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Published on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 by Common Dreams
America Wakes Up to the Reality: Inequality Matters
If you’re part of the one percent, even getting fired comes with a cushion made of eiderdown. GMI, a research company that gets paid to keep an eye on such things, just issued a study headlined, “Twenty-One U.S. CEOs with Golden Parachutes of More than $100 Million.” That’s each.
The report’s authors, Paul Hodgson and Greg Ruel, write, “These 21 CEOs walked away with almost $4 billion in combined compensation. In total, $1.7 billion in equity profits was realized by these CEOs, primarily on the exercise of time-vesting stock options and restricted stock.”
This news came the same day as another report, this one from Indiana University, titled, “At Risk: America’s Poor during and after the Great Recession.” Its researchers conclude, “The number of people living in poverty is increasing and is expected to increase further, despite the recovery. The proportion of people living in poverty has increased by 27% between the year before the onset of the Great Recession (2006) and 2010… Poverty is expected to increase again in 2011 due to the slow pace of the economic recovery, the persistently high rate of unemployment, and the long duration of spells of unemployment.”
In fact, the white paper finds that we now have the largest number of long-term unemployed people in the United States since records were first kept in 1948 – four million report they’ve been unemployed for more than a year. Not necessarily counting the former CEO’s gently floating to earth from those golden parachutes.
So no, Mitt Romney, when we say that Americans are waking up to the reality that inequality matters, we’re not guilty of “envy” or “class warfare,” as you claimed to Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today. Nor are we talking about everybody earning the same amount of money – that’s the straw man apologists for inequality raise whenever anyone tries to get serious.
We’re talking what it takes to live a decent life. If you get sick without health coverage, inequality matters. If you’re the only breadwinner and out of work, inequality matters. If your local public library closes down and you can’t afford books on your own, inequality matters. If budget cuts mean your child has to pay to play on the school basketball team, sing in the chorus or march in the band, inequality matters. If you lose your job as you’re about to retire, inequality matters. If the financial system collapses and knocks the props from beneath your pension, inequality matters.
Neither one of us grew up wealthy, but we went to good public schools, played sandlot ball at a good public park, lived near a good public library, and drove down good public highways – all made possible by people we never met and would never know. There was an unwritten bargain among generations: we didn’t all get the same deal, but we did get civilization.
Now the bargain’s being shredded. The people we met from Occupy Wall Street get it—you could tell from their slogans. One of the younger protesters wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the words: “The system’s not broken. It’s fixed.” That’s right – rigged. And that’s why so many are so angry. Not at wealth itself. But at the powerful players who win by fixing the game instead of by honest competition; at the crony capitalists who resort to tricks, loopholes, and cold cash to make sure insiders prosper – and then pull up the ladder behind them.
Americans are waking up to how they’re being made to pay with for Wall Street’s malfeasance and Washington’s complicity – paying with stagnant wages and lost jobs, with slashing cuts to their benefits and social services. To how our financial system profits by moving money around in exotic ways instead of supporting real economic growth. Waking up to the ludicrous Supreme Court decision defining corporation as a person, although it doesn’t eat, breath, make love or sing – or take care of children and aging parents. Waking up to how unlimited and often anonymous campaign contributions corrupt our elections; to the fact that if money is speech, no money means no speech. As one demonstrator’s sign read: “I couldn’t afford a politician, so I bought this sign.”
So while police have cleared many Occupy encampments, a collective cry, loud and clear, has gone up from countless voices across the country: Enough’s enough.
We won’t know for a while if what we’re hearing is a momentary cry of pain, or whether it’s a movement – like the abolitionists and suffragettes, the populists and workers of another era, or the civil rights movement – that gathers forces until the powers-that-be can no longer sustain the inequality, injustice, and yes, immorality of winner-take-all politics and a winner-take-all economy.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllExcellent article that states the truth very simply. Thank you.
Journalist Chris Hedges states:
>>>" I think we have to ask, if the security establishment did not want this bill [National Defense Authorization Act - that provides for unlimited detention without a trial of U.S. citizens], and the FBI Director Mueller actually goes to Congress and says publicly they don’t want it, why did it pass? What pushed it through? And I think, without question, the corporate elites understand that things, certainly economically, are about to get much worse. I think they’re worried about the Occupy movement expanding. And I think that, in the end—and this is a supposition—they don’t trust the police to protect them, and they want to be able to call in the Army. And if this bill goes into law, and it’s slated to go into law in March, they will be able to do that."
A big part of the mechanism to imprison dissenters is the monstrously destructive, counter-productive, freedom-strangling fraud of marijuana prohibition.
More than 800,000 innocent Americans are arrested for simple marijuana possession each year and made PERMANENT second-class citizens for life. They will forever face huge obstacles to decent employment, education, housing, government benefits, and will always go into court with one strike against them. They can even have their CHILDREN taken away. 20 million Americans are now locked away in this very un-American sub-class. That has a horrible effect on the whole country, being an incredible waste of human potential.
Further, the fraudulent prohibition causes vast amounts of crime, corruption, violence, death and the severe diminishment of EVERYONE'S freedom. This war on Americans set many horrific precedents to be used against all of us in the future.
In addition to "paying" for the 1%'s crony capitalism through "stagnant wages and lost jobs", the the 99% are on the hook for $16 trillion dollars in bankster bailouts alone and there is no limit to how much higher that figure may climb.
To assure the $16 trillion is there when the banksters need it the US Government is committed to gutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and every other "domestic "program in addition to increasing taxes on the working class.
Obama's response to OWS was 1) to sign three more NAFTAs to assure the OWS folks never find another job, and 2) to sign the NDAA that assures that OWS participants will have no right to due process and can be sent to detention camps here and abroad.
