Redistribution of wealth - easier in concept than practice.

Okay, Gene....I'll bite.... Is there any point where you would find it reasonable for "have not" voters using their power of sheer numbers to elect representatives and a president committed to using progressive taxation as a means to put a dent in this, at least in the US?:

Richest tenth own 85% of world's assets - Times Online

If not....what else do your propose to reverse the growing concentration of wealth?

It seemed to worl for the US masss, the last time -

"Taft called for a constitutional amendment that would specifically permit a
personal income tax. and meanwhile proposed a corporate income tax on profits..."

From an srticle posted on the website of the conservative think tank,

How Reforms in Mexico Could Make the U.S. More Secure

Carlos Slim: Mexico's Fattest Cat.  

Slim, 68, amassed his nearly $60 billion for­tune[62] in a nation where per capita income is less than $6,800 a year and half the population lives in poverty. His wealth amounts to 6.3 percent of Mex­ico's annual economic output: If Bill Gates owned a similar chunk of the U.S., he would be worth $784 billion. According to one account:

[I]t takes about nine of the captains of industry and finance of the 19th century and early 20th centuries—Rockefeller, Cor­nelius Vanderbilt, John J. Astor, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Stewart, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, Jay Gould and Marshall Field—to replicate the footprint that Mr. Slim has left on Mexico.[63]

As another observer has written, that's "enough to give any populist heartburn."[64]

Venezuela (06/08)

www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35766.htm

ECONOMY...

...."There is considerable income inequality. The Gini coefficient was 0.42 during 2007. According to government statistics, the percentages of poor and extremely poor among Venezuelan population were 27.5% and 7.6%, respectively, for the first half of 2007...."

The Best Part of Rachel Maddow's Obama Interview
Huffington Post, NY - Oct 31, 2008

...."He [Obama] surely heard the UN's "international alert" about U.S. cities. No, not a terrorist attack, or rising sea levels- instead, startling income inequality. The UN's State of the World's Cities report puts Beijing's Gini coefficient (a key measure of inequality), at 0.22, which is significantly lower than that of major American metros like Atlanta, Miami, and New York (with coefficients greater than 0.5). But it's not just that Beijing is beating us: the international alert line falls at 0.4!

Of course, this doesn't mean that people should pack their bags for Beijing, or for Freetown for that matter (Gini coefficient = 0.32). Poverty levels and standards of living are doubtless higher and lower, respectively, in those cities.

The real take-away from the report is that lower inequality results not from economic performance alone, but from "the regulatory, distributive and redistributive capacity of the national and local welfare states". Redistribution? Welfare? Uh-oh. Don't tell the McCain campaign, whose strategists only have time these days for abstract talk of "fixing crumbling infrastructure" without offering much in the way of specific proposals...."

My point, Gene, is that the US State Dept., and the authors of the piece at heritage.org that includes a description of the impact on the Mexican people of the wealth concentrated in the hands on the Carlos Slim Helu family, are mutual recognition of a problem you either cannot fathom, or refuse to incorporate into your thinking. Microsoft enjoys a worldwide, small computer operating system software monopoly, and Walmart enjoys a near retailing monopoly in it's sector. It dictates delivery terms and price to it's suppliers.

Obama recognizes that it is government's role to use it's potential power to alter the distribution of wealth derived from these monopolies and near monopolies.

Your "way", Gene....is Bush's "way", the policies that widened wealth inequity during the past eight years:

.."It emerged that there was less social mobility in the UK, US and Italy than in Australia, Canada and Denmark, with parents' earnings being a more reliable guide to a child's future earnings..."

Gene, you have a concept of what "the Uniited States'" recent histoy consists of that is out of synch with my concept of what has "gone down", and I think it is because your perception is clouded by elitist propaganda, mistaken as a mainstream POV.

You detest "cut n pastes", so I'll make a deal with you. Accept every point in the rest of this post as well supported fact, or challenge each point you find inaccurate or incredulous, otherwise we agree from the outset that I can back up eveything I post with well recognized news accounts, government reports, and from books authored by recognized authorities.

