In the beginning, what excited people most about traveling to the new world was freedom to practice their religion without persecution or being treated differently for not adhering to a state mandated religion.  As time passed, people were compelled by the idea that they could grab a piece of land and create their own wealth.  These two ideas best characterize the American dream, the freedom to have a set of beliefs and not be compelled to follow the group and the freedom to build wealth from a wing and a prayer.  Our governing system evolved from these two important rights. 

Our country suffered 25,000 casualties, not to mention as many wounded in the revolution to gain our freedom from England.  Once we had tasted freedom, it was hard to imagine allowing ourselves to be ruled by a king and a parliament determined to wield their authority over colonies that had been essentially governing themselves independently for years.  To be told where goods could be sold and where they could trade, to be taxed indiscriminately, to be tried in courts without a jury of peers…these ideas were recognized as unjust and intolerable. 

With freedom came wealth and power.  This is because in our country there was no built in ruling class or proletariat class.  In America, people were not seen as belonging to any particular class and it was a given that anyone could make it.  Andrew Jackson was the first president who exemplified that idea, having beat enormous odds.  He was not born of wealth and despite having lost both parents before he was fifteen, survived fighting (under age) in the American Revolution, being imprisoned, and smallpox.  Yet he managed to become a school teacher, and later a lawyer, before running for and being elected to the highest office in the land. 

What characterized the people who immigrated to America was that they wanted to become part of a country where people were free to pursue their happiness.  There was no expectation that the government would take care of them.  What drove settlers and foreigners to populate our country was the idea that with hard work and faith they could make something of themselves.  When did this change?

Historically, there are some landmark events that we can look at as contributing to the downfall of our country.  The passing of the 17th Amendment is one.  Senators no longer represent the state; the senate is not the state’s house.  It is just an extension of the people’s house.  This has eroded state’s rights and upset the balance necessary to prevent any part of the government from gaining too much power or forgetting that they are there to serve the people.  Another is Marbury v Madison, in which the judiciary branch of government could determine whether a law is to be followed, not whether a law is being applied fairly. Every time a president uses executive power to create law through regulation, instead of the congress, the balance is being eroded. 

In the past eight years, we’ve witnessed the decimation of the middle class.  With the economy tanking and the result of a government manufactured housing crisis, people who’d invested years of their savings into homes, found themselves in foreclosure. Forced to move and rent because of bad credit, their homes were often purchased by the wealthy and redistributed to people who qualified for section 8 and received government supplemented housing. Demographics of entire neighborhoods changed, bringing in people whose interests and values did not coincide with the established culture, changing political voting blocks. 

At issue this election are several concerns.  We are at war with political factions of a religion that calls itself peaceful.  We need to determine how this war is to be fought and eliminate this threat.  Will it be fought like Vietnam or will we eradicate the problem completely?  Domestically, our government is in debt because of all the entitlement programs that were passed by preceding congresses and foisted onto generation after generation to fund.   The economy has not recovered, despite the rhetoric.  The reality is that many people can no longer apply for unemployment because the timeline for when they can receive benefits expired.  Others have found jobs but they are not full time and they do not qualify for employee benefits.  Those who take advantage of Affordable Health Care policies are funded by taxpayers, as with any entitlement program.  They are not free. 

This election is the last gasp for the middle class.  Those running for office on the left have openly voiced that they would usher in socialism. Those feeling the bern or backing a progressive truly believe in the idea that the government knows best how to spend our hard earned wealth.  This is an election to determine whether we still believe in equality of opportunity or if we now believe in the idea of equality of outcome. 
It’s ironic that the sector that continues to show growth is the service industry.  As we watch our class structure fall, an entire servant class is being created. It reminds me of the world before America was settled, a world where there were upper classes and lower classes who served them. 

I used to enjoy following the election. For me, it was like following baseball or football.  Now, when I listen to the media interview the candidates, I feel like I’m watching the show in the Hunger Games hosted by Caesar Flickerman.  The media is whoring the candidates out for ratings.  I wonder why these are called debates? The candidates are coached to say what will get them ratings.  As Gale from the Hunger Games remarked to Katniss, “What if they just stop watching?” Unfortunately, Katniss was right when she replied, “But they won’t, Gale. They won’t.” We’re gawkers at the scene of an accident, compelled to watch the election process going down in flames. 

