will allow them to reap millions from misery. You might think that after plunging the country into said Recession with their fancy financial products, these Wizards might feel a little indelicate about gearing up for a game of shorting a community near you. Clearly you don’t know Wall Street. The Financial Times reports that once-boring muni bonds are suddenly sexy.â€
Speaking of reaping millions from misery, the food stamp racket pays off just as well as the war racket. The economic parasites profit off [45] of food stamps:
 Food Stamps: JPMorgan & Banking Industry Profit From Misery
“JPMorgan’s division that makes food stamp debit cards made $5.47 billion in net revenue in 2010. As the head of this division, Christopher Paton, says, ‘This business is a very important business to JPMorgan in terms of its size and scale.’ According to the company’s most recent quarterly filing with the SEC, the Treasury & Securities Services segment, which is the division that includes the food stamp business, was up 2% in the last three months of last quarter and brought in $5.47 billion in net revenue for most of 2010.â€
Republicans and Democrats, along with their Wall Street masters, are so arrogant, deluded with wealth, completely lacking perspective, shortsighted and, quite frankly, ignorant.
 As the economic top one-tenth of one percent has more wealth than they have ever had, the middle class is quickly disappearing and poverty is soaring. As politicians ignore the needs of the suffering masses in favor of a Kleptocratic Oligarchy, which operates above the law, it is only a matter of time before an uprising takes hold.
 After analyzing societal and economic indicators within the US, in comparison to rebelling countries, it is not a matter of whether people will revolt or not, it’s a matter of when.
 There are two significant differences between the United States and other rebelling nations:
 1) The US has a much more powerful, sophisticated and omnipresent propaganda media system to keep the populace suppressed – isolated and confused.
2) The US keeps 52 million people temporarily pacified in anti-poverty programs [46] by giving them food stamps, unemployment benefits or other forms of life-sustaining government assistance.
Both of these differences are temporary, and not in any way sustainable. The safety nets here are unraveling and cuts in vital social services will be implemented just as millions more will need them. At the same time, food stamps and other forms of limited government assistance will be worth less and less as food and gas prices continue to rise.
Rising commodity prices will push the 239 million [33] Americans currently living paycheck to paycheck over the edge. Also factor in healthcare costs, which have been skyrocketing even faster. On a personal level, my health insurance provider just notified me that my family has to pay 45% more for coverage – and we already had the world’s most expensive healthcare system. For my wife, one child and myself, we will now have to pay over $1100 per month for a basic health insurance plan.
 There are currently 59 million Americans who don’t even have healthcare insurance. The health system has become vintage Grapes of Wrath [47], as have most aspects of the centrally planned system of economic despotism that we live under.
 Add all of these factors together and you have a recipe for revolution. The mainstream propaganda news outlets and “Reality†TV soma will only keep people at bay for so long. The propaganda system collapses when people can’t afford to eat. Americans may be late to the party, but once one city revolts, the dominos will fall and a wave of protest will sweep through the country like a tsunami.
The only questions are: when will it happen, and how it will begin?
 VII :: “Hungry People Don’t Stay Hungry For Longâ€
 Food prices have been a leading indicator for rebellion thus far. Given the Federal Reserve’s commitment to driving food prices higher, as a matter of policy, and the government’s commitment to cutting assistance programs, people lining up at Wal-Mart on the last day of the month, waiting for the clock to strike midnight so they can buy their family milk and bread on their food stamp debit card, seem to be the most likely to rebel first.
As food prices increase, food stamps are obviously going to buy you less food. On top of that, as food prices escalate, millions more will need food assistance, right at the point when the current safety net can least afford it.
 Let’s analyze the most recent food stamp data to see how America’s inevitable revolution may begin.
