The greed of the 80's led to the illusion of the wealth in the 90's, where clever schemes were set in place that ultimately led to the financial collapse of the 2000's.

Now the figures are in and it is sobering.

Today, the 400 richest people in the US have as much wealth as the bottom 155,000,000 Americans.  Yeah, that's 155 MILLION!  That means it takes the wealth of about 387,500 people to equal the wealth of one of the uber-rich.  Wrap your head around that! 

In the 80's the average corporate CEO earned about 40 times what their workers did.  Today that figure has ballooned to about 500 times.  In that same time multi-millionaires and billionaires have increased 1000 fold. 

How did they do it?  The 2008 tax cut was huge in helping the rich become super-rich.  Politicians either passed or fought laws that ultimately led to this obscene transfer of wealth.  And our justice system sat idly by when crimes were being committed, giving companies like Goldman Sachs the green light to steal. 

Just think about this; not one person in the Wall Street scandal went to jail.  Not one! (And Bernie Madoff doesn't count, he wasn't an architect of the schemes.  He just took advantage of the chance to loot, kind of like a looter in a riot.)  But the real criminals, the players in the banks, brokerage houses, etc - all of which were involved - walked away scot-free, untouched, except for their new super-rich status. (READ: "Why Isn't Wall Street In Jail) 

They took a few hundred dollars out of the pockets of each and every American and now we are paying while they enjoy their mega-yachts, mega-mansions and mega-wealth.  And they still want more. 

Now the average American is hurting big time, but it isn't over.  The wealthy are fat and happy and getting fatter.  Our lawmakers recently refused to rescind the 2008 tax break for the super-rich.  That keeps the money AND THE POWER in their hands.  You know how politicians react toward money and power.  And with more people fighting for the few job openings available, we will accept lower pay just to get our foot in the door and that means higher profits for the company.  Yet, in 2010 American corporations had one of the best performances in the history of the nation.

And you are scraping for grocery money.

So how long do you think it will be before those 155 million Americans, or actually the lower 90% of all Americans, will put their foot down and tell their politicians, "It's over!  Either things change, or you join the ranks of the unemployed!"  Will there be an Egyptian like uprising?  Or will we sit back and just keep taking it?

I have my guess, what's yours?

My money is on New York becoming the DMZ when it does.

If anyone gets that....High Five!

Quote from: Laura91 on March 07, 2011, 12:53:06 PM
Nothing is going to happen, people will just sit back and bitch about it.

I agree.  Unemployment is not enough.  I've seen how lazy people are.  They won't revolt until they lose their jobs AND their homes.  As long as they have one or the other, they'll let the top 1% of Americans control 40% of the nation's wealth.

Greed is not only a sickness of the rich. The poor make themselves poorer buying things made in China because they are cheaper. That means the poor have no problem paying people 80 cents an hour to get more. The rich are just on a different scale. Then take a look at all the over weight people. Seems they are gluttons and do not care about health.  We have found the problem and it is us.

I believe within the next two years there will be a severebacklash by Americans. The poor already know what is happening and are organizing. It's the middle class that needs to wake up.

One of the reasons there was so much backlash against the Vietnam war was that it was directly affecting the poor and the middle class. Don't remember any son or daughter from the ruling class putting their lives on the line. Much is on the linenow but people are asleep. I will be attending a protest on Thursday in support of health home aides. In April I will attend another protest against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is also war in Pakistan.

I'm following the events in Wisconsin and other places where people are organizing and making their voices heard. There needs to be a concerted effort by all Americans because our lives are at stake.

Gennee

QuoteThere needs to be a concerted effort by all Americans because our lives are at stake.

And expecting our corrupt Government to fix anything is not going to work. We need to do the hard work ourselves. If people need health aids then volunteer.

Yeah, it is true that our lives really are at stake. When the rich won't let you see a doctor or get healthy food they are threatening your life every bit as much as if they stuck a gun in your face. Many people don't realize that, and I fear things will have to get much worse before they do. Most of the middle class still has it too good to see what's wrong.

The problem is that the government and corporate America really aren't separate entities anymore. Since everything is determined by money, the rich rule everything and answer to no one. They control the military through defense spending, they control laws through bribes to politicans and government officals, and they control who lives and who dies by deciding who will get to afford the basics of life and who won't and by encouraging fear mongering and hate against any group that is not like them.

