Apparently, not everyone in Mexico is suffering in the current economic climate. Carlos Slim, a Mexican national, is now the world's richest man.
For those of you that think things are OK here in the United States because stock markets are soaring and you made a ton of money off of your year-end Wall Street bonus check, I'd submit that this country is beginning to look a whole lot like Mexico: protected zones containing small numbers of fabulously rich; another relatively small segment of society that derives modest income tending to the needs of the rich; masses of desperately poor outside the wire-enclosed zones of privilege with little or no voice or hope for a better life; laws designed to protect the rich; cops protect their property and prey on the poor.
We're not quite there, but that's where we're headed.
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Right on Don...,write on. You nailed it. And there is no shortage of statistics that will back you up..., the monetary wealth of the US is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands of the financial elite. The “middle class” is fast entering the fantasy stage.
ReplyDeleteI must admit that the first few essays of Joe Bageant’s that I read, I was a bit taken aback. As in, “Lighten up a bit on the working poor Joe.” But I am reading, “Deer Hunting With Jesus - Dispatches From America's Class War” now…, and I have a much clearer understanding of where he is coming from. I encourage everyone to read it. And his website
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/
From the chapter titled, “American Serfs”
“Admittedly, a real blue-collar middle class still exists I some places, just as unions still exist. But both are on the ropes like some old pug boxer taking the facial cuts and popping eye capillaries with no referee to come in and stop the carnage. The American bootstrap myth is merely another strap that makes the working poor privately conclude that they must in some way be inferior, given that they cannot seem to apply that myth to their won lives. Hell, Pootie, if immigrants can put together successful businesses of their own, why can’t you keep up with your truck payments? Right now, even by he government’s spruced-up numbers, one-third of working Americans make less than $9 an hour. A decade from now, five of the ten fastest-growing jobs will be menial, dead-end jokes on the next generation--mainly retail-clerks, cashiers and janitors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
If anything Don…, we may be closer to becoming a third world country than even you imagine.
One more from, "Republicans By Default"
"That is the American hologram. That is the peculiar illusion we live within, the illusion that holds us together, makes us alike, yet tells each of us we are unique. And it will remain in force until the whole shiteree comes down around our heads. Working people do not deny reality. They created it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction. Meanwhile, for the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns. That’s what they voted for--an armed and moral republic. And that’s what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit."