When Michael Moore interviewed Tony Benn, a former Labour politician in the House of Commons about the birth of Great Britain's National Health Service in Sicko, Benn observed that when you burden people with debt, they tend to become socially, economically, and most importantly, politically marginalized. They are, in effect, bullied into submission, as they do not want to do anything which will cause them to become unemployed and their debts unmanageable.

Nicholas von Hoffman writes this piece in The Nation making a connection between the ever growing socioeconomic gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of Americans:

"It was almost 100 years ago that Henry Ford startled the world by giving his workers a raise without being asked. He explained that if they didn't have money they could not buy Ford automobiles.

From then on, his self-evident bit of common sense was accepted decade after decade. But in recent years it got lost and forgotten. The big boys have stopped giving us little folks enough to buy the big boys' stuff.

Get this from the Wall Street Journal: 'The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks. The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.'

Or as Forbes Magazine put it recently, 'The price of admission to this, the 25th anniversary edition of the Forbes 400, is $1.3 billion, up $300 million from last year. The collective net worth of the nation's mightiest plutocrats rose $290 billion to $1.54 trillion.' So 400 individuals, or about 0.00001 percent of the population, own the equivalent of more than 13 percent of the gross national product of the United States.

This is bad news for Wal-Mart, for Proctor and Gamble, for Delta faucets, for Whirlpool, for Dupont, for everybody who sells anything to the American consumer because the consumers, as the figures show, have run out of money with which to buy. The rich people are sitting on top of all the dough. Even with yachts the size of ocean liners and private planes of the dimension of an Airbus A380, the rich cannot, even if they shop day and night, buy enough to keep the wheels of American and world commerce turning.

It takes but a whisper that the American consumer is dying on them to cause near panic on the world's stock markets and central banks. It is a settled truth that without the American mass market booming away, the much-advertised and overly praised global system will swoon.

The American consumer, however, has the financial equivalent of angina pectoris and has had it for some years now. Terrifying cardiac incidents have been prevented by administering a financial form of nitroglycerin, which we call credit. With credit comes debt, and for tens of millions of us debt is how we live. We use it to buy the houses we live in and the milk our children drink.

It used to be that debt was something you got into when you were fully grown up. It was only after you had a job, got married and were buying a house or car that you contracted debt and worry lines and a disposition not to take risks because you owed too much money.

Since so few people have so much of the money locked up and do not plan to share, either the masses cut back on their spending, which is the road to universal disaster, or they must borrow and borrow and borrow without end. Not only the grownups.

From the point of view of the big rich, getting young people in debt not only keeps the money coming in but also makes youth timid and obedient. Debt ensures that they won't turn up on the streets to demonstrate for some unwholesome cause. You could almost call it a rule that all people--black people, Hispanic people, white people, trailer trash people, college graduate people--when put in debt pretty much do what they are told.

Debt, of course, breeds more debt, as people contract new debt to pay off old debt. As the process proceeds, first it becomes a practical impossibility to pay off the principal and then people find they cannot pay the interest on their debts. That is what has happened to the subprime borrowers.

Should we reach the point where the half of our population trying to make it on 12 percent of the nation's payroll can no longer meet the interest payments, we shall have a crisis where all the choices are worse than awful. And a happy doomsday to you, too."

Last week, on Real Time With Bill Maher, Bill mentions this topic in one of his best "new rules" of the year:

"If America's richest one-percent are now so rich that even a five-star hotel isn't good enough, it's time to bring back the guillotine.

Yes, what's being dubbed America's first 'six-star' hotel has just opened in Miami Beach. How ritzy is it? Well, let's put it this way. J-Lo can afford to stay here, but her husband can't. At this hotel, when they ask if you'd like help with your bag, they're talking about your scrotum.

But, this is America, and we can afford it, along with $2-trillion wars and tax cuts. But, there's one thing we can't afford, and that's health care for sick kids.

