I guess I'm a socialist or something, but do you see the Third World in our future?

I hadn't been to New York in several years, but I went into the city a couple of times on my trip to the East Coast for the holiday season. Even before I left there in the late 90s, it was getting a bit ridiculous to live there. Some thought that maybe 9-11 would dampen the real estate market in the City, but that was merely a beep on the radar. Prices are out of control.

Back when I lived in New York, I had a little apartment in a two-family row home in Astoria, Queens--forget Manhattan even then. Since I moved out, even Astoria is looking astronomically expensive. Those who want to make an investment need to look out in Newark--it's a little dicey out there, but you've got a train route into the city.

In the meantime, I am reading an excellent book by Paul Krugman called The Conscience of a Liberal, which is labeled as current affairs, but I see more as an economic/political history of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. It looks at economic policy and especially tax policy as political tools to manipulate a greater political agenda by the Republicans, even while their rhetoric may have spoken more loudly to cultural issues. It is fascinating and to me, it all blends into what I see in New York, and to a broader extent across the country--a widening of the socio-economic gap in this country, which I feel could eventually propel us toward a Third World condition. I'm not saying this is immanent, but we cannot be complacent.

Having lived in Brazil, a country with one of the largest disparities in wealth distribution in the World, I am no stranger the dangers that exist. In Rio, where the slums have grown up the mountain sides through which the rich beach neighborhoods weave, those who wish to seperate themselves from the great unwashed, uneducated, poor and at times dangerous masses have had to resort to machine gun guarded, gated communities. Their maids venture out to the market in private buses and all is well for those who can. In Sao Paulo, on the other hand, apart from squatters under the overpasses, the majority of the city's poor live in far out neighborhoods, while the rich cluster in the center of town (grant it, the center of town is the size of Manhattan, at least, but we are talking about a huge city). The poor, like the guys who worked at the bakery on my block, traveled two hours or more each way to work for almost nothing. They walked part of the way.

New York could soon be the new Sao Paulo. Since the 1970s, the tax structure in this country has been arranged so that the very rich are keeping and investing and keeping so much of their income that the disparity between the rich and poor has been steadily expanding. The pay packages of high-level executives is so many hundreds of times the salary of the average worker that it is almost beyond belief. I would argue, that the extreme increases in incomes of the rich and in turn the super rich have been much of the drive behind the extreme increases in property prices in the major economic and political hubs of the country. Of course, this is coupled with the weakening of the dollar, which has recently compounded the phenomenon as wealthy foreigners have also sought to purchase property in areas like New York and San Francisco.

In the meantime, unlike after the post-war years, when the American middle class truly began to blossom, we are seeing a dangerous erosion of the average family's safety net and security. The fear of illness wiping out a family's security or leading to a loss of the family home is real for many hard-working and relatively well-educated Americans.

I work in education and all I hear is how we need to get every kid ready for college and that will be the ticket to a secure future, but I have felt in my bones that that was a croc of crap. And a college education is getting more and more expensive just as the guaranty it used to offer to security is eroding.

What Paul Krugman discusses in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, is how the GOP systematically went about developing a message and an infrastructure to dismantal the New Deal and to peel away from the Democratic base many voters who should have voted for and supported the policies of the Democratic Party and the continuation of the New Deal and its promise of a strong middle class.

I urge people to read the book and to decide for themselves. How is it that so many American voters can be convinced to vote against their own self-interests? Krugman points to subtle race bating as a major component of the plan. Fear tactics, for sure, enter in. I would love to hear from any of you and discuss the implications of his arguments-- and my own fear that if the tax and other economic policies of our nation are not reversed that we could be heading towards a Third World economy--not in terms of overall size, but in terms of economic disparity and increased obstacles in movement into higher socio-economic standing. In short, an end to the American dream and the American society as we know it.

If I am correct, the end of the American society will come not primarily from immigrants or minorities, or gay marriage or pre-marital sex, but from the economic policies and political tactics of the GOP.

Call me a socialist if you want to. I prefer American.