John Renesch: Exploring the Better Future

The Inverted Corporation: Shameful Organizational Citizenship

I read an article in Businessweek* the other day and learned more in detail about how U.S. corporations are avoiding federal taxes by a process called “inversion” – essentially having a post office box in a low-tax foreign nation as their “legal address” which subsequently means they needn’t pay taxes until they bring the funds back into the U.S.  

According to Americans for Tax Fairness, an estimated $90 billion a year in federal taxes are being avoided due to this manipulation. They further estimate that U.S. corporations are presently holding $2.1 trillion in untaxed profits offshore.

This deferral process can be delayed indefinitely as long as the earned profits remain offshore. Architects of the tax evasion scheme have called it “Flip Flop,” the “Panama Scoot” and other nicknames taking pride in the work they have done in both designing the scheme and defending it against IRS challenges over the past thirty years.

This year, according to Businessweek, “inversions have received more attention than ever, as well-known companies such as Burger King and Pfizer announced plans to change their addresses (Pfizer didn’t follow through).” According to Americans for Tax Fairness, “Burger King’s planned ‘inversion’ will allow the company and its leading shareholders to avoid an estimated $400 million to $1.2 billion in U.S. taxes between 2015 and 2018.”

If this practice is to be made illegal it must be done by Congress. In July, President Obama called the practice ‘an unpatriotic tax loophole’ and urged Congress to put a stop to it.” Businessweek quotes the President: “’My attitude is, I don’t care if it’s legal,’ he said earlier in 2014, ‘it’s wrong.’”

As far back as the 1980s, shortly after the first inversion deal was tested, a congressional committee called the scheme a “mockery” of the tax code. Despite this, corporate lawyers have succeeded in defending this practice year after year against the IRS lawsuits, resulting in more regulations, more laws and more complexity, “each permutation more complicated than the last,” according to Businessweek.

So Congress, can’t you go against all the lobbyists to whom you feel beholding and act in the best interest of your country, and close the loopholes that keep these trillions of unpaid tax dollars offshore? Any good citizen of this country pays their share of taxes to support all the services from which they benefit. This needs to include corporations, who are much bigger lobbyists than any individuals.

Shareholders in these corporations must approve these tax dodges. So, shareholders, if you own stock in a company that is planning one of these inversions consider disapproving it as a good deed of a responsible citizen.

Taxpayers, you are the ones being negatively impacted by this huge loss of tax revenue. Can’t you demand that your Congressmen and Congresswomen take a stand against this unfair evasion of taxes – this wrongful dodge of responsible corporate citizenry? Corporations have lobbied their way into having plenty of advantages already, including “personhood.” Let us require them to pay their share at least in this regard and deliver significant revenue to the federal coffers as well as returning a much needed multi-trillion dollar infusion of capital into our domestic economy.

*Bloomberg Businessweek, December 22-28, 2014, p. 50-53

Mister Smith is Dead: They Don’t Go to Washington to Serve Anymore

Do you remember the old James Stewart movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”? Probably few of you recall seeing it when it came out in black-and-white in the late 1930s but it has been a popular movie on television for many years, often airing around the holiday season since it evokes sentiments of justice, idealism and good winning over evil.  “Jefferson Smith” (played by Stewart) goes to the nation’s capitol to work with his childhood hero only to discover the many shortcomings of the political process. True to Hollywood, good wins out in the end, despite attempts to corrupt Smith at first and then to cover him in scandal.

Stewart and Jean Arthur (lead roles in the movie)

According to the IMBd website, the director  - Frank Capra - has “received many letters over the years from individuals who were inspired by the film to take up politics.” The movie surely continues to inspire idealists who want to serve their country through bettering the system from the inside out by enduring all the humiliation of running for office in order to “bring democracy back to the people.”

But the system continuously devolves into gridlock and dysfunction as each new rookie politician succumbs to the toxicity and corruption they encounter in city, state or national politics.

I have been writing about system dysfunction in Washington for several years and have viewed it as a “systems problem,” which I define as “when well-meaning, competent people keep trying to correct the problem and it keeps getting worse.”

The other day I happened to catch an interview of journalist Mark Leibovich on his latest book, This Town:  Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America’s Gilded Capital. Leibovich is the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, based in Washington. In 2011, The New Republic named him one of Washington’s “Most Powerful Least Famous” people whose “political writing is among the finest and most feared.”

