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Wealthy Reap Rewards While Those Who Work Lose
BOSTON - Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much of the economy, but life is perfectly rosy for those at the top.
Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much of the economy, but life is perfectly rosy for those at the top. (photo by Flickr user wannabehipster) The riches of the wealthiest North
Americans grew by double
digits in 2009, primarily from interest their money earned
when it was invested in the stock market and elsewhere,
according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group.
Millionaires in the U.S. and Canada saw their wealth increase 15 percent in 2009, to a total of 4.6 trillion dollars, the report found.
Worldwide, 11 million - or less than 1 percent of all households - were millionaires in 2009. They owned about 38 percent of the world's wealth or 111 trillion dollars, up from about 36 percent in 2008, according to Boston Consulting Group.
About 4.7 million millionaires live in the U.S., four percent of the population and more than anywhere else in the world. Japan, China, Britain and Germany followed the U.S. in the number of millionaires.
Their fortune is a stark contrast to the lives of more than 15 million people in the U.S. who are unemployed and searching for work, and the eight million more who are just getting by with a part-time job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than two million more people were working prior to the recession but have now dropped out of the labour force.
Apart from the newly unemployed, about 39 million people in the U.S. are chronically poor and do not have enough food to eat, according to the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Agriculture.
"The nation's jobs crisis is so catastrophic that, unless Congress acts on the scale of the New Deal, millions of Americans will experience extremely long periods of unemployment for many years ahead," Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told a panel of the Committee on Ways and Means recently.
Not so for millionaires and the uber-rich.
The uber-rich, those with more than 30 million dollars, are on the rebound. They spent more money in 2009 on fancy cars, yachts and jets compared to 2008, according to a study by Merrill Lynch-Capgemini. They bought fine art, expensive jewelry, gems and antiques, items that are likely to increase in value over time, so they can sell them later and make more money.
The recession isn't hitting those at the top as it has workers. In fact, many wealthy people benefited from the stock market's ups and downs, said Mike Lapham, director of the Responsible Wealth Project at United for a Fair Economy, an NGO in Boston.
"Folks at the top have a cushion, a disposable income to fall back on. Maybe their portfolios took a hit but they didn't lose their jobs and their homes. If they had losses, they can deduct them from their taxes," Lapham told IPS.
"Some people bet successfully on the financial system going under," he said. "The stock market went from 10,000 to 6,000 and back to 11,000. That's a big jump for people with significant portfolios."
"The people at bottom who've lost work, it'll be years before they get back to where they were before the crash," Lapham said.
The U.S. average national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent. Only those who are actively looking for work are included in this statistic. Among Black Americans, the rate is 15.5 percent and Latinos, 12.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Congressional Budget Office predicts that unemployment will remain almost unchanged in 2011, about 9.5 percent.
Many families have been surviving on small, weekly unemployment checks provided for 26 weeks by their state government, and an additional 73 weeks by the federal government. The first group of unemployed to run through both benefits hit that point Jul. 1, and today about a million people are receiving no assistance at all. About nine million more are still receiving unemployment payments.
Congress is considering extending federal assistance for another 20 weeks. The House approved the legislation, but the Senate did not. Congress left town for its holiday break until mid-July without passing the legislation.
In the Senate the issue fell almost precisely along party lines, with all but one Democrat for extending the benefit, and all but two Republicans against it, saying the 34- billion-dollar cost was not worth adding to the federal deficit.
Without the vote of Democratic Senator Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, the bill was one vote short of the 60 needed for passage.
"I think we're going to see a new wave of heartache here in Rhode Island," with the end of the federal assistance, Kate Brewster, executive director of the Poverty Institute, a Rhode Island NGO, told IPS.
The small, northeastern U.S. state, a former manufacturing centre whose jobs moved offshore, has struggled with higher unemployment and low-wage jobs for years. Most recently, it was hard hit by the foreclosure crisis and the downturn in the construction industry.
The ongoing unemployment and low jobs creation nationwide is helping to fuel the millions of foreclosures sweeping across the nation, according to a report by the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies.