 With 43.6 million Americans currently relying on food stamps, there are 13 states with over a million people already on food stamps:
 · Texas 3,925,119 (number of people on food stamps) — 15.6% (of state population)
· California 3,521,881 — 9.5%
· Florida 2,994,413 — 15.9%
· New York 2,934,493 — 15.1%
· Michigan 1,920,330 – 19.4%
· Ohio 1,772,608 — 15.4%
· Georgia 1,732,865 — 17.9%
· Illinois 1,732,169 — 13.5%
· Pennsylvania 1,673,714 — 13.2%
· North Carolina 1,531,255 — 16.1%
· Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
· Arizona 1,050,181 — 16.4%
· Washington 1,019,791 — 15.2%
States with over 18% of the population on food stamps:
 · Mississippi 612,889 — 20.7%
· Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
· Oregon 749,498 — 19.6%
· Michigan 1,920,330 — 19.4%
· New Mexico 399,454 — 19.4%
· Louisiana 866,905 — 19.1%
· West Virginia 345,683 — 18.7%
· Kentucky 813,041 — 18.7%
· Maine 241,117 — 18.2%
· South Carolina 839,109 — 18.1%
· Alabama 863,606 — 18.1%
In our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, there are 131,611 people on food stamps, which is a stunning 21.9% of the population.
 As mentioned before, cities with a poverty rate over 25% – Detroit 36%, Cleveland 35%, Buffalo 29%, Milwaukee 28%, St. Louis 27%, Miami 27%, Memphis 26%, Cincinnati 26% and Philadelphia 25% – are also highly vulnerable to revolt.
 VIII :: The Empire State Rebellion
 Given all the data, due to New York’s geographical lay out, population size and proximity to power, it is a prime candidate for insurrection. There are currently 2.9 million people living in New York that are on food stamps, which is equivalent to the entire population of Manhattan. Just imagine three million people flooding into lower Manhattan. Imagine if three million people decided to take a 15-30 minute subway ride down to the Financial District and camped out from Wall Street to the NY Fed, spilling over to the corporate offices of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.
Perhaps the one million people on food stamps from New Jersey and Connecticut will make a short trip into lower Manhattan as well, four million strong shutting down lower Manhattan, the economic capital of the world.
How would that play out in the global media?
One million people gathering in Cairo, Egypt sent shock waves throughout the world, and rightfully so, but just wait until millions of Americans begin flooding the streets. The revolution contagion will spread throughout the world like a category five hurricane.
 The civilization may still seem brilliant because it possesses an outward front,
the work of a long past, but is in reality an edifice crumbling to ruin
and destined to fall in at the first storm.†– Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
IX :: The Battle in Madison: A Sign of Things to Come
While bloated federal and state spending has grown to staggering levels of debt, and demands immediate attention, any cut in spending or attempts to reduce the deficit must first come at the expense of the organized criminal class that has looted the national economy. Any cuts that happen before that need to be understood as an escalation and extension of the attacks on the American people.
While continuing their attacks on American small businesses and private-sector workers, the global financial elite are now stepping up their attacks on public workers. In this context, the Wisconsin state government attacks against the state teachers’ union doesn’t have anything to do with the old Democrat Vs. Republican divide and conquer debates of the past. This is about people fighting back against their economic oppressors. In Egypt, Mubarak was the Neo-Liberal Aristocracy’s local enforcer. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is the Neo-Liberal Aristocracy’s local enforcer.
 This battle in Madison, Wisconsin, between the American people and the global financial elite, represents the opening salvo, the awakening of an American resistance movement and a sign of what’s to come.
In a report entitled, “Wisconsin governor threatens to call National Guard on state workers,†Andre Damon explains the situation:
 “Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, announced an assault against state…. Walker’s proposal, which he said would quickly pass in the state legislature, drastically limits collective bargaining, removing the right of unions to negotiate pensions, retirement and benefits….
When asked by a reporter what will happen if workers resist, Walker replied that he would call out the National Guard. He said that the National Guard is ‘prepared … for whatever the governor, their commander-in-chief, might call for … I am fully prepared for whatever may happen.’
Walker’s proposal allows state authorities to arbitrarily fire workers who ‘participate in an organized action to stop or slow work,’ or who ‘are absent for three days without approval of the employer,’ according to the governor’s press release.â€
Democracy Now pointed out:
 “… the governor’s actions could have national ramifications: ‘If Governor Walker pulls this off… if he takes down one of the strongest and most effective teachers’ unions, WEAC, in the country, then we really are going to see this sweep across the United States.’â€
As a recent Washington Post report [48] summed it up:
 Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin
“In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.
The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt’s military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.
But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers’ organizations here in the United States…. Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation… the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.)….
