The state of the American economy to some is no accident. There have been many key factors that have taken place to bring the American economy to where it is today. According to Donald Goldmacher, Co-Producer for the documentary “Heist: Collapse Not Catastrophe, But Planned Outcome Of Corporations,” it all started falling apart with a deliberate dismantling of middle-class prosperity, ramped deregulation and jobs being outsourced. In this video segment, Goldmacher gives us his take on who stole the American dream.
As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people, who own the productive capital wealth of the nation, that the system is rigged to benefit. Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of non-human productive capital increases (superautomation, machines, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.), embodied in the assets of our business corporations, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in widespread civil unrest and upheaval.
Democratic capitalism has yet to be tried. We are absent a national discussion of where consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, and instead argue about policies to redistribute income or not to redistribute income. If Americans do not demand that the contenders for the office of the presidency of the United States, the Senate, and the Congress address these issues, we will have wasted the opportunity to steer the American economy in a direction that will broaden affluence. We have adequate resources, adequate knowhow, and adequate manpower to produce general affluence, but we need as a society to properly and efficiently manage these resources while protecting and enhancing the environment so that our productive capital capability is sustainable and renewable. Such issues are the proper concern of government because of the human damage inflicted on our social fabric as well as to economic growth in which every citizen is fairly included in the American dream.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AIWDsRS0i4&NR=1&feature=endscreen
