The Undoing of the United States Part I

The Federal Government Became the Enemy

Between 1989 and 2018, the top 1 percent of Americans became $21 trillion richer, while the bottom 50 percent became $900 billion poorer. According to the Federal Reserve, in February 2024, the top 1 percent of households held 30.6 percent of the total wealth in the United States. The top 0.1 percent owned 14 percent of the total wealth, giving them a stunning average of more than $1.52 billion per household. The bottom 50 percent of households, on average, held $50,000 in wealth and collectively owned only 2.6 percent of the wealth of America.

This disparity of income and wealth came about in America because the wealthy seized control of the federal government. Let me cite one indisputable example. On May 28, 1993, the U.S. Congress passed President Clinton’s bill to grant the most favored Nation Status to China. The first line of Clinton’s press release was unadulterated BS: “Yesterday, the American people won a tremendous victory as a majority of the House of Representatives joined me in adopting our plan to revitalize America's economic future.”

American workers were sacrificed for two reasons: 1) Foreign policy experts thought a richer China would become like the consumer cultures of the West and thus less of a military threat and 2) Corporate America saw enormous profits flowing from the cheap labor in China.

China’s most favored nation status and the subsequent trade pacts with Mexico and Latin America, and later with Vietnam and Bangladesh, shipped well-paying jobs abroad; capitalism always seeks cheap labor.

I was born in Pontiac, Michigan, grew up in Union Lake, Michigan, attended the University of Michigan, and after knocking around Europe for a year, I moved to New Mexico. Most of my high school classmates remained in the Detroit area and worked in the automobile factories, making excellent money, for the world center of auto and truck manufacturing was awash with money. If I stayed in Michigan as a working-class dude, I would have witnessed my excellent lifestyle slowly slip away as jobs were shipped to Mexico and to the Orient. First, I would have had to sell my boat, then my cabin up north, followed by my pickup truck, then as part of my divorce settlement, I would have had to sell my three-bedroom house in an excellent suburb near Eight Mile Road, two miles from the Hudson Shopping Center. I may have become one of those deaths of despair caused by drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide in a declining middle class. I do know that I would have seen the federal government as my enemy.

As I slipped into the underclass, I saw that American society was rapidly becoming three tiers, the extremely wealthy, the professional class that ran everything—such as attorneys, financial advisors, and computer geeks—and the underclass that took care of everyday services, such as picking up the garbage, preparing and serving meals in restaurants, and maintaining the roads. The exceptions were mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and others whose jobs could not be shipped abroad.