Bye-Bye Miss American Pie

I love pie charts!

They are so deliciously informative. A good pie chart makes statistics so digestible!

The short and sweet of it is this:

There are 400 incomprehensibly wealthy people in America who have more money and property than the 150,000,000 individuals in the bottom half of our population. The .000133% vs. 50%!

The now infamous 1% controls 43% of America’s vast riches. And their share is increasing daily.

By the way, I got the pie chart already baked and ready for consumption from an article that appears at the website for the Curry County Democrats based in Brookings, Oregon. You can read the whole article here, and I thank them for their tasty work.

Of course, unlike a lot of the social and political crimes against the average American by our corporate-government oligarchical junta, income inequality is no secret.

Elizabeth Warren has railed against it. Obama has thrown his expensive hat into the ring. Even the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, has expressed alarm, a plea for sanity which was more twerking than real love.

From the people themselves, Occupy Wall Street created the most viral meme in modern history __ the 1% vs. the 99% __ but we saw how that ended up. The 1% brought some big guns to the skeet shoot and the clay pigeons turned to dust.

There is hope. But it’s down the road. The house of cards, aka the American economy, will collapse and the people at the top will have the furthest to fall.

In the meantime, we can expect more of the same. Which means more to them and less to the rest of us, the slobbering masses who amble idly like anesthetized sheep outside their gated communities and opulent private estates.

I will say this. The well-fed titans of economic tyranny at the top get paid well to stick it to the rest of us. As this graphic shows (sorry it’s not a pie chart but more of a stale cracker), the income ratios between CEOs and their worker-slaves in America is ridiculously out of sync and beyond excessive!

When looking at the obsessive hoarding and soul-numbing, society-gutting greed of our privileged patrons of profligacy, we have to ask ourselves: What is the point?

Yes . . . what is the point?

To paraphrase that classic song by Don McLean . . .

I remember when the music died
That was the day that I cried

R. I. P. . . . the American Dream.