-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 2, 2007 7:37:26 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Pareto's Law
Billionaires For Bush:
How Bush Paid Off His Base and Stuck We the People with the Tab
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2007/09/billionaires-for-
bush-reveal-how-bush.html
We have grown up with "official myths", Horatio Alger stories of
rags-to-riches, stories about how down-and-out boys might achieve
an American dream of wealth and success through mere hard work and
fair dealing. The US, myths say, is not an aristocracy; it is a
"meritocracy". On the other side of the coin is an implicit message
that if the deserving poor eventually get rich, those that are not
rich deserve to be poor.
The GOP are well-advised not to waste my time and their time
denying it. Their progenitor is Scrooge.
"Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons...then let them die
and decrease the surplus population."
—Scrooge, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Still, the GOP is indicted best in their own words. Pat Buchanan is
the class example.
One by one, the prophets of doom appeared at the podium. The Reagan
decade, they moaned, was a terrible time in America; and the only
way to prevent even worse times, they said, is to entrust our
nation's fate and future to the party that gave us McGovern,
Mondale, Carter and Michael Dukakis.
--Patrick J. Buchanan, 1992 Republican National Convention Speech,
Houston, Texas
Buchanan targeted Democrats already tarred with the label
"liberal", a GOP code word for anyone opposing GOP robber-baron
economics. Any Democrat would have made a better President than any
Republican chosen at random. At least one on Buchanan's hit list
did. Jimmy Carter, now demonized with a GOP made-up, code word --
stagflation. There is, in fact, no real word for an economic
condition that only Republicans seemed to have complained about.
Certainly, when another Democrat interrupts the GOP diet of
government gravy and Pentagon pork, he/she will be accused of
stagflation --or whatever word GOP consultants and focus groups can
make-up or otherwise "pass".
The critics Buchanan so vociferously publicized were right about
Reagan's disastrous presidency. Much of the rest of Buchanan's
speech credits Reagan with any number of things which Reagan had
nothing whatsoever to do with or things which occurred despite
Reagan's worst efforts.
It was under our party that the Berlin Wall came down...
Thus it is implied that Ronald Reagan, who paid tribute to Nazi SS
dead at Bitburg, had something to do with bringing down the Berlin
Wall. Reagan is more accurately remembered for having "blinked"
when Gorbachev put total nuclear disarmament on the table for
negotiation at Rekjavik.
Buchanan's next absurdity must be read while remembering Bush v Gore:
We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who
interpret the law as written, and against Supreme Court justices
who think they have a mandate to rewrite our Constitution.
To be fair, Buchanan could not have known in 1992 that in a mere
eight years a "conservative" majority on the high court would prove
him wrong yet again. For all the right wing bluster about "strict
constructionist" interpretations of the US Constitution, it will be
forever recalled that it was the Republican majority on the Supreme
Court that rewrote the Constitution in order to put into office an
imperial "President" who would finish off the venerable document
for good!
Wealth "trickling up" is a world wide phenomenon but the effects
are stunning. In the year 2000, almost twenty years after the
infamous Ronald Reagan tax cut benefiting only the richest
Americans, a tiny elite, the richest 1% of adults, owned 40% of the
world’s total assets. In 2000, the richest 10% of adults owned 85%
of total assets. The bottom half of the world adult population
owned a mere 1% of global wealth.
[See: World Institute for Development Economics Research, The World
Distribution of Household Wealth, 2006]. It's gotten much worse
since then.
It is well known that wealth is shared out unfairly. "People on the
whole have normally distributed attributes, talents and
motivations, yet we finish up with wealth distributions that are
much more unequal than that," says Robin Marris, emeritus professor
of economics at Birkbeck, University of London.
In 1897, a Paris-born engineer named Vilfredo Pareto showed that
the distribution of wealth in Europe followed a simple power-law
pattern, which essentially meant that the extremely rich hogged
most of a nation's wealth (New Scientist, 19 August 2000, p22).
Economists later realised that this law applied to just the very
rich, and not necessarily to how wealth was distributed among the
rest.
Now it seems that while the rich have Pareto's law to thank, the
vast majority of people are governed by a completely different law.
Physicist Victor Yakovenko of the University of Maryland in College
Park and his colleagues analysed income data from the US Internal
Revenue Service from 1983 to 2001. They found that while the income
distribution among the super-wealthy- about 3 per cent of the
population- does follow Pareto's law, incomes for the remaining 97
per cent fitted a different curve- one that also describes the
spread of energies of atoms in a gas.
In the gas model, people exchange money in random interactions,
much as atoms exchange energy when they collide. While economists'
models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always
make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large
systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many
factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat
people like atoms in a gas. The analogy also holds because money is
like energy, in that it has to be conserved. "It's like a fluid
that flows in interactions, it's not created or destroyed, only
redistributed," says Yakovenko.
--New Scientist, There's one rule for the rich
Some essential background:
In 1979, the top 1 per cent of the US population earned, on
average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20 per cent. In 2000, the
multiplier had grown to 88.5. Certainly, since Ronald Reagan's tax
cut of 1982, US "inequality" grew steadily but for a brief respite
in Clinton's second term. Bush's final record will be even worse.
Surveys have also identified a small, but fast-growing global group
of 70,000 super rich individuals with more than $30 million in
financial assets. This group is growing even faster than "paupers"
in the $1 million-plus bracket." [See: World's richest worth $29
trillion in 2003; Survey: Wealthy now back at level before dot-com
bust. MSNBC.com, June 15, 2004 ]
The top fifth of households saw their income rise 43 percent
between 1977 and 1999, while the bottom fifth saw their income fall
9 percent.
