According to Bloomberg News, “the number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a record 40.8 million in May as the jobless rate hovered near a 27-year high," according to government sources.  That means that one eighth of the population of a country that still claims to be the most prosperous on earth depends on federal subsidies to survive.

If that doesn’t startle and anger you, juxtapose it beside the small number of people who have amassed huge fortunes—often through what is called “public service.”  At the moment, I’m thinking of the Clintons and, in particular, of Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and wondering why a simple civil ceremony in front of a justice of the peace wouldn’t have been a decent gesture at a time when so many lives are adrift.  Instead, we got a real "Let them eat cake" moment!

If there is anything more disturbing than the persistence of poverty in this country, it is the economic and social inequality that threatens any sense that we really have a meaningful “democracy.”  And, frankly, Bill Clinton personifies this.  As president, he contributed to it and, fatherly pride aside, has now rubbed our faces in it.  

It’s become a truism that George W. Bush created a huge budget deficit after Clinton left him a great surplus.  But, that surplus was built, among other things, on a Clinton era reduction in government spending on crucial social services.  As Michael Meeropol’s 1998 book put it, the Clinton administration completed the “Reagan Revolution,” or counter-revolution to be more precise, if one views such policies as a reversal of the progressive impulses of the New Deal, which is what Meeropol meant.

This is not really surprising.  The great sociologist, G. William Domhoff, once described the Republicans and the Democrats as the right-wing and the left-wing of the Property Party.  Despite the various ways they seek to characterize one another in their periodic electoral games, the fact is that our system is no less than what Chomsky once said of Colombia: it is an elective dictatorship, in which the two principal parties alternate in how and when they do the bidding of the power elite.  So, Clinton’s economic (and, hence, social) policies) were not actually much of a departure from those of his predecessor.

As Gregory Albo, a political scientist at York Universty in Toronto, wrote in his review of Meeropol’s book,

“from the start Clinton’s budgetary policy fixated on the deficit and combined major spending cuts and minor tax increases. His monetary policies did not alter at all the direction that Greenspan had long established of moving to monetary restraint with a relatively high level of unused capacity and unemployment. The first order of business, as Meeropol records Clinton’s advisors as saying, was to ‘satisfy the bond market.’ Indeed, with Greenspan firmly ensconced as an economic tsar in Washington, Clinton left neoliberal monetary policy completely untouched. The second step was the deficit reduction package of the 1993 Budget Reconciliation Act. Here, too, Clintonism made its peace with neoliberalism. When congressional wrangling blocked tax increases, the weight of deficit reduction had to fall on cuts to program spending” to the poor.

We are reaping today what Bill Clinton (and his cronies, such as Larry Summers, still working his magic in the Obama White House, and former Goldman Sachs man, Robert Edward Rubin, Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury) sowed on behalf of the Wall Street mob.  Much of what has gone wrong with the U.S. economy in the last two years is directly attributable, for example, to the demise of Glass-Steagall, the famous New Deal banking act of 1933, that Clinton repealed in 1999, an action that Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel designed to investigate the U.S. banking bailout (TARP), and others hold largely responsible for the financial crisis that is the main reason that so many of our countrymen are now on food stamps and in need of unemployment benefits.  Not at Goldman Sachs, though, where the bonuses roll on.

And everything was fine in Rhinebeck the other day, when Chelsea Clinton married former Goldman Sachs banker, now hedge-fund trader, Marc Mezvinsky (whose father, a former Iowa congressman, was convicted of defrauding investors of millions in 2001 and did time in a federal prison).   The wedding cake, which reputedly cost between ten and twelve thousand dollars, was a reassuring sign that all is well among the financial elite: it was 4 feet tall and weighed 500 pounds.  But, perhaps more impressive is the fact that young Marc purchased the multi-million dollar apartment in Manhattan, where the couple will live, when he was just 30.  This was as the economy was going belly-up for millions of his fellow citizens.

This is testimony not just to his personal moxie, but to the vast, excruciating distance that separates those in this troubled country who toil for a pittance and barely survive and the smiling mobsters who rule the economy and enjoy inestimable bounty and have no shame, in these hard times, about flaunting it.