by Larry Romanoff, The Unz Review:
Introduction
In an earlier essay on the 1917 Jewish revolution in Russia,[1]
I related this quote: “The [Jews] systematically exterminated the clergy, the wealthy, the business class, the intelligent educated class, all the high-achieving segments of the population, leaving Russia with a population of ignorant workers, peasants, and a powerful Jewish ruling elite.”
This is precisely the situation – and the intent – with the US today. The methods are different, but the final result will be the same. It is dispiriting that, while the signs are everywhere to be seen, few seem sufficiently interested or astute to connect the dots. In reading these combined essays on this topic, it will greatly assist your understanding if you keep in mind that the events and circumstances described herein were all deliberately created and implemented. None of what you will be reading about, was an accident of fate or due to “economic circumstances beyond control”. All was contrived for the above transitional purpose, and that transition is perhaps 80% completed in the US today. Read, and form your own judgment.
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The United States of Inequality
Among the more indelible impressions burned into my memory from a lifetime of travel is an image from the city center of Caracas, Venezuela, many years ago, seeing the grand display of the wealth of the elite class, with their huge palatial homes and the nearby private airport containing all their private jets. I met one man who had two planes because whenever he needed to take a business trip, his wife had “taken the damn thing to Miami to go shopping again”. That’s half the image. The other half was more or less across the street from the first half, and consisted of the long and steep side of a mountain, with homes covering the slope for as far as the eye could see. But these were not really homes; they were shantytown hovels of only a few square meters in size, cobbled together from scraps of wood, metal, anything. Doors were simple openings in a wall, as were windows. Each home had a single electric light bulb with current supplied by a single cable that threaded its way up the slope between those thousands of residences. There were no roads, a single winding footpath providing the only access. Both toilet and garbage can were one of the downslope windows, the rubbish and excrement eventually making their way to the bottom of the mountain. And it wasn’t only rubbish that made its way to the bottom. During heavy rains, the unanchored hovels would frequently lose their grip on the mountainside and thousands of homes with their occupants would find themselves gathered in a heap on the valley bottom. I have been unable to erase that memory of the opulent wealth and the heartbreaking abject poverty contained in the same single view of that city.
We can find much the same in many parts of America today, the only significant difference being that the US physically separates the two halves of the picture. Most visitors to the US, and indeed most residents of the US, will tend to see one picture or the other, but seldom both. The streets from our landscaped villas to our air-conditioned offices do not pass through the slums and tent cities. With a bit of planning and the absence of an adventurous spirit, it is easily possible to live your entire life in an American city and see only what you want to see. The city of Las Vegas in Nevada is probably the best example of overstated nouveau-rich opulence and gaudy excess in the world today, with the giant casinos casting a long and glitzy shadow. But Las Vegas also has one of the highest rates of home foreclosures and homelessness, not only in the US, but in the world. Almost within sight of the overwhelming wealth and glamour of the strip are some of the estimated 16,000 educated homeless people who have built shelters inside the city’s 500 Kms of underground storm tunnels.[2]
Heavy rains are infrequent in Vegas, but when they come, those storm sewers quickly fill with two or three meters of water and flow with as much force as any raging river, washing away every trace of the inhabitants and their belongings. Many die, but nobody knows how many.
These two paragraphs form an appropriate introduction to what in economics we dispassionately refer to as income disparity. It isn’t a matter of you having more money than me, or having a three-story house far removed from my humble bungalow, or finding my ten-year old Ford Pinto parked beside your new Ferrari. This is a matter of living in another world entirely, eerily reminiscent of Caracas then and Las Vegas, Chicago or Detroit today. For 500 years, this disparity defined the urban landscape of the great United States of America, a pattern more or less unbroken except during the time of the new social contract that was born in 1946 and developed a terminal cancer in 1980. You will not be able to correctly understand this without an appreciation of the history of American labor and the 1946 social contract. This is an article I urge you to read.[4]
It is vital.
Joseph Stiglitz wrote a compelling article that originally appeared in Vanity Fair,[5]
on the problem of income inequality in the US, providing an intelligent explanation as to its causes, and a concerned illustration of its dangers to American society and to US political survival. He began by telling us, “It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened”. And what has happened is that the top 1% of Americans now take in 1/4 of all the nation’s income every year, and control 40% of the nation’s wealth. He tells us, and it is clearly true, that as a society becomes more divided in terms of wealth, the wealthy – who control the government – are more reluctant to spend money on what Stiglitz calls “common needs” – things like health care or education. The rich can provide for themselves and they tend to quickly lose empathy for those not as rich or fortunate as themselves. Greed and inhumanity are in control. Since these people control the government through their power, wealth and influence, they invest time and money to keep it weak lest it use its powers for the common good. Stiglitz claims inequality exists because the top 1% want it that way, and his point is impossible to argue.
The most commonly used, and most commonly accepted as fair, method to measure inequality of income or wealth is the GINI coefficient, which ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 being totally equal and anything above 0.5 considered excessive and socially dangerous. New York State is at 0.503, with the nation’s capital, Washington, DC, at an astonishingly high index of 0.534, worse than most banana republics and, according to the US State Department, at a level where imminent revolution or civil war are almost assured.
