It's not going to work anymore. We've reached the breaking point. Maybe I'm wrong.

Corporate America: a world where workers are essentially treated as if they were corporate property, both on and off the clock. Disposable. Interchangeable.

Corporate America: a place where multi-billion dollar companies get a 15-year retroactive tax break, and where 140,000 people are 'patriotically' laid off by an airline industry that doesn't seem to give two shits about anyone or anything but its shareholders and CEOs.

Corporate America: a heartless, faceless entity that controls the president, the senators, the congressmen, and the judges that I've elected into public office.

The recklessness, the arrogance, the short-sightedness and, worst of all, the naked greed of the corporate American establishment�despite its commercialized and consumerist insistence to the contrary�is one of the biggest reasons why America sucks.

Like the Drug War, there are many facets to this area of suckiness. Let's start with number one: disparity.

Forbes Magazine online recently listed the 15 richest people in America today. Along with the list were brief little summaries complete with a few little sob stories about how badly they suffered during the recent recession. Boo hoo.

15 people. Their combined total worth is around $222.1 billion dollars.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Year 2000 report (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-213, Money Income in the United States: 2000, U.S.Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2001) the average per capita income for people of all races and both sexes in the year 2000 was $22,199.

The richest 15 Americans made more than 10,000,000 average workers combined.

In terms of the poorest workers, it would take approximately 36,669,000 of them to equal the wealth of the richest 15.

The Census also measures income according to households, and in the year 2000 it would have taken the combined income of about 20,700,000 of the poorest households in America to equal what those 15 people make.

Since the average household is roughly estimated at 2.69 persons, that means that the 15 richest Americans have more money than around 55,677,906 of the poorest people in this country.

Given that the average size of poorer households tends to be slightly larger than that of more affluent households, it's safe to say that the discrepancy is larger.

And given that we are in a recession and layoffs have reached record levels, it is safe to say that the discrepancy is just that much greater.

It's interesting to note that of the 15 richest people, 5 of them belong to one family (the Waltons, of WalMart fame), and two of them are sisters (Ann and Barb Cox).

Granted, this is an unscientific method that I'm using, and statistics can be deceiving.

I have only spent a few hours searching for the data and looking at the numbers provided by the Census. There's a lot there.

It's not an easy task.

If you doubt any of these figures, you're welcome to tackle the Census yourself and tell me what you find.

All I can say is, albeit unprofessional and off-the-cuff, I think these numbers are fairly representative of the way things are in this country, which is....