Recently, two articles gave me pause. The first by Alana Semuels, “How Chicago is Trying to Integrate its Suburbs” caught my attention because I spent many formative years in Glenview, the suburb highlighted in the article. Reading about the new low income housing there, a collaboration between the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and Regional Housing Initiative (RHI), I recalled a conversation with a long term resident and respected member of the community (prior to the shut-down of the naval air base and subsequent redevelopment), one in which she explained that Glenview, a Chicago suburb, got around a previous Section 8 requirement by building low income senior housing. She had no qualms about the community’s position in this matter. Many middle class communities felt this way about Section 8 moving into their neighborhoods.  In a SPOA article called The Great Housing Experiment That Failed, the author writes:

Starting back in 1977, families living in housing projects began to be relocated to middle-class suburban neighborhoods with good public schools. If these families could see a different way of life, the middle-class way of life, they could learn to live like the middle class – or so everyone thought…But then the crime rate started to go up in suburbia where they moved. As one former housing project tenant said: “You move from one place to another and you bring the element with you. You got some [people] trying to make it just like the projects.”

Landlords in more affluent suburbs did not want to rent to Section 8 tenants.  Erin Eberlin writes in, “Disadvantages of Renting to Section 8 Tenants”

There is a stigma that Section 8 tenants are very destructive. There have been horror stories about floors being destroyed, cabinets being pulled off the walls, toilets being cracked, garbage and filth everywhere and many more people living in the unit than are listed on the lease… Tenants who do not collect rental assistance may be turned off by the fact that you allow Section 8 tenants in your property. They may believe that you are a “slumlord,” that the property will be dirty or that the tenants will be disrespectful and noisy.

In “Let’s End Housing Vouchers” Howard Husock provides insight into why Section 8 vouchers have failed in integrating classes of people.

Better neighborhoods are not better because of something in the water but because people have built and sustained them by their efforts, their values, and their commitments. Voucher appropriations are based not only on the mistaken belief that it is necessary to award, at public expense, a better home to all who can demonstrate "need," but also that it is uplifting to do so, when in fact it is the effort to achieve the good home, rather than the good home in itself, that is the real engine of uplift.

What he is saying is that the effort and goal to achieve a better life for one self is a major factor in the ability to contribute to and better a community. Those residents who achieve the American dream by saving their hard earned money and purchasing and maintaining their homes in a neighborhood of their choosing understand the sacrifice involved in making that happen.  They want a return on their investment.  They have made a decision to become a part of something larger and want to belong. 

Husock explains how the voucher program ends up segregating classes of people and “accelerate neighborhood decline.” 

For properties in precariously respectable neighborhoods, the government-paid rent is more than the market rent. Reason: the Section 8 program allows voucher holders to pay up to the average rent in their entire metropolitan area, and landlords in working-class or lower-middle-class neighborhoods, where rents are below average, simply charge voucher holders exactly that average rent. Assured payment and a more-than-generous risk premium: no wonder some landlords in neighborhoods teetering on the brink of respectability gladly welcome voucher tenants over working-class families offering lower rents and so accelerate neighborhood decline. South Philadelphia state representative William Keller tells of local property owners who "couldn't rent their place for $500, but they can get $900 from Section 8." The result is a familiar government-subsidized racket: landlords who specialize in Section 8s—who advertise for them and know the bureaucratic rules about what it takes to get paid. 

Homeowners pay more to live in affluent neighborhoods to ensure safety and opportunities for their families.  Residents of these communities are expected to maintain their homes and want to participate in events sponsored by their communities.  Shared values are what makes people come together as a community.  Section 8 disrupts this.

In the Chicago suburb of Riverdale, here is how it went.

EMT crews respond to emergency calls to find callers, accustomed to city emergency rooms, simply saying they're "feeling ill." Riverdale's Potter elementary school, once boasting a top academic reputation, now has the state's highest student turnover. Student achievement has dropped—putting paid to the idea that shipping poor families to good schools in the suburbs will cause an education ethic to rub off. Instead, the concentration of disorganized families has undermined a once good school. School funds, says the mayor, must now be diverted to the legions of "special needs" students. Crime is up, too—"we have real legitimate gang issues now," the mayor says—and the city has had to increase its police force by 35 percent, from 26 to 35. That's pushing the tax rate up, which the mayor fears will discourage new home buyers, pushing the small city into a cycle of decline. A lack of local buying power—a function of the voucher program's preference for very low-income renters—has already left storefronts abandoned on Riverdale's main street.

