Wall Street may be "recovering", but Main Street certainly isn't. The unemployment rate continues to rise, the cost of living keeps getting higher, wages are stagnant, and the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.
Don't kid yourself; there will not be a TRUE recovery to this recession until we fix the very real and urgent problem of today's stratified class system and its income inequality.
Such is the truth. Not since the 1920s have we had so lopsided a boom -- a boom so completely dedicated to the enrichment of the upper 10% of income-getters and to ensuring that those who get the highest incomes have no responsibility toward anyone. The Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality of income, for most of Europe is somewhere between .25 and .35; for the United States it is around .40. We now have the same sort of economic stratification that Mexico has. Such reflects the economic values of Dubya and his backers.
We had an administration that believed that if the Right People got everything, then miracles would happen for the rest of us. Profits would have to come first, and only those who got the profits or were the best-paid retainers deputized to squeeze and cheat others out of all possibility of happiness achieved what they deemed necessary, then there would be such prosperity that all questions of equity would become irrelevant.
The capacity for elites to never cease in their rapaciousness amazes me. I have yet to know of a tycoon who has said that he has made enough. The most exploitative elites -- mobsters, swindlers, feudal lords, and corrupt politicians -- never find that they have made enough even though they do great harm and wreck the system whence they derive their lucre.
...Did you know that 20,000 Americans
die each year because they can't afford their medicines or medical treatments? That's roughly half the toll from motor vehicle accidents.