The nation's anemic jobs creation, high foreclosures and weak consumer spending has convinced Mishel and many economists that the U.S. is in for an extended downturn. Just 83,000 jobs were created in June, instead of the 150,000 needed for robust employment, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
"The United States is undergoing the worst economic downturn in 70 years, and the damage and suffering it is causing will last many years beyond the official end of the recession," Mishel said.
Rhode Island's future is uncertain.
"We've consistently had one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country," Brewster said. Today, in the midst of the recession, more people are showing up at soup kitchens for free meals and dialing in to a toll-free, crisis phone service for families in dire circumstances, she said.
"They've had an enormous influx of calls in the past 18 to 21 months," she said. Fewer services are available to help them.
"Within last five years the state cut back work support programmes like child care assistance and funded health insurance," Brewster said. "The cruel irony is that when families really need help, less is available."
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Show AllThis is from a Parenti article in 2000:
The Super Rich Are Out of Sight
January 2000
The super rich, the less than 1 percent of the population who own the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth, go uncounted in most income distribution reports. Even those who purport to study the question regularly overlook the very wealthiest among us. For instance, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, relying on the latest U.S. Census Bureau data, released a report in December 1997 showing that in the last two decades “incomes of the richest fifth increased by 30 percent or nearly $27,000 after adjusting for inflation.” The average income of the top 20 percent was $117,500, or almost 13 times larger than the $9,250 average income of the poorest 20 percent.
But where are the super rich? An average of $117,500 is an upper-middle income, not at all representative of a rich cohort, let alone a super rich one. All such reports about income distribution are based on U.S. Census Bureau surveys that regularly leave Big Money out of the picture. A few phone calls to the Census Bureau in Washington D.C. revealed that for years the bureau never interviewed anyone who had an income higher than $300,000. Or if interviewed, they were never recorded as above the “reportable upper limit” of $300,000, the top figure allowed by the bureau's computer program. In 1994, the bureau lifted the upper limit to $1 million. This still excludes the very richest who own the lion’s share of the wealth, the hundreds of billionaires and thousands of multimillionaires who make many times more than $1 million a year. The super rich simply have been computerized out of the picture.
When asked why this procedure was used, an official said that the Census Bureau’s computers could not handle higher amounts. A most improbable excuse, since once the bureau decided to raise the upper limit from $300,000 to $1 million it did so without any difficulty, and it could do so again. Another reason the official gave was “confidentiality.” Given place coordinates, someone with a very high income might be identified. Furthermore, he said, high-income respondents usually understate their investment returns by about 40 to 50 percent. Finally, the official argued that since the super rich are so few, they are not likely to show up in a national sample.
But by designating the (decapitated) top 20 percent of the entire nation as the “richest” quintile, the Census Bureau is including millions of people who make as little as $70,000. If you make over $100,000, you are in the top 4 percent. Now $100,000 is a tidy sum indeed, but it's not super rich — as in Mellon, Morgan, or Murdock. The difference between Michael Eisner, Disney CEO who pocketed $565 million in 1996, and the individuals who average $9,250 is not 13 to 1 — the reported spread between highest and lowest quintiles — but over 61,000 to 1.
...
The higher one goes up the income scale, the greater the rate of capital accumulation. Economist Paul Krugman notes that not only have the top 20 percent grown more affluent compared with everyone below, the top 5 percent have grown richer compared with the next 15 percent. The top one percent have become richer compared with the next 4 percent. And the top 0.25 percent have grown richer than the next 0.75 percent. That top 0.25 owns more wealth than the other 99 percent combined. It has been estimated that if children’s play blocks represented $1,000 each, over 98 percent of us would have incomes represented by piles of blocks that went not more than a few yards off the ground, while the top one percent would stack many times higher than the Eiffel Tower.
Marx's prediction about the growing gap between rich and poor still haunts the land — and the entire planet. The growing concentration of wealth creates still more poverty. As some few get ever richer, more people fall deeper into destitution, finding it increasingly difficult to emerge from it. The same pattern holds throughout much of the world. For years now, as the wealth of the few has been growing, the number of poor has been increasing at a faster rate than the earth's population. A rising tide sinks many boats.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Superrich.html
Thank you. Michael Parenti is a writer worth reading.