It’s no wonder that higher socioeconomic neighborhoods fear Section 8.  But it is not about race. As Husock points out, “Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson famously argued that class, not race, is the most powerful divide that separates Americans today.” So, why then does the current administration want to make socio-economic inequities about race?

In “Obama Collecting Personal Data for a Secret Race Data Base” Paul Sperry writes that the fed is collecting sensitive data on Americans by race… to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.”

In its justification for social and economic engineering, this administration is saying that inequities are a result of prejudice, not the values and work ethics displayed by different classes of people. Yet, social and economic engineering is a means to redistribute wealth, not integrate and diversify communities of people. Probably the biggest redistribution of wealth came during the mortgage crisis when thousands upon thousands of middle class people had to walk away from their homes, which were then repossessed by banks and re-purchased by the very rich or rented to Section 8 voucher holders, creating greater class divisions.  In American Spectator’s, “The True Origin of this Economic Crisis,” this crisis came about in part because of a “1992 Boston Federal Reserve Bank study of discrimination in home mortgage lending,” which concluded,

While there was no overt discrimination in banks’ allocation of mortgage funds, loan officers gave whites preferential treatment. The methodology of the study has since been questioned, but at the time it was highly influential with regulators and members of the incoming Clinton administration; in 1993, bank regulators initiated a major effort to reform the CRA regulations.

Clearly, the Obama administration is pursuing a policy of social and economic engineering and saying it is about race.

Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.

In a Crain’s Chicago Business article, Why one suburban development soared, and the other staggered, Dennis Rodkin writes,

Because the Glen is a tax increment financing district, all property taxes go into the pot; after the TIF expires in 2018, tax collections will stream into the city's general fund. Planners behind the Glen expect the previous 23 years will have generated $820 million, according to Messrs. Owen and Brady. That figure includes $250 million in land sales, $20 million in federal grants and $500 million in property and sales taxes, Mr. Owen says.

The Glen received $20 million in federal land grants. Therefore, Glenview is a federally funded city. Thus, it is susceptible to the Obama administration’s social and economic engineering plans. 

It has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that money has allowed federal overreach to influence local and state decisions about schools, housing, churches, and other services that fall under the states’ purview in our federalist system of government.  This division of power is failing.  Strongholds put in place in our Constitution to prevent centralized government are surely toppling. Our Constitutional Republic, which generates great wealth and allows for social mobility is being replaced by social and economic engineering, i.e., socialism. I am moved to wonder how this will affect voter demographics. 

According to Paul Reuben, the term “American Dream” was coined during the Great Depression.  “There emerged a profound sense that America had LOST something,” he speculates, “individual freedom, social justice, the ability to participate in the consumer economy, and the hope of a better place for one's children.”  Many Americans again are experiencing such loss.  However, what is one person’s loss is another’s gain. 

I want to make the case that we are experiencing the largest redistribution of wealth that has ever come to pass in the United States.  One contributing factor is the result of millions of foreclosures on homes formerly owned by Americans who found they owed more than the value of their home in today’s housing market.  Many of those losing their homes never dreamed they would be laid off from work or working at substantially lower income after an exhaustive job search ripped through their savings.  However, because of the current economic climate, many unemployed or underemployed cannot sell their homes for anything more than what they owe because of their devaluing.  Becoming a landlord brings a whole new set of challenges. Letting the house go becomes the only option when mobility is necessary for employment, or if a new income level cannot meet the requirements of an existing mortgage contract. 

According to Alex Veiga, Associated Press, ”While the pace of foreclosure sales slowed, lenders stepped up their home repossessions, taking back more than 1 million homes last year.”

Americans are being forced to purchase health insurance, they are required to purchase auto and home insurance to cover accidents and natural disasters, yet they do not even have an option of home insurance to provide some measure of assistance during financial hard times. 

Veiga writes, “That deepened the so-called shadow inventory of foreclosed homes that have yet to hit the market. Experts contend that the housing market won't fully recover until banks find buyers for those properties. ‘We need to clear out the inventory if the market is going to come back," Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac.’”

Basically, what is happening here is that foreclosed houses which hit the market for resale devalue the homes in the neighborhood, which also cannot sell at their former market value. There is no light at the end of this tunnel, so if a person cannot hold onto an investment for the long haul, not only will it not yield any profits and require being written off as a loss; the problem for those writing it off as a loss is that their credit ratings are often penalized and they are sometimes issued deficiency judgments.  These are not your ordinary investment losses. 

