• Four hundred families now own $1.27 trillion of the wealth in the United States. Their average annual income in 2007 was $345 million each. Their tax rates which have been cut in half over the last 15 years are now 16.6%.[1]
• The top 10% of income ‘earners’ in 2007 received very close to 50% of all income in the U.S. Such top decile families have annual incomes above $109,000.[2]

What is interesting here is the spread between the ‘400’ and their average of $345 million a year and the lowest income that makes the top decile, $109,000 annually. Quite obviously in order to skew the statistics that greatly other figures are decisive:

^· 24% of income went to 1% of the population.

^· 6% of all earnings went to 0.1% of the population, about 15,000 families. They make at least $11.5 million a year.[3]

^· Each of the 400 is worth at least $1 billion.[4]

^· Just as impressive is this concentration of wealth for the top 10% has climbed steadily since 1978 from 33% to the present 50%

^· From 1980 to 2005, 80% of total income went to the top 1% of income earners.

^· Even though economic productivity increased by 20% from 2001 to the present, NONE of the remuneration for that increase reached middle and lower income people whose wages remained stagnant.[5]

Paul Krugman has called it all The Great Divergence in his book by that name.[6]

Mainstream economists have labored strenuously to find explanations for this distortion of value in the nation’s income in market value terms. Few, if any have done so successfully though they have tried. The reason for the expenditure of energy was so that no important group or class could be blamed. As for any suggestions for everyday people in coping with such a shrinking and stressing of their lives, Raghuram G. Rajan, a business school professor at the University of Chicago, has argued that “let them eat credit” has been the political establishment’s answer to this reprehensible condition.[7]

Inequality has been the result. Inequality that has surpassed that of the early 1900s when that ‘golden age’ of blatant wealth of the upper 1% garnered only 18% of national income compared to today’s 24%. Why did an American public stand for it? Lie down for it would be more descriptive. There were riots in the early 1900s, massive strikes and protest. Nothing today compares though the robbery has been greater. Perhaps there is a partial explanation in the following chart by Professor Rajan derived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[8]

The crucial evidence is in the 4^th and 5^th columns. A public which is seeing its wages apparently rising by the amounts in the 4^th column may well think it is doing better without realizing that inflation is stealing their income in gobs. And of course, this relationship had been going on for far longer than 2002, since at least 1980. Only the 1% and 0.1% portion of the 90^th percentile were making mammoth gains as invisible to the everyday citizenry as it is in this chart

Thus a country’s citizens who believe themselves to be free are in the most danger of entering servitude. A situation, of course, which approaches slavery when no end of the condition is contracted for and everyone is chained in place for health benefits, staring at high unemployment rates around them and with very little discretion as to choice or a sufficient savings cushion to carry them through a change in employment even if they took the risk.

The coming election watered as it is by corporate wealth is shaping up to be a battle for reality. The reality is that the nation is democratic only in name and theory, but has become a peasantry of indentured servants. As such the vast majority are beholden to shrinking wages offered by wealthy oligarchs fattened in their expansive homes seeing nothing as they ride in their too many limousines. To avoid any revelation of that reality, the wealthy are extending every effort and mountains of money to make a smokescreen of unreality. The ranting claims being made paid for by corporations or their ruling plutocrats seek to obscure who was responsible for and who controlled and still controls our deadbeat economy and therefore who damages our squashed lives within it.

In this swamp of national existence whatever opposition exists or arises against it cannot proceed by merely twitching and feeling good, spewing flammable rhetoric and anger sky high and feeling satisfied by whatever destruction they cause. It must be about the people reinstating their rightful place and obtaining their rightful control by demanding intelligent public policy that benefits everyone. That means shrinking inequality by a clear transparency of economic knowledge made available to the general public at regular intervals. That public must then make that identity for itself that has the organization and the will to demand that capitalism be either democratized or recognized as an illegitimate social and economic system.