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http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/0303socialcriticism.htmlTHE RICH AND THE SUPER-RICH A Study in the Power of Money Today
BY FERDINAND LUNDBERG
Lyle Stuart, Inc. • New York
Copyright 1968 by Ferdinand Lundberg.
Poverty Defined
For my part, I would say that anyone who does not own a fairly substantial amount of income-producing property or does not receive an earned income sufficiently large to make substantial regular savings or does not hold a well-paid securely tenured job is poor. He may be healthy, handsome and a delight to his friends--but he is poor. By this standard at least 70 per cent of Americans are certainly poor, although not all of these by any means are destitute or poverty-stricken. But, as was shown in the 1930's, Americans can become destitute overnight if deprived of their jobs, a strong support to mindless conformity. As a matter of fact, many persons in rather well-paid jobs, even executives, from time to time find themselves jobless owing to job discontinuance by reason of mergers, technical innovation or plant removal. Unable to get new jobs, they suddenly discover, to their amazement, that they are really poor, and they also discover by harsh experience to what specific conditions the word "poverty" refers. And even many of those who never lose their jobs often discover in medical and similar emergencies that they are as helpless as wandering beggars. They are, in fact, poor. In such eventualities the man of property is evidently in a different position. He is definitely not poor. And this is all I say.
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Lest such an observation be thought by provincials to give this exposition an unholy Marxist aura, let us in reverential solemnity quote such an austere Establishmentarian as Woodrow Wilson, who said (Franklin D. Roosevelt later concurring) in words as valid today as when first uttered:
"The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. It is written over every intimate page of the record of Congress, it is written all through the history of conferences at the White House, that the suggestions of economic policy in this country have come from one source, not from many sources. The benevolent guardians, the kind hearted trustees who have taken the troubles of government off our hands have become so conspicuous that almost anybody can write out a list of them. . .
Power not exercised by dilatory members of any functioning organization will of necessity be exercised by more diligent members, a universal rule applying to corporations, fraternal societies and labor unions as well as to government. To a very considerable extent, then, we see in all organizations, including the government of the United States, rule by default, by a self-selected oligarchy. If the citizens won't run the show the endless procession of Bobby Bakers, W. Judson Morhouses, Everett Dirksens and Lyndon B. Johnsons will.
It should be observed that, except for disaffected, out-of-step critics, there is no widespread rejection on the American scene of the ascendant notion of success. Not only does a broad public uncritically accept steamy monetary success as a proper life goal but it feels any questioning of this goal to be un-American, possibly traitorous or at least subversive and surely cowardly. Who but a coward would shrink from entering the glorious contest for success? The "unsuccessful" are regarded with contempt or pity, often even by themselves.
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Financial deficiencies are blamed on the man; family deficiencies are blamed on the woman. As comparatively few individual incomes, only 10 per cent until the more recent Johnsonian inflation, exceed $10,000 a year, according to the cold statistics, it is evident that most American males are big flops incomewise and are wide open to cutting remarks from their success-oriented, status-craving wives wrestling with child care and household chores.
All, then, as one could easily show by citing a variety of sources, is not happy sailing in the alcohol-sustained, drug-propped affluent belt of society, which in its own way is as badly churned up as the city slums and ghettos. Children in this situation, of course, suffer most of all.
In passing, it is difficult for a habitual reader of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post to avoid concluding that the United States shelters under the glorious Star Spangled Banner an extremely sick society, fundamentally made ill by the institutional implementation of a set of extremely destructive values.
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