Robert Scheer: Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed

from truthdig:



Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed

Posted on Oct 26, 2011
By Robert Scheer


It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.

Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.

Those three decades of rampant upper-crust greed unleashed by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s will be well marked by future historians recording the death of the American dream. In that decisive historical period the middle class began to evaporate and the nation’s income gap increased to alarming proportions. “As a result of that uneven growth,” the CBO explained, “the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979: The share of income accruing to higher-income households increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined. ... The share of after-tax household income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income more than doubled. ...”

That was before the 2008 meltdown that ushered in the massive increase in unemployment and housing foreclosures that further eroded the standard of living of the vast majority of Americans while the superrich rewarded themselves with immense bonuses. To stress the role of the financial industry in this march to greater income inequality as the Occupy Wall Street movement has done is not a matter of ideology or rhetoric, but, as the CBO report details, a matter of discernible fact. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thirty_years_of_unleashed_greed_20111026/

(to the tune of Sting's "We Work the Black Seam", from his 1984 album "Dream of the Blue Turtles")

This world has changed for good
Your corporate Commie theory said it would
It's hard for us to understand
We can't give up our jobs the way we should
Your obscene profits reek
We’re training our replacements as we speak
We matter more than dollars and cents
Your corporate Commie theory makes no sense

One day in a globalized age
They may understand our rage
They lay off workers they can't control
And bury the truth in their twisted souls
Middle-aged folks were to be let go
Younger workers were paid too low
Unbridled greed for 30 years let this cancer grow
We work the factories together

The crumbling plants abound
Three trillion bucks of profits shut them down
We walked through pristine forest lands
And paved a million miles with our hands
Your foreign sweatshop mills
Have murdered all our manufacturing skills
You can't exchange an outsourced hand
For all the blackened air in Michigan

One day in a globalized age
They may understand our rage
They lay off workers they can't control
And bury the truth in their twisted souls
Middle-aged folks were to be let go
Younger workers were paid too low
Unbridled greed for 30 years let this cancer grow
We work the factories together

Your evil runs so deep
You’re terrorizing Congress while we sleep
Should corporate greed accelerate
There will exist no more United States

One day in a globalized age
They may understand our rage
They lay off workers they can't control
And bury the truth in their twisted souls
Middle-aged folks were to be let go
Younger workers were paid too low
Unbridled greed for 30 years let this cancer grow
We work the factories together
_________________________________________

I'll have to come up with a worthy rewrite of a new song to express my anger at this emerging neoliberal tyranny of corporate greed.

on edit: provided link to original Sting song lyrics

Thanks for the thread, marmmar.