Just look at history. Nations that cannot provide for all their people ultimately fall, either through internal forces or external. The question is, how many have to suffer and even die before things change?

QuoteSince everything is determined by money, the rich rule everything and answer to no one.

But they do answer to the consumer that is supplies them with money. Stop consumeing and you put them out of bussiness.

QuoteNations that cannot provide for all their people ultimately fall, either through internal forces or external

Nations never can provide anything but safety and protect property rights.  You have to provide a living for yourself.
Grow your own food and build your own shelter and forget giving you hard work to either the government or corporations. They both will fail. That might just cramp your living style but it will set you free.

  Funny thing, a woman was just at my door looking for 75 bucks for her son's treatment for the same kind of cancer I may have.  I told her that I am in the same boat and I didn't have anything.  I recognized the lady and the son when that kid was walking to high school about 20 years ago.  I've been in this neighborhood for about 27 years now.  I am seeing more people beg for similar in front of the grocers.  I have seen the houses next to mine go into foreclosure at a high rate over the past 18 years that I had lost count of the promissory notes that I saw in the windows. 
  I was in the Navy during the Vietnam war and the economic conditions back then was actually at the top.  I did not wait for the draft board to determine my fate, I enlisted instead.  Most of us were from the lower classes, but we served anyway.  When I got out about 18 months after the war,  the conditions changed.  It was the last half of the "looking out for number one" 70's and us vets had trouble getting good and steady jobs.  The same people who were protesting in our behalf on the campuses got their degrees, got in the job market and proceeded to turn their back on us vets.  In one of the job interviews I went to back then there was this kid about my age then who was working for that company's Human Resources dept. with a large Greek ring on his finger. He looked at my application and said that I looked good according to his standpoint until he read into my service history and the attached DD-914.  The mood changed, he would no longer look me in the eye and started to get negative about the position I applied for. The places I got jobs were the shops that had vets in them and was ran by a veteran. 
  Well, these kids became to what is known as the "Yuppies" or Young Urban Professionals(ies).  "Upwardly mobile" with the long "i" in mobile was their mantra.  They turned in their hippie beads and the VW microbuses for Gucci rings and baby Mercedes and the like and saved almost nothing.  They helped run their companies the way they ran their own finances.  The economy started to really go downhill in the 90's when the upper managers from the WWII and Korean War era started to retire.  The "Boomers" as we are called now didn't change the style of running the companies as they did back in the Yuppie era.  And today's slide?  The conditions were so bad in the early 'aughts that we did not know until what I call the 9-11 trigger.  The government started to tightened regs not only with travel, but how companies handle the money.  When the audits were through, those companies found out that they did not have any real capital to run their companies, just paper tigers!  One by one they shut down and put a lot of us on the streets.
  I don't really pan or exault the über rich that made it themselves.  They will always be there, especially during a downturn.  People like Skilling, Boesky, Lay, Madoff and others are the real greedy ba****ds who put us here.  Who knew?  I keep telling people to look in the mirror, have a really hard look in the mirror. We all knew that this was going to happen but the 99 and 44/100% of us could not do a thing because we let it slide earlier with the loose regs and spending habits.  I've been doing a lot of pro bono work at my expense since 9-11.  I am sitting here with the HRT kicking in, starting to cry because I cannot help my neighbor right now.  Deus Irae.
  Joelene

QuoteI told her that I am in the same boat and I didn't have anything.

Economic growth is just like cancer. We can not grow forever, yet the population went up from 200 million in 1964 to 308 million now. The resources simply are not on earth to support that many people. We all suffer from too many people on the planet. More than half live on less than 2 dollars a day. Yet we have no problem extracting wealth from them buying products made by slaves. We have lived above our means to the tune of 14 trillion and we have run out of credit as our children can not pay.

Many went to public school and have been conditioned consumers through operant conditioning. We have been lied to by our government to fight wars for corporations. We have not questioned our media and people on the ballots. We got lazy with TV and entertainment and have not gone to public government meetings. We have been irresponsible in researching for placing our votes. We deserve to be fleeced by people doing wealth extraction.

Seeing you don't have compulsory voting in the US, a lot of the people most affected will not bother to vote because they won't believe that real change is possible.  So not much will change.  Being required to vote means you can't be prevented or "discouraged" from voting.
Australia survived the Asian meltdown  and the GFC because we have enough regulation to generally stop the worst excesses, without stifling things like the EU's worst regulations.

Quote from: lisagurl on March 07, 2011, 06:42:06 PM
Grow your own food and build your own shelter and forget giving you hard work to either the government or corporations.

Try that and there will be someone there telling you to get off "their" land, or that you don't have a permit to build that hut, or that sleeping outside is illegal even if you're homeless. That approach worked back in the days when a person could head out west and farm or mine a piece of land without being bothered (at least most of the time), but those days are long gone. If I could sail to a new land away from the corruption like my ancestors did I would, but that is not possible in this age.

Quote from: lisagurl on March 07, 2011, 07:40:15 PM
The resources simply are not on earth to support that many people.

This is the real problem, and it is the reason why the grow your own food strategy will no longer work. There is simply not enough room for everyone to have their own patch, so most are denied the chance outright. There are really only two high level solutions: either expand to other planets or seriously reduce our resource consumption. Both would take a huge investment, but I think the biggest hurdle will be simply getting started. The first solution would give our species some insulation against a future extinction-level event (something humanity must take seriously if we care about our long-term survival), but some consumption reduction will most likely still be required. The bottom line is that the human population is currently unstable. If we don't do something about it, Nature will, and we won't like what happens.

QuoteIf I could sail to a new land away from the corruption like my ancestors did I would, but that is not possible in this age.

There is still homesteading in Alaska. You can also share crop. Life is not impossible just hard work. People are always looking for excuses to be irresponsible.

If you don't like your government and/or the way it works.  If your politicians piss you off.  If you feel like going someplace else is better than staying here...

You have no one else to blame but yourself if you don't vote the bastards out.

Screw the two party system.  Don't take the "I'll waste my vote voting for _____" attitude.  Vote against rather than for someone you don't believe in.  The only way to get these tax revenue leeches out is to VOTE them out.

Something like 40% of the US identifies as independent.  But they don't vote that way!  Maybe if they did we wouldn't keep seeing the same old shuffle step.

Thank you very much for posting this, hon.

Finally, somebody is paying attention.  You see, I'm leaving this forum and the other transforum I belong to because one cannot speak the truth on either of them.  I'm tired of being the maverick.  I'm tired of being hated.  I'm tired of being laughed at.  Hey, take a hike!

While people on these forums are worrying about tucking, lipstick and nail polish, I'm mired in the real world.  When I was 15 years old, I became aware of what's going on, and THIS is why I did NOT achieve mightily.  I refused to be a part of it in a Mahatma Ghandi fashion by NOT participating in it. 

Of the thousands of people on here, maybe a handful of you will watch this vid.  It's 2 hours, 39 minutes and 53 seconds long.  Yeah, it's as long as a long feature-length movie.  You can expand it to full-screen size.  I recommend that you do and like Dr. Timothy Leary said back in the 1960s:

Tune in.  Turn on.  Drop out. 

Hardly anyone really knew what he was talking about.  Check it out:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4430543376785758889#

Farewell & Godspeed

    Lacey Lynne

Quote from: lisagurl on March 07, 2011, 02:12:29 PM
Greed is not only a sickness of the rich. The poor make themselves poorer buying things made in China because they are cheaper. That means the poor have no problem paying people 80 cents an hour to get more.

It's worse than you think.  The reason people will work for 80 cents an hour is because ten of their neighbors are willing to work the same job for 70 cents an hour.  The poor are scrambling over themselves to put bread on the table (if they even have a table) when what they really need to do is band together against the corporations that exploit them.

Some poor bloke in another country is working for pennies on the dollar for some company that is going to markup the product in our inflated currency so they can make unreasonable profits while appearing to sell us a product at a "reasonable" price.

Quote from: lisagurlThere is still homesteading in Alaska. You can also share crop. Life is not impossible just hard work. People are always looking for excuses to be irresponsible.

Oh, wow.  Alaska.  Some place where 99% of the land is controlled by the federal government.  Yeah, that sounds like a great place to make a homestead.  Forgive me for not leaping into an airplane with blueprints for a home in hand.

At least it's better than Australia, where the government wants to control every plant that you can extract DMT from.  Last time I checked, that was just about every plant in existence.  The fact that the Australian government thinks they can prevent people from extracting DMT from random pieces of grass only shows that their desire for control greatly exceeds their knowledge of the physical world they are attempting to control.

