America is Not Broke, Just Broken

James Preston Allen

What is there to say? The national debate— hell, the local debate is dominated by those screaming that the sky is falling and everyone is trying to cover their ass from the budget ax. Few people are discussing the causes of the deficit. Even fewer are discussing how to avoid them in the future. And no one is prosecuting those who defrauded the American people in the first place. Oh yes, there was Bernie Madoff with his overlooked ponzi scam and Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial Corp. But the real crooks are still hiding in plain view. The problem with our country is not that it’s going broke, it’s that it is broken––politically broken. Can you just imagine for one moment what would have happened if we’d taken the advice of those Republicans who are now screaming to balance the budgets, and placed the Social Security Trust fund into the stock market? Talk about disasters. That would have been the crown- ing crisis of George Bush Jr.’s 8 years in office.

The crisis-filled legacy of that presidency is what we are now grappling with. How the issue is being framed by the Gingrich faction, media pun- dits and the Tea Party idiots, is that America is broke. The truth is far from this accusation.

As Michael Moore proclaimed on the steps of the Wisconsin State House the other day, “Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined.” This makes you wonder just who the Tea Partiers call “We the People?” Moore continued, “Let me say that again—400 ob- scenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer ‘bailout’ of 2008, now have as much loot, stock and property as the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.”

So if you are wondering why we can’t afford pension funds or health care and social programs like funding schools and libraries, ask yourselves why it is that these 400 de- serve any tax break at all. This divide be- tween the uber -rich and the average citizen has been ever growing since the Great Communicator—Ronald Reagan—convinced us that “trickle down” economics was the formula for creating wealth in America. He just didn’t say for whom that wealth was going to be created and that you weren’t included.

What is even more disturbing is the recent report that reveals that some 25 percent of all children in the “greatest nation on earth” are now living in poverty. In many cities across this great nation, the rent-by-the-week hotels are doing a booming business with families of unemployed workers whose homes have been foreclosed on—unemployed workers, who are now forced to live in a single room and compete for daywork with the immigrants on the corner. You could blame the immigrants, but they’re only here because NAFTA decimated their economy as part of the same “free trade” system that gave incentives to American corporations to ship good, middle class manufacturing jobs to China.

We are now witnessing the demise of the American Dream with the foreclosure of millions of single-family homes. We have just witnessed a vast transfer of wealth from the middle class to the robber barons of Wall Street and their super rich investors. Wall Street has managed to skirt all reasonable regulation and scrutiny of billions (or trillions) of investments. If exposed, betting your measly 401K plan at the racetrack will look like a better option than trusting Bear Stearns and their exotic derivative bond algorithms. To explain how America has been sold short, just read Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short—Inside the Doomsday Machine or see Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary, Inside Job, which presents a comprehensive analysis of the 2008 global financial crisis–– a crisis that cost us over $20 trillion. Both of these have exhaustive research, revealing interviews with key players and commentators in the financial game. And if any of you doubt what I’m offering here, just do a little research yourself.

What we have here is not that America is broke, it’s that we’ve been robbed. Not by the bandit on the corner, but by the bankers on Wall Street who are now holding our government hostage. And no one is calling for these people to be arrested for the biggest robbery in history.