Working
Americans dug the country out of recession, but the rich snapped up the gains.
From offshoring jobs to busting unions, and from slashing wages
to looting pensions, avaricious executives and wealthy investors are taking
everything they can get from America’s formerly middle-class workforce.
Plainly put, the more they can take from workers, the more they
can put in their own pockets — or, more likely, in their offshore bank
accounts. It adds up to a massive redistribution of wealth from the many to the
few.
In addition to greedy, though, these people are rank thieves. As
Woody Guthrie succinctly put it: “Some’ll rob you with a six-gun, some with a
fountain pen.”
We’re now in a rapacious fountain-pen economy.
What a phenomenal national achievement that is, produced in an
astonishingly short time by the shared effort of our people.
But strenuous effort is all we shared.
The richest 1 percent of Americans grabbed 91 percent of
those gains in income, and the even-richer one-tenth of 1 percent sucked up almost a quarter of
the new wealth.
The vast majority of us still haven’t recovered the homes, cars,
and savings we lost to the crash. And 99 percent of us are getting less income
today than we were before Wall Street crashed our economy seven years ago.
The rich aren’t getting richer because they’re more
enterprising, harder-working, or of stronger moral character than everyone
else. They’re thieves. They’re getting richer by stealing from you.
OtherWords
columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org.