According to economist Edward N.

Wolff at New York University, In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80%. The lopsided distribution of the fruits of the nations labor is an affront to the idea that American citizens portray when they consider the American Dream. What currently passes for the American Dream Is a perversion of the idealistic viewpoint under which it was envisioned; the American Dream is being represented by the obnoxiousness and callous greed present only at the top levels of our nations hierarchy. To properly examine the status quo of financial disparity, we need to make a threefold analysis: problem, cause, and tentative solution. The people are done with having to deal with our natural superiors; we are done with the only ethic left remaining in this society between man and man being naked self-interest, the callous desire for cash. This ethic has throttled the most chivalrous enthusiasms formerly known among the prosperous, it has eliminated the inherent desire of charitable action, it has drowned philistine sentimentalism, it has ruined and exploited the lives of AMERICAN CITIZENS in the murky bath water of egotistical calculation. To first examine the problem with the status quo of Class Warfare, we have to understand the sentiments of the common man. And according to David Morris, author of Now that were in the streets, what are we asking for? Were angry. That is the message the American people are trying to send through the occupy movements, the protests against the banks. The American people are furious in consideration of the distasteful and detrimental combination of unrestrained greed and concentrated wealth. The lower classes, due to societal influence, are forced to take a paycheck sooner as opposed to later. The results of this need for quick cash? Twelve to fifteen million families in the greatest nation in the world have received foreclosure notices. Seven to ten million are unemployed. The poverty rate is at a 17-year high. American men, women and children, being forced to take refuge in municipal centers night after night because of the blatant greed of the 1 percent of this country who intentionally make the decisions that are designed to enrich themselves and impoverish the rest of us. To really understand the idea of the rich getting richer while the poor pay for it we merely need to examine a statistic. In the midst of financial recession in memory, the Forbes list of the richest 400 Americans, in 2009, had average incomes of 227 million dollars. In 2011, to qualify for this list, you must be a billionaire. Once upon a time, the USA had the most prosperous middle class in the history of the world but now that is changing at a blinding pace. Globalism, once the agent of good fortune, has had several unforeseen

side effects. Greed has led to the international corporations exploiting third world labor pools over the last 40 years and the American workers who once composed of the middle class are becoming the lower class. The reality of the matter is that no matter how hard people are working, no matter how educated or motivated American workers are, they just can not compete with people who have to work 10 to 12 hours each and every day for less than a buck an hour. No CEO is going to make the business decision to pay an American worker more to do the same job. This leads into the causes of the American Problem. The foremost problem in society is the mindset voiced by the fictional Gordan Gecko, Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. The world is returning to a state of the bourgeois elite and the labor fueled poor after a brief period of prosperity for the middle class. Wealth and power, the objectives of equal opportunity, are no longer equally available to every American citizen. Consider the man who is born into a lower class environment, works hard for his entire life, gets a degree in medicine and ends up with an annual salary of 200,000 dollars a year. His efforts are pitiful when compared to the rich man who blows off school and then pays someone to invest his money for him. That man ends up with billions. Therein lies the travesty in American society, the withdrawal of equal opportunity. The American Middle Class is failing, as formerly superior U.S. workers are slowly being absorbed into the cheaper and larger global labor pool. Compared to the rest of the world, US laborers are extremely expensive; hence, the job crisis. Our officials lie about acting in our interests, the extremely dysfunctional political body known as the United States Congress, continues to pass rules and regulations that make it even more difficult to conduct business in the United States. This slippery slope has created a situation where most Americans are finding it difficult to make it. There are six unemployed Americans for every job opening in this country. Americans got an education and are usually overqualified to do the job. But, due to the greed at the top in this country Americans are finding themselves falling behind. Americans are being forced to try and raise their families off of the wages given by flipping burgers at McDonalds or by greeting customers at Wal-Mart. As a result of this lower salary, fewer Americans can afford to go to college. The government in this nation needs to address the truth: that the American Middle Class is vanishing. There is only one epiphany in this matter. The redistribution of wealth is the only possible salvation for our struggling nation. The redistribution of wealth has to be formatted in a reasonable way and involve taxes, regulations and globalization. Other countries are ahead

of the curve. According to the CIA World Factbook, nine European countries currently place ahead of the United States in Gross Domestic Product. Those nine states are Luxembourg, Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Netherlands. All of those nations are socialist. I am not advocating socialism in the United States. I am advocating for is an appropriate financial plan that would cover a reasonable redistribution of wealth. This plan would start with Taxes. Taxes have become a banned word in our nations congress. The tax solution so far has been to create loopholes so large that even Warren Buffet complains that his secretary pays more taxes than he does. The American people are tired of hearing platitudes about job creators. The United States Congress needs to grow up. They need to learn to compromise. They need to save the American people. They need to heavily tax any financial capitalists who invest in these companies because none of that money is coming back to the American people. The second part of rehabilitation takes form in stricter regulations for the Financial Industry. By setting up traffic lights and stop signs, we stop the financial market from becoming an out of control NASCAR extravaganza. The third part of the solution is the concept of globalization. Free Trade should mean more opportunity for all businesses. The current situation has businesses that are too big to fail when what we should be doing is supporting small business and the American people. If one is an advocate of limited government, they should by extension support limited corporate dominance. There is no denying that we, as Americans, are angry. We are tired of being the scapegoat of Multinational Corporations, of Bankers, or Corruption. Now is the time in which we need to stop being the willing subject; it is time for the American Dream to return to its original state of being. People do have the power to change ways of thinking, they have done it before. Now is the time in which American Exceptionalism needs to take hold of the lower class American citizens dream. We are Americans, and we will not be satisfied with being members of the worlds labor force. We are angry, we are showing it, and once the ball has started rolling, there is nothing that can stand in the way of that most idealistic being, the citizen of the United States of America.