Janna Herron, Associated Press writes, “Foreclosures are expected to remain elevated through the year as homeowners contend with stubbornly high unemployment, tougher credit standards for refinancing and falling home values. Sharga said he expects prices to dip another 5 percent nationally before finally bottoming out. The decline will push more borrowers underwater on their mortgages. Already, about one in five homeowners with a mortgage owe more than their home is worth.”

Who stands to gain in all this?  Certainly, those with money to purchase income property are finding that their purchasing power is taking them much further in this market. 

“According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Americans who rented out properties in May 2011 had a gain of $3.3 billion in income. That's up sharply from April's stats, which showed a $2.9 billion rental income.”

Real estate continues to be a winning proposition for those who can rent out property and who can afford to hold onto a piece of property that cannot rent for the asking price.  There is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an entirely new housing market based on rental properties as opposed to the value of a home growing during ownership.

As reported in Short Sale Daily News, “the rental housing market is continuing to grow in both size and demand. This is fueled, in large part, to families who went through a foreclosure or short sale and are now seeking alternate living arrangements.”

But there is a very disconcerting element in all of this which isn’t being discussed in the news.  It has to do with the fact that those who cannot hold onto their homes are not only losing them, but in many cases, they are being rented to those with less economic means than those who are leaving.  The American Dream is top down, bottom up, inside out. 

How many people know what the phrase Section 8 housing means? 

The Housing Choice Vouchers Program (often referred to as “Section 8”) is the federal government’s primary program to provide housing for Americans who are living in poverty, as well as the elderly and disabled. It provides qualifying families with assistance in paying the monthly rental fee for homes and apartments that are located anywhere, not just in subsidized housing projects. In every major market in the country it is administered locally by municipal public housing agencies, which certify the tenants and residences for participation in the program.

In essence, the people moving into the foreclosed homes are having their rent paid for by the government through the tax dollars paid by those losing the homes.  Often, those losing the home are able to become gainfully employed, just unable to cover the expenses at a lower income level and unable to sell without taking the loss. 

“’It’s guaranteed money,’ said David Benham, who owns several rental properties and is a founder of the Benham REO Group, which sells bank foreclosures to investors in 35 states. ‘It has a great accountability program with the renters. I love Section 8. I wish every one of my properties was Section 8.’”

Michigan Legal Aid provides an explanation for the love affair between rental property managers and the government. 

“A Section 8 rental subsidy is a federal payment to a landlord on behalf of an individual tenant.  With a Section 8 voucher, the government pays the difference between 30 percent of the tenant's household income and the set "fair market" rent of the unit.”

The American Dream, which is based on the idea that if you work hard, you can achieve great success, is quickly being replaced with the socialist idea, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. Does anyone remember voting for this? Is that what this hope and change was about?

During an interview on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ 95 FM, future President Obama discusses the best way to bring about a redistribution of wealth.

One of the I think tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change and in some ways we still suffer from that…This country is not always been willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring about a new day and a new age I think when you spread the wealth around its good for everybody…My argument would be we also have to make sure people are trained for jobs they have child care they have affordable housing in areas where jobs are being created, entrepreneurs in minority communities are getting financing to create their own businesses and create jobs in those communities and all of those involve not only individual society but also societal responsibility.

Thomas Sowell explains the reality of income distribution in his book, Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy. 

“Although people in the top income brackets and the bottom income brackets – “the rich” and “the poor,” as they are often called – may be discussed as if they were different classes of people, often they are in fact the very same people at different stages of their lives.  Three-quarters of those Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent income in 1975 were also in the top 40 percent at some point over the next 16 years…because of the movement of people from one income bracket to another over the years, the degree of income inequality over a lifetime is not the same as the degree of income inequality in a given year.”

There is no factual basis for President Obama’s assertion that a redistribution of wealth needs to take place in order for those in the bottom income bracket to move into a higher bracket, yet the country has embarked on a plan to redistribute the wealth. 

As the song written by David Bowie, goes:  This is not America.  Shala la la la.

The people in this country are no longer sovereign. Our rights have been yielded to a government that believes it knows what is best for the people.  And this means providing the means for one economic class to afford what another cannot yet will ultimately end up financially supporting. 

A little piece of you. The little peace in me will die. For this is not America...