The Second Gilded Age: Has America Become an Oligarchy?

[FarCenter]

At first, the outraged members of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York were mainly met with ridicule. They didn't seem to stand a chance and were judged incapable of going up against their adversaries, Wall Street's bankers and financial managers, either intellectually or in terms of economic knowledge.


"We are the 99 percent," is the continuing chant of the protestors, who are now in their seventh week of marching through the streets of Manhattan. And, surprisingly, they have hit upon the crux of America's problems with precisely this sentence. Indeed, they have given shape to a development in the country that has been growing more acute for decades, one that numerous academics and experts have tried to analyze elsewhere in lengthy books and essays. It's a development so profound and revolutionary that it has shaken the world's most powerful nation to its core.

Inequality in America is greater than it has been in almost a century. Those fortunate enough to belong to the 1 percent, made up of the super-rich, stand on one side of the divide; the remaining 99 percent on the other. Even for a country that has always accepted opposite extremes as part of its identity, the chasm has simply grown too vast.

Those who succeed in the US are congratulated rather than berated. Resenting other people's wealth is viewed as supporting class struggle, which is something very frowned upon.

Still, statistics indicate that the growing disparity is genuinely overwhelming. In fact, the 400 wealthiest Americans now own more than the "lower" 150 million Americans put together.

Nearly two-thirds of net private assets are concentrated in the hands of 5 percent of Americans. In comparison, the upper 5 percent of Germany hold less than half of net assets. In 2009 alone, at the same time as the US was being convulsed by mass layoffs, the number of millionaires in the country skyrocketed.

Indeed, if you look at the reports it compiles on every country in the world, even the CIA has concluded that wealth disparity is greater in the US than in Tunisia or Egypt.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,793896,00.html

[no_hypocrisy]

1. If this country's become an oligarchy, it's temporary.

No way we're going let this be the way it will be.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

2. Our era has spawned a new leisure class like the gilded age

a class of people who principally live by making money with money and wait around the pool all day for their dividend checks. Not all rich people are lazy with their money. Some entrpreneurs risk everything they have on new ideas that bring new thngs into the world, like Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors who risked $100 million of his own money developing a private space rocket that could service the international space station. But this new leisure class has no concept of hard work and actual productivity, risk, or what it's like to have to pull themselves up from obscurity and poverty. The leisure class is not concerned with job creation. If they can make money with money, they don't are about producing things or technology.

[Sherman A1]

3. About 30 years ago

[LWolf]

4. I listened to a history professor lecture on "The Gilded Age II" a couple of weeks ago.

He made a great case.

[Fumesucker]

5. Oligarchy by itself wouldn't be quite so bad..

What we have is an oligarchal kakistocracy.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kakistocracy

Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.

[alfredo]

6. When do we start calling it treason?