The story of the goose that laid the golden eggs is one of  the best known of Aesop's fables, but people rarely seem to discuss it in terms of the modern world.

The fact is, though, that one could easily see the goose as the American middle class, and the fools who killed it as America's mega-rich.

[caption id="attachment_1181" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The goose is dead."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/dream.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1181" title="dream" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/dream-300x199.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="199" /></a>[/caption]

On one of his final albums, the late George Carlin said that we call it the American Dream, because we've reached a point where you have to be asleep to believe in it.

All of us who grew up middle class and suburban in this country during the baby boom years were told that as long as you worked hard and did your best, you could make a success of yourself. And in addition, your children would have the opportunity to have a better life than you did.

Of course, that's not true any more, although you won't find anyone running for president in either party who will tell you the truth about that. There is no question that our best days are behind us as a nation, and a large part of that is because the truly rich in our country decided about 30 years ago that no matter how much money they had, it was never enough.

It used to be a big deal to be a millionaire. As of 2010, according to Forbes magazine, there were 410 <em>billionaires</em> in the United States alone. As of 2009, there were 4.7 million millionaire households in our country. Admittedly a lot of that is tied up in home equity and retirement accounts for some people, but that's still a helluva lot of wealth.

That sort of means that if you're not a millionaire, you're pretty much screwed these days. So much of our national capital is just being accumulated as wealth that we have official unemployment of 9 percent and probably double that number are either unemployed, enderemployed or have just stopped looking.

And if you lose your job and you're past 50, you are well and truly fucked. Pardon my language, but nothing else seems to express the problem as accurately. Lose your job and unless you're a rare bird, you'll fall behind on your bills, use up what savings you have and God forbid if you have mortgage payments.

One of my closest friends in the world just learned that in all probability, she will be losing her job at the end of the summer. She has worked and worked hard for 30 years since she graduated from college, and at times has been pretty successful. But the last few years have been tough, and the odds are pretty good that if she is out of work for any length of time, she'll have to sell her house.

This is where things really get evil. Not just in my friend's case, but all over the country. There are so many houses on the market -- both from foreclosures and just people who need to sell -- that the market is badly depressed in most parts of the country. That means first, that people who sell for less than they thought their house was worth will come away with a lot less money than they should, and second, that rich people who have been sitting on their money can grab properties for really good prices.

The rich get richer and everyone else loses.

For all the talk about fortunes wiped out by the Great Depression, most people who were truly wealthy in 1929 because even more wealthy during the down years. But we have a greater disparity of wealth between the rich and the middle class now than we have since the days before the federal income tax. The richest people in our country have been stealing -- morally if not legally -- from the rest of us for the last 30 years.

We are probably in a position where too much has happened to get back to any kind of balance under the present system. We are either going to slide into an oligarchy where tens of millions of people are on subsistence wages while a comparative handful live like sultans or we will have some sort of revolutionary upheaval.

For all the talk about change from the Tea Party types, they have it completely wrong. Most of what they support only makes things even better for the mega-rich. We need people who are willing to tear things down and start all over again.

Right now, all we are is a dead goose.

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