Just a catharsis. Nothing more.

[Deja Q]

Well, if a CEO makes 500~900x what their employees earn, and continuing to drive down workers' wages just so the CEO's can go up, isn't it rather obvious at some point the deck of cards will fall???

For decades, cost of living has eclipsed wages (with wages going down as mentioned above), and credit cards made it easier too - paying things in installments (with interest rates that even the ancient Romans would despise; they capped theirs at 10%. The Muslims dropped the notion of interest, claiming it was against God, since ALL is owned by God and we just use it (paraphrased from Wikipedia). )

Even the Christian Bible has far worse things to say about sneaky and greedy creditors than it does debtors... yet the politicians bought and paid for by the creditors somehow claim we're a Christian nation... yeah, right... If that's true, I am 20 feet tall, say "ho ho ho", and peddle green tomatoes...

I used to believe that people could spend wastefully. That may still be true, but I don't put as much weight into that anymore. Not when looking at the WHOLE picture.

It's also hard to get a job when you're deemed "overqualified" because they have a degree higher than "high school diploma". (Long gone are the days when such a diploma landed a good paying job when you proved you were capable... now it's a bachelor's degree for wages that are great... in 1979 standards... but are nigh on impossible to live on today, in 2009.) And with more jobs becoming 33 hour no-benefits "underemployment", things can NEVER improve in this country.

Never mind cost of education and pertinent equipment skyrocketing too -- maybe that and the other factors above are why Americans are losing interest... especially with the "return on investment" - hey, that's not just for balance sheets, you know.

Offshoring doesn't help - well, it doesn't help working Americans. But it does help raise the CEO pay from 500~900x to 800~1200x. But even that can only go so high when fewer and fewer can buy. Especially if other countries are supposed to make up the purported "imbalance" made by American consumers. Current stats show they're not. So much for being engines of growth. It's just about cheaper labor; not raising quality of life. (Even the products being made -- HP is going to lose its reputation fairly quickly, if it hasn't already... when a dozen laserjet 5 printers (1995) still operate perfectly yet a half-dozen year-old P3015 models need a gear assembly or circuit board replaced... C-H-E-A-P. Yet prices never went down, how odd... Even the plastic in the 3015 printers is literally 1/5th the thickness. Very fragile... garbage. Simple as that.)

And about consumers: The media usually has 4 things to say about the cause of the economy's malaise:
* consumers spend too much
* consumers spend too little
* consumers save too much
* consumers save too little

So it's only about the consumers? Not the banks? Not the companies? Just consumers? Sorry, but I smell something funky, yanked fresh from the cow... token references to non-consumers don't cut much ice. Cheese, maybe, but not ice.


Now I might just agree that the 90% tax rate in 1950 was too high. But today's tax rates for the wealthiest, especially after every bit of government subsidy, bail out, tax cheat, whittling down wages... is 8% really too high?

http://www.jrlc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=81&Itemid=158
(hard cold proof, which was obtained from sources they readily provide)

Pretty low for the top as it is, before all the other subsidies, "havens", bailout money, and the rest.

By, of, and for the wealthy corporation. An oligarchy. We are not a democracy. We are a facade of one.

(and, lastly, I am not against capitalism. But what is going on is corporatism. BIG difference.)

[John Q. Citizen]

1. John Lennon had it nailed -

"And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're all fucking peasants as far as I can see."