That's a superb overview of the phenomenon, as Parenti so often provides. Necessary info if we're really going to understand this issue.
The best resource explaining this graphically is here:
http://www.lcurve.org/
http://www.lcurve.org/LCurveVideo.htm
But without looking to cause...
First is simply the human nature of the game, and the common sense understanding of how and why it takes money to make money. Thus, the natural effect of the capitalistic marketplace turns out to be just like that of a Las Vegas Casino - a few players may occasionally buck the odds to win but the system inevitably favors the house overall (i.e. those that have the money make the rules - aka the other "golden rule" - which always and necessarily favors gain at the expense of others.)
That takes us to the most significant cause of the current situation - Reagonomics and the so-called trickle down theory, which instead of contributing anything positive over the long-term merely amplified the short-term natural effects of that self-rewarding "golden rule." Also, the concept of debt-spending to stimulate the economy depends entirely on our collective understanding of "guns and butter." By stimulating consumption we are only being given a fish to eat for the day, whereas when we stimulate investment (in individuals and social infrastructure, not Wall Street) we are providing for how to fish over a lifetime.
Humankind has learned nothing in regard to the nature of wealth and power if we cannot understand this and cannot learn to favor and guarantee a system of government and economics that seeks balance and equitable growth for ALL of society. Whatever is put in at the bottom will, of necessity and practicality, funnel upward in a natural and pragmatic way, but what is put in at the top will serve little practical purpose and create even greater inequity than the system will foster on its own.
It has been said that a society is only as great as its most unfortunate, or "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link." This simple and obvious truth seems lost to many in today's society.
"The L Curve" is a good graphic representation of U.S. income distribution. My take away: we're (essentially) all together in the bottom 99%. I'm a 99 per-center. How about you? http://www.lcurve.org/
______________
The following is from a campaign ad by Mark Dayton, candidate for Minnesota governor:
"We're gonna make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. If the richest Minnesotans paid the same percent of their income in state and local taxes as everybody else, that would be over $4 billion of additional revenue. That would go a long way to solving our deficit. ...The rich can afford to pay their fair share, they should be paying their fair share, and if I'm governor they will pay their fair share."
I'll bet the same is true in most other states. Especially California. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI5jLe77dvM&feature=player_embedded#!
________________
Sadly, working-class, working-poor and poor U.S. citizens are almost never reported about in corporate and liberal* U.S. media. It falls to Inter Press Service (Rome, Italy) to report this story. And even this report only mentions them as a contrast with the uber-rich.
*I once self-identified as a "liberal." I thought it meant men who burned their draft cards, women who burned their bras, and people who broke the no-sex-before-marriage taboo. Now, the term has been usurped by corporatists and Democratic Party/Obama apologists, working for the establishment to preserve the status quo.
________________
Why the growth in income disparity? The article mentions offshoring of jobs in Rhode Island. Left unsaid is the human trafficking of 11 - 20 million illegals who admit they "only come here to work."
Meatpacking jobs that paid $65/hour and full benefits in the late 1960s (in today's dollars), now pay $8/hour and no benefits. Where do those dollars go? Directly to the Wall Street firms that own the meatpacking giants. Who loses? U.S. citizens who used to work in those plants, their families, and their communities where they once spent their wages. That's just one industry. Yet "liberals" claim they can't connect the dots between human trafficking, falling wages (real wages have fallen since 1974), the skyrocketing wealth of the uber-rich and the plummeting wealth of the working class.
At least we can thank Inter Press Service for pointing out that:
"5 million people in the U.S. who are unemployed and searching for work, and the eight million more who are just getting by with a part-time job..."
"More than two million more people were working prior to the recession but have now dropped out of the labour force."
"The ongoing unemployment and low jobs creation nationwide is helping to fuel the millions of foreclosures sweeping across the nation..."
"39 million people in the U.S. are chronically poor and do not have enough food to eat..."
I'm at about the 60-70 yard line.
I don't know if it is proper to put the whole bottom 99 percent in the same boat. Someone in the top few percent enjoys a degree of security and power in a society that someone at 50 percent or lower cannot imagine. They also pay far less a percentage of their inclome in stste and local taxes in most states - go here: http://www.itepnet.org/whopays.htm)
On the L Curve, the bottom 99% are represented by a stack of $100 bills between 1.6 inches and 1 foot high. The final 1% is represented by a stack of $100 bills that shoots up to 30 miles high.
