June 19, 1996

Here are some facts read in an article by Ronnie Dugger, Real Populists Please Stand Up, published in The Nation, August 14/21, 1995:

• One percent of Americans own 40 percent of the national wealth.
• The after-tax income of the top 20 percent of U.S. families exceeds that of all other families combined.
• Between 1977 and 1989 the 1 percent of families with incomes over $350,000 received 72 percent of the country's income gains while the bottom 60 percent lost ground.
• In 1994, seventy American individuals and fifty-nine American families collectively owned $295 billion, an average of $2.3 billion. The top fifty-one individuals and families owned $197 billion, an average of $3.9 billion. The two richest Americans, William Gates and Warren Buffet, and the richest American family, the du Ponts, owned a total of $34 billion among them.
• In 1992 half of our families had net financial assets under $1,000. Debts exceeded assets for four out of ten of our families.
• The rate of child poverty in the United States is four times the rate in Western Europe.

When confronted with the pure, unabated obscene self-destruction of our social fabric, what else can you do but cry and laugh... or wake up and get involved.

Please do.

And remember that these United States of America were conceived by Jefferson and his peers so that we would not repeat the ills of the concentration of private wealth which had been so destructive to the Old World.