Oh, And

See what I mean about profiting from poverty? That's what the pension squeeze is all about! Why are corporations dumping worker pensions and the Bushies underfunding the emergency pension fund and trying to throw Social Security to Wall Street? Because CEOs and high-level investors make MONEY off of dumping worker pensions and getting Social Security accounts! All across the board, that's how it works. Stagnant wages, the upward transfer of wealth, increased poverty (which is just another way of saying "the upward transfer of wealth")...the continued appalling poverty in the Third World...IT LINES PEOPLE'S POCKETS. The Bushies would love nothing better than for us to end up like Ethiopians, because all the money we lose would go to THEM. That is how it works. That is why this upward transfer of wealth is going on here at home, and why efforts to restore wealth to the Third World poor keep failing. Because The Man wants to get it for himself, and once he got it, he ain't lettin' it go.

WAKE UP!! everybody.

Not that I know what the hell can be done, outside of electing a lot of Democrats and then starting to elect a lot of *real* Democrats, and then getting control of the World Bank and engineering debt relief for all debtor nations and encouraging social spending and all that stuff that's never going to happen. And put down the pitchforks; peasant rebellions just make things worse. In fact, that's probably the explanation for the whole mess. The social-democratic movements of the 20th century (labor, women's, black, civil rights) were essentially peasant rebellions. (I think I said that before, actually, but I can't find it.) And now comes payback. Now they make us wish we'd kept our mouths shut. Now they make us long for the days of Jim Crow, six-day workweeks, and sex-segregated help wanted ads.

Buckle up, gonna be quite a ride.