How the 1% Defeated the 99% By Concentrating Wealth and Power

 

America has become a place where the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is vanishing and the rich are getting richer.  The facts and stats are startling.  Economist Robert Richter wrote:

The richest 1 percent of Americans last year took home 23 percent of total national income. Back in 1980, the richest 1 percent took home 8 percent of total income. The last time the top 1 percent took home more than 20 percent of total income was in 1928, just before the Great Crash.

This graph shows the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

 

While the gap between the rich and the poor in America has been widening for decades, CEO compensation also continues to soar.

Average CEO Pay 2011 Nearly $10 Million At Public Companies: AP Study

The issue isn't so much about how much CEO's earn but what they earn in relation to worker wages.  The disparity between CEO compensation and worker compensation is incredibly wide and growing.

In 1982, the ratio of CEO pay to the wages of an average worker stood at 42 to 1. Today, it is beyond 300 to 1. If the minimum wage had increased as quickly as CEO pay since 1990, it would be $15.71 an hour today, here.

Moreover, the wealthy are well insulated to absorb currency devaluation shock but the poor and middle class suffer extreme hardship because most of their income is not discretionary but pays for essentials like food, shelter, transportation, clothing and medical expenses - products and services whose prices have soared while real wages declined.

What went wrong?  How did we get to this miserably low point?

There are several key reasons, starting with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913.  The Federal Reserve is neither federal nor does it have any reserve.   It's a consortium of private bankers and it's sole purpose is to transfer wealth and power from the people to them and the government they control.  It's no accident that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and WW I broke out in 1914.  America has practically been in a permanent and non-stop state of war with somebody since the Fed was created (WW I, WW II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Balkan Wars and a ton of other military interventions all over the world).  The true history of why America entered WW I is here.

Despite the wars and the Fed, the poor and middle class were able to prosper because so long as the dollar was pegged to gold it functioned as a noose around the necks of banksters, congress critters and imperialist warmongers.

Then the unthinkable happened in 1971.  Nixon de-tethered the dollar from gold via an Executive Order and without any congressional approval, the dollar became a 100% pure fiat currency and America got Banksters Gone Wild, Wars Gone Wild and Government Gone Wild.

What was the impact of Nixon's act on the middle class?  It was devastating because Americans  were then forced to become debt slaves to maintain their standard of living.  An entire nation became Debt Man Walking as Americans indebted themselves on a scale only witnessed in an undiscovered parallel universe.  The Empire of Public, Personal and Corporate Fiat Money Debt is now imploding all around us.

What Happened to America's Middle Class? It's All in One Graph

Congress Critters also committed a whole lot of other treasonous treachery to disenfranchise the 99%.  They passed bills encouraging U.S. domestic producers to relocate their factories to other parts of the planet by offering them lucrative tax breaks if they earned their profits offshore.  Profits earned on US soil were taxed at higher rates.  Congress also accelerated corporate welfare, crony capitalism and fascism.

While the solutions to our immense problems are relatively simple, our problems will never be solved nor will the middle class ever rise again until the 2 absolute worst scourges are vanquished:  the Federal Reserve and the ability of the government to wage perpetual bankrupting wars.

The Republicans and Democrats are worthless because nearly 100% of them are nothing more than wholly owned subsidiaries of the banksters, the military industrial complex and corporatist/fascist special interests.  The Dems scream "we'll raise taxes"  but America is already nearly fully plundered and  no longer even has a viable powerhouse of an economy that can produce things to tax.  America is simply tapped out.  The middle class is nearly wiped out.  The Republicans scream "we'll start more wars and create more crony capitalism and a bigger more powerful Nazified Police State" but the wars have bankrupted us and are largely responsible for the $15 trillion mountain of unsustainable debt.

Oddly and as difficult as it is to believe, Republicans were once anti-foreign interventionists and opposed foreign wars.  Who got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, Vietnam and the Balkan Wars?  All liberal progressive Democrats, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Clinton, respectively.  WW I consumed 35 million lives, WW II consumed a minimum of 50 million lives and an estimated 20-30 million have been killed in US foreign interventions subsequent to the end of WW II, here.

The crazy Dems moralize that they are the good guys because they want all their serf/slaves to be happy on their lovely totalitarian plantation.  The crazy Republicans wallow in the delusion that America is a free and prosperous country while simultaneously killing liberty and the constitution every chance it gets (NDAA, SOPA, Patriot Act).

There is only one hope for America.  Bust up the phony baloney left-right paradigm, eradicate the evil RNC and DNC corporatist money laundering machines, end the damn wars, kill the military industrial security complex, restore sound money, restore civil liberties and boot fedzilla back to its constitutional boundaries and limitations.

Do the folks have the courage to just do it and fire Congress en mass?  Probably not but their profound trust in the government's powers to be the cornucopia of plenty is about to be shattered beyond recognition.