Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [60]
In the United States, we are afraid to sock it to them. We hate to put our CEOs in prison when they break the law. We are more than happy to cut their taxes even as ours go up!
Why is this? Because we drank the Kool-Aid. We bought into the drug, the lie that we, too, could some day be rich. So we don’t want to do anything that could harm us on that day we end up millionaires. The American carrot is dangled in front of us all our lives and we believe that we are almost within reach of making it.
It’s so believable because we have seen it come true. A person who comes from nothing goes on to strike it rich. There are more millionaires now than ever before. This increase in the number of millionaires has served a very useful function for the rich because it means in every community there’s at least one person prancing around as the rags-to-riches poster child, conveying the not-so-subtle message: “SEE! I MADE IT! YOU CAN, TOO!!”
It is this seductive myth that led so many millions of working people to become investors in the stock market in the 1990s. They saw how rich the rich got in the 1980s and thought, hey, this could happen to me!
The wealthy did everything they could to encourage this attitude. Understand that in 1980, only 20 percent of Americans owned a share of stock. Wall Street was the rich man’s game and it was off-limits to the average Joe and Jane. And for good reason—the average person saw it for what it was, a game of risk, and when you are trying to save every dollar so you can send the kids to college, games of chance are not where you place your hard-earned money.
Near the end of the eighties, though, the rich were pretty much tapped out with their excess profits and could not figure out how to make the market keep growing. I don’t know if it was the brainstorm of one genius at a brokerage firm or the smooth conspiracy of all the well heeled, but the game became, “Hey, let’s convince the middle class to give us their money and we can get even richer!”
Suddenly, it seemed like everyone I knew jumped on the stock market bandwagon, putting their money in mutual funds or opening up 401(k)s. They let their unions invest all their pension money in stocks. Story after story ran in the media about how everyday, working people were going to be able to retire as near-millionaires! It was like a fever that infected everyone. No one wanted to be left behind. Workers immediately cashed their paychecks and called their broker to buy more stocks. Their broker! Ooh, it felt so good . . . after working your ass off all week at some miserable, thankless job, you could still feel that you were a step ahead, and a head above, because you had your own personal broker! Just like the rich man!
Soon, you didn’t even want to be paid in cash. Pay me in stock! Put it in my 401(k)! Call my broker!
Then, each night, you’d pore over the stock charts in the newspaper as one of the all-finance-news-all-the-time cable channels blared in the background. You bought computer programs to map out your strategy. There were ups and downs but mostly ups, lots of ups, and you could hear yourself saying, “My stock’s up 120 percent! My worth has tripled!” You eased the pain of daily living imagining the retirement villa you would buy some day or the sports car you could buy tomorrow if you wanted to cash out now. No, don’t cash out! It’s only going to go higher! Stay in for the long haul! Easy Street, here I come!
But it was a sham. It was all a ruse concocted by the corporate powers-that-be who never had any intention of letting you into