          Click on picture to watch video

Leibovich provided a detailed account of how Washington has been grossly distorted by the relatively recent (last twenty years or so) explosion of money in politics, turning the city into “a mecca for glitz, gold and greed” according to PBS. The book is exposing the perverse and pervasive narcissism of Washington’s ruling class, again according to PBS. He spoke about how “money rules the day and status is determined by who you know.”

Watching the interview on TV, what caught my ear was his reference to the “Mr. Smith” movie. He talked about how most of us think people go to Washington to serve the people, like Mr. Smith did in the movie, like the way it is supposed to be in the “greatest democracy in the world.” “However,” he said “now people go to Washington to get rich, to make money.”

While the system is indeed dysfunctional and needs a major overhaul, perhaps even a complete rebuild, people are not as much the victims of “the system” as I have been asserting. Many are. Leibovich identifies a good many from both parties who are contributing to the dysfunction and ripping off “We the People” from what we are entitled to and lining their pockets through greed and more greed.

I am writing this while raw with this new recognition/perspective, feeling more outrage, even at some of my former heroes whose haloes have become tarnished as a result of this revelation. I’m feeling more disappointment, more sadness and more hurt than I ever have over the state of our nation.

As I expressed in my email to Leibovich, my hope is that enough people who can do something about this will become enraged enough to actually do something about it and make it illegal for politicians to get rich at the expense of the people who elect them.

Jim Carrey and Eckart Tolle Team Up to Bring Consciousness to Media

Over the last couple of decades I have been part of many, many discussions, dialogues and debates about how the Great Turning, the “new paradigm,” the Age of Consciousness. They have all been directed toward a shift from a social paradigm based on separation, fear and scarcity to one based on connection, love and sufficiency. In each of these conversations, both private and public ones, the final “yeah but” comes by way of this discourse stopper: “How will we ever get the media to change, after all they are driving much of what is unwanted in our culture?” or something to that effect.

Well, three years ago, an organization was birthed with a mission to transform the entertainment and media industry that has so much influence on so many people. It was formally inaugurated on June 4th, 2009, at the Zanuck Theater on the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles. It seeks to empower entertainment and media professionals and companies to produce and distribute content that inspires new consciousness-based worldviews for global audiences by providing information in three primary arenas: 1. education, 2. collaboration and 3. advocacy.

1.    Education
It plans to provide resources and guidance supporting its members’ personal, inner education thereby assisting them in deepening their fundamental connection with themselves which, once achieved, results in the desire to express that essential sense of self and personal transformation in and through their work; to bring to members’ awareness the need for responsibility for the ideas, issues and events that they are shaping the world we live in – for both “good and ill;” and provide mentorship,  giving back and supporting the next generation of industry professionals.

2.    Collaboration
It will provide resources and services to help its members in the entertainment and media businesses, who are living a transformational lifestyle, to connect with their like-spirited peers; its offerings will encourage collaboration to create content that expresses transformational intentions and values.

3.    Advocacy
Within the trade, it will support the larger media and entertainment communities in understanding transformation and its importance in a cultural and global context, and to help them become comfortable with the reality of transformation; In the public arena, it plans to help legitimize the genre of transformational entertainment and of transformational content in the media.

Pretty ambitious. you say? Pie in the sky, you say?

Over the decades I have seen hundreds of well-intended initiatives fizzle out within a few years or even months. Could this be another?

Well, it might if it lacked credibility. In this case, there is credibility. The founder, John Raatz, who has introduced many transformational films and books into the world through his public relations firm Visioneering, brought in superstar actor Jim Carrey and bestselling author and spiritual leader Eckhart Tolle as his co-founders.

Here is a video of Carrey talking about the initiative and introducing Tolle at one of the inaugural events:

                                                                 Jim Carrey introduces Eckhart Tolle (13 mins)

The name of this membership organization in the Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment (or “GATE”) which describes itself as a global movement to Transform the World by Transforming Entertainment and Media. Still evolving, GATE has just morphed its legal structure to a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization in the U.S.

GATE is now accepting memberships, so I urge you to join me as a member and, even better, forward this article to anyone you know in media or entertainment. This is the best initiative I have seen to dramatically transform an industry that, for better or worse, possesses so much influence in the world, for better or worse.

Bribery vs Lobbying: One is Illegal and Wrong; the Other is Legal, but Is It Right?

