Inequality

Selling Lemonade To Save Your Mother’s Life? That’s American Healthcare For You

May 5, 2018 Jamie Peck, Theguardian.com Create! Health Care, Inequality, New Economy

When 11-year-old Nemiah Martinez of Las Cruces, New Mexico, found out her mom needed money to help her get a kidney and pancreas transplant, she didn’t waste time feeling sorry for herself. She got off her 11-year-old behind, pulled herself up by her Dora the Explorer shoelaces, and opened a lemonade stand. To date, she’s raised over $1,000 for her mom’s care by selling drinks out of her family’s garage every weekend for $1.50 a pop. Now, with any luck, this resourceful little girl might still have a mother by the time she graduates from high school. “I’m the lucky one,” Nemiah’s mom, Paloma, told ABC News. ABC News portrayed Nemiah’s plight as a feelgood human interest story. One radio show called the story “heartwarming”. We should call it what it really is: a damning indictment of everything that’s wrong with America.

The Crime Of Being Poor And Black

May 1, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Inequality, Poverty, Racism

NEWARK, N.J.—This is the story of Emmanuel Mervilus, who got locked up for a crime he did not commit, whose life was derailed and nearly destroyed by the experience and who will graduate this spring from Rutgers University. It is a story of being a poor black man in America, with the exception being that most poor black men never get a second chance. The only reason Mervilus got a second chance was because of one man, history professor Don Roden, who founded the Mountainview Program at Rutgers for formerly incarcerated students. This program accepts, among others, the students I teach in prison, one of whom, Ron Pierce, also will graduate this spring. There are only a few saints in this world. Professor Roden is one. Mountainview staff, students, professors and families gathered Friday at Rutgers’ Newark campus to speak of the struggles and hardships endured by students such as Mervilus and Pierce.

Addressing Systemic Challenge At The Heart Of Escalating Inequality And Environmental Destruction

April 12, 2018 By Ted Howard, Thenextsystem.org Create! Environment, Inequality

Let me be clear: I recognize that everyone in this room is doing extraordinary work, has devoted your lives to this cause, and are making some real difference – but in the main the difference is being made at the margin. The inconvenient truth is that we face a problem beyond politics and reform, beyond good projects and initiatives and campaigns – ours is a systemic crisis at the very heart of our 21stcentury political-economy. One of my colleagues is James Gustave Speth – an esteemed environmentalist who founded leading U.S. organizations such as the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and who served as chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and as the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme.

The Oligarchs’ ‘Guaranteed Basic Income’ Scam

April 3, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com Educate! Guaranteed basic income, Inequality, oligarchy

A number of the reigning oligarchs—among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $64.1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth $20.8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth $5.1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth $1.6 billion)—are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations. The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated.

Students, Youth Speak About War, Inequality At DC March For Our Lives Rally

March 28, 2018 Tom Hall, Wsws.org Educate! Guns, Inequality, March, Students, Wars and Militarism, Washington DC, Youth

An estimated 800,000 people descended on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC for the national March for Our Lives rally on Saturday. The turnout for the DC march, the largest of 800 demonstrations throughout the US and internationally, exceeded organizers’ expectations of half a million demonstrators. Some media outlets are saying that the rally was the largest in the history of the American capital. (See, “Hundreds of thousands of students march against mass violence in America ”) High school students and other youth who attended the rally had far more on their minds than gun control and the midterm elections—the issues promoted by the media and the Democratic Party. Many sought to connect the epidemic of mass shootings in American schools to broader issues, from the promotion of militarism and war, to poverty and social inequality.

No CEO Should Earn 1,000 Times More Than A Regular Employee

March 20, 2018 Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, Theguardian.com Educate! Class Struggle, Income inequality, Inequality, New Economy, Wages

The CEO of Marathon Petroleum, Gary Heminger, took home an astonishing 935 times more pay than his typical employee in 2017. In other words, one of Marathon’s gas station workers would have to toil more than nine centuries to make as much as Heminger grabbed in just one year. Employees of at least five other US firms would have to work even longer – more than a millennium – to catch up with their top bosses. These companies include the auto parts maker Aptiv (CEO-worker pay ratio: 2,526 to 1), the temp agency Manpower (2,483 to 1), amusement park owner Six Flags (1,920 to 1), Del Monte Produce (1,465 to 1), and apparel maker VF (1,353 to 1). These revelations come thanks to a new federal regulation that requires publicly traded US corporations to disclose, for the first time ever, how much their chief executives are making compared with their median workers.

Growing Apart: A Political History Of American Inequality

March 19, 2018 By Colin Gordon, Inequality.org Educate! History, Inequality

In December 2013, a year into his second term, Barack Obama identified“dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” as “the defining challenge of our time.” That observation — two years after Occupy Wall Street, four and half years into the “recovery” from the Great Recession, and eighteen years since the growing income share of the top one percent surpassed that of the bottom fifty percent — was both true and trivial. Now, a long year into a new administration determined to deepen that divide — even as it mines its resentments — our inequality persists in starker and starker dimensions. The digital project “Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality,” is an effort to grapple with that challenge — its dimensions, its roots, its causes, and its consequences.

