Criminal suspect Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a billionaire copycat who preaches economic growth in Italy by breaking down the right of people to work and by subordinating workers to the law of the Free Market as preached by the US big corporations and their fortunate sons.

Silvio Berlusconi has been tampering the Italian justice system to have his criminal charges either overturned or dismissed as per new legislation or dismissed as per the statute of limitation. And now that Berlusconi is still in power and joining shoulder to shoulder President Bush in his fight against terrorism he wants to tamper the labour legislation so that corporations have the flexibility to fire employees with no just cause.

We want to provide Silvio Berlusconi with an understanding that the American Free Market is a BIG LIE and as a consequence I am going to mention some social and economic statistics which contradict the perception of the United States as creating wealth for all of its citizens. We must take notice of the faults of the Free Market so that we can change our economic environment and therefore balance our economic growth with our social growth for all of our citizens.

1. The Free Market has privatized governments along with the social system and as a consequence corporations have become more important than people. People are not full citizens anymore as they have become essential consumers to sustain Corporate America. In 1953, if you count only income taxes, individuals and families paid 59 percent of federal revenues and corporations 41 percent, according to The Statistical Abstract of the United States. By the latest confirmed figures in the Abstract, the corporate share has dropped from 41 to 20 percent, while that of individuals has increased from 59 to 80 percent. The overall lower taxes paid by the corporations become more dramatic when we understand that corporations avoid taxes by setting offshore head offices and by other widespread legal or illegal or criminal schemes.[1]
2. The US has the worst record on poverty in the industrialized world - a poverty level which is twice as high as England's. Tens of millions of people are hungry every night, including millions of children who are suffering from discase and malnutrition. In New York City 40% of children live below the poverty line.[2]
3. It is my understanding that the US incarceration rate is the highest in the industrialized world. As of the end of 1999, 6.3 million Americans were under some form of judicial supervision-on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole.[3]
4. The top 1 percent of households have more wealth than the entire bottom 95 percent. Between 1983 and 1995, the inflation-adjusted net worth of the top 1 percent of households swelled by 17 percent. Nine years into the longest peacetime expansion in U.S. history, average workers are still earning less, adjusting for inflation, than they did when Richard Nixon was president.[4]
5. In 1998 the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings. On an inflation-adjusted basis, the median hourly wage in 1998 was 7 percent lower than in 1973 - when Richard Nixon was in the White House. The pay gap between top executives and production workers grew from 42:1 in 1980 to 419:1 in 1998 (excluding the value of stock options). According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, the typical American now works 350 hours more per year than a typical European. More than 65 million anti-depressant prescriptions were written in 1998. Parents spend 40 percent less time with their children today than they did thirty years ago. The Census Bureau reports that the pretax median income was $1,001 higher in 1998 than in 1989. For the decade of the 1990s, that's an average annual raise, adjusted for inflation, of $111.22, or 0.3 percent.[5]

References

[1]The 50-Year Swindle, by Ben Bagdikian, April 2002, The Progressive http://www.progressive.org/April%202002/bag0402.html

[2]How is free the Free Market? By Noam Chomky, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, Massachussets, USA http://www.oneworld.org/second_opinion/chomsky.html

[3]When Corporations Rule the World, by David C. Korten, second edition, page 304 http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/corprule/corporat.htm

[4]Shifting Fortunes. The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap. 1.Overview: The Growing Wealth Gap by Chuck Collins, Copyright 1999 Holly Sklar and United for a Fair Economy http://www.ufenet.org/press/archive/1999/shifting_fortunes_report.html

[5]Ownership Statistics: Why a Shared Capitalism is Needed... Site managed by Jeff Gates and Christopher Mackin, Shared Capitalism Institute http://www.sharedcapitalism.org/scfacts.html#Call1