So, the question I'm asking is, how did it all ever get so uneven? Warren Buffett asks that question. He's the third-richest man in the world, and a decent man. He points out how ridiculous it is that he - the third-richest man in the world - is taxed at 17.7%, while his secretary, who makes sixty grand a year, is taxed at 30%. Which brings up a very fundamental economic question: why is Warren Buffett paying his secretary only sixty grand a year? He's the third-richest man in the world!

But, you know, the days when a shop girl in the big city could support herself working a full 40-hour week, or a family of four could live off a single blue-collar breadwinner, are as bygone a fantasy as malt shops or heterosexual wizards. If you're living hand-to-mouth, and still buying into the con that the big threats to America are socialized medicine, Mexican immigrants and tax increases, then you're not being kept down by the rich. You're being kept down by you.

In America, it's not the haves and have-nots. It's the haves and the been-hads. If you, the citizen, deliberately vote for someone who won't give you health care over someone you will, you need to have your head examined. Except you can't afford to have your head examined.

Please remember that if you hear the new radio ad from Rudy Giuliani, who says his chances of surviving prostate cancer in America were 82%, whereas, in England, under 'socialized medicine,' his chances would have been 44%. Numbers that, like the cancer, were pulled directly out of Rudy's ass.

Now, I know socialized medicine sounds like Stalin himself is going to come over to your house and perform a forced sterilization. But, really all it is, is universal health care. Which means everybody - not just the rich - gets to see a doctor when their erection lasts longer than 72 hours.

And I just hope that one day, ten or fifteen years from now, one of Rush Limbaugh's 'Ditto Heads' is going to wake up in his cell in debtors' prison - because that's where President Giuliani throws you when you can't pay your Visa bill - and he'll turn on the Fox Financial Channel, and as he watches some CEO gloat over his $200 million in stock options, he's going to suddenly realize that he's been had. And on that day, that man will begin the great middle class uprising of the 21st century.

Oh, no, he'll probably just switch over to 'Pimp My Truck.'"

I'm not even going to begin to describe my student debt. It's embarrassing; I tell friends how much I owe and they gasp and look at me as if I had just told them I wanted to run in the Naked Mile.

And that's just student debt. You know. The so-called "good kind." I'm lucky I don't have car payments, mortgage payments (or rent, since I'm living at home again) or even a substantial amount of credit card debt. And all of these people are right: we are shackling ourselves to debt so that we can attain the "American Dream."

By my calculation, if everything goes as planned, I will owe more to the federal government and to private lending companies for my education than my parents ever owed on the mortgage to their house. I think.

Is this what constitutes life in the "greatest country on Earth"? Is this what my ancestors, who fled the pogroms of Czarist Russia, abject poverty of Eastern Europe, and anti-semitism, wanted for me? For my family? For my descendants? For my generation?

All the while, the richest of Americans bask in the more and more wealth taken from the poor and given to them by the Bush Administration. The writers and comedians and documentarians and British politicians are right: a top-down economy is going to bankrupt itself and self-destruct. I'm no economist; any right-winger would love to point that out. But even I understand that economies are not built and maintained on the wealth of the few, but rather the hard work of the many.

Concentrating wealth like this administration has, privatizing things that should NEVER have been privatized, and disregarding rules of US and international law can only lead to disaster.

Back in 2003, it was popular to call neoconservatism as an ideology that put Israel and so-called "Jewish interests" above all others. But all of the events and blunders since then should have shown us that, by 2007, neoconservatism isn't about Jews or even Israel.

Neoconservatism is about maintaining US supremacy on the global stage as well as extolling the virtues of capitalism, giving the best resources to those that need them the least.

There are many things in the past I may have written which I was I could take back. But, I never believed that this administration was worth the trouble it caused.

Eight years of Bush has given us one of the largest wealth gaps in history, never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growth of an ever-powerful, monarchical and fascist executive branch.

And this legacy of debt is just the wake in this ocean of catastrophe and misery. For all of you dopes that voted Republican in the last election and in 2004 (and even 2000), I hope you're happy.

And I hope you realize exactly what Bill Maher was saying: you've all been had.