Thanks to the federal and state politicians who don’t possess the will to reform our campaign finance laws, the endless amounts of money that special interests are willing to spend to gain special advantages and a U.S. Supreme Court who thinks corporations are people, millions of anonymous dollars are pouring into political advertising and influence peddling without any accountability or transparency. Let’s look at the similarities between illegal bribery and legal influence peddling:

    •    Both buy favors.

    •    Both are anonymous or faceless.

    •    Both tilt the playing field of fairness.

    •    Both disenfranchise those who can’t afford to purchase favorable treatment. 

    •    Both compromise the politicians.

    •    And both subvert the system.

Bribery is illegal and frowned on by society. Lobbying is legal and thereby tacitly condoned by our society.
Who made campaign financing and lobbying legal? The beneficiaries are the ones who made the laws. The issue of morality versus legality I shall leave to you the reader.

This query was prompted by two recent media pieces. One was a June online piece by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor: see http://robertreich.org/post/24472398883?632ecf88

The other was a segment on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on July 8th where Lesley Stahl interviewed Jack Abramoff, one of the most notorious U.S. lobbyists of our time, who served more than three years in prison for his crimes – one of only a few lobbyists who ever served time. You can watch the interview here: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-57319068-10391709/jack-abramoff-inside-capitol-corruption/?tag=cbsnewsMainColumnArea.1

Please read the former and watch the latter. Then see if you have the same reaction that Stahl had during the interview: "I think the public's going to be furious watching this," she said after expressing her anger at what he’d done. I hope people do get angry. I hope you do. We need to get mad as hell and stop taking this anymore!!

They Have It Upside Down: We the People Get the Short Stick

 
Scene from “Network”

When we elect politicians, we expect them to serve their constituents – “we the people” - first and foremost. It is the basis for a modern democracy, that “we the people” are represented by those we elect, those who ask us to trust them.

Given the predominately two-party system we have in place in this democracy, we might expect our elected representatives to remain loyal to the platform on which they ran their campaign, regardless of their party. After all, they can assume their electors are likely members of the same party and that the platform or the promises made to the voters are important to them.

It is natural, we suppose, that once elected, these people who represent us may wish to get re-elected and remain in office. So their second priority might be to get re-elected next time an election rolls around. Thus their constituency becomes the people and corporations who pay for their campaigns to get re-elected.

But our present day politicians seem to have these priorities upside down!

Their first loyalty is to get themselves re-elected, raising money so they can buy votes. Their party loyalty comes next and, finally, last on the list, is serving the people who elected them in the first place.

There is no wonder why gridlock is so pervasive in our politics today given these upside down priorities. We are paying politicians to work for us and all they give us is gridlock and excuses, blaming the other party for their failures. Their first loyalty is to themselves and to the lobbyists and their clients who finance their campaigns. This assures their reelection. Their second loyalty is to their party, which shows up so conspicuously when they stand united in their explanations for their failures to govern. Finally, the last priority in the queue, is “we the people” – the ones whose interests they solemnly swear to represent  – but only after they have achieved their first two priorities.

The Occupy Movement is evidence that many people are “mad as hell and don’t want to take this anymore” as was so powerfully portrayed in the movie “Network” (see six minute video clip). Maybe our politicians will respond, get their priorities straight and start serving the people they claim to represent.

Occupy Movement in the U.S. Predicted Last April

The other day a reader reminded me that my April blog from earlier this year – what has now been named “the Arab Spring” - predicted the Occupy Movement here in the U.S. With that in mind, here it is again:

April 1, 2011

Growing Income Gap Could Spark Our Own Tahrir Square

Watching the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo several weeks back followed by the storming of the Wisconsin state capitol building by crowds upset over the prospects of being disenfranchised here in the U.S., I wondered when there might be pro-democracy  demonstrations popping up all over the United States. After all, one of the major factors of the leaderless demonstrations in the Arab world is the oppressive economic disparities between rich and poor. As can be seen from the graph below, the gap between the richest one percent of Americans and the rest of us continues to widen. Eventually this gap will reach a breaking point. No society can sustain this rising disparity before the other 99% figures out the system is rigged against them.

