Main St. Vs. Wall St. -- the Lost Decade

Time was when a rising tide lifted all the boats and not just the ones in the high end marinas. The current economic mess is further proof that making the big bucks has been decoupled from the shared prosperity that once sustained a healthy middleclass.

Once, fat cats made their money when working stiffs made real stuff in factories, earning enough to buy homes and send their kids to college. Now the fat cats make more money if the little guy doesn't. Off-shoring jobs, leasing low paid workers, busting unions, looting pension funds, slashing benefits and generating massive layoffs as a result of mergers, acquisitions and asset stripping -- all for the sake of excessive profits and obscene executive compensation -- have become SOP.

According to The Washington Post, even before the Crash of 2008 we were bearing the legacy of Wall Street's salivating avarice. "Job growth was half that of the previously lowest decade (1980s)...Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s. Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999...And the net worth of American households -- the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts -- declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since -- the 1950s."

Yet, as recently as two years ago Wall Street mavens, using phony-baloney statistics, were still telling us how swimmingly the economy was doing. One stat touted increases in median wealth when all along it was the "Bill Gates Factor." (Nine beer and shot guys sitting in a bar; in comes Bill Gates and the median net worth shoots up to sixty billion dollars.) Truth is the last decade is the only period of economic expansion since the 1940s in which workers, except for the top five percent, lost ground, even given significant increases in productivity.

All this in the face of the enormous (Bush) tax cuts that Republicans claim are the magic key to prosperity -- and insist more of will get us out of our current predicament -- but in reality only served to widen the economic chasm between the executive and working classes.

But a "lost decade" is not the worst of it. Instead of pouring the massive profits made prior to the meltdown as the result of buccaneer capitalism, "cheep" credit, unfunded tax cuts and financial deregulation into R&D, cost-efficiencies, streamlining factories, green technologies and entrepreneurship, the wealthy compounded the coming disaster by squandering trillions on highly leveraged financial derivatives, McMansions, corporate jets and lavish lifestyles, none of which will create new jobs or produce long term economic growth for the middleclass.

Welcome to the new America.