So, to your point, is there a difference between 1.6 inches and 1 foot? Sure there is. But that difference is tiny compared to the difference between 1 foot and 30 miles. That's why I emphasize the similarity of the bottom 99%. We should find some unity in that. Few people understand just how rich the uber-rich really are.
Thanks for the Who Pays? link. It confirms what Minnesota candidate for governor, Mark Dayton, is saying: in Minnesota, median income people pay about 10% of their incomes in state and local taxes, while the top 1% pay only 6.6%.
Regressive taxation: another reason for the growing income disparity.
I find it interesting that if a person has a house full of 20, 30, 40 pets it is considered not normal and the person is sited and the pets taken away. If a person has a house full junk so they can barely move in it, it is considered not normal, the person is considered a hoarder, and is told to seek some kind of psychological help. If a person went to a buffet and proceeded to fill up 5 plates with food people would look at him like he was some kind of pig.
Two of the seven deadly sins directly refer to taking more than you need, greed and gluttony. It obvious as a society we look at people who take more than they need as not normal, that is until it comes to money. Why is it that so many look with respect, at people who take more money than they can ever use in a hundred lifetimes, at the expense others? Why do we have laws to promote things like greed, and gluttony? Why is greed and gluttony not reviled by the religious right, like gay marriage and abortion is? Why do they not protest in front of the mansions of the multimillionaires like they protest in front of abortion clinics? Think of all the babies that these money hoarders dollars could help.
I just don't get it at all.
Excellent observation, and one that lies at the heart of our refusal to make the changes we need ....
You already know this, of course, Tom, but the reason is that the US was set up and is being run for the benefit of psychopaths.
Cicero, 2100 years ago: "Never is the thirst of [the greedy] filled nor sated. And not only are they tortured by the longing to increase their possessions, but they are also tortured by the fear of losing them."
Spinoza, 370 years go: "But when a greedy man thinks of nothing else but profit, or money, ... they are not thought to be mad, because they are usually troublesome and are considered worthy of Hate. But Greed ... really [is a] species of madness, even though ... not numbered among the diseases."
Thanks for those great philosophical quotes. Could you ever imagine Obama ever using one of those quotes in a state of the union speech? I suspect there would be more than just one republican screaming at him "You Lie!"
More than one Dem, too.
But we'll never know, will we. Obama'd liefer drop his trousers than say anything so politically exposing.
CONGRESS SHOULD BE THOROUGHLY ASHAMED OF ITSELF!!!!!!!!!!
You would think that this body, that is supposed to REPRESENT THE PEOPLE, would make as its first priority the provision for those out of work to continue receiving unemployment benefits.
I am ASHAMED to be an American today because we have a Congress that doesn't care a whit about the desperate needs of thousands of their countrymen today who can't even afford their next meal.
Then, TO ADD INSULT TO INJURY, they take their summer break without staying in session until they see to it that all Americans at least have sufficient funds to buy groceries.
It demonstrates clearly and without doubt that we the people do NOT have any REPRESENTATION in Congress any more.
WE MUST ALL VOTE IN THE NEXT ELECTION AND REPLACE THESE SELF-CENTERED PEOPLE WHOM I WILL NO LONGER EVEN CALL AMERICANS!!!!!
Don't be ashamed to be an American.
There are many very good Americans who care, like yourself and other commondreamers.
It is very hard to feel sympathetic for the poor.
DCH's less than compassionate comment is echoed by what conservative Cal Thomas wrote in his syndicated column yesterday when he claimed that it is basically the fault of the working class "not to live within [their] means" and that "too many expect too much from the government and too little from themselves."
The surprise in reading Thomas's article, as well as DCH's statement, is that they did see fit to repeat Reagan's phrase of welfare queens regarding those who dare to seek government assistance in order to survive or that they did not wonder why, to recall Dickens, that there are no prisons or no workhouses to place those pesky poor who have become such a blight upon the image of America.