 
John Perkins, former “economic hit man” who has inside experience of the power of corporate appetites, calls this result “corporatocracy.” Wikipedia defines corporatocracy, in part, as a governing system where “corporations, to a significant extent ‘own’ or have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people, and that they exercise such power not by back-room conspiracies but by their enormous, concentrated economic power, and by legal in-the-open mechanisms (lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and more subsidies, etc).”

In many respects, corporatocracy causes this growing disparity. By its nature it continues to drive economic wealth to the rich while leaving the lower and middle classes pretty much stagnated. This becomes especially notable when you adjust for inflation. Some argue that 99% of us are actually worse off now, in terms of spendable income, than we were thirty years ago!

As I was drafting this article, the popular CBS News TV show “60 Minutes” featured a shocking story which included, in part:
    American families have been falling out of the middle class in record numbers….One of the     consequences of the recession that you don't hear a lot about is the record number of children     descending into poverty….it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25     percent. (see entire report here)

Here’s a TED talk by Wael Ghonim, which was recorded last month at TED 2011. Ghonim is the Google executive who helped jumpstart Egypt's democratic revolution. He tells the inside story of everyday Egyptians showing that "the power of the people is stronger than the people in power." When enough people get fed up enough being victims of unfairness they will stand up for themselves.

Remember the parable of the boiled frog? Like the slowly-boiled frog we can get sleepy, then become unconscious and eventually die if the process is slow and gradual enough. The temperature rises so gradually that we acclimatize to the heat without triggering our life-threatening -danger responses. The disappearing middle class and the lower classes have been lulled into near-oblivion over the past thirty years as the gap continues to widen between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert opined a few days ago, “There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.”

Where is that tipping point for organizing our own Tahrir Square vigil? Like the people in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain who have been willing to risk their lives for liberty, perhaps Americans can emulate what the protestors in Cairo bravely declared on television, “This isn’t fair!” and “We want our country back.”

Fortunately we are not frogs. We possess consciousness which, when awakened, allows us to make dramatic changes in our responses to situations. A dear friend recently reminded me of a pertinent quote to share here. It comes from Scottish psychiatrist, Ronald Laing: "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."

 

NOTE: My December 2011 newsletter features an editorial titled “Bad People or Bad Systems? A Crisis of Social Conscience.” To read it click here.

Too Many Causes; Too Little Bandwidth: The Challenge of the Progressives

  Last week I was reminded as to why some political ideologies gather more traction than others, when they seemingly have less support amongst the population. This has puzzled me for many years.

Allow me to admit that I am a fiscal conservative, more liberal when it comes to providing a safety net for the disadvantaged, an advocate for small but effective government, pro-government regulation on matters where the public well-being is at stake (such as the FAA, infrastructure and parks) and pro-entrepreneur having been one since I was 18. I have voted for numerous Republicans but probably more Democrats in my lifetime and backed Ross Perot out of frustration back in 1992.

At present, I don’t feel much loyalty to either of the two main political parties here in the U.S.  I was excited when Obama replaced Bush in 2008 but have since witnessed the greatest dysfunction in both parties, to the point of feeling significant embarrassment for my government.

This leaves me as somewhat of an objective observer of Washington without any strong loyalty. In this context I offer the following opinion.

It is safe to say that I have more Liberal friends than Conservative, quite largely due to living in San Francisco, which like many coastal cities is a largely-Liberal community.

One of the frustrations I hear from my Liberal friends is their inability to strategize and implement changes like Conservatives do. It appears that a few Conservatives can focus on issues they feel strongly about and make lots of progress politically in a short time, as has the recent Tea Party movement in the U.S. which was unheard of a couple of years ago.

My Liberal friends care passionately about a whole range of social ills and they want to see them all fixed. They are puzzled by their Democratic leaders’ inability to compete with Republicans who, in their opinion, have less to do with social good and more to do with ideology.

The Right seems to be able to rally massive support for a few issues and maintain consistent talking points amongst its spokespersons, even to the point of exposing themselves to ridicule by the satirists who compare them to robots or playback machines. They pick their issues, gather support for those issues amongst their leadership and orchestrate consistent narratives around those issues. They are laser focused on what they have chosen as their primary issues.

The Left, by contrast, seems to have no end of issues they care about. This leaves them with many leaders of various causes attempting to rally support for a wide-ranging myriad of issues – from climate change to rainforest protection, from human rights to poverty prevention, from campaign reform to closing tax loopholes. As a result, the Left’s agenda is scattered and diffused, sometimes confusing to those who observe the clear focus of the Right.

