* More than 99 percent of American businesses have fewer than 500 employees and account for less than 37 percent of all business sales.
* Elite corporations (those employing more than 5,000 people) comprise a fraction of the remaining 1 percent of American businesses, yet ring up over 40 percent of sales.
* Within specific business sectors, corporate monopolists shine brightly. The 50 largest banks control over 35 percent of bank assets in the United States.
* One percent of Americans own more stock than the 90 percent of us who dwell at the bottom of Bush's "ownership society."
While a tiny segment of the US population becomes increasingly powerful both economically and politically, working class families continue to rely on two incomes to make ends meet, while 13 percent of the population lives below the poverty level.
As the semblance of a meritocracy in America succumbs to the forces of plutocratic ambition and greed under the Bush Regime, the American economic system's "noble and fair" reputation is dutifully maintained by genuflecting mainstream media pundits. Yet there is one particularly shameful stain that not even master propagandists can mask.
Material Prosperity . . . Spiritual Bankruptcy
In a self-proclaimed Christian nation awash in a sea of money, guided by allegedly noble principles, and purported to have a Manifest Destiny to convert the world to the American Way, a significant number of discarded, hopelessly poor human beings are living proof of the cruel hypocrisy of the ruling elite of the United States. America's homeless are living testaments to the gross injustices of Capitalism, even in an economy tempered with elements of government-funded social programs and regulations on businesses.
"Let all bear in mind that a society is judged not so much by the standards attained by its more affluent and privileged members as by the quality of life which it is able to assure for its weakest members." --Javier Perez de Cuellar (former Prime Minister of Peru and Secretary General to the UN)
Each year 3.5 million Americans experience homelessness. Of these unfortunates, 750,000 are chronically homeless. Forty-nine percent are Black while only 35 percent are white (which represents an obviously gross disproportion when compared to the racial make-up of the general population). A startling 40 percent of the homeless include families.
Who Are These Nameless, Forgotten, "Disposable" Human Beings?
Homelessness is not limited to the conventional notion of people sleeping in a cardboard box or on a park bench. America's homeless people include those who live in their cars, abandoned buildings, cheap motels called flop-houses, and train or bus stations.
Many homeless maintain jobs making sub-standard wages. Other ways the homeless obtain their meager incomes is through begging, street performance, selling street magazines (written and distributed by the homeless), and selling their blood. In their desperation, some feign illness to gain admission to hospitals while others commit crimes so they can get "three hots and a cot."
Those with untreated mental illness are amongst the most vulnerable of our society. Tragically, the mentally afflicted comprise 25 percent of the homeless population. In the 1960s, the United States government de-institutionalized many suffering with chronic mental illness. Our ruling elites at multiple levels of government failed (and continue to fail) to establish and fund adequate community service programs necessary for these people to achieve stability in their lives. Without adequate support systems in their communities, many mentally ill individuals wind up living on the street.
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