The American people just witnessed a wealth transfer authorization of a borrowing of $700 billion in new national debt to be transferred directly to insolvent financial corps., or to buy assets of these corps. currently worthless or near worthless in the markets they are customarily bought and sold in. Every member of congress who voted for this legidlation admits that input from constituents was vastly against it's passage. Dr. John Houseman of the Houseman Funds wrote an open letter to Congress on 9/22, pointing out that those holding the debt of these insolvent banks and brokerages and insurers....the owners of the corporate bonds, would be made whole in the event of the passage of the proposed bailout, and that instead, these corps. could accept insolvency by declaring common and preferred shares as worthless as they are in a non-federally subsidized market, and the bond holders could receive new issuance of stock in exchange for the bonds representing the secured debt owed to them. The insolvent corps. would then begin operations anew with no bonded debt on their books, and the former bondholders....the 5 percent of US households described in the 2004 triennial Fed SCF report as owning "93 percent of all corporate bonds". WOULD BE IN THE POSITION AND TAKING THE RISKS THAT THE TAXPAYERS HAVE BEEN MADE TO STEP IN FRONT OF, INSTEAD. The bonded debt in the bailed out corps, is still seured by the assets of these corps., but the stock issued to the Federal Reserve is subordinate to the bonds because preferred and common stock, or warrants for stock, ALWAYS ARE subordinate to bonds in the event of liquidation.

The US "free enterprise system"....it isn't "capitalism", because profits are private, and losses, as I described above....are "social"....and it isn't "free", or even "enterprise" if it is too big or too "important" to fail....and it isn't a "system"....it's an oligarchy ruled by "cronies".

Are you aware, Gene, that the US economic system requires a surplus labor condition and price supports in order to function? Workers can have no power to bargain for wages, benfits, or working conditions, ideally, or.....a business could end up "ruined" by it's unions, as the UAW is accused of "ruining" the big three US automakers, even though UAW workers had no say in the design and choice of which vehicles to build, with what quality of parts, fit , or finish, or in how to market and finance abnd service the finished product to consumers.

John Flynn, in his 1940 book, "FDR: COUNTRY SQUIRE IN THE WHITE HOUSE", an obviously anti FDR, anti "New Deal" accounting of FDR's qualifications, background, and presidential decision making,, described how pricing in the US business system is always at risk of falling too far because of the influences of efficitent, modern production methods, and that the New Deal was an open invitation by the Roosevelt administration, forr representatives of Wall Street and Industry to institute and practice New Deal policies to keep prices of manufactured goods and food items higher than they would have been in response to supply and demand conditions.

What author Flynn described as 1930's price propping,  sounds just like what the US government is currently trying to do with stock prices, asset backed securities, and prices of homes and commercial real estate, doesn't it?

The "propping" of prices of business assets and output by government intervention, has a history of working the opposite, when it comes to the price workers can charge for their labor. Even the propping of home prices is related to propping the prices of the distressed asset backed paper banks are now stuck owning, and not out of concern for the consequences to individual mortgagees.

In the 1970's, a labor researcher found a letter stored in the US National Archive, sent via US Mail in 1916 by a "wobbly", a member of the IWW labor organization, to another IWW member. The letter was intercepted by US government authorities monitoring the activity of the labor activist, and never reached the intended recipient. The letter contained a description by Jane Street, of how she developed a system to drive up pay and working condistions of house maids hired by the wealthy in the city of Denver. Ms. Street went through the process, herself, of responding to newspaper employment ads and learning through her own experience, what to expect in pay and working conditions. Street then placed ads for house maids herself, and then sent those who responded to the ads she had placed, to respond, with her directions, to the ads for house maids placed by Denver homeowners. Street instructed each maid on her list to ask for $25 per month wages, when Street's own experience had been wage offers of no more than $20 per month. She instructed the applicants to demand no laundry chores and set days off before accepting job offers. When employers experienced similar demands for $25 wages and the working condtions I already described, they accepted these terms as the norm and hired the maids who responded through Jane Street.  One woman singlehandedly raised pay of housemaids in Denver by 25 percent and improved their working conditions.

Why would a US government, "of the people", confiscate a letter routed throught the US Mail, describing how to accomplish such an improvement, Gene?

We who live in the SE US states were still paying $4.19/gal for gasoline as recently s 4 weeks ago due to the power failures extending the shutdown of refinieries in hurricane ravaged Texas and Louisiana. The price of a gallon of regular gas has dropped dramatically to $1.98 in this area, today. The dramatic price spike and fall of a consumer neccessity played out in just the past year, in an unregulated market.

When the price of crude oil rose in the late 1970's, the Carter administration drafted and passed legislation that set up and federally an alternative fuel research organization called the Syn-Fuels Corp. Tax credits and government funding for solar power research and manufacturing was alos part of this energy bill. Domertic oil and gas, 70 percent of US supply at that time, was price regulated, based on when the source of it was first produced. By law, "old oil" was price capped at a much lower price than product sourced from newer sites, allowing compensation for costs and incentives for new exploration, while minimizing windfall profits caused by imported supply interruption from an unstable middle east region.

