Paul Buchheit

America is gradually, but unrelentingly, destroying part of itself. The facts to support this are well-documented, told in many ways from past to present.

If a revolution is to take place, Americans — especially young Americans— need to know the facts, and they need to know how they’re getting cheated, and they need to get angry.

The severing of our society into a plutocracy and a peasantry is so far along that statistics almost cease to have meaning.

Many wealthy Americans believe that dysfunctional behavior causes poverty.

It’s not a game for Americans who need jobs and education and public transportation and infrastructure repair. But public services continue to be cut, while the wealthiest Americans benefit the most from a government they say they don’t want.

“Save the public education!”

4. TV News Dumbed Down For American Viewers.

As we try to grasp the reasoning behind cuts to life-saving programs while billion-dollar incomes and trillion-dollar profits are being made, we must understand that extreme wealth deadens parts of the brain.

Free market idealists argue that capitalism works for anyone with a little initiative and a willingness to work hard.

The first step is to learn the facts, and then to get angry and to ask ourselves, as progressives and caring human beings, what we can do about the relentless transfer of wealth to a small group of well-positioned Americans.

Some of America’s leading news analysts are beginning to recognize the fallacy of the “free market.”

First of all, who are they? Mostly the 1%. But the top 2-5% have also done quite well, increasing their inflation-adjusted wealth by 75 percent from 1983 to 2009 while average wealth went down for 80 percent of American households.

Are political and corporate leaders even remotely aware of the conditions of society beneath the wealthiest 10% or so?

Every clear-thinking American knows that education and jobs are needed more than armed guards in poor neighborhoods.

Free-market libertarians go to outrageous extremes to convince themselves and others of the infallibility of the market. Even when opposing evidence smacks them in the face, they conjure up sound bites that seem vaguely convincing but are in reality meaningless.

Congress and others who apparently don’t study the facts, believe that Social Security is a government handout. But ‘entitlement’ means that people who have paid into a program all their lives are entitled to a reasonable return on their investment.

As they accumulate more and more wealth, the very rich have less need for society. At the same time, they’ve convinced themselves that they made it on their own, and that contributing to societal needs is unfair to them.

The process is gradual, insidious, lethal. It starts with financial stress in various forms, and then, according to growing evidence, leads to health problems and shorter lives.