the gilded age

I got into an interesting conversation about Social Security today, which led to a slightly different but very closely-related topic: Timothy Noah has posted an important and informative three-part article at Slate on income inequality in America. As everybody whose head isn't stuck in one of television's various echo chambers knows, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans has widened dramatically since 1980, and in between the two, the former middle class is getting squeezed out of existence.

Why is this connected to to politics? Because, as another author on another site wrote today, when we look at the American political system today, no matter which party is in power we see "a government captured by the economically powerful in society, as they find a way to convert economic into political power."

And those "economically powerful in society" are more powerful today compared to the rest of us than ever before. The facts, as Noah explains them (and he's done the research to back it up): [I]ncome distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic.

Exactly. Because what, in a typical banana republic, does that elite upper crust of society own, besides all the wealth? All the political power, of course, and with it all the power and apparatus of repression.

As the Gini Coefficient in the U.S., that statistic which measures income inequality in a given society, approaches .5 and the top 10 percent of money earners continues to accumulate an ever-larger share of the national income, their larcenous grab at Social Security is something we should expect. What we need to do now is take strong measures to keep from being cannibalized. The question is, are we capable of that?

Before this is over we'll find out whether ordinary Americans have any capacity any longer for defending themselves and acting in their own interest, or whether they've been lobotomized by the mustard gas cloud of Fox News fascist propaganda, or so hypnotized by the giggling and frivolity that characterizes the worldview of CNN just across the way, that they can no longer help themselves.

Or I should say, "ourselves."