By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
Never in the history of the world has so much been stolen from so many by so few as in the past 30 years of corporate capitalist, Neoliberal/Neoconservative, “trickle-down,” so-called supply-side economics or Reaganomics.
Led by Ronald Reagan – The Great Prevaricator – the extreme-right-wing nutbar fringe sold Amerikkka and even much of America on the supposed merits of throwing money at the rich, in the hope that by some weird quirk of fate some of that money would someday “trickle down” to the masses – The Other 99% – the poor, the working class and the middle class.
To their credit, Amerikkka’s poor and working class by and large saw the scam for what it was and opposed it. But so many middle-class Amerikkkans – blinded by their own petty resentments and their own petty jealousies – bought into the scam and helped to saddle the common people in Amerikkka and around the world with 30 years of malignant decline.
Amerikkka, Canada and most of the advanced industrial world were fairly egalitarian in 1980 by today’s standards.
But then the governments of Amerikkka and Canada and the United Kingdom led the rest of the developed world down the garden path.
The Top One Percent – aided and abetted by their puppet political prostitutes and their corporate mass media – began the most massive redistribution of wealth ever – not from the rich to the rest but from the rest to the rich.
In 1980, the year before Reagan took office, the Top One Percent of Amerikkkans enjoyed eight percent of total national income. The middle class – the next 49 percent – enjoyed 74%, and the bottom 50% shared 24 percent of the national income pie.
In other words, the Top 1% received 8% of national income in 1980 and The Other 99% shared 92%.
But after 30 years of coddling the Top 1% and lavishing them with unparalleled wealth, the so-called “job creators” have not only failed to create quality jobs, they have stolen a huge portion of the national income that rightly belongs to The Other 99%.
Today, the bottom 50 percent of Americans – the poor and the working class – only get 12% of national income, a loss of a full one-third of the share they enjoyed before Reagan.
The next 49% – the middle class – now share only 64% of the income pie, representing the loss of one-seventh of the share they enjoyed prior to Reagan and the Republican revolution.
Today, the Top 1% monopolizes fully 24 percent of the national income pie – a tripling of their share since 1980 – and The Other 99% are left to divvy up only 76% of the pie.
This year alone, the Top One Percent – the millionaires, mega-millionaires, billionaires and mega-billionaires – will have stolen $2.4 T-R-I-L-L-I-O-N from The Other 99% – the poor, the working class and the middle class – in just one short year.
This elitist, corporate-capitalist hijacking not only of the U.S. economy but also of the economies of much of the rest of the world must be brought to a crashing halt before the entire global economy collapses.