[Those who] often profess admiration for foreign workers’ bravery in protesting and undermining authoritarian regimes. Letting workers exercise their rights at home, however, threatens to undermine some of our own regimes, and shouldn’t be permitted. Now that Wisconsin’s governor has given the Guard its marching orders, we can discern a new pattern of global repressive solidarity emerging – from the chastened pharaoh of the Middle East to the cheesehead pharaoh of the Middle West.â€
Part Two :: The Most Repressive Regime: US Police State
 X :: Torture: Made in the USA
 It is extremely hypocritical when well-paid mainstream “news†people talk about how repressive and barbaric the Mubarak regime is in Egypt. Once again, I doubt they’ve been to inner city America recently.
 If you want to report on Egypt participating in torture, it is vital to point out where they were getting their weapons, training and funding from. Who paid them to commit horrific crimes against humanity? Look in the mirror US taxpayers; you may not like what you see.
 WikiLeaks revealed information on a US-Egyptian torture program [49]:
 WikiLeaks Docs: Torture-Linked Egyptian Police Trained in U.S.
“Newly released classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks have shed more light on the key U.S. support for human rights abuses under Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. The cables show Egyptian secret police received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as U.S. diplomats in Egypt sent dispatches alleging extensive abuse under their watch.
Coincidentally, Quantico also hosts the military base where alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement.
A cable from October 2009 cites allegations from ‘credible’ sources that some prisoners were tortured ‘with electric shocks and sleep deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state.’ One cable from November 2007 shows then-FBI deputy director John Pistole praised the head of Egypt’s secret police for ‘excellent and strong’ cooperation between the two agencies. Pistole currently heads the Transportation Security Administration in the United States.â€
America the beautiful… The Transportation Security Administration, from electric shocks, sleep deprivation and zombie states in Egypt, to cancer causing, civil liberty-destroying Naked Scanners at an airport near you.
 XI :: American Gulag: World’s Largest Prison Complex
 If you want to report on Egypt putting their citizens in prison, again, the hypocrisy is astonishing. The US, by far, has more of its citizens in prison than any other nation on earth. China, with a billion citizens, doesn’t imprison as many people as the US, with only 309 million American citizens. The US per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 [50] citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000. In the Middle East, the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia imprisons 45 per 100,000. US per capita levels are equivalent to the darkest days of the Soviet Gulag [51].
 The majority of prisoners are locked up for non-violent crimes, with tens of thousands in Supermax cells. In addition to the heinous torture programs that the US government has carried out in Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Gitmo, we have our own solitary confinement torture programs for Americans in Supermax Units throughout the country. As Jim Ridgeway from Solitary Watch [52] explains:
 “Solitary confinement has grown dramatically in the past two decades. Today, at least 25,000 prisoners are being held in long-term lockdown in the nation’s ‘supermax’ facilities; some 50,000 to 80,000 more are held in isolation in ‘administrative segregation’ or ‘special housing’ units at other facilities. In other words, on any given day, as many as 100,000 people are living in solitary confinement in America’s prisons. This widespread practice has received scant media attention, and has yet to find a place in the public discourse or on political platforms.â€
The US prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation [53]†revealed, “A new prison opens every week somewhere in America.†If you want to report on the brutal suppression of citizens, consider that somewhere in America, every week, a new prison is being built to literally “house the poor.â€
 A Boston Globe article [54] by James Carroll shined a light on our repressive regime:
 “… as federal corrections budgets increased by $19 billion, money for housing was cut by $17 billion, ‘effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.’ State budgets took their cues from Washington in a new but unspoken national consensus: poverty itself was criminalized. Although ‘law and order’ was taken to be a Republican mantra, this phenomenon was fully bipartisan.â€
Again, just because you don’t hear this reported on TV, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
 XII :: Loss of Civil Liberties
 In addition to the record-breaking imprisonment of the American population, since 9/11 our civil liberties have been violated in unprecedented fashion. Tom Burghardt, in an article entitled, “American Police State: FBI Abuses Reveals Contempt for Political Rights, Civil Liberties,†summed up a new report [55] from the Electronic Frontier Foundation “documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade:â€
 “As mass revolt spreads across Egypt and the Middle East and citizens there demand jobs, civil liberties and an end to police state abuses from repressive, U.S.-backed torture regimes, the Obama administration and their congressional allies aim to expand one right here at home.
Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an explosive new report documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade. That report, ‘Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001-2008,’ reveals that the domestic political intelligence apparat spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents….
According to EFF, more than 2,500 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that:
* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI reported to the IOB approximately 800 violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations, although this number likely significantly under-represents the number of violations that actually occurred.
* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI investigated, at minimum, 7000 potential violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.
* Based on the proportion of violations reported to the IOB and the FBI’s own statements regarding the number of NSL [National Security Letter] violations that occurred, the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations.
But FBI lawbreaking didn’t stop there. Citing internal documents, EFF revealed that the Bureau also ‘engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations’ that included, ‘submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts,’ ‘using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas’ and ‘accessing password protected documents without a warrant.’
In other words, in order to illegally spy on Americans and haul political dissidents before Star Chamber-style grand juries, the FBI routinely committed perjury and did so with absolute impunity.
 Reviewing the more than 2,500 documents EFF analysts averred that they had ‘uncovered alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence investigation practices’ and that the ‘documents suggest the FBI’s intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed.’â€
XIII :: Internet Crackdown
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When the Egyptian regime shut down the Internet, they did so by using American made technology. Having been knocked offline here at AmpedStatus.com, we have firsthand experience in what it feels like to have your ability to communicate and First Amendment rights stripped away. We still don’t know who was behind the attacks on our website, but the situation in Egypt was an interesting case study. As it turned out, Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Bill Daley’s company provided the technology used to shut down the Internet in Egypt. No, I’m not referring to JP Morgan, it was the other company Bill Daley was a board member of up until last month, Boeing.
As media reform organization Free Press revealed [56]:
 “The Mubarak regime shut down Internet and cell phone communications before launching a violent crackdown against political protesters.
Free Press has discovered that an American company — Boeing-owned Narus of Sunnyvale, CA — had sold Egypt [Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider] ‘Deep Packet Inspection’ (DPI) equipment that can be used to help the regime track, target and crush political dissent over the Internet and mobile phones. Narus is selling this spying technology to other regimes with deplorable human rights records.
The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high. That’s why, before DPI becomes more widely used around the world and at home, the U.S. government must establish clear and legitimate criteria for preventing the use of such surveillance and control technology.â€
It is probably just be an odd coincidence, but it was soon after we published the following report [57] that we were knocked offline:
 Obama Renews Commitment to Complete Destruction of the Middle Class – Meet the New Economic Death Squad
“…. Boeing certainly does love Wall Street. For those of you out of the loop, you may not recall that the most powerful and destructive WMD that Boeing executives ever helped develop was the CDO, that’s a Collateralized Debt (Damage) Obligation. Do you remember Edward Liddy? Liddy and Bill Daley were both Boeing board members, before Liddy temporarily moved to Goldman Sachs where he oversaw their Audit Committee. Liddy was the person who had the most knowledge of Goldman’s CDO exposure insured through, what was that company’s name?… Oh, AIG. Yeah, that was it. Then, Hank ‘Pentagon-Watergate-Goldman’ Paulson unilaterally made Liddy the CEO of AIG, before teaming up with Tim ‘Kissinger-Rubin-Summers-IMF’ Geithner to flush $183 billion tax dollars down the ‘too big to fail’ drain. And then… after the government was finished pumping our tax dollars to financial terrorists through the AIG SPV, Liddy scurried back to the board of Boeing where he could have cocktails with his ole pal Billy-Boy Daley. Yep, Goldman, JP Morgan, Boeing and the destruction of the US economy, birds of a feather…â€
Within an hour of publishing that report [57], our site was knocked offline.
 Something that has become very clear to me: when you accurately criticize the most powerful people, most people will ignore you, except the people who have the most power. They notice right away, and they let you know about it.
 As I said, this is all probably just a coincidence.
 However, this tangled web of interests between the Pentagon, Wall Street and the White House is fully exposed, yet again, with Obama’s special envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner Jr.
