Yesterday I commented on Robert Reich's book, After Shock, in which he urged us to recognize the fundamental cause of the 2007-2008 Great Recession lay in our imbalanced economy in which income and wealth is becoming more concentrated and consolidated in the hands of wealthy elites, while the vast majority of Americans are stagnating or struggling just to hold even. Others have noticed the long-term consequences of such substantial income and wealth inequalities. For example, Charles Hugh Smith writes, on of two minds.com, Apr. 20, 2011, about "The Fundamental INjustice that is Poisoning the Nation."
There is a fundamental injustice that is poisoning the soul of the nation, and if it is not openly addressed then the nation will face the explosive consequences of institutionalized injustice. (bolding in original)
Simply put, it is this: those responsible for the nation's financial crisis and its catastrophic after-effects are not paying for the consequences of their actions--it is the innocent, those who were not responsible, who are paying the price.
You can call it whatever you want: the Anarchy of the Super-Rich (as per Paul Farrell), the Financial Power Elite, the financial Oligarchy, Plutocracy or Corporatocracy, or the unprecedented concentration of financial wealth and political power in a financialized post-industrial economy. Whatever you call it, we all know this class of financiers and its minions got away with high financial crimes.
The biggest quibble I have with this is that it limits the "crime" to the "financiers and its minions." In truth, the guilty are the entire upper crust--CEOs, CFOs and other high-priced managers of multinational corporations and the wealthy elite who own most of the stock, municipal bonds and other financial assets--who continue to benefit extraordinarily from the low cost of borrowing, offshoring, de-unionization, privatization, deficit-focus, and "entitlement narrowing" mentality that has been pushed by right-wing think tanks who still proclaim that just getting government out of the way (including by use of the favored three: deregulation, privatization, and tax cuts) so the free market decides winners and losers will create jobs and stimulate growth. Of course, in this age of "truthiness" rather than truth-telling, none of the pushers bother to acknowledge that the favored three policies have apparently had exactly the opposite effect throughout the four decades of the reagonomics experiment--more concentration of wealth and income at the top; puny economic growth; and fewer jobs (and especially fewer good jobs) for the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Smith goes on to make the point that I have been hammering with my focus on democratic egalitarianism--unless we ride herd on the forces that are consolidating wealth at the top, using tax policy and other policies to do so, we face the rapid deterioration of the institutions that make possible a democratic society.
[T]he really catastrophic losses are to the foundations of democracy and the economy. Democracy has been subverted--...--and the economy has been incentivized to favor poisonously addictive financialization and the shadow institutions of corruption, fraud, embezzlement, favoritism, collusion and misrepresentation of risk. This might be summarized as the protection of vested interests, engineered and overseen by the partnership of the ever more intrusive Central State and the nation's Financial Power Elite.
There is a second part to this fundamental injustice: look who will pay for the bailouts, guarantees and the interest on the borrowed trillions. ... Those who the Central State can easily tap: taxpayers who earn most of their income from wages, and those politically weak players dependent on government payments.
Now that the bills of the bailout are coming due, the State isn't going after GE for more taxes. ... No, the politically easy thing to do is raise taxes on wage earners and trim entitlements, because all the government needs to do is send down the orders and it is done: the taxes are withheld and the bennies trimmed.
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