Business Leaders Agree: Inequality Hurts The Bottom Line

March 15, 2018 By Chuck Collins, Otherwords.org Educate! Capitalism, Inequality, New Economy, wealth inequality

A growing number of corporate leaders say it's time for them to start sharing the wealth. For decades, big business leaders have warned that redistributing wealth is bad for business. Taxing the rich to pay for infrastructure and education, they say, will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. But what if it’s the opposite? What if decades of stagnant wages and growing inequality are scrambling the golden egg and stifling the economy? A growing body of research suggests that’s exactly what’s happening. And a growing number of business leaders now agree. Jim Sinegal, the retired CEO of Costco, famously fended off Wall Street pressure to cut wages and made an eloquent case for a higher federal minimum wage. “The more people make, the better lives they’re going to have and the better consumers they’re going to be,” Sinegal told the Washington Post years ago.

“If Poor People Knew How Rich Rich People Are, There Would Be Riots In The Streets”

March 7, 2018 David F. Ruccio, Anticap.wordpress.com Educate! Class Struggle, Inequality, wealth inequality

All the experts agree—from Thomas Piketty and the other members of the World Inequality Lab team to John C. Weicher of the conservative Hudson Institute—that inequality in the United States, especially the unequal distribution of wealth, has been worsening for decades now. Both before and after the crash of 2007-08. And there’s no sign that things are going to get better anytime soon, unless radical changes are made. But, as it turns out, even the experts underestimate the degree of inequality in the United States. The usual numbers that are produced and disseminated indicate that, in 2014 (the last year for which data are available), the top 1 percent of Americans owned one third (35 percent) of total household wealth while the bottom 90 percent had less than half (45.3 percent) of the wealth.

The Wealthy, The Poor, The Vulnerable

February 28, 2018 By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org Educate! Class Struggle, Inequality, New Economy

In our deeply unequal age, we’ve become accustomed to talking about concepts like income and wealth, affluence and poverty. Researchers at the OECD, the developed world’s official economic research agency, would like to toss another concept into the inequality mix: economic vulnerability. Why do we need to talk about vulnerability? Wealth and income stats alone, a new OECD study points out, often don’t tell us the whole story about who’s prospering and who’s not. One example: Households with decent incomes often don’t have much in the way of assets. In these asset-poor households, any serious disruption — a sudden job loss, a family breakdown, a disability — could bring economic disaster. How many households are living at the precipice of this disaster? The OECD’s new economic vulnerability study has an alarming answer. The study covers the United States and 27 other major developed nations.

The Strategy Of The 1% And Ours

February 15, 2018 Raúl Zibechi, Chiapas-support.org Strategize! Class Struggle, Inequality

In recent days two facts illuminate the strategy of the richest 1 percent of humanity. Towards the end of January the media divulged an Oxfam study, wherein is asserts that of all the wealth generated in 2017 in the world, 82 percent went into the hands of the richest 1 percent, while half of the population received absolutely nothing. The economy only functions to benefit a tiny minority that concentrates more and more power. The second fact comes from the Davos Forum, where the sector that represents the interests of the 1 percent meets. All the chronicles assure that the CEOS of the multi-nationals and the world’s most powerful men (there are few women), were happy and converted the annual gathering in the Swiss Alps into a real party. Almost all of them arrived in private jets; they paid $245,000.00 for the four days of meetings and conferences and access to the private sessions.

How Rich Are The Rich? If Only You Knew

February 14, 2018 By Gil B. Manzon Jr., Theconversation.com Educate! Class Struggle, Inequality, New Economy, Ruling Class

“If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Actor and comedian Chris Rock made this astute statement during a 2014 interview with New York magazine, referring to the yawning gap between rich and poor. In so doing, he stumbled upon a key challenge in the study of inequality. What’s the best way to measure it? Most inequality studies have focused on income – measures of which are widely available. However, being rich is not about a single year of earnings but rather about the accumulation of wealth over time. In the past, quantifying that has been tricky. The wealthy would probably prefer we stay in the dark about how rich they are, presumably to avoid the aforementioned riots.

Poverty: American Style

February 10, 2018 By Kenneth Surin, Mintpressnews.com Educate! Inequality, Poverty

In December last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued a statement on his 15-day fact-finding mission of some of the U.S.’s poorest neighborhoods. Alston, the author of the quoted phrase in the excerpt, is an Australian who is a professor of law at New York University. During his mission, he visited Alabama, California, West Virginia, Texas, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. Alston’s statement on American poverty and inequality has been overlooked by most of the mainstream media. Alston has a record of consistent impartiality, which makes his statement on American poverty all the more credible. He was critical of China in his report on that country (the Chinese government later accused him of “meddling” in its judicial system).

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