 Wisner has just as many conflicts of interest as Bill Daley and Edward Liddy. Some reports have mentioned that Wisner was biased toward supporting the Mubarak regime because he is a longtime friend of Mubarak, and worked for a law firm that represented the regime, Patton Boggs. But that’s only part of the story. Wisner, like Bill Daley, is a Council on Foreign Relations member [58]. He is the son of legendary CIA propaganda expert Frank Wisner Sr., who created and ran Operation Mockingbird [59]. For those of you who haven’t heard of Frank Wisner Sr., he used to report on “his ‘mighty Wurlitzer,’ on which he could play any propaganda tune.â€
 Frank Jr. was also a board member of Enron [60], up until its collapse, and like Edward Liddy, he also worked for AIG, from 1997 until 2009 [61]. Wisner oversaw two of the greatest corporate catastrophes in American history, back to back. Given his track record, Barack “mighty Wurlitzer†Obama must have thought he was the perfect guy for a collapsing corporate puppet regime in Egypt. Wisner is a disaster capitalism expert, right up there with Edward Liddy and Chief of Staff Bill Daley. Birds of a feather…
 XIV :: Silencing Dissent
 The recent internal emails from cyber-security firm HB Gary, released by WikiLeaks, exposing online campaigns to crackdown on critical journalists, reveals some of the other common methods used by the financial elite, like the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, to target and silence political adversaries.
 As one of the targets of the revealed campaign, Brad Friedman reported [62]:
US Chamber of Commerce Thugs Used ‘Terror Tools’ for Disinfo Scheme Targeting Me, My Family, Other Progressive U.S. Citizens, Groups
“The US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful Rightwing lobbying group in the country, was revealed to have been working with their law firm and a number of private cyber security and intelligence firms to target progressive organizations, journalists and citizens who they felt were in opposition to their political activism, tactics and points of view.â€
Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who was a constitutional law and civil rights litigator, was also a target of these planned attacks. In a report on the campaign [63] to smear and discredit him, he focused on how common these illegal attacks are:
 The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters
“The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained the unified axis of government and corporate power is. As creepy and odious as this is, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous’ hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is. “
Greenwald later added [64]:
 “Given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention…. As the episode… demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted…. Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability… that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this behavior is.â€
Dylan Ratigan recently interviewed Glenn Greenwald and they summed up the situation [65], here’s a brief excerpt:
 DYLAN: Am I correct in understanding that substantial, legitimate, serious, powerful private security firms were pitching Bank of America and the Chamber of Commerce a campaign for which they would be paid money, in which they would assassinate the reputations and intimidate and threaten the well-being of targeted private individuals. Is that true?
GLENN: Yes, the journalists, activists, political groups, and the like.
 DYLAN: Whoever it may be. And that the law firm that brought these private security firms in was recommended by the U.S. Department of Justice. So it’s on a recommendation from the DOJ that private and substantial security firms are being brought in to pitch smear and intimidation campaigns against those who support transparency in information. Fair?
GLENN: Yes, exactly….
DYLAN: … they were saying, ‘You pay me money and those who are validating the efforts of WikiLeaks or the efforts of transparency, period, in the modern information world, we will threaten their careers such that they’ll give up the cause, if you pay us.’
N: Right. ‘We’ll investigate them. We’ll find out dirt on them. We will destroy their reputation using all kinds of schemes and techniques.’
 DYLAN: And this came out through another leak which is the ironic twist…
 GLENN: Well, one ironic twist is that it came out through a leak and the other ironic twist is that these are internet security firms that held their expertise in providing internet security and yet their e-mail system was hacked.
 XV :: Protected By Anonymous
 Propaganda doesn’t work as well when you have the Internet, a cyberspace Underground Railroad, a form of mass communication that allows citizens to interact without corporate gatekeepers effectively censoring critical thought. All of these attacks show the desperation of the ruling class, in attempting to maintain an obsolete propaganda system. Just look at how common and accepted unlawful practices have become in pursuit of their goals.
It is a strategic imperative that we protect Internet freedom from the forces of media concentration and censorship. Organizations such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous are playing a critical role in exposing information and protecting those who are critical of the most powerful and corrupt elements within society.
 Part 3: Bring the Tyrants Down
 Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience:
 “All people recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency is great and unendurable. And oppression and robbery are organized, I say; let us not have such a machine any longer. I think that it is not too soon for honest people to rebel and revolutionize.â€
 XVI :: The Denial of Wealth
 As I wrote in The Economic Elite Vs. The People[66]:
 “When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard-working Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the US population.â€
In a new report entitled, “Nine Pictures of the Extreme Income/Wealth Gap [67],†Dave Johnson helps make the point:
 “Many people don’t understand our country’s problem of concentration of income and wealth because they don’t see it. People just don’t understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people’s ability to comprehend. If people understood just how concentrated wealth has become in our country and the effect it has on our politics, our democracy and our people, they would demand our politicians do something about it….
Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined….
400 people have as much wealth as half of our population.â€
XVII :: Economic Death Squad
 A report entitled, “Grapes of Wrath – 2011 [68],†presents a challenge to us:
 “The American people have a choice…. The current path, forged by a minority of privileged wealthy elite, will lead to the destruction of this country and misery on an unprecedented scale…. Are you prepared to incur the wrath of the vested interests and meet their lies and propaganda with the fury of your own wrath in search for the truth? These men are sure you don’t have the courage, fortitude and wrath to defeat them.â€
In an article and video entitled, “The Wall Street Economic Death Squad [69],†as I reported back in October, 2009:
 “We need to focus our strategy on the small group of men who carried out the financial coup. These 13 men played leading roles in first crashing the economy, and then stealing trillions in taxpayer funds. Some of them are now calling the shots and running the government to insure that their obscene profits keep pouring into their coffers.
Know Our Enemies, EHMs – Meet The Wall Street Economic Death Squad:
Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Mack, Vikram Pandit, John Thain, Hank Greenberg, Ken Lewis.
These men ‘presided over the largest transfer of wealth in history, from the working class to the flamboyant super rich.’ What these men have done is obscene. After crashing the economy, trillions, literally trillions of dollars have been funneled into the pockets of a select few, in secrecy, while billions of people suffer in poverty, billions suffer to survive. This small tight-knit Wall Street cadre has committed a crime against humanity.â€
Ralph J. Dolan, writing on Dissident Voice, declares, “Bring the Tyrants Down!â€
 “… while we’re observing these historic events in Egypt we might take a lesson in justice. We might come to our senses and freeze the assets of Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase and John Strumpf of Wells Fargo – for starters. Then we could go after the other major players in orchestrating the financial meltdown – Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, etc.
These guys who waltz away with billions in profits while they create misery and dislocation for many millions of struggling working people are beneath contempt….
We seem ready to kneel at the feet and kiss the hands of those who would rob us blind.
Enough! Let us bring these tyrants down!â€
If Egyptians can seize the assets [70] of a dictator like Mubarak, why can’t we seize the assets of Jamie Dimon and Llyod Blankfein?
 A new report from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone harshly sums up Banana Republic USA:
 “A former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. ‘Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,’ he said. ‘That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.’ I put down my notebook. ‘Just that?’ ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.’
Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft.â€
Once again, veteran financial journalist Paul B. Farrell hits the nail on the head. Writing for Market Watch, Farrell doesn’t pull any punches in summing up [71] what needs to be done, and it can’t be said enough:
 Fed Dictator Bernanke Needs To Be Toppled
“Fed boss Ben Bernanke is the most dangerous human on earth, far more dangerous than Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s 30-year dictator, ever was. Bernanke rules a monetary dictatorship… But this reign of economic terror will end. Just as Mubarak was blind to the economic needs of the masses and democratic reforms, Bernanke is blind to the easy-money legacy that’s set the stage for revolution, turning the rich into super rich while the middle class stagnates and peanuts trickle down to the poor.â€
You can’t sentence the overwhelming majority of the population to slow death through economic policy and expect to get away with it.
 While one-tenth of one percent of the population rolls around in obscene wealth, they may want to take a look outside of their groupthink short-sighted delusional perspective and notice the outside world. You cannot ignore the suffering of the masses. They will show up at your doorstep next.
 I hear footsteps…
 XVIII :: 99.9% Vs. 0.1%
 Egypt exposed the power that the people have. One million Egyptians proved that you can shut down a powerful regime through a mass demonstration of non-violent force. Here in the US, according to public opinion polls, 75-80% of the population believes the government doesn’t have the consent of the governed.
 The mainstream media leaves Americans feeling isolated and powerless to create change, but in reality, average Americans have all the power that they need to end the economic suffering and injustices that they endure. The overwhelming majority of people feel powerless to create change, if they would just realize that they are the overwhelming majority, we would have the change we so desperately need.
 As I’ve written in the past [72]:
 “To those Americans who feel powerless to change things, I say that your feelings are only a result of your induced delusion. You have become so propagandized that you do not even understand the significant position that you are in…. We are still a mass of people who have the power to change the course of history…. we are 99.9% of the US population, and they are only 0.1%.
