10/31/11

When Class Wealth Increases 275%, So Does Political Power

Recent studies have found that over the past three decade’s wealth and political power of the rich-those with earnings in the highest one percent of income in U.S.A. increased 275% over three decades.

Political affluence increases collaterally with monetary affluence through the ability to buy political influence and toy with economically reliant sub-structures.

The wealthy control the broadcast media left and right. Talk radio millionaires program their sycophants on how to vote. Herman Cain, Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods sex allegations are given the optimal politically correct spin so they become warm and fuzzy creatures or threatening, abusive exploiters of the innocent. The media preponderantly determines the direction national political debate goes.

Costs for the middle class and poor have risen markedly for housing and health provisioning the last three decades. Employers have eliminated innumerable health insurance benefits transferring the cost to government and individuals. Now they want to cut government social spending and provide tax cuts for the wealthy and tax increases on the poor-even a national sales tax trivial to the rich and devastating for the poor.

The federal government has not stepped up to the plate to fight for a public health service for the poor and Veterans able the serve as a national emergency hospital infrastructure in event of unforeseeable global designer biological attack made by rogue corporate bio researchers.
The wealthy have supersized on easy global pickins since 1990 including the U.S.A. outsourcing business and factories as if they were the Red Army in Germany after World War II relocating German industry to Russia.

The first year of the New World Order in 1990 accelerated U.S. industrial invention arterial sclerosis. Corporate owners and workers grew apart as cheap global labor made investing in China, India and elsewhere a better profit prospect. The Clinton year taught Americans to flip burgers and take on debt while the wealthy were experiencing the problem of financial obesity.

The rich are in danger of fat-headedness and fiduciary cholesterol cutting off money supply to extreme, distal poor members of society.
Wealth concentrates in big shareholder and CEO heads without regard for the masses of unemployed and underemployed American workers. Like addicts in opium dens the wealthy experience a dreamliner financial reality without regard for conditions of deterioration of the position of the United States in the World as an independent, social leading nation.

In Anchorage Alaska Mayor Sullivan has asked the state government for a gift of 350 million dollars to complete a port construction expansion project over-budget and overdue that is supervised by a former state governor and millionaire former owner of hotels sold to Westours/Westmark and the Carnival cruise line I believe. The present Governor of Alaska also led an effort to cut taxes on cruise ships including the Carnival subsidiary Holland line. Meanwhile Mayor Sullivan has forced the eviction of Anchorage's homeless from city parks with just a few days notice even in winter.

Anchorage has become a city buy and for the corporate world that extracts Alaska resources. It also has military spending. With fewer churches per capita than any other major American city it also has moved more toward godlessness.

The Brother Francis homeless shelter and the nearby Bean's Cafe is the basic alternative for camping in Anchorage in the winter for the very poor. It is quite overcrowded and the Mayor has not asked the state for a gift of a million or two for construction of a video supervised safe outdoor camping facility for the broke.

On an average cold winter night when the temperature is zero degrees Fahrenheit the homeless sleep elbow to elbow on mats on the entire floor of the facility-a good way to share pneumonia, SARs, TB and whatever other respiratory virus is going around, brought perhaps from distant Arctic villages, visiting Bloods from L.A., hit men from corporations searching for political dissidents rounded up at the homeless shelter to beat up or East Coast sex tourists looking for wild game.

The shelter is very overcrowded and excess bodies yearning to breathe free spills over into Bean's Cafe nearby with the floor there too sometimes becoming full. If a dead body with smallpox from the early 20th century epidemic ever emerges because of global warming melting of Arctic village snowfields and is discovered by a poor rural Alaskan on his way to stay in Anchorage like as not the crowded Brother Francis shelter is the first place it virus would turn up. All homeless people should have complete free medical care if for no other reason than to combat potential respiratory epidemics.

Mayor Sullivan might have requested an emergency state grant to have a monolithic concrete dome shelter built on one of numerous city properties, and a library for the south side too for those homeless readers of books and cut back the scale of the free money request from the too obliging state Governor Parnell and the Alaska Legislature that seems to want to build facilities most useful to cruise ships and importers of cheap Chinese goods off-loaded from Chinese built ships-they have more than 200 shipyards these days.

The American middle class was said to have increased its wealth by an average 40% the past three decades while the poor, I believe became poorer. The middle class figure is actually misleading; for white men the income declined the past three decades adjusted for the value of the dollar then and now.

More women and minorities entered the workforce and the middle class and that made the number reported overall seem to increase. As long as there is a continuing new cheaper labor supply to subvert wage raise demands of the middle class the rich can continue to concentrate wealth.
Concentrating wealth is something like increasing the grade of a slope of a pit into which water from the surrounding area flows.

The U.S. top one-percent have seemed to encourage and industrial existentialism worldview without regard for the health of the environment. For example, a lumber mill at Wrangell Alaska processed about a half a trillion board feet of old growth lumber between the 1950s and 1994 with fewer than 300 employees including longshoremen loading the vanishing rainforest old growth onto foreign ships.

Corporate profit seeking encouraged industrial bio-existentialism over global environmentalism in order to avoid creating a class consciousness of conservation of finite, valuable environmental networks. Degrading environmental effects of concentrating wealth require and existential shallowness in global warming denial and over-use of finite resources, pollution in extraction industry, over-fishing and collateral extermination of species in building development.

If water is regarded as money and the rich are those accumulating it at the bottom of the pit it is easy to comprehend that the money and power accumulates faster as the size of the excavation or establishment of financial networks increases. The deep and broad pit overcomes and drowns out the poor, expendable miners first and later the middle class as the ocean of wealth and power of the dominant one percent globally overcomes world political systems morphing into being the perfect corporate Leviathan.

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