Michael Butler’s Blog

I received this message yesterday. I don’t know who sent it nor how I got on this list. I have mulled over it for a couple of days. There is so much to write about this subject. I don’t want to overcome you.

“ This page was sent to you by:� lori.couzens@ucsfmedctr.org
Message from sender:
I would be very interested in your response to the issue of disparity between the very wealthiest Americans (Of which you are one) and the middle and lower income americans as described in this column.
OPINION � | September 8, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist:� Whining Over Discontent
By PAUL KRUGMAN
We are, finally, having a national discussion about inequality, and right-wing commentators are in full panic mode. “

Why don’t you start by hitting on Paul Krugman’s Op-Ed - if you have not already read it. It was in MB-Civic 2 days ago.
http://www.michaelbutler.com/blog/civic/

Yes! I am very interested in “responding”.

We are coming to a threshold, a turning point in civilization. We� can either advance to a period of light or be taken down into darkness. Besides all the fundamentalist conflicts over religion, great concern for the health of all peoples and of all the planet, we face inequality. We have materialism versus spirituality. Or as Thom Hartman writes in “Screwed”, a subtitle ‘Profit vs People’.

What we have is an Obscene situation in this country, not to forget the world, which threatens the stability of America. It puts our children and grandchildren in peril. The gulf between the Rich and the Poor has become a canyon. The vaunted middle class, Americas strength and fortress of stability, is falling into that chasm.

The age of creativity, entrepreneurism, artisanship, manufactory which has made America the goal of the world is under duress. It is overcome by wealth made by money not by creative accomplishment.

CEO’s, those captains of industry, are rewarded ‘000’s of time over that of their own workforce. Pensions are being jettisoned. Health care for the world’s wealthiest nation is a disgrace. Housing cost is out of sight. And the minimum wage at $5.15 has not been raised in a decade. However our politicians have seen great increases in salary and perks not to mention the corporate largess of their masters. Of course many are so wealthy such increases do not matter.

How did this come about? I want to quote something I copied but cannot identify the author.

“ How did this happen? By design. For a quarter of a century now a ferocious campaign has been conducted to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual, cultural, and religious frameworks that sustained America’s social contract. The corporate, political, and religious right converged in a movement that for a long time only they understood because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries ” Anon

It has been longer than twenty five years. This campaign started with the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy.� Of course the precursor - the demise of hope - began with the murder of Jack. The riots of the black ghettos and Columbia University were clarions to the beginning of the collapse of the Hippie Movement. A radical left wing called the Yippies destroyed the image of Freedom, Peace and Love with their provocations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. I do not excuse the reactions of the Chicago Police but they lost it - egged on by a violent group masking as Hippies.

This is particularly hard to retell as I had flown to Chicago to warn the Governor Otto Kerner and Mayor Richard Daley, both friends and mentors that the Yippies were setting the Convention up. Otto was concerned but Richard couldn’t “believe it could happen in my city”

So, “dear Richard Nixon”, as my Mother would call him, was elected on a crest of fear by those who sought after security in place of freedom. Mother did not care, she could buy freedom.

I was on another side and wound up being the only person listed twice (at different addresses) on Nixon’s Enemies List.

Thus began the active dismantling of America’s social contract. The envy of most of the world.
Nixon was a real hater. He, amongst other actions, instructed Mitchell, his Attorney General, to get Otto Kerner, Governor of Illinois. They wanted to discredit his work, along with that of Mayor John Lindsay, NYC, on The Kerner Commission on Civil Rights. Of course, these Nixon plots were the beginnings of the Republican take over of the South to their advantage in retaliation to the Kennedy/Johnson administrations giving the disenfranchised and the poor a chance.

Otto Kerner was my mentor and later my patron when I was preparing to run for the US Senate. No more honorable person ever lived� to which anyone who knew him or studied the facts will attest. It was due to my being with him in NYC during his Civil Rights work that I became involved with HAIR.

The government was followed by that benign ruler Gerald Ford who most memorably pardoned Nixon and gave us Cheney and Rumsfeld who recently enlivened our days, with such classics as “threat of WMD’s” and “stuff happens”, true Ministers of Fear Control.

Carter pulled the rug out from under the Shah, thus suppressing millions of Iranians and destroying our major ally in the Middle East.
Inflation was running rampant. I recall staggering interest rates when we were building a hotel. Of course the greatest burden of the cost of interest falls on the poor and the middle class.

Reagan, that nice, friendly communicator ushered in the “trickle down” theory of economics aka “voodoo economics” which I am certain he did not clearly understand. The era of privatization took over. Mergers and conglomerations became the rage. One of the greatest casualties affecting us today was the rise of the great media groups.� This has hobbled the freedom of the press through disinclination to question the government who control so much of their privileges. Again all, except the wealthy, were hurt by the dismantling of the American social contract.

Bush I continued the rise of� corporate power in America.
The overwhelming influence of corporations compared to the clout of the commonweal. Of course the middle class was squeezed more all the time.

Bill Clinton, what a charmer, notwithstanding his cigars and the stained blue dress, his sexual affairs were none of our business. As none of ours should be anyone else’s. Ken Starr, financed by Richard Mellon Scaife - a trip himself, has discredited his profession.
However Clinton went along with the consolidation of corporate power while he sold us, myself included, on NAFTA. Free Trade was the mantra and easily believed as it would be a great thing for the world to have true free trade and the collapse of barriers.

Last night with Jim Rado, author of HAIR, we went to Red Bank, NJ to see what turned out to be great production. We were discussing� NAFTA and I my active support of it. I agreed that I and others had been sold a bill of goods.

We did not get get free trade instead we got globalization which means that the Mexican peon is thrown off the land because his minimal method of farming cannot compete with our subsidized Agro giants like ADM, cotton growers in Texas, or sugar barons in Florida. So he treks north to give cheap labor to those who dispossess him in the first place.

Well, Bush II has ridden in from the deep SouthWest with all guns blazing and riding the neo-con band wagon. There are so many issues created by this cabal that I fear to mention them by name. So to this particular area of wealth gap let us concentrate.� Bush is constantly repeating, in the support of tax reductions for the wealthy, that they will invest money to increase industry and make jobs = thus raising employment. That the middle class will benefit from the increasing production. I think this is bull shit. I am not going to build a larger or another plant unless I am certain the demand increase is there. Where are the customers getting the money? Not at $5.15 per� hour or even an hourly rate more than that. The current minimum age is not a livable wage. More than even the proposed increases are not a livable wage during the Greenspan inflation.
People with wealth will invest their money in safe havens overseas, hedge funds or US Treasuries whose returns are paid for by the general population. The majority who feel those costa are the middle class and the poor.

My response to this Rich / Poor Gulf is that it is Obscene.
It is also stupid. If you want to create wealth raise all boats so more can afford to buy things produced at the newly built factories by the rich.
Trade (on a leveled playing field) not Aid will help the international scene.
If these thoughts do not suffice please recall the such upheavals� as the Russian Revolution of 1917 where the middle class and the poor outnumbered the wealthy. That gap sure exists today.

Now for a final thought. Yes we raise all boats and everyone wants what we, the rich, have. How are we going to save our home, the Earth?
We need something other than Materialism. Something from the Heart.