Creating hardened criminals for profit is part of our corporate congresses money!
I'm glad Bill's back!!!!!!!!
- and better than ever!!!!!!!
yes,!!!!!!
I"m glad Bill is back too, I love the part where he gets very specific with examples of people's real life situations when it comes to money....... perfect, it shows he gets it...
The Occupy movement is not a game; the participants are not players. While it is no doubt long overdue and may or may not bring about the critical changes America needs to recover from bankster fraud and political bribe taking, it is in my opinion the long awaited people's revolution that many have long expected and predicted.
Revolutions only become necessary when the powers that be fail to recognize that they are part of reality too. The one percent may well feel totally insulated from reality, but time will prove them wrong.
Thank you Bill Moyers for your voice and your conscience. You are one of the very few honest journalists left, a man with a conscience, a heart, and guts. Keep up the outstanding work.
You are absolutely right. As an example, amongst the 99%, though I don't think we all agree, but I believe that the overwhelming majority of us believe that global warming is real, and that it it represents a clear and present danger to all of humanity and to the viability of a habitable planet for future generations.
I believe that such issues matter to us very deeply, but yet globally, the power rests with the less than 0.1% who have control of the levers of power and, due to their narrow economic interests, have refused to recognize the reality of what we are doing to the planet.
They have brought us to this environmental, political, moral and economic abyss, and they must answer for it. They cannot say that they didn't know. If I was aware, and I'm a just a high school drop out, then these people, with their degrees from the finest universities in America must have understood the implications of increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.. The didn't give a sh*t.
Excellent article! Now, if enough of the population...including large numbers in the 1%...actually grasp the reality of just how unsustainable and catastrophic prolonged inequality is to everyone and everything, and choose to adopt a kinder more compassionate relationship with all things...we may be onto something.
Seems, though, the pessimist in me has trouble seeing humanity, as it exists in the clutches of patriarchal sociopathy, turning long enough away from its self-serving sense of entitlement to effect the lasting change that will be necessary to steer itself out of this insane whirlpool of greed, fear, hypocrisy, pretense, discrimination, demonization and intolerance of 'different' that keeps cyclically throwing the most loudly and violently proclaimed Empires into fatal tailspins.
Perhaps, this moment in history we really are on the brink of an evolutionary shift to a saner state of existence. It would be quite a beautiful thing to witness such a shift and actually get to live in it for a while before my time here is up.
It would appear it's going to be a painful metamorphisis for most. I don't think I am going to live long enough to see it. I just hope it evolves as you hope and not the way it's being orchestrated to happen.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's work on this is valuable and should be disseminated as much as possible.
They have assembled a very large bank of standard data from governments and agencies that measure populations. And they have correlated that data to demonstrate the impacts of financial inequality in the so-called "rich democracies."
Of course it shows that inequality damages everyone's life. But I have never seen it shown so irrevocably and straightforwardly before. And I was actually myself surprised at the extent of it.
Something that am beginning to think, is all this attention being paid to revolutions in other countries is to divert us in the US a from the one that is building here. Look over there, don't look here.
Those in power know very well that they deserve to be thrown out in street for what they have done to the poor and middle class, that's why they are getting very nervous. They just always believed they could get aways with it. And so far, they have. But time, and the gaining of knowledge with it, is on our side.
We have the numbers, the 99%.
Perhaps we can even build a society where people do not have to sell their bodies 9 to 5 to survive.
We just have to awake the people from they consumer based stupor..Get them out of malls into the streets.. Make them understand that we the 99% all have a big stake in how this turns out. That if we organize and stick it out, we can change things.
The people of Wisconsin are good example of this, and my hat is off to them.We do not have to accept the status-quo has it is.. We can build a new status-quo..
One where the poor and middle class's needs are the priority.
We can see that those that cannot afford it can get the healthcare they need..
That those that cannot afford a good education, can get one.
That those that have fallen on rough times are not thrown into the streets.
We can build society that lifts the heavy burden of survival from people lives and sets them free to be what and who they are.
" Without economic equality, they can be no social justice".- MLK
The elephant in the darker room of the collective American mind is that "the unemployed don't really want to work". I hope Bill can help further awaken people to the fact that an online clearing site (transparent and audited) with strong governance, transaction statistics and ratings would allow for the creation of credit and commerce (exchange) by anyone who wants to work. With simple infrastructure on the Internet and enough participants, anyone who has a skill or product that someone else needs or wants can work to supplement his/her own needs. Then lets see how many people really don't want to work.
Who exactly believes that? You don't get hundreds or thousands of applicants for one job opening if people don't want to work. Human Resource Departments don't add the line "unemployed need not apply" if they don't expect the unemployed to apply.
The lie that the unemployed don't want to work sounds a lot like the lie that if we bailed out Wall St. they would start lending. Or the ones that said the market would regulate itself, or a rising tide lifts all boats, or upper level wealth trickles down, or privatization works for the consumer, or deregulation inspires job creation....I could go on, but why bother.
I'll go for a while, the 15 percent income tax for capital gains is an incentive for the rich to keep investing into wall street, if they had to pay income tax like us wall street would collapse, all of congress is immune to penalties for insider trading, kind of unfair to Martha Stwart but allows millions to be sucked out of the system, this won't change after all these same people make the laws. Just a couple more examples of how free trade and self-regulation works. It pisses me off to support Willard Mitt Romney by paying 38 percent income tax like any good working American while he pays 15 percent, that is on the income he doesn't hide.
So glad Bill Moyers is back!
We enjoyed the first PBS segment of "Moyers & Company" last Sunday. Excellent, informative and eye-opening as his programs always are.
Check with your local PBS station for the time. In Maine it's on MPBN at 6pm. There are two more programs scheduled.