OK America, it's time to choose. It's
Get Rich or Die Trying versus
The Golden Rule. How much is enough? Is there enough for all of us if we only shared or at least played fair? How many exra chromosomes does a President need? Fairness or Fear? Read on...
Because right now, I tell, you God's Away on Business. That's the title of the Tom Waits song that plays as the credits roll in the Enron movie (Smartest Guys in the Room).
Birth, School, Work, Death -- that's the course we're surely on as our parents' golden-age of post-war baby-boom retirement (leading edge boomers only, mind you) plays out.
Did you know that the median annual income for U.S. citizens over 65 is less than $27K
However things are a whole lot better if you work for Goldman Sachs like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson did. It seems Wall Street, especially Sachs, pays damn well even as they write government deregulation policy and carry the commercial paper for companies like Enron.
About two months into his appointment, your $700M net-worth Treasury Secretary already wants to get rid of Sarbanes-Oxley (legislation to prevent the next Enron through increased accounting transparency) even while the transition to Fair Value in GAAP worries regulators for what it doesn't reveal about corporate financial status.
Yes, it seems the big capitalists that run the U.S. have all the power but never really pay their fair share. That duty I'm afraid is left to "suckers" like you and me in the form of credit spreads, prices, diminishing and costlier entitlements and housing, etc.
Today, minimum wage is rising in importance because middle-class jobs and wages have become modern-day dinosaurs, destined for extinction, even as aggregate wages are rising. Gee I wonder who's getting richer amid all the layoffs and off-shoring?
Now I know Marx is a dirty word in the United States (maybe even here), but he's still dead-on about the downside of capitalism, IMO, especially unregulated capitalism.
So as we all know, so much hinges on the November mid-terms. I don't wish to be a divider but there are so many more of us than there are of them (rich getting richer) and our numbers are growing even as our political and economic power is diminishing.
So this time, just for once, let's vote for what really matters: fairness YES; fear NO.