.
Last modified: July 1998
"Senate Democratic majority leader George Mitchell
exclaimed late in 1994, shortly before he abandoned
Congress in disgust: "This system stinks. This system is money." The law
of life among us now is what Jefferson called
"the general prey of the rich upon the poor." The moment is dangerous.
Democracy is not guaranteed God's protection; systems and nations end.
If we do anything serious now we might make
things worse; if we do nothing serious now we are done for.
. . .
"Jefferson wrote that what distinguished our new country from the Old World was the absence among us then of the fatal concentrations of private wealth that so deformed imperial Europe. Yet the gap between the very rich and the rest of us now is morally more obscene that anything Jefferson could have had in mind. One percent of the people among us own 40 percent f the national wealth. The after-tax income of the top 20 percent of the U.S. families exceeds that of all the other families combined. Between 1977 and 1989 the 1 percent of families with incomes over $350,000 received 72 percent of the country's income gains while the bottom 60 percent lost ground. In 1992 half of our families had net financial assets under $1,000. Debts exceeded assets for four out of ten of our families. In 1994, seventy American individuals and fifty-nine American families collectively owned $295 billion, an average of $2.3 billion. The top fifty-one individuals and families owned $197 billion, an average of $3.9 billion. The two richest Americans, William Gates and Warren Buffett, and the richest American family, the du Ponts, owned a total of $34 billion among them. The rate of child poverty in the United States is four times the rate in Western Europe."
by Ronnie Dugger: "A Call to Citizens: Real Populists Please Stand Up!" The Nation, August 14-21, 1995.