The top fifth now makes more than the rest of the nation combined
Table 2: Share of Total Available Household Net Worth, 2001*
Wealth Group Share of Net Worth
99-100th percentile 32.7%
95-99th percentile 25.0%
90-95th percentile 12.1%
50th-90th percentile 27.1%
0-50th percentile 2.8%
Total 100.0%
[See: Kennickell, 2003. See data from the Federal Reserve Board for
details.
The "center" itself would not be so bad were not the centers so far
to the "right", in other words, skewed.
Imagine a line with a tiny, ruling oligarchy on the right end and a
perfectly egalitarian democracy i.e, a group sharing both power and
wealth in perfect equity on the left end.
The bulging bell curve in the middle of this line is not --in
America --the middle at all, but far to the right. In America, the
center is not in the center (and may never have been).
While a tiny few, like Bill Gates, may indulge acts of philanthropy
from time to time, the over all trends have not changed. A more
egalitarian society is the preferred remedy to injustice --not
isolated acts of charity, however kind. Moreover, with very, very
few exceptions, those growing rich at the expense of others are
unlikely to become more liberal as they gain riches. With few
notable and statistically insignificant exceptions, the nouveau
riche will continue to "...dance with the party that brung 'em."
Reagan-heads called it the "Reagan Revolution" for good reason.
Conditioned to think of "revolution" in terms of the French or
Russian revolutions, Americans might not have grasped the
significant harm "Reaganomics" have done America. It was for real.
How many people actually rule America by virtue of their great
wealth, their ability to finance political campaigns, their ability
to open doors with a phone call? The size of this group is
variously estimated, but the fact is no one really knows. Surveys
don't ask that question and political consultants like Karl Rove or
Paul Caprio will most certainly not tell you. It is possible,
however, to estimate the size of a group that literally owns some
99 percent of all "wealth" in the US. As this group grows both
smaller and richer, the GOP declines in terms of total votes that
can be counted on. This is why the GOP must, of necessity,
communicate to its core base via "code words". The GOP, in other
words, cannot afford to be honest even with its rank and file. It
has cut a Faustian bargain with a tiny elite, Bush's base.
This tiny elite, Bush's base, must work behind the scenes. Robber
barons have the money and the power to interfere with the electoral
process in numerous ways. The most glaring development is the rise
of super-conservative "networks" like Fox and talk shows like Rush
Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. These programs are the Right Wing's
propaganda machine, "faux news" programs that make no effort to
tell the truth. Gullible people who have nothing in common with
Rupert Murdoch will nevertheless fall for the Fox line. In more
egalitarian days, opposing voices could demand and get "equal
time". The Fairness Doctrine was deliberately targeted by un-
American, "monied" interests for whom the open exchange of ideas is
a threat.
Even Roman Emperors gave the vox populi lip service with a healthy
soupcon of bread and circuses. The most successful oligarchs --real
and faux --are those who succeed in tricking the "folk" into
thinking them "...of the people". A regular contributor to this
blog wrote recently:
Howard Dean, along with the other main stream Dem orgs. and the
progressive Dem.orgs had better figure out a way to co-exist and
share resources, they are going to need, if they are to over come
this corrupt bunch they are about to take the field with.
Certainly, as more voters grow dis-enchanted with George W. Bush
and the GOP in general, Democratic prospects will improve. But
there is a downside to the political reality that even as they grow
smaller in number, the GOP's natural base grows very, very rich.
Sadly, our electoral system seems designed to weed out dissent
deviating past a certain "norm", a norm acceded to by a tiny,
exceedingly rich, ruling cabal, a "norm" established by the
Democratic and Republican wings of a single party.
An update.
Americans Now Resemble Pre-War Nazi Germans
You see them at the supermarket aggressively pushing their shopping
carts around, and you get this feeling that if you do not move fast
enough they might just run into you. You detect an undercurrent of
suppressed rage, hostility, and detachment as if they are on some
other planet.
You feel the same thing when you are driving down the road, and you
see them driving with one hand on the wheel, the other hand holding
up a cell phone to their ear, wheeling their SUVs around just as
aggressively and at the same time detached, like those people in
the supermarket pushing their shopping carts around.
No-one smiles any more. No-one wants to talk about things that
matter. If you want to discuss anything other than sports, sex, or
Dancing with the Stars, no-one seems interested.
What is happening? Is it something in the water, or is "Invasion of
the Body Snatchers" actually happening, for real?
I do not remember people being like this. They are hostile,
impatient, full of suppressed anger, abrupt, suspicious, and some
even threatening.
Not so many years ago, you couldn't walk down the street without
running into your friends and neighbors wanting to talk about
anything and everything, and have a good laugh. People, I remember,
used to communicate -- now they just glare at you, or completely
ignore you.
No-one wants to complain about anything. No-one seems to be
bothered by high taxes or inflation. They just look at you and roll
their eyes like you are crazy if you dare to express your
dissatisfaction with the status quo. And God forbid, do not mention
the wars, that topic really gets people uncomfortable. It is as if
you are asking some personal question. ...
Just how much debt will Bush leave to your children to pay back --
unless, your children somehow become billionaires?
As percentage of GDP, "deficit is twice as large as it's ever been"
[YouTube link]
Billionaires for Bush
Additional resources
The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller,
Jr. University of North Carolina at Wilmington
We're Right, They're Wrong
Wealth Inequality Charts
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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