It enrages me that our political and media dialogue about the economy seems to ignore the dirty little secret that is central both to the current "recession" and the longer term trends.
Bottom line is that a tiny fraction of the wealthiest members of the oligarchy and Corporate America have been systematically LOOTING the rest of us for years by eliminating jobs, cutting wages and benefits and fueling a concentration of wealth and power into the hands of corporate monopolies and wealthy financial con artists.
And we -- the American people -- have let them do this to us. On the right, the Republicans and their right-wing, teabagging, "Jesus was an entrepreneur" fanatics have convinced a sizable majority of Americans to the support indecent and immoral economic policies and social values that allowed this to happen.
On the left, the mainstream Democrats have not even tried to counter the lies or fight for at least a basic liberal/progressive counterbalance to the right wing corporate noise machine.
Thus, this recession has enshrined the growing gap between the "Have Everythings" and the ever growing ranks of the "Have Nothings"
A tiny fraction of the Rich keep getting richer, while the Middle Class is destroyed as more and more working people are pushed into ever-growing Underclass. And Corporate America is sitting on pots of money, but refusing to let their profits "trickle down" into the majority of the economy. But still the lies of Faux News and the GOP remain uncontested in the public dialogue.
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The Dirty Little Secret has been acknowledged by prominent people at opposite ends of the spectrum in the last few days....
On the right, we have Alan Greenspan. I am no fan of him, but even HE referred to this today on Meet the Press by acknowledging that we do have "two economies" now. One economy of the wealthy and the corporate, who have seen their fortunes do well recently, while the Other Economy -- the vast majority of the population, continues to decline and face worse and worse financial struggles.
At the other end of the spectrum is the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. In a must-read column he wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/opinion/31herbert.html?_r=2&hp Excerpt:
A Sin and a Shame
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 30, 2010
The treatment of workers by American corporations has been worse — far more treacherous — than most of the population realizes. There was no need for so many men and women to be forced out of their jobs in the downturn known as the great recession. Many of those workers were cashiered for no reason other than outright greed by corporate managers. And that cruel, irresponsible, shortsighted policy has resulted in widespread human suffering and is doing great harm to the economy.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Andrew Sum, an economics professor and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. “Not only did they throw all these people off the payrolls, they also cut back on the hours of the people who stayed on the job.”
As Professor Sum studied the data coming in from the recession, he realized that the carnage that occurred in the workplace was out of proportion to the economic hit that corporations were taking. While no one questions the severity of the downturn — the worst of the entire post-World War II period — the economic data show that workers to a great extent were shamefully exploited....
(CUT)
Worker productivity has increased dramatically, but the workers themselves have seen no gains from their increased production. It has all gone to corporate profits. This is unprecedented in the postwar years, and it is wrong. Having taken everything for themselves, the corporations are so awash in cash they don’t know what to do with it all. Citing a recent article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Professor Sum noted that in July cash at the nation’s nonfinancial corporations stood at $1.84 trillion, a 27 percent increase over early 2007. Moody’s has pointed out that as a percent of total company assets, cash has reached a level not seen in the past half-century.
Executives are delighted with this ill-gotten bonanza....
...MORE
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