The Reagan adminsitration came into office in Jan., 1981, accelerated the planned price deregualtion of "old", price capped oil and gas, ending tax credits and subsidies of solar and synthetic fuels research, and pushed a mantra of a "free market" energy industry, as it stacked the Syn-Fuels Corp, with political and oil industry hacks who had no interest in making the government's investment in any energy research, work out as envisioned by 1980. The end of the initial stage of the 1980 Iran-Iraq war and the recession that peaked with 10.8 percent unemployment in 1982, dampened the price of oil until after 1986, with gasoline sinking at one point, below 70 cents/gal at the pump.

The intent of Carter's 1979 energy bill was to insulate, with government provided tax incentives and research and other investment subsidies, exactly what the "free market", reversal of the Reagan administration, succeeeded in bringing about. By the mid 1980's, all solar powered R&D and maufactured product companies were acquired by....THE MAJOR OIL COMPANIES. Syn-Fuel Corp, was defunded and shut down after congressional hearings exposed the woefull conduct and conflicts of interests of the Reagan appointed executives chosen to oversee and operate it. A huge solar panel array built in the early 1980's in the California dessert to power 20,000 homes, designed and built under and because of the research advances of the Carter energy independence program, became uneconomical by the late 1990's, as a vulture purchaser bought it to deliberately dismantle the still functioning solar power generation array, to sell off the solar panels individually, as they were calculated to be worth more separately during a period of depressed oil prices, than they were as components of a functioning complex. Many of those panels were sold and resold on Ebay, usually in pairs, adequate to provide back up power for a single residence.

If oil prices stay depressed, as they suddenly are now, the cycle of alternative energy investment in a "free" market, will quickly bust, as it did twice since 1980, and major oil companies will buy up and suppress any research and product development seen as likely to compete in the next petroleum price ramp up.

The point is that Carter's people came up with a method to avoid what the "free" market has done to eliminate energy sources alternative to oil, when oil products enter a period of rising prices.

From 1914, until probably the present time, a small group of financial elite have combined investment strategy with political "operators" and the influence the elite's money buys, to front run arms production and arms sales profits in the US, and to effect foreign and domestic policy that has both accelerated a US war footing, and involved trading with the very enemy that the push toward war is intended to engage militarilry with. This small group of elite had included both George Walker and Prescott Bush, materanl and paternal grandfathers and geat-grandfathers of our current and recent Bush presidents, as well as influenced and directed the policies and decisions of these two presidents, while in office. This group of closely knitt families, since at least 1914, has designed and handpicked US intelligence agencies and the men who staff and operate them, as well as both the uranium and hydrogen bomb development projects, the cold war, collaboration with high level members of the Nazi regime in Germany, and of with it's principle arms, fuel, and organic chemical manufactures, and with it's espionage agency dirtectors and operatives, before, during, and after WWII. The Dickstein-McCormack congrssional committee on Un-American Activiteis found that members of this small group were involved, in 1934, in the planning and financing of a fascist coup intended to overthrow and replace the lawful US government. In addition to the offices of US President and VP, members of this group have founded and directed the OSS in WWII, the CIA, served as under-secrataries of war during WWII, as two secretaries of defense after WWII, and as secretary of the US Treasury, and served on JFK's Ex-Com advisors group during the Cuban missle crisis in OCt., 1962.

The consequences of the extreme right wing agenda of this small group is the primary driver of present US circumstances, ranging from the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, a ten trillion dollar national debt, gross wealth inequity, neglected public infrastructure, inefficient, world's most costly, and least encompassing network of healtcare insurance coverage of any western post industrialized nation. US residents enjoy none of the job protection, or liesure time mandates, or retirement benefits minimums of western European and Scandanavian countries like France, Germany, Denmark, or Sweden.

The most successful result of the agenda of this small group of elite is the near universal mindset....the disconnect that the dysfunction, extreme right politics driven militarism, violence, neglect, exploitation of the many, and the elevation to unaccounatble power of a criminal, elite class, even as it continues to loot the borrowing faciltiy of the US Treasury and concentrates even the declining national wealth into fewer and fewer hands.....is somehow noble, "the American Way"!

....Gene....you love it, just the way it is, don't you?