Cal Thomas is definitely NOT a Christian ... not in the sense of follower of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Cal is a FASCIST THEOCRAT who worships money.
Are you proposing that the solution to income disparity lies in the practice of Christianity? If so, how so, please?
Read the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Slowly and attentively.
That's what I thought.
A better solution can be found by studying the French revolution and their response to income disparity.
Such remarks are also not actual characterizations of the poor, but are just a complete carricatrue of the poor from their white suburban isolation, and are total bullshit. Cal Thomas, and DCH, need to spend a few hours riding the 86B Bus between downtown Pittsburgh and poor districts of Homewood-Brushton and Wilkinsburg. They should look at the tired faces of the people working multiple minimum wage jobs, then, I dare them to tell me the poor are lazy or looking for a handout.
Come to think of it, I'd like to force Obama (in disguise) to ride the 86B bus for a few hours too.
But people like Cal Thomas, and DCH, and Obama have probably never even ridden on a city bus in their fucking lives. And their eyes (Obama too) would be as big as saucers riding the 86B, becasue like most racists, they get terrified when they are around poor black men, who are all carricatures formed from the 6 O'clock news in their eyes.
hey, sabocat!
I vanpool at the moment, but for years, I rode buses to and from work...while I didn't personally know the other riders on my buses, I 'knew' them all by sight, and they, me...we saw each other every day, and knew well what stops we each used, where we preferred to sit, etc.
in the summer, of course, it's hot on the bus, and many of us fall asleep on the 30-60 minute rides...one day, out of the blue (never happened before or since), a bike cop gets on our bus at an otherwise routine stop...
I was slumped in my chair, with sunglasses on, having been nodding in and out of sleep...
the cop goes all the way up and down the aisle of the packed bus, then back to me, where, without saying anything to me, he starts waving his hand back and forth in front of my sunglasses...
I said, "what?" he says, I wanted to be sure you weren't asleep...I say, what if I was? he says, that's a ticket, then implies it's unsafe to sleep around strangers...
the funny thing is, of course, he was the stranger in the situation...
just an example of a guy with nothing else to do but get on a bus full of tired, hard working people and hassle them, potentially ticketing them for falling asleep on the way home in a hot bus...
peace
sad but true
Cal Thomas is a elitist pig, and as such does what he does.
Also to blame is the newspaper editor/publisher who pay him for his drivel.
The MSM are owned and managed for the benefit of the 1%. If the MSM was owned by the middle class and managed to serve the bottom 98% we might all know where the top 1% lives.
This article and the comments talk about income taxes, what about home property taxes? For most people who are well off enough to own a home, the property tax is a flat share regardless of income. Their home represents most or all their net worth. People still have to pay school and property taxes on their home even if they are disabled or old and have no income. What if the top 1% had to pay a flat share of their total worth to help pay for public expenses, especially wars?
Cal Thomas is a dried up OLD azz piece of shit. I would like to tell that to it's ugly face, but this will have to do.
When I came back to this piece, I never thought I would get lumped in with Cal Thomas that shitstain on humanity.
I like to use a cliche' : "Reality is despair." Because I am in despair and state what I believe to be a fact of humanity. I get lumped into the shitstain with Cal Thomas.
I have to laugh. I am poor, too. I have less than one thousand dollars in the bank, I live in a trailer. I am old and only have SS to live on, and a meager veterans pension from a long ago combat service.
Life is funny. And I am without compassion. Life is funny.
If you think life is funny, wait till you get to the punchline.
Actually, compared to people who are starving or in constant danger of attack, people in one of the many hells here on earth, maybe an income and a trailer park isn't as bad as you think. Not a picnic, certainly, but still, better than a lot of ways to go.
Some responding here have misunderstood my point.
To have sympathy for someone in lesser conditions, one has to be relatively secure in their own condition.
People of similar economic, social conditions rarely would have sympathy for each other. The poor don't care for the poor, nor the rich for the rich. The rich may have some sympathy for the poor.
This may explain why there is so little political change. If we had sympathy for one another, we would demand that our elected officials do what is "good" for us. As it is, we are in competition with one another, therefore, have little reason for mutual cooperation to effect political, economic, and social change for our benefit.
