The Rich and The Rest of Us

[EV_Ares]

From The Nation:

Over the past three decades, market-worshiping politicians and their corporate backers have engineered the most colossal redistribution of wealth in modern world history, a redistribution from the bottom up, from working people to a tiny global elite.

Bill Gates Sr. & Chuck Collins: We should be offended when the power of concentrated wealth brazenly dictates the rules of our society.
This special issue of The Nation exposes the widespread costs of this rising inequality and offers a blueprint on how to reverse course. We will never achieve social and economic justice for those at the bottom of our economic pyramid until we tackle wealth concentration at the top.

Doug Henwood begins the issue by placing our current extreme inequality in historical context. We now live, he writes, in a second Gilded Age. Today, as in the robber baron era a century ago, the gap between those at the top and the rest of us is simply staggering. The richest 1 percent of Americans currently hold wealth worth $16.8 trillion, nearly $2 trillion more than the bottom 90 percent. A worker making $10 an hour would have to labor for more than 10,000 years to earn what one of the 400 richest Americans pocketed in 2005.

How vast has our parallel universe of the ultrarich become? The Wall Street Journal now dedicates a full-time beat reporter, Robert Frank, to cover what he calls Richistan. Richistan did not suddenly appear on the American scene. Our top-heavy era has evolved from a heavily bankrolled effort by conservatives and corporations to instill blind faith in the market as the magic elixir that can solve any problem. This three-decade war against common sense has preached that tax cuts for the rich help the poor, that labor unions keep workers from prospering, that regulations protecting consumers attack freedom. Duly inspired, our elected officials have rewritten the rules that run our economy--on taxes and trade, on wage policies and public spending--to benefit wealthy asset owners and global corporations.

To reverse this reckless course, we need to change our nation's dominant political narrative and restore faith in the critical role that government must play to protect the common good. But we can't stop there. We need to confront directly the threat posed by this inequality.

entire article @ link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/cavanagh_collins

[MichiganVote]

1. And all this wealth is for the trust fund babies people....the next generation of tax payer slavery

[Karenina]

2. K&R

[janet118]

3. Bye-bye middle class. Hello, third world.

Bill Moyers' Journal focused on this topic last week Inequality in America.

And this graph "The L-Curve" by David Chandler fascinates me.

[dysfunctional press]

4. would the ultra-rich prefer a wealth tax, or a revolution- complete with guillotines...?

throw in the rising costs of food and energy, and it becomes apparent that something is going to have to change fairly drastically and fairly soon. i think most people are just holding their breath and trying to hang on until this disaster of a bogus potus is flushed out of office.

[Echo In Light]

5. Wealth Creates Poverty? "Terrorism, Globalization and Conspiracy"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3468220