SHOCKING INCOME INEQUALITY REPORT DROWNED BY MEDIA NOISE

As our mainstream media continues to abuse us with nonsensical blow-by-blow accounts by blowhard headline-grabbing louts, this story received scant attention:

Scary New Wage Data

As millions of Americans lost jobs, homes, and life savings in the Great Recession of 2009, the highest-paid earners saw their average incomes rise more than five-fold in a single year. According to new data, the 74 highest income earners – the uppermost income bracket as measured by the Social Security Administration -- saw their average incomes skyrocket from $91.8 million in 2008 to a staggering $518.8 million in 2009:

These 74 people earned an average of $10 million -- per week. Meanwhile, half of all American wage earners, or about 75 million people, earned less than $505 per week.

An abrupt change in tax and economic policies started under the Reagan administration, conflated by Bush era tax cuts, made this possible. Three decades of Reaganomics have crippled the base of the income ladder while adding a burdensome weight at the top. The result is an unstable and unsustainable structure awaiting collapse.

Meanwhile the Republican Party and their tea party rabble are clamoring for more tax cuts and an indiscriminate dismantling of the social safety net for middle class Americans.  If our mainstream media had done a better job of informing the public, perhaps voters would be making more intelligent choices this November.  Fat chance!

The recovery will not be televised

Throughout the rule of Dubya, the game was about denying the cancer eating at the economy: the lack of job growth, the exploding debt, the declining revenue. We saw articles proving that it was the "Liberals" who were endangering the economy with their gloomy predictions. Fox told us that the predominance of negative economic reports was proof, not of negative economic implications, but of the Liberal bias of the media. When a certain amount of reality was unavoidably showing through the flimsy screen, it was Bill Clinton's fault.

As with the 11 year sunspot cycle, each resurgence of activity arrives with a reversed magnetic polarity and of course the game now is to show that any signs of recovery that can't be ignored, repressed or misrepresented will be buried under hyperbole and deceitful numbers. Since employment levels only begin to fall long after a recovery, we will hear no end of talk about it from the fair and balanced folk and of course we will hear about reckless government spending -- as we always do under a Democratic administration, even when the budget is balanced. The recovery will not be televised, if it's acknowledged at all.

The bulls are loose on Wall Street following increased consumer spending and investor confidence in the recovery. Banks are beginning to lend to small businesses again. Leading indicators are up for three consecutive months now, the wild and reckless TARP program is returning a profit while the folks who brought about the nosedive are still howling about Nancy Pelosi's Job Killing Bill, making fictitious claims about spending levels and other hypertrophied hyperbole as though we hadn't lost more jobs and shipped them overseas when they last had the reins and were telling the Liberals to stop 'whining.'

They're never going to admit that a catastrophe has been avoided, that we could have had 25% unemployment again or a decade of deep depression and a poverty level we haven't seen since the 1930's. No, not until they get back into power, that is and we can return to administrative bloat, runaway defense spending, borrowing against the fatuous promise of increased revenues from top bracket tax cuts and giving Wall Street and banking pirates, mining, drilling, food and drug and insurance companies free reign. Things will be all right then and we can be sure that doing what caused 1929 crash and the more recent crash will not happen again even if we do the same things that caused both. Only a stupid liberal would believe such a thing.

A poor sort of memory

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?*

No, I'm not that bad off by any means, but there was a time, not long ago, when I bought yachts and sports cars and houses on a whim; gave houses and condos to my kids without the slightest worry and used the Queen Mary the way some people take the bus. I should have worried. I should have heeded the warning I gave my handful of readers: George W. Bush and the Republicans are playing a shell game with the economy. They're the house, we're the rubes and the house always wins.

Of course I was laughed at. I no longer hear from the guffawing gulls who insisted I was further to the left than Chairman Mao, that the market was sound, the war was going to pay for itself, that "Liberals" were not only focusing on the negative, but trying to precipitate a market panic just to make St George the Genius and God's favorite son look bad so they could bring on an era of Socialist/Fascist oppression. They've long since invented a new mythology to hide what they said and did; how I was right and they were wrong.

Of course we Liberals were being quite conservative in worrying about the fact that Reaganesque tax cuts have always done just what they just did again: worrying that trying to finance the most expensive war ( toldya so) we've had by depending on a solidly disproved dogma, by borrowing abroad rather than domestically and firing anyone who suggested fiscal or military foresight, worrying that the light at the end of the tunnel only they could see, was only the fires of fiscal hell.

Debt doesn't matter,
Don't you know,
St. Ron the Reagan told us so.

The born-again believers are washed clean and born again into a new mythos, one where the Black Satan caused the massive recession which continues to deepen because of government spending that used to be good but now is bad. That means that economists who say that not only has a 1929 reprise been averted, but it's slowly getting better are the new Liberals talking down the economy by talking it up. If you're a TeaParty twit, you need things to be getting worse and indeed they do believe. They need to believe that their taxes went up with Obama and believe they do.

'The market is up, all's well with the world' won't be their Christmas carol again this year. Even though the market is up -- the Teabaggers think it's not and is going down. They insist the recession is deepening, that we have a tyrant in office and they insist their taxes are up when they aren't. They still rage about Death Panels and rally around the Witch of Wasilla like she were Joan of Arc.

That means that a conservative approach to economic realities is once again seditious, once again farleftliberal propaganda and those liberal people from Business Week must be talking up the economy to undermine freedom, prosperity and free enterprise.

"If Obama was a Republican, we would hear a never-ending drumbeat of news stories about markets voting in favor of the President." says Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist for Miller Tabak + Co.

It's just the kind of farleftliberal stuff you might expect from an institutional trading firm in Jew Controlled New York rather than the illiterate hordes sucking up seditious stupidity from the teats of Mother Fox who know better.

"It's a poor sort of memory that works only backwards," said the Queen to Alice,

but of course she wasn't American and couldn't be expected to understand.


* "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," lyrics by Yip Harburg, music by Jay Gorney (1931)

A GHOST OF DEPRESSION PAST

(Double click on the image for a larger view)

Fellow creatures above and below the waves: We have managed to retrace the route of the Great Depression and repeat the same mistakes as if we learned nothing from history.

Marriner S. Eccles served as Franklin Roosevelt's Chairman of the Federal Reserve from November 1934 to February 1948. In his memoir, Beckoning Frontiers (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), he offered his opinion of what caused the Great Depression:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth -- not of existing wealth, but of wealth as it is currently produced -- to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation's economic machinery.

Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

Sound familiar? In essence, Bush's economic policies created conditions similar to those that triggered the Great Depression. From 2001 through 2007, the American economy grew by 31%, but the increase in wealth was not fairly or evenly distributed throughout the economy. After-tax income for corporate CEOs grew 40 to 400%; whereas average income for middle class wage earners declined 3% during the same period.

Factoring in rising costs of energy, food, education, and health care, which rose faster than the base inflationary rate, what do get? A middle class that can no longer serve as the engine for economic recovery. Thus, the real reason behind our economic crisis is the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many ... just like it was almost 80 years ago.