Or maybe they are; like most middle-class Americans, I am so busy trying to put food on the table, I don't have time for much else. After being outsourced out of a job for the third time in my career and hired back again at half the rate and with no benefits, this week I am training the guy in Calcutta India who will probably replace me, yet one more time. But that is not the topic that no one is talking about; outsourcing, age discrimination, and slashed benefits are among the things that people are talking about, maybe not in the mainstream media, but at least in this forum.
Earlier in my career I was offered a chance by my employer to contribute to a 401K, so figuring that I could afford it at that point and knowing that when retirement age came, I would have no company-paid retirement, I started putting a percentage of my salary into what was termed a self-funded retirement option. After a period of time though, it became clear that while the stock market continued to go up and inflation continued to eat up any potential gains, growth in the stock funds that were available in my account was virtually nil.
At that point I started watching Jim Cramer each evening in an effort to learn more about how I could manage my own investments. But, after my 401K lost over half of its value in the bankster debacle of 2008 (never to regain all of it), I decided that I was too close to retirement, when I would need that money, to gamble it any longer in the stock market.
But something that Cramer kept pointing out in his show made me realize what no one is talking about. Even before the 2008 crash, one of the strategies that he stressed over and over was investing outside of the US. His view was partially the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" philosophy, but more than that it was that growth within the US economy was expected to be slow, but outside of this country, in places such as China and other countries that still made things, the growth rate was much higher. Much of the advice he gives is based on the trends he sees in the big investors, the world's billionaires, and if there is one thing about the super-rich, they only bet on sure things most of the time. And what is one of the easiest ways a billionaire can help to ensure that his investment philosophy becomes a sure thing? That would be to invest heavily in the campaigns of those who will make laws guaranteed to help you to personally increase your wealth.
We have seen countless filibusters and other congressional antics (mostly Republicans, but not all) in the last few years aimed at making sure that any legislation written to help improve the economy, or the lives of the middle-class, was stopped long before it could be enacted. There have been countless commentaries on this forum that mention the possibility that these actions were partially meant to hamstring the Obama administration in its efforts to implement economy-improving policy. Most have speculated that this was done to aid in defeating Obama in the next election.
But I think the goals on the rich and powerful go far beyond elections; they go to using their owned-politicians to facilitate the destruction of this country by letting its infrastructure crumble, devastating its manufacturing base, and killing anything resembling a well-paying job, because the super-rich who own these lawmakers have bet on this country going under and will profit handsomely when it happens, after all, most of their capital lies elsewhere. They have essentially bought "puts" on the future of this country and are taking no chance that the big takedown might not happen. If they succeed, this country will be destroyed along with its middle-class, and become just another burned out third world has-been. There was a time when trying to destroy this country would have been called treason; now, it's just called business.