🚀 go-pugleaf

On 9/10/2011 1:36 AM, Billy wrote:
> In article
> <3ae4adfd-0328-4b93-8d57-cda1fc4aa5ab@u26g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>,
>   brad herschel<bradherschel@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> On Sep 7, 2:48 pm, chatnoir<wolfbat3...@mindspring.com>  wrote:
>>> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20102289-503544.html?tag=reddit
>>>
>>> headline:
>>>
>>> Left behind in America: Who's to blame for the wealth divide?
>>> By Brian Montopoli
>>>
>>> Take a moment and think about how you feel wealth should, ideally, be
>>> spread among the American people.
>>>
>>> If you're like the average respondent in a 2010 Harvard Business
>>> School/Duke University study, your response was this: The richest top
>>> 20 percent of society, as determined by net worth, should control 32
>>> percent of the wealth. The bottom 20 percent should control about ten
>>> percent. And the rest should be spread out among the 60 percent in the
>>> middle, with higher-earners taking a slightly larger share.
>>>
>>> It probably won't surprise you to hear that those figures don't match
>>> reality. But you might well be shocked by just how far off they are.
>>> In the study, Americans were asked how they thought wealth was
>>> actually distributed; they estimated that the top 20 percent
>>> controlled about 59 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom
>>> controlled about three percent.
>>>
>>> That wasn't even close: In reality, the top 20 percent controlled
>>> about 84 percent of the wealth, while the bottom quintile controlled
>>> just 0.1 percent. The combined net worth of the bottom 40 percent, in
>>> fact, accounted for just 0.3 percent of the nation's wealth. (See
>>> chart below, where that bottom 40 percent doesn't even show up.) ...
>>> (cont)
>>
>> Remove the unproductive Blacks and Hispanics from the equation.
>> Another story.
>>
>> http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/  The Occidental Observer
>
> As everyone must know by now, the above is a white power, racist organ.
>
> <http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/9/rebuilt_ground_zero_billed_as_natio
> nal>
> SCOTT PAUL: Yeah, it�s a good question. It�s the right question to ask,
> Juan. And it is a fact that German manufacturing workers are paid an
> average of $48 an hour. In the United States, the average for
> manufacturing workers is $32 an hour. Germany has a national healthcare
> system. As you know, we do not. Germany has thick regulation, a much
> more progressive tax system than the United States does, yet Germany
> thrives in manufacturing. Germany has held its share of manufacturing
> throughout the last decade, while China has risen, and the U.S. has
> dramatically declined, in fact by one-third just over the last decade.
>
> And the reason is because Germany has an industrial policy. Its leaders,
> of all the parties, believe that manufacturing is central to the
> performance of its economy, and it actually weathered the recession a
> lot better than the United States has. And there�s a lesson to be
> learned there, that there is a high road to economic development, where
> you can build your middle class, have a unionized work force, if you�re
> willing to put a focus on something like industrial production rather
> than on oil and gas subsidies or other things that don�t have nearly as
> much benefit for the American economy.
>
> -----
>
> Death of the Liberal Class
> by Chris Hedges (Oct 17, 2010)
> <http://www.amazon.com/Death-Liberal-Class-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586442/ref
> =sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304804162&sr=1-1>
> (Available at a library near you.)
>
>
> Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He
> promised that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall
> Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer
> following the financial crisis. It did not. The Federal Deposit Insurance
> Corporation (FDIC) admitted that banks have reduced lending at the
> sharpest rate since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would
> filibuster amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
> (FISA), which retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of
> millions of American citizens without warrant; instead, he supported
> passage of that legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops
> from Iraq, close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, end torture,
> restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus, pass a health-care bill
> with a robust public option, and create new jobs. Some troops have been
> withdrawn, slowly and piecemeal, from Iraq, but other than this too-
> little-too-late process, almost none of his promises has been kept.
>
> He shoved a health-care bill down our throats that will mean ever-
> rising co-pays, deductibles, and premiums and leave most of the
> seriously ill bankrupt and unable to afford medical care. Obama, after
> promising meaningful environmental reform, did nothing to halt the
>
> PERMANENT WAR / 27
>
> collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference, a decision that
> ended perhaps our final chance to save the planet from the catastrophic
> effects of climate change. He empowers Israel's brutal apartheid
> regime. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where
> hundreds of civilians, including entire families, have been slaughtered
> by sophisticated weaponry such as drones and the AGM-144 Hellfire
> missile, which sucks the air out of its victims' lungs. He is delivering
> war and death to Yemen, Somalia, and, perhaps soon, he will bring it to
> Iran. Obama is part of the political stagecraft that trades in
> perceptions of power rather than real power.
>
> The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth
> upward in U.S. history, the deregulation that resulted in the environ-
> mental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and the egregious assault on civil
> liberties�begun under George W. Bush�raise only a flicker of protest
> from the liberal class. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally
> disabled. They appear not to feel. They do not recognize the legitimate
> anger of those who have been dispossessed. They retreat instead into
> the dead talk of policy and analysis. The Tea Party protesters, the
> myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath
> Keepers, and myriad groups of armed patriots have brought into their
> ranks legions of dispossessed workers, angry libertarians, John
> Birchers, and many others who, until now, were never politically active.
>
> The three-thousand-word suicide note left by Joe Stack, who flew
> his Piper Dakota into an Internal Revenue Service office in Austin,
> Texas, on February 18, 2010, murdering an IRS worker and injuring
> thirteen others, two seriously, expressed the frustration of tens of mil-
> lions of workers over the treachery of global corporations and a liberal
> class that abandoned them.4
>
> Stack, in his note, remembered that when he was an eighteen- or
> nineteen-year-old student living in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he
> occupied an apartment next to an elderly widow. The woman had been
> married to a steel worker, who, Stack wrote, "had worked all his life in
> the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business
> and the union that, for his thirty years of service, he would have a
> pension,and medical care to look forward to in his retirement." But the
> worker, got nothing "because the incompetent mill management and corrupt
>
> 28 / DEATH OF THE LIBERAL CLASS
>
> union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and
> stole their retirement." The widow survived on Social Security.
>
> "In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was liv-
> ing on peanut butter-and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to
> splurge) for months at a time," he wrote:
>
> When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse
> for her plight than for my own (I,'after all, thought I had everything
> in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we
> exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations,
> when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me
> that I would be "healthier" eating cat food (like her) rather than
> trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn't
> quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn't
> trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take
> responsibility for my own future and myself.
There are some probably many now that have lost the American Dream to 
the extent of living in tents, old RV's, in shantys put together of 
whatever they can find, in the woods and elsewhere. The sales of cat and 
dog food is up.
Many years ago some of us took as many as we could budget, under wing 
to, make sure they had decent food to eat. Their Social Security was all 
they had. Some didn't even have that. Some didn't use heat as they 
couldn't afford the electric bill. The reasons and they were there were 
out of their reach to control. It's always been with us but it became a 
larger problem, around 1990 just as the Illegal Alien invasion started 
big time. People that made their lives,in orchards, construction and 
just honest hard work were thrown out of work and Illegals went to work 
in their place.
Greater poverty is on it's way. Actually it is here. Family and some 
resources they have toward what would have been retirement are dwindling 
down. We are headed for a two class society. The Global or Foreign 
Investor class and the rest of Americans. Even the professional will see 
their opportunity and pay check depend on investment more than their 
profession. Everybody else will live in an economy of debt or servitude 
to Banks.