Is this a matter of strategy then? Or is it culture? Perhaps it is both.

From a strategy perspective, the Left and Right certainly employ very different means to bring about the change they are seeking. From an effectiveness point-of-view, the Right seems better at getting their issues on the table, presenting a more united front and bringing them to the fore of the public narrative. There is significantly more alignment amongst their politicians on these issues, as if there’s been “a meeting of the minds” about each issue. Even the same catch phrases are used by their advocates.

How long has this distinction been obvious? My earliest memory of U.S. politics was watching the Republican Convention in 1952 when Eisenhower was nominated. Reagan was the first President in my memory to focus on just a few major issues and champion them consistently, rallying his constituency around those same views and issues. “Reaganomics” still lives loudly despite the thirty years that have passed since he took office. Some might say it live louder now than it did in the 1980s when he introduced Art Laffer’s version of supply-side economics.

Not only was Reagan successful in implanting this economic philosophy into Americana, it has become embedded in the Right’s many arguments for lower taxes, smaller government and less regulation. This ideology manages to remain strong and compelling for many despite glaring evidence that tax cuts do not necessarily create jobs nor are they good for the economy at large. The Bush tax cuts, extended by the Obama Administration, and the present state of employment and the economy should be ample evidence that this cause–effect relationship is mythical. Nonetheless, the idea retains a fervent championing by the Right who have been successful in taking any increase in revenue or taxes off the table even in these times of historic budget crises.

So what does all this mean? For me, the lesson is that focus and unification on a few key issues gains public support more effectively than trying to promote many issues no matter how compelling they may be.  The latter engenders “cause fatigue” where people feel somewhat overwhelmed by so many issues they should care about. 

What does all this mean to you? Let me hear from any of you with thoughts to share, comments to make.  Whether Liberal or Conservative, I welcome your responses. Even you cynics who may feel like reengaging, your comments are most welcome.

Third Thursday Explorations: Hospicing Our Decrepit, Dysfunctional and Obsolete Organizations

Last Summer, I started hosting a special conference call each month in conjunction with the Heartland Network, a social network hosted by the same people who host the Thought Leader Gatherings in Minnesota and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The intended purpose of this call was to explore with colleagues around the world how it would be to stop investing in the social institutions on which we depend for governance, regionally and internationally.  By “investing” we mean the emotional capital and the high hopes we embrace for changes we may make, such as bringing in new leaders, funding dysfunctional systems, spending time in debate or conversing about better candidates and planning reforms.

Our existing institutions may have served us well in the past but it seems that their time may be over given how dysfunctional, in some cases, even harmful, they have become. If their time is over and the time has arrived for them to retire, let us treat them as we do our dying – hospice with respect and compassion – honoring their service. Simultaneously, let us midwife what wants to be born, the yet-to-be-revealed  replacement organizations to serve our 21st Century globalized, diverse adult society.

Every third Thursday, unless I’m traveling, I host an open conference call to explore alternative systems and structures that might be more deserving of our energies - our hopes and our dreams for change which most of our existing institutions are squandering. The calls are open to anyone who wishes to engage in such an exploration. I ask people to email me at [email protected] to reserve a space. Once I know who will be on the call, I send prospective callers the call-in information. The calls take place for one hour, on the third Thursday of each month at 10 AM Pacific time.

Here’s an interview I did with a local cable show on this subject:

Link to TV show

The next call is August 18th. Let me know if you’d like to join it.

The New Responsibility Revolution

Those of us who are veterans of the human potential movement in the 1970s may well remember one of the popular mantras of the day urging us to “be willing to be totally responsible for creating our reality.” Remember that?

If I look around today and scan the horizon for who are amongst the most socially responsible people in the world, I’d be hard pressed to find anyone putting “more skin in the game” than the people who are risking their lives each day standing for democracy.  These people – most notably those in the Middle East and North Africa - not only include those who are demonstrating in the squares and circles, marching peacefully against totalitarianism, and showing their faces to the cameras publicly, they also include the many ex-patriots who could afford to flee their countries who are now returning to their homelands to be part of this pro-democracy revolution. They know they are at risk doing what they are doing and they are doing it anyway. They are standing on their values and willing to risk their lives in their stand.

Who would have thought we could find so many models for the courage of responsibility we are seeing in our media today? People from Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan are serving as models for leadership from the rank and file.

Map of Northern Africa and Middle East: Revolutions       Civil war       Sustained civil disorder and governmental changes       Protests and governmental changes       Major protests       Minor protests       Map source: Wikipedia

 

The paradigm of leadership is changing. We are shifting from a paradigm of a leader in an elevated position of authority with a following, a parental model you might say, to an emerging paradigm of universal responsibility – we are all responsible! Stated more poetically perhaps – It is time to stop looking for leaders “out there” and start looking leadership within ourselves. Said another way, it is time to stop looking outside and start looking inside.

This is the revolution we wrote and talked about years ago – no charismatic leaders, no Churchill’s or Roosevelt’s leading the charge. Just ordinary people willing to say, “No – that’s enough. We aren’t going to take this anymore.”

The Arab Spring is a collective stand by our fellow brothers and sisters putting their lives on the line, reminiscent of a collective stand taken over 230 years ago here in North America.

The founders of these United States of America were willing to pay a price to stand for freedom and liberty in the 1776 version of a pro–democracy movement. It might be worth a brief review of what it cost them to fully appreciate what risk really means. This summary is courtesy of Rush Limbaugh (you can read his entire essay – “The Americans Who Lost Everything” here):

    Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the     war. Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons     or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were, at one time or     another, the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes     completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his     pledged word. Their honor and the nation they sacrificed so much to create is still intact.

Now that’s putting your butt on the line. That’s putting your money where your mouth is. That’s putting skin in the game!

 

Growing Income Gap Could Spark Our Own Tahrir Square

Watching the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo several weeks back followed by the storming of the Wisconsin state capitol building by crowds upset over the prospects of being disenfranchised here in the U.S., I wondered when there might be pro-democracy  demonstrations popping up all over the United States. After all, one of the major factors of the leaderless demonstrations in the Arab world is the oppressive economic disparities between rich and poor. As can be seen from the graph below, the gap between the richest one percent of Americans and the rest of us continues to widen. Eventually this gap will reach a breaking point. No society can sustain this rising disparity before the other 99% figures out the system is rigged against them.

John Perkins, former “economic hit man” who has inside experience of the power of corporate appetites, calls this result “corporatocracy.” Wikipedia defines corporatocracy, in part, as a governing system where “corporations, to a significant extent ‘own’ or have massive power over governments, including those governments nominally elected by the people, and that they exercise such power not by back-room conspiracies but by their enormous, concentrated economic power, and by legal in-the-open mechanisms (lobbyists, campaign contributions to office holders and candidates, threats to leave the state or country for another with less oversight and more subsidies, etc).”

In many respects, corporatocracy causes this growing disparity. By its nature it continues to drive economic wealth to the rich while leaving the lower and middle classes pretty much stagnated. This becomes especially notable when you adjust for inflation. Some argue that 99% of us are actually worse off now, in terms of spendable income, than we were thirty years ago!

As I was drafting this article, “60 Minutes” featured a shocking story which included, in part:
American families have been falling out of the middle class in record numbers….One of the consequences of the recession that you don't hear a lot about is the record number of children descending into poverty….it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent. (see entire report here)

Here’s a TED talk by Wael Ghonim, which was recorded last month at TED 2011. Ghonim is the Google executive who helped jumpstart Egypt's democratic revolution. He tells the inside story of everyday Egyptians showing that "the power of the people is stronger than the people in power." When enough people get fed up enough being victims of unfairness they will stand up for themselves.
Remember the parable of the boiled frog? Like the slowly-boiled frog we can get sleepy, then become unconscious and eventually die if the process is slow and gradual enough. The temperature rises so gradually that we acclimatize to the heat without triggering our life-threatening -danger responses. The disappearing middle class and the lower classes have been lulled into near-oblivion over the past thirty years as the gap continues to widen between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert opined a few days ago, “There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.” [For the full column click here.]

Where is that tipping point for organizing our own Tahrir Square vigil? Like the people in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain who have been willing to risk their lives for liberty, perhaps Americans can emulate what the protestors in Cairo bravely declared on television, “This isn’t fair!” and “We want our country back.”

Fortunately we are not frogs. We possess consciousness which, when awakened, allows us to make dramatic changes in our responses to situations. A dear friend recently reminded me of a pertinent quote to share here. It comes from Scottish psychiatrist, Ronald Laing: "The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."