Therefore, this is why I say: It is very hard to have sympathy for the poor.
I'm sorry, but empathy can be a component of sympathy and one cannot have empathy unless they've been there and done that. Your premise of "similar economic and social condition" as precluding the capacity for sympathy seems to indicate confusion of sympathy with pity or charity.
It is true humans can be competitive by nature, but that does not extend to preventing us from cooperating together. It is said politics makes for strange bedfellows precisely because people with very different personalities and agendas will come together for a shared cause.
Sympathy does not have as much to do with the lack of critical mass to effect political change as does common vision and purpose. It is sad how our greater situation must become dire before we seek revolutionary/evolutionary change. We need to better learn and understand the influences that shape our horizon.
While it is true sympathy for the less fortunate would prompt some to action, sympathy alone would likely tend to the giving of a fish rather than the teaching of how to fish. We need to understand how to enable and empower others and how to create opportunity - this has more to do with wanting and valuing the success of others than it does with being sympathetic to their struggles. This country became great because it was known as the land of opportunity, for rugged independence and self-actualization, not as the land of sympathy.
I think sympathy explains more than you want to admit.
sym·pa·thy
–noun
1.
harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.
2.
the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.
3.
the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.
4.
sympathies,
a.
feelings or impulses of compassion.
b.
feelings of favor, support, or loyalty: It's hard to tell where your sympathies lie.
5.
favorable or approving accord; favor or approval: He viewed the plan with sympathy and publicly backed it.
6.
agreement, consonance, or accord.
7.
Psychology . a relationship between persons in which the condition of one induces a parallel or reciprocal condition in another.
8.
Physiology . the relation between parts or organs whereby a condition or disorder of one part induces some effect in another.
I think it admits more than you want to admit.
"People of similar economic, social conditions rarely would have sympathy for each other. The poor don't care for the poor, nor the rich for the rich. The rich may have some sympathy for the poor. "
Tax rate of 50% on all income above 150k. Income here includes capital transactions. Includes gifts, ie asset transfers to progeny / heirs. Inheritance taxes, 50% on any estates with total value above 1M.
Who do you think will be complaining?
People of similar economic, social conditions rarely would have sympathy for each other. The poor don't care for the poor, nor the rich for the rich. The rich may have some sympathy for the poor.
---------------------------------------
You might recall that it was the very wealthy, conservative George Mason who bluntly said to the other members of the hijacked Convention in 1787 that it was stupid for the rich to care only about the rich, not only because of the enmity such selfishness always creates, but also because they themselves inevitably would have descendants who would not be rich.
The flip side of that is the well-documented fact that it's the poor who give most generously to charity: they're aware of how thin the thread is that keeps them from the pit, and how little anyone's individual efforts contribute to their fate (an intuitive realisation of Deming's finding that 80% of the success or failure of any individual within a system is due to the system itself, not the individual's performance).
So you seem to have it backwards: both rich and poor care for their own class, though it's mostly the rich who are actually class-conscious (as Adam Smith noted).
Do you call yourself a christian?
There but for the grace of God go you...
Circumstance and opportunity play into this, and even recent history (the Great Compression) proves how government policy and income equity can foster a substantive growing working class. Still, a hard working class does not equate with elitism, as the pursuit and possession of wealth does not necessarily equate with hard work.
Christianity plays a role because it espouses compassion and care for the poor, and advises the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
The key to understanding the current sociopolitical dynamic is realizing that the middle class must be marginalized and reduced in order to effect government and social change (i.e. NWO). The poor will always seek change, and the elite will always benefit, unless of course the change is to promote social equality and equity.
Every prospering nation and society required/requires the prospering of the many. Every decline can be correlated with class disparity and excesses of the few.
Condescension for those less fortunate is arrogant and self-righteous, and reveals a very poor understanding, perhaps even disdain, for what it is that actually makes us rich as humans.
After all, they are wholly to blame for their situation, medical or other calamities notwithstanding, or even calamity withstanding (because God is showing His disfavor). Isn't ironic how loud you scream 'injustice' when you wind up in their shoes--or foolishly avoid asking for help when you do wind up there, even if it means your own self-destruction. It's just fine and dandy to spend trillions on military hardware to kill others, but immoral to help those in need, and they call that a Christian attitude. Hell, I call it plain MEAN. We must start calling things what they are, and avoid euphemisms.
