>>Yeah, right. The middle class has built all of it, and now it's being decimated over and over.
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>What was the size of middle class in let say 1953 ?
>Look at these figures http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0104547.html
>Take 1935 as starting point and then watch 1945 - 1970 period in particular. This is the time when 'owners of the world' as you call them got very anxious about being swept away by expanding communism and started actually paying people for their hard work.

That was the time when capitalism had its most important ingredient: competition. Without it, it is degenerating into this kind of feudalism, indentured slavery and stateless imperialism.

>In the process many many people BECAME middle class. Back then many western factory workers became actually middle class, how come ? (Hence/Tip; factory worker in USSR was making what ? Or today factory worker in India is making what ?)
>If there was no massive 'trickle down' of money (whole Niagara in West Europe!) back then, there would be no large size middle class 'consumer society' style as we know it today.

>Exactly the same is true for ex YU. If there was no 1948 (triple-agent {g}) Tito changing sides and hopping up the same money train, our fathers (and consecutively our generations) would have had much harder time ever becoming anything close to middle class.
>More or less the same economic model we had back then, was operating in East Germany or Czehoslovakia for instance, resulting in quiet different living standards back in 'golden' 70ies. And you know very well how good we had it back then :)

In a way all of the countries close to the iron curtain have benefited from it, being the shop window to show to the other side. From time to time I remember the arguments my western friends used to bring up when defending capitalism as not as cruel and dog-eat-dog as it was depicted in the eastern bloc. Most of those were about workers' rights, social safety networks and other things which are currently anywhere between being scheduled to be dismantled and long forgotten.

BTW, my wife has downloaded the text of the agreement between Cyprus and IMF/banxters, and it's pretty much all your base are belong to us. Tax everything, sell or privatize the main infrastructures, double the excise on tobacco and beer, add two more years before retirement, cut retirements bit by bit here and there, and don't forget to report to the ECB which EU citizens hold their money in your banks, we want to tax them at home as well. Of course, the usual IMF stuff about cutting health services and education was in there somewhere. Um... the agreement is supposed to be secret, which is funny because its effects will become public really soon. I guess the task of publishing a sugarcoated version of it was delegated to your government.

>Now is the payback time. And we all know how good we all have it.

Pay off your house ASAP.