dominated and directed by a tiny minority of wealthy ...

"What these figures reveal is that America is every bit as dominated
and directed by a tiny minority of wealthy people as the Mexico and
Nicaragua of my high school teacher's fantasy."

Excerpt from "Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television"
_

" It was not only abstract entities like corporations that benefited disproportionately during the commodity boom. So did the people who owned the corporations.

Dr. Lester C. Thurow, professor of economics and management at MIT and former member of the Council of Economic Advisors, published some enlightening figures in the Public Interest Economics Newsletter of December 1975.

By 1962, says Thurow, during the final spurt of the greatest economic growth of any industrial nation in history: "The top 18 percent of all families owned 76.2 percent of all privately held wealth in the U.S., while the bottom 25 percent, roughly 50 million people, had no assets at all .... recent estimates suggest no significant change. . ."'

Thurow continues: "The top 5 percent of the families own more wealth than the bottom 81 percent. The top .008 percent hold as many assets as the bottom half of the population."

Thurow goes on to say that "wealth and power are even more concentrated than are indicated in these data, because of the interrelationships among the wealthiest individuals and the large corporations they control."

In other words, this .008 percent can, through their stock ownership and interlocking directorships, effectively dominate the few corporations that in turn dominate the economy.

I believe Thurow is suggesting conspiracy, or at least a startling degree of collaboration among these few. Perhaps his academic standing prevents him from putting it that way. Since I don't have any academic standing, I am willing to draw the obvious conclusions.

Thurow goes on to talk about income: "The income gap between the bottom 5 percent [of the families] and the top 5 percent is 45 to 1, and the income gap between the bottom 1 percent and top 1 percent is 525 to 1. The top 1 percent received nearly three times as much income annually as the bottom 20 percent of the American population. The fact that only the government transfer payments [social security, welfare, food stamps] have kept the position of the lowest income groups from declining, indicates that the distribution of earnings by the private sector is becoming more and more unequal .... The lowest fifth of the population receives only 1.7 percent of the earnings as distributed by the market [private industry], down from the already miserable 0.6 percent in 1943. The top fifth receives through the market 28 times as much in wages and salaries as the lowest fifth."

Thurow's point is that if the government, that is, the taxpayer, didn't pick up the slack which industrial growth has created, the widening gap between the rich and poor would be perfectly obvious. In the false belief that industrial growth will provide benefits to the poor and unemployed, we provide tax breaks to aid industrial growth. Meanwhile, with our own taxes, we feed the growing number of hungry and poor, who are blamed for the rising taxes. We pay for what is being taken away from us. At each turn of the cycle, the situation becomes more desperate.

What these figures reveal is that America is every bit as dominated and directed by a tiny minority of wealthy people as the Mexico and Nicaragua of my high school teacher's fantasy. Looking at the past thirty years through our new reality of unemployment lines, bankrupted small businesses, and the immense profits of a handful of corporate giants, we can see that we are now much further away from an egalitarian society than we were a generation ago. The American Dream was a dream. "
- Jerry Mander

- http://www.motherearthnews.com/DIY/1978-11-01/Four-Arguments-for-the-Elimination-of-Television-Argument-Two-The-Coloni.aspx
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