If we fight, we win!â€
The people of Tunisia and Egypt has shown us the way. People are rising up throughout the world against the exact same people who looted America. The economic central planners that have launched an economic war on Americans, are also plundering the rest of the global economy with devastating consequences for 99.9 percent of the global population.
 As John Pilger points out [73]:
 The Egyptian Revolt Is Coming Home
“The uprising in Egypt is our theatre of the possible. It is what people across the world have struggled for and their thought controllers have feared…. Across the world, public awareness is rising and bypassing them. In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To their victims, the resistance in Cairo’s Liberation Square must seem an inspiration.â€
We are, as fate has it, the most power group of people on the planet. The sooner a critical mass can understand this, and the urgency of the moment, the better chance we have of solving this crisis through non-violent means. When the aware but passive realize that they too will face increasingly harsh consequences, that’s when we will have a chance to fix things. Until then, the hole gets deeper by the day.
 As nations continue to fall to internal revolt, the more covert and militaristic elements of power will move to the fore. In a world of collapsing economies, limited resources and extreme weather, it appears we are on a road to worldwide war [74]. As the people of Egypt have demonstrated, the non-violent movement has to assert itself before the situation gets so dire that outbreaks of violence will be commonplace, thus insuring a further, much harsher crackdown, police state and Neo-Feudal economic order.
 As Chris Hedges makes clear [75]:
 “The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion….
No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance….
All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs.â€
If we do not stand and rebel now, devastating consequences are sure to drastically lower our living standards within the near future. If we rise, people across the globe will continue to rise.
 “We must conclude that a changeover is imminent and ineluctable in the co-opted cast who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of that domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed [in the mainstream media]. It appears instead like lightening, which we only know when it strikes.†– Guy DeBord
 When revolution returns to America, the point won’t be to take down a figure head puppet politician like Mubarak or Obama, mere public relations moves will not suffice. We will take down the system behind them. We will take down the global banks, break them up, end the campaign finance racket, end closed-door lobbying, end the system of political bribery, end the two-party oligarchy, remove puppet judges who voted for unlimited spending by private economic elites, end corporate welfare and the various financial rackets which loot national wealth at the expense of the people.
 “All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time,
in fact they are all artificial and temporary.†– Strobe Talbott
 We must enact common sense polices to deter organized corruption. The devil is always in the details, so rain RICO laws down upon them.
 They shall reap what they sow.
 Their day of reckoning is fast approaching.
 Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.â€
 As Jefferson rightfully declared, “Every generation needs a new revolution.â€
 Great ready… here it comes.
 As a wise man once said,
“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains
to earth like dew
Which in sleep
had fallen on you Ye are many
they are fewâ€
 We will not let our families continue their descent into debt slavery.
 We will not leave our children to toil in a Neo-Feudal society.
It’s time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country.
America is great in many ways, but on a whole host of measures — some of which are shown in the accompanying chart — we have become the laggards of the industrialized world. Not only are we not No. 1 — “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!†— we are among the worst of the worst.
Yet this reality and the urgency that it ushers in is too hard for many Americans to digest. They would prefer to continue to bathe in platitudes about America’s greatness, to view our eroding empire through the gauzy vapors of past grandeur.
Republicans have even submitted a draconian budget that would make deep cuts into the tiny vein that is nonsecurity discretionary spending, cuts that would prove devastating to the poor and working class.
At the very time that many Americans — and the very country itself — are struggling to emerge from a very deep hole, the Republican proposal would simply throw the dirt in on top of us.
This cannot be. Financing for education and social services isn’t simply about handouts to the hardscrabble, it is about building an infrastructure that can produce healthy, engaged and well-educated citizens who can compete in an increasingly cutthroat global economy.
One of President Obama’s new catchphrases is “win the future,†but we can’t win the future by ceding the present and romanticizing the past.
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.
So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich.
In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people “have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities.†Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.
The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists and think tanks and media buys and anything else they could think of. They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, “Winner-Take-All Politicsâ€: “Step by step and debate by debate, America’s public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many.â€
As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.
When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.
As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.†(A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)
It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?
The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.
I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,†he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.â€
I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.
