Two Economies in America
This is a tale of two economies.
In one of these economies, employees on Wall Street are pulling in record salaries that average around $1 million.
In the other economy, workers’ wages are falling. “Pay cuts are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression,” writes Louis Uchitelle of The New York Times.
In the one economy, J.P. Morgan Chase is reporting a quarterly profit of $3.59 billion.
In the other economy, foreclosures are going through the roof.
In the one economy, the stock market flirts with the 10,000 mark.
In the other economy, 9.8 percent of Americans are officially out of work, and the actual number is almost twice that many, especially when you count the underemployed.
One economy is for the rich and the upper middle class.
The other economy is for everybody else.
And the people running the economy of the rich are the rich themselves. Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, has surrounded himself with people who made a fortune on Wall Street. His predecessor, Hank Paulson, headed up Goldman Sachs.
Is it any wonder, then, that they fixed the economy of the rich, and let the other one go?
And still today, Congress has not passed a bill outlawing the crazy and crooked trading on Wall Street that got us into this mess.
Because Congress consists largely of the rich, or those on retainer for the rich.
One member of Congress who isn’t in either category is Senator Bernie Sanders.
In a speech at Fighting Bob Fest in Wisconsin last month, he said: “The great cause of this crisis is the incredible greed and selfishness that exists in the ruling elite of America.”
Despite all the wreckage which that elite has created over the last two years, we are no closer to curbing the greed and selfishness.
Until we do so, we will remain a country of two economies.
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We Were Dreamers Once...and Free
Once, America had a soul.
And from that soul, the freedom of spirit spawned dreams.
Dreams turned to ideas, and ideas flowed into the streets like rain.
American dreams, American visions, and American ideas
flooded the world, and the world watched in awe.
The money changers saw the ideas, as gold or oil.
Ideas transformed into products.
And products changed lives and made profit.
At first, profit allowed freedom which spawned more dreams.
And from those dreams came more ideas.
Then silently, like rust on iron, a transformation began.
First, the dreams and the ideas they spawned, lost their luster.
Then the focus changed, and the vision became unclear.
America closed it's contented eyes,
And the profit became the dream.
Nothing had value, save for the profit.
Lives and livelihoods became commodities.
Self respect became a quaint remembrance of what was,
...then a nuisance...and finally a pariah.
Profit supplanted decency as freedom was replaced by chains of greed.
And the soul became a sale item on the shelf at the local discount store.
But because ideas come from freedom of the mind, and from the soul,
America, who had long ago sold both, lost it's will and it's freedom.
And ideas became like snowflakes on warm earth.
Too fleeting to see, too few to be remembered.
And America dreamed no more.