As long as money rules in this society, the rich rule everything.
The more inequality there is, the closer we are to chaos or fascism. I wonder how long the rich think this can go on before something gives?
The rich taste better with BBQ sauce or dry rub?
The rich are dry enough. I would go with the sauce.
1% vs the 99% makes for slim portions.
There is always cake.
The cake could be the assets seized and distributed to those who can use it to better humanity. If there was a progressive tax on those making or worth 50k over the poverty level, and if that tax was used to build alternative energy sources and develop a super fast national transit system, we would be eating some of that cake.
We also have to remember that the rich made much of their wealth at the expense of the rest of us. Even with this outrageous imbalance of wealth, both Republicans and Democrats are afraid to increase taxes on the wealthy. Also, remember that it is the wealthy, and their corporations who benefit the most from government. The people have the collective power to do something about it, but are too complacent.
I think that their is another question to ask. With this type of wealth disparity, can we call are ourselves a democracy?
Oh, has it become as when the Romans invaded the island of Crete and the people of island asked the Roman General: "So where is our democracy"? And the Roman general replied, democracy for us,occupation for you"!
Have we become occupied?
Democracy for the wealthy. Occupation for the rest of us.
Are headed down the road to serfdom?
This hasn't been a democracy since 1787, and of course wasn't one before that. All we've ever had of democracy is the distant and ever-receding ideal that is perpetually hammered into the American psyche by Madison Avenue con men and delivered up daily thru corporate media outlets, Hollywood, and Fourth of July fireworks propaganda.
Voting, the system we're stuck with, is a total joke, since no candidate is EVER permitted to be on the ballot (except at the most local level, and even then not always) unless and until they've been thoroughly vetted by corporate interests in full control of our hydra-headed duopoly of Democrats and Republicans. Every office of real consequence is off-limits to anyone truly intending to represent the interests of the people. Examples, like Ralph Nader, abound in our sordid history.
So there is no democracy here and there never was. It's just that, as this article indicates, the problem has worsened to the point where the situation is now grotesquely obvious to anyone with a pulse. The multi-millionaire class has the rest of us by the balls, and most of us apparently think this is fine and natural, we should be the eternal underclass, because God has designed capitalism and we dare not question or reject it. So keep those TVs humming and chattering, shop all you can while you can, clutter your lives up with expensive junk, run as many gas-powered engines as you possibly can every day, and call it FREEDOM. That's all our faux-democracy amounts to.
Good rant, I think I'll go pour a drink after reading it.
Outstanding post!
"Hard work will get you ahead".
Absolute rubbish. Working hard increases productivity. Let us assume a person does work hard and does the work of 2 men.
He might retain his job while the other worker is laid off. Management will then press the worker to be even MORE productive using the threat of lay offs and that larger labor pool against the same worker.
Assume all the workers "work hard" equally.
Spreadsheets will be printed that show the worker spends half the day with "Not enough work to do" and people will get "laid off".
This is the nature of Corporate Capitalism. The "Leeches" are in fact that same "Investor Class" who grow rich off the labor of the worker.
Always remember that the wealthy investing and rentiier classes have created for themselves a rigged game that they cannot lose! When the stock markets goes down, they sell short, or move their vast wealth to precious metals and make fabulous riches, when the sotock market goes up, they sell long and make fabulous money. They aboslutely cannot lose!
Meanwhile, wher does this wealth actually come from? It comes from the excess unpaid value - the sweat, health, and sometimes lives, of the worker.
Yet, in breathtaking chutzpah, their media apologists call The Rich the "innovative", and the "creative class", while the worker is "lazy", "irresponsible", "looking for a handout".
The wealthy are NOT the "hard working", the "innovative" or the "creators of jobs" whose fucking asses we shound be kissing in adoration and thankfulness! Thay are filthy blood-sucking leeches - every one of them. We need to hammer this home at every opportunity to everyone we meet.
For years such articles appear on a near daily basis, so that one is prompted to think "So tell me something new".
The question is ... what to do about it.