Wednesday, May 14, 2008

And America Too !!


Yes, I know. I spend too much time criticizing Israel. I am too focussed on her problems and faults. What about the faults of other countries?

Well just to show I am not a one trick pony, I want to share this article from the Wall Street Journal about the sorry state of the U.S. economy.

The U.S. may be a technical democracy. It is certainly a government of the people. But it has cease to be a governmnet by the people and for the people. For at least 20 years it has been a government by professional politicians for the rich and the super rich. (And most professional politician are at least in the "rich" category.)

Highlights (or rather lowlights) include:


Median "nonelderly" household income, we find, fell consistently through the first half of this decade, despite the solid economic growth enjoyed by the
country as a whole. Some nonmedian folks did just fine, of course: The top 20% of households earned more, after taxes, than the rest of the country combined in 2005, while the topmost 1% of the population took home more than the bottom 40%. The top-earning hedge fund manager of 2007, in fact, made about as much last year in nominal dollars ($3.7 billion) as J. Paul Getty, one of the richest men in the world, was worth in the mid-1970s.

Real hourly wages for most workers, on the other hand, have risen only 1% since 1979, even as those workers' productivity has increased by 60%. What's more, American workers now clock more hours per year than their counterparts in virtually every other advanced economy, even Japan. And unless you haven't read a newspaper for 15 years, you already know what's happened to workers' health insurance and pension plans.

...

So let us have one now. Instead of pleasant talk about "change" and feats of beer drinking at the corner tavern, let us hear our candidates address this greatest issue of them all: What kind of country are we to be? A land of equality? Or a bankers' utopia – where the law of the land has achieved mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics, and devil take the bottom 80%



And the situation in Canada is only marginally better.

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