The Peasants Need Pitchforks By Robert Scheer

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27838.htm

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_peasants_need_pitchforks_20110405/

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy.

That is the harsh reality obscured by the media’s focus on celebrity gossip, sports rivalries and lotteries, situations in which the average person can pretend that he or she is plugged into the winning side.

Even though most Americans accept that the political game is rigged, we have long assumed that the choices we make in the economic sphere as to career and home are matters that respond to our wisdom and will.  But the banking tsunami that wiped out so many jobs and so much homeownership has demonstrated that most Americans have no real control over any of that, and while they suffer, the corporate rich reward themselves in direct proportion to the amount of suffering they have caused. 

“The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles,” Stiglitz  (http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105) concludes, “but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.”