STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 28 May 2014

[Demeter]

20. Our Elites Are Extremely Isolated from Real Life in America -- and That's Dangerous

...Imagine for a moment you’re Tim Geithner. You’re intelligent, competent, and hard-working. Your friends like you. Your bosses appreciate you. You’re a good family man. You worked under extraordinary pressure to save the financial system. And all you get for it is grief. Naturally you want to write a book to set the record straight.

It’s all perfectly understandable, at least from Geithner’s point of view.

Now imagine that you’re a middle-class wage earner who’s worked hard all your life. You bought a house, perhaps sometime in the 1990s. The talking heads on TV said it was a great investment, your bank’s assessor said the house was valuable, and politicians from both parties had been telling you for decades that homeownership is the American Dream.

But you were defrauded by lawbreaking bankers, and then abandoned by presidential administrations of both parties. You’ve been unemployed for years now – thanks to a financial crisis that the banks created by manipulating people like you – but in Washington they’ve stopped talking about job creation. You’re slipping down the economic ladder, rung by rung. Maybe you’re suicidal, like some of the people who wrote to me back in 2010.

Nobody’s asking you to write your memoirs. In fact, nobody seems particularly interested in your story anymore. If you’re a little bitter at all the attention Tim Geithner’s new memoir is receiving, that’s understandable. A lot of the economists and bankers who ruined your life are featured prominently and flatteringly in Geithner’s book...

MUCH MORE AT LINK--MUST READ

http://www.alternet.org/our-elites-are-extremely-isolated-real-life-america-and-thats-dangerous?akid=11849.227380.8D-VfW&rd=1&src=newsletter996430&t=7&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark