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Inequality

How The 1 Percent Stays On Top

April 4, 2015 George Lakey, www.wagingnonviolence.org , ,
By the end of the 20th century, some imagined that the 1 percent had obtained all they could want — after all, their level of wealth and power was beyond fabulous. Now that their deindustrialization of the country had hollowed out the working class and many people had turned to elections and given up their most powerful weapon, nonviolent direct action, surely the 1 percent could relax. As we now know, however, the 1 percent did not ease up; they knew what Gandhi also believed: The best defense is an offense. The 1 percent took even more power and wealth while most progressive movements (except for LGBT activists) played defense and cried in their beer. The next national use of shock and awe might be a new Republican administration early in 2017. But there is time to get ready to turn their move to our advantage.

Americans Are Angry About Inequality

April 3, 2015 Nicholas Fitz, www.salon.com ,
In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” The findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become. In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the percentage of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population. Next, they asked people to construct their ideal distributions. Imagine a pizza of all the wealth in the United States. What percentage of that pizza belongs to the top 20% of Americans? How big of a slice does the bottom 40% have? In an ideal world, how much should they have?

Protesters March On Home Of Greenwich Hedge Fund Mogul

March 16, 2015 Greenwich Free Press, www.greenwichfreepress.com , ,
While small rivers of rainwater gathered momentum along the curbs, engulfing sneakered feet, the enthusiasm of the protesters was not dampened. The bus loads of protesters traveled from New York City to voice anger over what they say is a rigged tax structure that has exacerbated income inequality and altered the political landscape in New York. “We’re here to call out the hedge fund billionaires who have taken over New York state politics, and they’ve exploded inequality around the country,” said Michael Kink, of Strong Economy for All Coalition, who was organizing the crowd as they prepared to march down Field Point Rd to Paul Tudor Jones home on Field Point Circle.

People’s State Of The Union Injects Reality Into Debate

January 22, 2015 Margaret Flowers, www.popularresistance.org , , ,
Following the President's State of the Union on January 20, the Green Party US invited several speakers to present a People's State of the Union. Rather than the charade, manipulative stories and lies told in the President's SOTU, these speakers hosted by Green Party Presidential Candidate in 2012 Dr. Jill Stein spoke of the realities that people in the US face with falling wages, rising poverty, environmental and racial injustice and more. The people spoke about real solutions to the crises we are facing - solutions that will not be embraced by our corrupt and plutocratic government but that must be demanded and created by an organized and mobilized populace. The theme of the President's SOTU was inequality. And while some of the solutions he presented sound great, Dr. Stein noted that he waited six years, until he had a Republican Congress that would block them before he proposed them. She urged people not to succumb to his rhetoric.

Thousands Rally Across The Nation To #ReclaimMLK

January 20, 2015 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopularResistance.org , , , , ,
Over 50 Cities Nationwide Rally Against Police Abuse and For Racial Justice on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Thousands of people across the country took to the streets to reclaim the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a radical who sought national transformation, not just voting rights for all but an end to militarism, challenged capitalism and an end to racism. Ferguson Action wrote “From here on, MLK weekend will be known as a time of national resistance to injustice.” Thousands of people took to the streets on Monday rebuking what they say is the "sanitized" version of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and calling to restore the legacy of a man whose protests, like their own, were never "convenient." The nationwide actions marked the birthday of the civil rights leader in a year that saw renewed calls for racial justice in the face of persistent inequality, discrimination, and police targeting of communities of color. Capping off almost a week of demonstrations, organizational meetings, and other pledges of resistance—all done with the intent to "Reclaim MLK"—grassroots coalition Ferguson Action issued a specific call for Monday: "Do as Martin Luther King would have done and resist the war on Black Lives with civil disobedience and direct action. Take the streets, shut it down, walk, march, and whatever you do, take action."

Newsletter: 2015, The Year We Build Power Together

January 2, 2015 Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, www.PopularResistance.org , , , , , , , , , ,
“2015 The Year We Build Power Together” is the major task we see for the movement this year. In 2014 we saw tremendous growth of the movement across numerous fronts of struggle – worker rights and the wages, racism and policing, climate, the environment and extreme energy extraction, building a new economy and so much more. We also saw how uniting and working in solidarity is a foundational requirement for success. “Building power together” means building on the 2014 successes of creating a larger and bolder movement that is beginning to work together as a movement of movements and recognizes that we are building our unified power because all of our issues are connected. If the people defeat transnational corporate power in the first big confrontation of 2015, we will be on our way to making 2015 the year we built our power together. We will be freed to create the world in which we want to live and one that increases the chances of a livable future.

Is It Bad Enough Yet?

December 17, 2014 Mark Bittman, www.nytimes.com , , ,
The root of the anger is inequality, about which statistics are mind-boggling: From 2009 to 2012 (that’s the most recent data), some 95 percent of new income has gone to the top 1 percent; the Walton family (owners of Walmart) have as much wealth as the bottom 42 percent of the country’s people combined; and “income mobility” now describes how the rich get richer while the poor ... actually get poorer. The progress of the last 40 years has been mostly cultural, culminating, the last couple of years, in the broad legalization of same-sex marriage. But by many other measures, especially economic, things have gotten worse, thanks to the establishment of neo-liberal principles — anti-unionism, deregulation, market fundamentalism and intensified, unconscionable greed — that began with Richard Nixon and picked up steam under Ronald Reagan. Too many are suffering now because too few were fighting then.

It’s All Tied Together And The Starting Point Barely Matters

December 15, 2014 Mark Bittman, www.nytimes.com , ,
THE police killing unarmed civilians. Horrifying income inequality. Rotting infrastructure and an unsafe “safety net.” An inability to respond to climate, public health and environmental threats. A food system that causes disease. An occasionally dysfunctional and even cruel government. A sizable segment of the population excluded from work and subject to near-random incarceration. You get it: This is the United States, which, with the incoming Congress, might actually get worse. What makes this an exciting time is that we are beginning to see links among issues that we have overlooked for far too long. Everything affects everything. It’s all tied together, and the starting place hardly matters: A just and righteous system will have a positive impact on everything we care about, just as an unjust, exploitative system makes everything worse.

Moyers’ Last Episode: The Long, Dark Shadows Of Plutocracy

November 30, 2014 Bill Moyers, www.popularresistance.org , , , , ,
Some people say inequality doesn’t matter. They are wrong. All we have to do to see its effects is to realize that all across America millions of people of ordinary means can’t afford decent housing. As wealthy investors and buyers drive up real estate values, the middle class is being squeezed further and the working poor are being shoved deeper into squalor — in places as disparate as Silicon Valley and New York City. At the end of the show Bill says: “Tell us if you’ve seen some of these forces eroding the common ground where you live. Perhaps, like some of the people in our story, you’re making your own voice heard. Share these experiences at our website, BillMoyers.com.” Please use the comments section below to do so.

Leave No Generation Behind

November 14, 2014 Chuck Collins, www.otherwords.org , ,
For today’s college-age youth, talk of a debt-free education sounds like science fiction. Over 40 million Americans owe student debt. The average student borrower graduated last year with $33,000 worth. Over the last three decades, staggering inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity have emerged. As Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen observed recently, the U.S. households in the bottom 50 percent lost half their net worth between 1989 and 2013, while the top 5 percent saw their net worth double. This inequality is hitting the rising generation hard, as today’s students graduate into a much tougher job market than their parents did. We need a GI Bill for the next generation. It would be a game changer for equality of opportunity.

Detroit Canary In The Coalmine When It Comes To Water Rights

October 22, 2014 Maude Barlow, www.rabble.ca , , ,
Today, October 20, two UN experts, Catarina de Albuquerque, the special rapporteur on the human right to drinking water and sanitation and Leilani Farha, the special rapporteur on housing, will visit Detroit Michigan to assess the charges that water cut-offs violate the human right to water and sanitation. This is a very important development in the ongoing struggle for water justice in Detroit and the experts will be welcomed by the civil society movements there. While water cut-offs for non-payment of water bills are nothing new in Detroit, the practice took a serious turn for the worse last March when the emergency manager, appointed to administer the newly “bankrupt” city, announced he would commence with an aggressive plan to cut water services to 3,000 residences a week throughout the summer.

UN: Upholding Human Rights Means Urgent Climate Action

October 20, 2014 Andrea Germanos, www.commondreams.org , , ,
Climate change poses a global threat to human rights, underscoring the need for worldwide action to rein in runaway greenhouse gas emissions, a group of United Nations independent experts has stressed. The Special Rapporteurs, independent experts and working group members issued their warning in an open letter (pdf) dated Friday and sent to governments involved in the upcoming UN climate negotiations. "The need for urgency in addressing this topic is underscored by the approaching deadlines for the climate negotiations to reach a concrete solution," they write. "We urge the State Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to recognize the adverse effects of climate change on the enjoyment of human rights, and to adopt urgent and ambitious mitigation and adaptation measures to prevent further harm. We call on the State Parties to include language in the 2015 climate agreement that provides that the Parties shall, in all climate change related actions, respect, protect, promote, and fulfill human rights for all."

Uniting To Transform US Policing

October 17, 2014 Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org , , , , ,
Throughout the nation the issue of police brutality, including killings of unarmed people, is a common problem. It is part of a criminal enforcement system that has pitted police against people in ways that are very destructive to the fabric of the nation. DOJ is taking or has taken action involving three dozen law enforcement agencies during the Obama era. To turn this moment of awareness and activism into an effective movement, we need an agenda to transform policing so police play a constructive role in the community. At the inspiring FergusonOctober actions, protesters put forward a list of demands that provide an agenda for a movement to fix policing in America. People need to unite around the resulting agenda from the killing of Michael Brown and so many others across the country. At the same time, people need to act on their own to create the world we want to see, e.g. instituting Cop Watch and forming citizen groups to define the police they envision. Finally, we need to recognize the connections between police abuse with the broader issues of an unfair economy, environmental destruction, racism and government corruption. Uniting to build a mass transformative movement is the only path to the changes that are needed.

Public TV: Where The One Percent Rule

October 9, 2014 FAIR, www.fair.org , ,
A recent essay in Harper's (10/14) roiled the waters at PBS by arguing that public television is too often geared towards serving the "aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics." Perhaps that's no surprise. A new FAIR study finds that the trustees of major public television stations are overwhelmingly drawn from the corporate sector. Out of 182 trustees surveyed on five station boards, 152--or 84 percent--have corporate backgrounds. Among these corporate-affiliated members, 138 are executives at elite businesses, while another 14 appear to be trustees because of their families' corporate-derived wealth. Seventy-five of the corporate-affiliated trustees are executives from the financial industry; 24 are corporate lawyers.

Research: Pollution Inequality Even Worse Than Income Inequality

October 8, 2014 Lynn Parramore, www.alternet.org , ,
One of the real take-home findings is that if you look at how unequally environmental quality is distributed in the U.S., it actually makes inequality of the distribution of income look relatively modest. I wasn't entirely surprised to find that air quality is distributed even more unequally than income, but I was surprised at the magnitude of the difference. It’s really striking. Another thing that became clear is that how you look at inequality can have rather dramatic results on which communities stand out as being the most unequal. I was a bit surprised that states and congressional districts that ranked highest in terms of disproportionate exposures of people of color, for example, did not necessarily rank highest in terms of the scale of disparities between the most exposed and the least exposed communities.
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