WHO WILL STAND UP TO THE SUPERRICH?



Photo by Damon Winter

Yesterday, Frank Rich, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote an opinion piece dealing with one of the biggest problems that we are currently faced with in this country and one that is grabbing a lot of headline attention - the Bush Tax Cuts and the corporate gurus who are really running this country.

As it appears that President Obama is waffling yet again in an effort to appease the right-wing elements of Congress, and signaling some sort of "compromise" on extending these tax cuts, many of us are becoming more and more incensed by his wishy-washy, mamby-pamby performance.

Frank Rich, questions who, then, will stand up against those who represent the upper echelon of the out-of-control economic ladder:


The wealthy Americans we should worry about instead are the ones who implicitly won the election — those who take far more from America than they give back. They were not on the ballot, and most of them are not household names. Unlike Whitman and the other defeated self-financing candidates, they are all but certain to cash in on the Nov. 2 results. There’s no one in Washington in either party with the fortitude to try to stop them from grabbing anything that’s not nailed down.



The Americans I’m talking about are not just those shadowy anonymous corporate campaign contributors who flooded this campaign. No less triumphant were those individuals at the apex of the economic pyramid — the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

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