What made America the greatest nation on earth was most Americans post World War Two were able to live the “American Dream” Up until the middle eighties prosperity was part and parcel of the lives of all middle Americans. Every working American shared in the wealth that was created by making real things. Houses over the last sixty years were built with at least two car garages, because most families were two car families! We just didn’t have one television set, we ended having one in the kitchen as well as every bedroom! For nearly forty years American companies grew organically making better and better products that helped them to become more and more profitable. Middle class Americans shared in the growing wealth, by receiving great healthcare and pension plans and higher wages in keeping with their employers increased profitability.

Twenty-five years ago thanks to President Reagan’s promotion that life should be about less government and less taxes, we created a dominating class representing the selfish and greedy. In 1970 the average Fortune 500 Company CEO earned twenty-five times the average worker’s wage. Today the ratio is nearly 450 times! In 2009 the average worker (one of the lucky ones yet to be laid off) is earning less than he did twenty years ago and is struggling to maintain payments on his house and car while the bastards at the top flit from mansion to mansion in the corporate jet, and like John McCain married (second time around) to a wealthy woman, probably can’t even remember how many family homes they and his missus owned!

One of the saddest things for me is to see the destruction of the middle class and in its place find an underclass, the working poor! Being the socialist I am, once this recession is over, I want to see some re-distribution of wealth. No-one should be earning money they couldn’t spend in 200 lifetimes while so many of their felloe citizens are having sand thrown in their faces by these heartless monsters who have grown rich by literally riding on the backs of the former middle class.

Yes, this recession is global, but I disagree with the experts that the solutions must be global. This is the time when we need to look within and work on the principle, charity begins at home. Right now we do not have the resources to continue looking after the rest of the world and quite frankly with our popularity around the globe having hit new lows under the last administration, we can quietly concentrate on repairing America. I do feel badly for poor third world nations’ economies becoming more desperate, but let Russia, India and China (and experts in knowing what poverty is all about) with their new found wealth open their check books and help. Why does it always have to be America?

Well, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America et al, I am not buying into your boloney. Jail is the place where we hold murderers, rapists and thieves and the senior executives of the financial world (yes, the lot of them) whom I deem to be thieves are absolutely deserving of a very long holiday in the Big House courtesy of the court system. And I would include some publishers/ journalists in my list of felons too! You people still cannot pony up with the truth and even though your companies are in meltdown you have the audacity to keep up in telling the average bloke, “Sorry, little fellow, you spent up on the American Dream when you couldn’t afford to and look what a mess you have gotten us into!” The fact is you jerks on Wall St gambled with our hard earned money creating extraordinary wealth for yourselves, bought the media onto your side, all the while believing you held the trump (excuse the pun) card over us.

Now we’ve seen the first major collapse of a media corporation, Sam Zell’s Tribune Company, (with many others, including CBS on the brink of insolvency) we may find editors prepared to print/speak the truth and to hell with their employers’ self interests. The world in my opinion is in recession and no amount of bailouts to the banks is going to make any difference; they all need to be nationalized. Until independently-owned Media is truly owned and controlled by men and women with a passion for seeking and publishing the truth, we will be camouflaged from what is truly happening in this world. At least public broadcasting news and views has a history of informing its viewers/listeners with the unfettered truth without bias. Maybe some of the “TARP” funds should be used to increase the coffers of NPR and Public Television so they can take a dominant position in imparting America with knowledge of the real facts of the state of our nation.