When the US Elitist Pork Barrel Explodes

Dear Colonel Hackworth and Admiral Thomas Moorer,

As both your newsletters, "Broken Arrow" and "Defending America", are interested in the sundry ramifications of the corruption, lies and hypocrisies coming out of, and macro managed by, Washington, DC, let me provide you here below a terse summary of why there is hot economic steam building to soon blow off the phony "National Security" porkpie lid protecting the Corporate Statism which rules directly profits the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex, and, generally, all of US.

We've known now for well over twenty years that the wealth of this nation has been purposefully trickling down into fewer and fewer pockets. Much disappearing into unaccountable, wholly selfish pockets - many anonymously protected in Offshore locations such as the Caymans, Bahamas, Panama, Switzerland, etc. Purposefully, that is, because this injustice against the American commonweal, and 80 % of our citizens, is NOT resulting from fair and competitive free market forces but because that market has been corrupted and bought out by Corporations and the wealthy through purchasing influence in our Federal, and most State, government Executive and Legislative branches.

As the average working stiff has been forced to rely on a second income just to survive, plus over $6,000,000,000,000 in total personal debt in order compete in this fixed market place just to obtain his fair share of the fruits of what has evolved to a Corporate Welfare state. This is NOT what out Constitution meant, what our Bill of Rights tried to enumerate, when speaking and defining our national "pursuit of happiness".

When the desk con men fabricating the White Collar paper wealth bubbling over the various markets and exchanges have gone too far, in their GREED, the bubble will burst open : over the sleepy heads of everyone calling themselves 'middle class'. Then those lower echelons will have had enough, sadly not from the hypocrisy of our 'humanitarian' war in Yugoslavia but from their pent up frustrations exploding in far more widespread and deeper violence than that perpetrated in singular places like the fifteen victims of Columbine High School.

When that explosion occurs it will not be only my old riot squad or SWAT police called in to stop a few 'nuts', as our leaders superficially like to explain the discontented away, but the US Army called in to stop tens-of thousands of citizens fed up with being turned into feudal workers and cheated by their lying, scheming, hypocritical, cowardly, PAC controlled, and avaricious leaders.

As most of the siphoned off wealth will be safely offshore, the corporate bosses will simply hunker down in their gated and muscle guarded estates as they push their bought politicians to yell a "National Security" cry of crisis, screamed out of Washington into every State Capitol (Mayor Giuliani will be in his glory as New York's version of a Gestapo, dressed like Space men, tries to control the embittered people surrounding Wall Street and Madison Avenue). But this National Security alarm will not be a false one, made to benefit the Military Industrial Complex, but will be defined in the streets.

And I find a most intriguing question to be : who will the lower ranks of police and military support? The people crying for a change in a corrupted democracy turned into a Corporate Plutocracy defrauding everyone?; or the corporate bosses crying for the suppression of labor strikers, anti-war demonstrators, radicals, anarchists, communists, progressives, Midwest militias, environmentalists, traditionalists, Humanists and Ethical Culturalists, awake conservatives, libertarians, liberation theologians, Unitarian Universalist congregations, the Societies of Friends, and like groups, … all those who care about the people of America far, far more than Corporate America?

Sounds like a radical summary, yes? But take it from someone who has been in the middle of two New York City Riots, who has witnessed first hand the vast exploitation and ignorance that was our Indochina War lies, fabrications and greed; who has worked twenty-five years overseas resolving corporate and government international fraud, extortion and resource asset stripping : all those bubbles of lies, corruption and paper profits are soon ready to burst. Where the explosions surely will produce varied lots of economic wounded, strewn about the living rooms and kitchens of America. These new marginalized will take to the streets - not like the morose, disquieted but silent victims of the depression - as radicalized demonstrators, extending into all of society that violent corruption which leaves little recourse for resolution than a laundering of our government commercial criminals and fiscal vice lords.

The question is : will the Police and Army allow higher pay, health plans and pension security to control and suppress their natural and human support for the just complaints spilling over into the streets from their fellow citizens? Or have our security forces been already sufficiently divorced from public moral consciousness, and compromised by pension greed and promises, to beat, kill and arrest these angry workers?

Once again will they become violent strike breakers ready to bloody the history of American democracy and its labor of discontent? Or perhaps, this time, will soldiers and policemen have enough friends and family out there among those defrauded sufferers and protesters to allow their conscious to awaken their real duty to a Democracy in America?

richard manning

* Most households have lower net worth, adjusting for inflation, than they did in 1983, when the Dow was still at 1,000.

* From 1983 to 1998, the S&P 500 grew a cumulative 1,336 percent. But the wealthiest households reaped most of the gains.

* Since the mid-1970s, the top 1 percent of households have doubled their share of the national wealth.

* This top 1 percent of U.S. households now have more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent.

* The top 1 percent of households control 40 percent of the total wealth of the nation.

* The top one percent control nearly half of all financial wealth (net worth minus equity in owner-occupied housing).

* Microsoft CEO Bill Gates possesses more wealth than the combined bottom 45 percent of American households (in the fall of 1997, Gates was worth more than the combined GNP of all Central America. By late 1998 Gates’ $60 billion worth was greater than the GNPs of all Central America, Jamaica and Bolivia.

* The current 'economic miracle' has been a bust for millions of Americans. The inflation-adjusted net worth of the median US household fell from $54,600 in 1989 to $49,900 in 1997. Nearly one out of five households have zero or negative net worth (greater debts than assets), an increase from the 1980s.

* Workers are earning less, adjusting for inflation, than they did when Richard Nixon was president. Average weekly wages for workers in 1998 were 12 percent below 1973, adjusting for inflation. Productivity grew nearly 33 percent in the same period.

* Families have sunk deeper into debt. Household debt as a percentage of personal income rose from 58 percent in 1973 to an estimated 85 percent in 1997. Total credit card debt soared from $243 billion in 1990 to $560 billion in 1997. Credit card limits have risen to the point that the average person can charge more than eight times what they already owe. As of 1997, almost 60 percent of American households carried credit card balances—balances that average more than $7,000, costing these households more than $1,000 per year in interest and fees.

(from: "Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing Wealth Gap in America," a report by United for a Fair Economy, Boston, based upon the latest findings of economist Edward Wolff of New York University, a leading authority on wealth distribution)

Some Simple Conclusions :

* The wealth concentration indicated above is catalyzed by corporate greed, with serious societal iniquities resulting, degrading de facto US democracy and social harmony.

* The wealth gap is a major cause of economic iniquities, resulting in downward trends in educational results, vocational opportunities and the overall equality of life, (from quotes by Chuck Collins, a co-author of above report.

* "Health, well-being and satisfaction appear to be heavily influenced by the ways in which economic resources, prestige and social position are distributed," (Juliet Schor, a co-author of report).

* "In more unequal societies, human well-being and quality of life appear to be lower," (Juliet Schor).

* "Wealth, more than income, directly translates into political power." (Edward Wolff, who has proposed a wealth tax on the richest Americans in order to counter the severe wealth threat to democracy he noted).