Eat the Rich

There's a great piece in the Jan. 8 New York Magazine about how the hard working American middle class is getting screwed.

In American Roulette, Kurt Anderson leads with two pilots complaining about their CEO's 40 percent raise and the demise of their pension plan. He segues into the 2006 revenues at just Goldman Sachs being larger than the GNPs of two-thirds of the countries on the planet, and he has become a convert to the "anger and disgust about the ongoing breaches of the social contract, an American economic system that seems more and more rigged in favor of the extremely fortunate.

"I know capitalism is all about creative destruction, that the pain of globalization must be endured and flexible labor markets are good; inequality is endemic; life is uncertain and unfair, sure, yeah, of course. We’re all Reaganites now—or at least no longer socialists by instinct. But during the past two decades we’ve not only let economic uncertainty and unfairness grow to grotesque extremes, we’ve also inured ourselves to the spectacle."

What kind of America have we ushered in for our children?

I think about the lines of Leonard Cohen's Suzanne:

"And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said 'All men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them'"

And it seems to me that today's hard-hearted Christianists who go along with the Social Darwinism of winner-take-all economics must justify their stand by believing that the drowning poor will have no other option than to turn to Jesus.

Thanks to One Good Move for linking to this piece.