Story Comments

This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »

We have been digging a very deep hole for ourselves for a long time now. While the downhill slide became precipitous with the Reagan administration, unfortunately both parties have participated in digging the hole. We will have to demand much more radical solutions from the Obama administration to start getting out of the hole.

Obama and the System: The Economy and the Big Picture

None of the reporting I’ve seen on the “economic crisis” discloses to the American People what is at the core of the crisis... In 1948 George Kennan, one of the chief architects of post-war US foreign policy, famously stated the chief object of US policy in the post-war era: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. ... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.....” US foreign policy during the last half of the 20th Century conforms closely to Kennan’s statement of that policy’s core object...

The 60s and 70s conditioned Americans to expect a standard of living which Kennen and the ruling class knew could not be maintained over the long haul. They understood that world military dominance could only hope to delay the inevitable time of reckoning.

But military dominance required expenditure of vast sums. The problem became how to make these expenditures and at the same time maintain the consumption level of working Americans. The only solution was massive deficit spending...

By the 1980s the chief concern of the ruling elite became making sure that when the reckoning finally came it would be working Americans – not the rich – who would bear the brunt of the adjustment. That required transferring wealth from working people to the rich in advance of the reckoning. This has been the main projects of the ruling class since the election of Ronald Regan....

Personal income data suggests that the wealth transfer project of the ruling class has been spectacularly successful. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, income for the bottom half of American households rose six percent since 1979 but, through 2005, the income of the top one percent skyrocketed by 228 percent. The Wall Street Journal reports that the top .01% of the population, or 14,000 families, hold 22.2% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, have just 4%.

1 Reply