State of the Superpower

Listening to this podcast of Bill Moyer’s PBS program The Journal didn’t make for a pleasant run on the treadmill today. His guests basically do a collective post-mortem on the American middle class. Not surprisingly, it turns out there’s not a lot left of it after 30 years of corporate America and “pro-business” government liposuctioning off living wages, health care, and pensions.

On balance though, we have gained a small class of uber-super-rich the likes of which old duffers like Rockerfeller from the last Gilded Age couldn’t have touched. Steve Fraser, the last guest on the program and the author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace documents these guys’ antics (which make anything that Bill Gates has ever done look beatific). In his interview, he mentions the single most galling example of wealth inequality that I’ve ever come across. That would be hedge fund manager John Paulson’s 3.7 billion (that’s BILLION!) dollar personal income for last year.

How did he do it? As described here, by betting that all those suckers holding subprime mortgages (i.e., the middle class) wouldn’t be able to pass Go.

It’s stories like that that foment revolutions.