Income Inequality Is At An All-Time High
It truly amazes me how many people see nothing wrong with this income inequality. Earlier today I was part of a discussion about whether or not corporations have any obligations to uphold with it’s employees. The general consensus was corporations only had an obligation to stockholders.
Personally I would like to see unions become stronger, minimum wage raised and tougher oversight of corporate behavior.
Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers “truly amazing.”
Though income inequality has been growing for some time, the paper paints a stark, disturbing portrait of wealth distribution in America. Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.
January 5th, 2010 at 6:26 am
Yes … all of these bank bailouts, (initially set by the Jr. Bush’s administration and now being continued by Obama), along with corporate greed, jobs having been exported to other places away from this country, insurance bailouts and so on, all have contributed to this creation of serfdomhood so very visible in America these days, especially in neighborhoods like the one i live in, but also in more affluent neighborhoods where so many homes have been reposesed and are empty, and where police surveillance has turned to high tech by placing cameras on practically every street corner through which they can watch anyone entering affluent streets. The camera doesn’t like your car, or thinks it is a stolen car, or the camera confuses your license tag, or the pix of it transposes a number on it … be ready for a surprise because law enforcement means it when it says, no serfs allowed to enter affluence. O:~
January 5th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
In the ’70s farmers were stressed by low prices and consumers were stressed by high prices at the supper market and so the farmer’s market movement was born in a big way. Farmers could sell directly to consumers at weekly markets; both benefited by cutting out the middlemen (who always made a profit).
Muhammad Yunus created the Grameen Bank to provide an alternative for the poor who were being gouged by moneylenders.
” I became involved in the poverty issue not as a policymaker or a researcher. I became involved because poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from it. In 1974, I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, in the backdrop of a terrible famine in Bangladesh. Suddenly, I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty. I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me, even if it was just one human being, to get through another day with a little more ease. That brought me face to face with poor people’s struggle to find the tiniest amounts of money to support their efforts to eke out a living. I was shocked to discover a woman in the village, borrowing less than a dollar from the money-lender, on the condition that he would have the exclusive right to buy all she produces at the price he decides. This, to me, was a way of recruiting slave labor.
I decided to make a list of the victims of this money-lending “business” in the village next door to our campus.
When my list was done, it had the names of 42 victims who borrowed a total amount of US $27. I offered US $27 from my own pocket to get these victims out of the clutches of those money-lenders. The excitement that was created among the people by this small action got me further involved in it. If I could make so many people so happy with such a tiny amount of money, why not do more of it?”
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunus-lecture-en.html
Gandhi led a march to the sea to break the British monopoly on salt. The American Revolution wasn’t just about “taxation without representation”, but about the right of the colonists to determine their own economic destinies outside corporate monopolies.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Read the “Autobiograhy of Mahatma Ghandi”. Martin Luther King did.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:49 am
The Amish need to take over our government. Things would be much simpler, we would care for our fellow humans and the cities that were built with corporate greed would revert to farmland. Terrorists would have not reason to attack us, since we would be minding our own business.
Sage Reply:
January 6th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
LOL…sorry, but I couldn’t take not being able to wear jeans.
January 6th, 2010 at 11:47 pm
When I was a realtor, I listed an Amish farm. They were selling it by order of their elders. From what I saw, it was like the government stepping in. This guy had borrowed money from every small bank around. His horses and children were starving.
Once the farm was sold and debt paid off (for the most part) he was then sent to work for the “English” his take home wages were $3 and hour and a house to live in. I have no idea how that family did after that, but I am sure the community took care of the family.
A friend of mine picked up a battered teenage Amish girl stumbling down the road. Her father was sent to jail for sexual and physical abuse. She now lives amongst the English and works in a bakery.
Amish will contract with you but in my experience, many do not keep to the contract. Not all are bad. They are frugal with their money and consequently, their medical care. Most have very few teeth after 30 yrs of age. Saved the money on dentist.
One woman spoke with almost pride that she had to go to a hospital after the birth of her last baby Her baby had hydrcephlia. One visit, the baby was not there and I never saw him again. Amish babies tend to do that. They are there, then they are not. But hey, they saved the money and allowed “God’s will”
They count on their pius reputation to make you hesitate taking them to court. After all, how would it look taking them to court?
Yup, they are frugal alright.
Sage Reply:
January 7th, 2010 at 2:27 am
Wow, Wizcon. I had no idea. I’ve never had an contact with the Amish.