By Jean Hodgkinson

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it -Mark Twain

The Republican Party’s contest to select an opponent for Barack Obama in November’s U.S. presidential election trudges painfully along, heading now to Florida. And anybody following it may have noticed that, for reasons which remain unexplained, being filthy rich has suddenly become a liability. So much so that Mitt Romney’s $250 million fortune is in need of defending by such esteemed supporters as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. But the defenders are sounding odd, to say the least.

“I think what the American people are going to see is someone who’s been extraordinarily successful in his life,” Christie said. “I don’t think they want a failure as president.” It seems Republican amnesia is terminal, and gets worse when talk turns to the starring role played by Barack Obama’s predecessor in driving the country into the ditch. The trail of destruction left by CEO George W. Bush before entering politics isn’t worth wasting space in this column, but it remains a fact despite the fairytales conjured up and spread by right-wing demagogues.

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money,” predicted Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who authored Democracy in America after touring the country in 1831. “The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.” This is currently the Republican Party’s biggest problem: its principles are so far removed from those of democracy it needs to find somebody capable of convincing voters that such isn’t the case. And it isn’t the first time, either.

From the Harper’s Index (August 1998): “Ratio of the number of raises Congress has granted itself since 1938 to those it has granted minimum-wage workers: 21:19” Another interesting statistic catalogued by the Index (September 1989): “Ratio of the average salary of an American CEO to that of an American public school teacher in 1960: 38 to 1 ... In 1988: 72 to 1” That’s nearly a doubling in 28 years. The AFL-CIO website observes that, according to a union-sponsored study, “In 1980, CEO pay equalled 42 times the average blue collar worker’s pay. By 2010, CEO pay had grown to 343 times workers’ median pay – by far the widest gap in the world.” In the world?

Yes. And the “world” is defined by its history as well as geography. In December 2011 historians Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen determined “the income inequality gap in modern-day America is far greater” than it was in Ancient Rome, a slave-owning society. “In the Ancient Roman Republic in the days of Julius Caesar, the top one percent controlled 16 percent of society’s wealth. In twenty-first century USA, that one percent on top controls 40 percent of the country’s wealth.” But, you may wonder, doesn’t the rest of the world count for anything – after all, those are only American statistics.

Well, when Credit Suisse compiled its Global Wealth Report 2011 it found “the 29.7 million adults with household wealth of more than US$1 million make up less than 1 percent of the world’s adult population, but own 38.5 percent of global household wealth ... Of these, 2,700 have assets above US$500 million.” Credit Suisse also “projects global wealth to rise by 50 percent in the next five years,” yet didn’t deem it necessary to remark on how all of this newly created wealth might more equitably be distributed.

Earth is home to an estimated 1,200 billionaires and 412 of them live in the U.S. In this category only China (115) and Russia (101) have managed to follow the U.S. into the triple digits. There are also 3.1 million American millionaires, and here Japan is the only other nation to surpass a million individuals (1.73 million). Canada (where CEOs earn “174 times more than the average worker”) isn’t being overrun with billionaires, incidentally, but at 282,000 is holding down seventh on the list of millionaires.

South Carolina’s January 19, 2012, debate brought to 16 the number of major Republican debates for the current election cycle. In those debates, President Obama’s name has come up “560 times [and] Ronald Reagan has been invoked 221 times,” according to Steve Benen. Yet George W. Bush has been mentioned “a pitiful 56 times.” Obviously the candidates are hoping everybody has forgotten Dubya, whose honesty was perhaps a little too blunt. “You bet I cut taxes at the top,” he said referring to his tenure as governor of Texas in the GOP’s South Carolina debate of February 15, 2000. “We ought to make the pie higher.”