A Basic Income for All Americans: Is It Possible? What Prevents Americans from Addressing Its Great Economic Inequality?

Lynn Parramore recently wrote a timely article in ’Nation of Change' on America’s awakening to the damage to our society by our increasingly unregulated capitalism: ‘5 Reasons to Consider a Basic Income for all Americans’. Hope Lynn survives the weekend.

Two years ago, Lynn’s suggestion or even discussion of a ‘basic income’ would have been shouted down as sacrilegious and un-American, a double edged clue to the complexity of the 'American problem'. But Lynn’s thoughts are now appropriate for these mal-wealth-distributed, mega-rich, noir times.

But, despite the truths and suggestions in this article, there is still a gap, a fog-bank of our own making, and which we Americans seem to want to continue to drift around us and shield us from ‘what’s there’. This shield hides from us what is at the heart of this article but is left unsaid even by Ms Parramore.

It is the great 'family secret’ about America’s road to power: that America became ‘king of the hill’ by not only militarily dominating its aggressors but also by cannibalizing ourselves, our poor, and our children by willingly depriving them of access and mobility which their parents have thought they were defending by going off to war and enduring economic exploitation out of a disrupted sense of, at best, loyalty-to-the-flag and ‘suffering with honor’, or just being too naive to understand what has been perpetrated upon ‘us’.

But at worst, there seems to have been, and even now, the attitude of ‘them’s our betters’, right out of the feudalist past of the, still, majority of Americans of European or colonial descent...and which has resulted in a tip-toeing’ around issues like wealth-inequality and the increasing numbers of the poor, and has led to an era marked by rabid attacks on any kind of broad-base health care and in general a shying away like a whipped horse from dealing with a sick, exploiting economy that has no respect for Americans that feed their last penny into a till that funnels riches to a ‘1%’ of super-rich. This unbalanced national illness is like a ghost that does great damage but is kept locked up as if being out of sight will make things better.

The closeted ghost is ‘greed’ that dominates our culture and places a price tag on just about everything and everyone in America. As an example, America’s food industry is converting from selling actual food that serves a biological need, to a twisted ‘food concept’, a food experience where food serves not a biological purpose but is a spear to hit a psychological target, a mental need that doesn’t exist without media stimulation.

My point: until America faces and resolves its great sin of greed, will even a basic income solve anything? Until ‘greed capitalism’ is brought out from behind the curtain, a basic income will just rapidly disappear into the pockets of the 1% just as it is doing now. The picture will look like the nether-world of Dante in the heartland - rail-thin, ill-clothed, unhealthy and mentally deficient Americans offering up their last pennies the the ‘uber’ who blindly take it all in to the last 'sou’. And then? At best, bloodlessly, it will all collapse as dividends dwindle and more and more of the ‘uber’ become the ‘unter'.

America’s great unspoken-of secret in the closet is we haven’t openly faced, much less admitted, is that our version of capitalism is like the bull-in-the-china-closet.

American capitalism has been let go to run virtually unrestrained to wherever it smells new markets and new profits even at the disadvantage of the American working class...who are contradictably still expected to purchase more and more of what they can’t afford and can’t pay for without increasingly heavy credit debt.

American capitalism is characterized by a set of deeply destructive sins, both to its market(targeted consumers) and to itself. American capitalism is awash with the sin of greed that consumes ‘all’ for the ’now’. This greed has led to a version of capitalism that is: (1) almost 100% motivated and driven by greed, (2) this ‘greed’ has no limits, is ungovernable by our naive choice to defend it as a sacred cow and is like an amoeba that eats until there is nothing left, (3) this greed-driven capitalism will consume our resources until there are none left or none remaining that are safe for us, (4) that our choosing to defend greed is largely the result of manipulation of the greater majority of unsophisticated Americans by immensely wealthy interests who by their wealth are able to dominate and control public propaganda venues (newspapers and television, internet) that by command distort and lie to prevent the truth from ever reaching the 99%, (5) that we regard these greed-driven, destructive actions as largely forgivable acts, the ‘nature of the beast’ and the cost of national success, and for which we the exploited seem to have a high tolerance for these excesses of the ‘anointed few’, (6) that the same vested and greedy interests that distort the truth and cleverly hide behind religion and faux-historicist-chauvenism, most evilly convince America’s most economically exploitable (malleable) population to vilify and deny their own need for access to higher education for them or their children, hence preventing them, the ‘great unwashed’, from becoming less vulnerable, (7) and that the ‘1%’ have managed to convince our weakest and most vulnerable majority they must vote for politicians and shibboleths that work against their interests.

This is a clever if not evil agenda put into practice. Unfortunately, it will lead to not long-lived super-wealth and riches for the few but to a near-horizon collapse of our society and the very economy that enriches the few. Talk about killing your ‘Golden Goose’. But killing the goose and eating the last fertile golden egg is what greed is all about. Listen to Mother Goose, children.