So you'll have to forgive me for not moving to either Alaska, or Australia.

Quote from: justmeinozSeeing you don't have compulsory voting in the US, a lot of the people most affected will not bother to vote because they won't believe that real change is possible.  So not much will change.

With Obama, we got change.  It hasn't helped much.

Quote from: Lacey LynneYou see, I'm leaving this forum and the other transforum I belong to because one cannot speak the truth on either of them.

People don't like the truth, because it is harsh.  When I speak the truth, I am called a pessimist.  When I speak a lie, people nod their heads as if they know what is going on.  It's no wonder the populations of nations are pawns to occult interests.  People make it way too easy for the intellectuals and the rich to abuse them.

Quote from: Lacey Lynne on March 08, 2011, 10:49:57 PM
Thank you very much for posting this, hon.

Finally, somebody is paying attention.  You see, I'm leaving this forum and the other transforum I belong to because one cannot speak the truth on either of them.  I'm tired of being the maverick.  I'm tired of being hated.  I'm tired of being laughed at.  Hey, take a hike!

While people on these forums are worrying about tucking, lipstick and nail polish, I'm mired in the real world.  When I was 15 years old, I became aware of what's going on, and THIS is why I did NOT achieve mightily.  I refused to be a part of it in a Mahatma Ghandi fashion by NOT participating in it. 

Of the thousands of people on here, maybe a handful of you will watch this vid.  It's 2 hours, 39 minutes and 53 seconds long.  Yeah, it's as long as a long feature-length movie.  You can expand it to full-screen size.  I recommend that you do and like Dr. Timothy Leary said back in the 1960s:

Tune in.  Turn on.  Drop out. 

Hardly anyone really knew what he was talking about.  Check it out:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4430543376785758889#

Farewell & Godspeed

    Lacey Lynne

Good post, Lacey. I'm of the same mind also. I'm working with a group looking to create an indepedent media that addresses the concerns of ordingary people. I'm paying attention to what's happening in Wisconsin and other places. My concern is that this protests will be usurped by the two parties. My feeling is that every one whose part of this two party system have to go.

Gennee[/font]

I always told people that the Savings and Loan crisis/theft was just a dry-run rehearsal for getting the big banks.  I tragically did not have the creativity that they did, they got the real estate as part of the bargain.  What has gone on, and is going on, is the largest transfer of wealth the world has ever seen.  In many ways it's been done as outright theft. 

Obama, the huge disservice that the tea party idiots are doing is trying to paint him as some radical Mao-Mao extremest, when in fact, he's just like the rest of the people that have been doing this.  He's part of the corporate ruling class, Harvard Law does not graduate Mao-Mao extremists, they graduate the corporate ruling class.  The problem isn't that he's some sort of liberal (he's not) but that the solutions put forward are not near liberal enough.

Health care is easy.  We don't even have to write some huge new law.  Just ask Germany or France to send us over a copy of theirs.  They have it worked out.  No need to reinvent the wheel.  Single-payer government-regulated health care works well, and it's cheaper than what we're doing by a long shot.  But that idea, single-payer - the basic system used by just about every other industrialized nation in the world (except England) - wasn't even proposed or talked about.  Such is the power of the corporations in the US.

But what they really control is all the news, hence 'the debate' as they would like to see it.  There are no shocking exposes on corporate power, no questioning of how that system became the default 'the system'?  Everybody is bitching about teacher and people at the DMV, but the real spending is in defense, and it's HUGE!  HUGE!  The money we have tossed at Iraq and Afghanistan - not to mention how lavishly we spread it everywhere else too, mostly as weapons - 'cause we're your pal! That money is enough to finance just about anything our hearts desire.

The amount of money we have spend on defense issues since WWII has been staggering.  But no cutting back there.  Nope, it's those damn teachers, with their summers off to paint houses and work in resorts - those bastards!

It is time we listen to our forefathers.

Quote from: Declaration of IndependanceWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

If you don't like the way things are do in Washington.  Vote the bastards out of office.

QuoteSo you'll have to forgive me for not moving to either Alaska, or Australia.

Beggars can not be choosy. Nothing in this life is without strings attached. Not health care not education and not income. They all take advantage of people being ignorant.

We need to stop asking for things and do them our selves.