Inequality

Blocking The Google Bus

April 7, 2014 Creative Resistance, www.creativeresistance.org Resist! California, Inequality, Protest

From CreativeResistance.org: San Francisco Bay Area protests tech giant “Google Buses” are given special treatment, while city services struggle. “The protesters said their action was a parody that would introduce a new “Google” product called “GMuni”–where San Franciscans can ride the Google Bus for free now that Muni is in financial crisis.” For more on the issue, a recent article on SF Gate.

The Media Won’t Tell You: Eight Reasons To Revolt

April 7, 2014 Paul Buchheit, www.alternet.org Resist! Inequality, Mass Media

he following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the "hard news" stories that the media has a responsibility to report. But the business-oriented press generally avoids them. 1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got Almost None of It. That's an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people who already own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For them, the average gain was well over a million dollars -- tax-free as long as they don't cash it in. Details available here. 2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum Wage Workers A recent report stated that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair market rent.

Job-Based Benefits And American Inequality

April 4, 2014 Colin Gordon, www.dissentmagazine.org Educate! Inequality, Worker Rights and Jobs

American inequality is driven not just by the uneven distribution of wages, but also by the uneven distribution of job-based benefits. More than any other country, the United States relies on private employment and private bargaining to deliver basic social benefits—including health coverage, retirement security, and paid leave. The results—on any basic measure of economic security—have been dismal. Reliance on private benefits made some sense in a mid-century economy organized around lifetime “family wage” employment in large and stable firms. But even under these circumstances, benefits bypassed many workers. Their coverage was always uncertain (loss of a job meant loss of benefits) and often capricious (consider the health and pension plans that routinely evaporate in corporate restructuring). Good benefits followed good jobs, widening the gap between low-wage workers and everyone else.

Reducing Inequality And A Strong Economy Go Hand-In-Hand

April 3, 2014 Joseph Stiglitz, www.nextnewdeal.net Educate! Finance and Economy, Inequality, Politics

It is a great pleasure for me to discuss with you one of the critical issues facing our country, its growing inequality, the effect it is having on our economy, and the policies that we might undertake to alleviate it. America has achieved the distinction of becoming the country with the highest level of income inequality among the advanced countries. While there is no single number that can depict all aspects of society’s inequality, matters have become worse in every dimension: more money goes to the top (more than a fifth of all income goes to the top 1%), more people are in poverty at the bottom, and the middle class—long the core strength of our society—has seen its income stagnate. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, today is lower than it was in 1989, a quarter century ago.[1] An economy in which most citizens see no progress, year after year, is an economy that is failing to perform in the way it should. Indeed, there is a vicious circle: our high inequality is one of the major contributing factors to our weak economy and our low growth.

Amazing Wealth Surge For Top 0.1 Percent

April 2, 2014 Sahil Kapur, www.talkingpointsmemo.com Educate! Inequality, Wealth

New research finds that richest 0.1 percent of Americans have dramatically expanded their share of the country's overall wealth in the last three decades. The study is unique in that it measures inequality in terms of wealth, rather than income. It builds upon a slew of research that details stark and growing inequalities in the United States. "Wealth is as important as income for thinking about overall well-being," write Princeton's Atif Mian and University of Chicago's Amir Sufi. "For example, wealth may be more important than income in predicting who can send their kids to an expensive college. And wealth also represents control. Corporations are controlled by shareholders. So a higher concentration of wealth naturally implies that fewer individuals control the decisions made by firms in the economy."

Vatican Banner Drop: “Stop For God’s Sake. You Are Killing Us. Give Us Back Our Lives.”

March 30, 2014 Staff, www.nbcnews.com Resist! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Inequality

A man scaled the dome of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican on Saturday, protesting Italy's tough austerity programs. When bar-owner Marcello Di Finzio, 49, got on to the famous rooftop, he unfurled a banner calling for Pope Francis to step in and help those hit hard by the financial crisis and push an end to the austerity program. The banner read, "Stop for God's sake, you are killing us. Give us back our lives." Italian media reported that shortly before his climb he also posted a message via social media. He wrote: "They have taken everything from me, but they won't take my dignity as well".

Kids Used As Pawns in Bid to Up Lottery Ticket Sales

March 27, 2014 Matthew Vaz, InTheseTimes.com Educate! Government, Inequality, Poverty, Youth

Lottery sales in America are driven by a core group of devotees, with 70 percent of national sales coming from only 20 percent of players. Who these players are is no mystery: According to Bloomberg News, households making between $30,000 and $40,000 a year spend twice as much on lottery tickets as households making upwards of $100,000, and high-school dropouts spend an average of $50 a month on lottery play, while people with graduate degrees spend $13. A lottery bill of $50 a month represents a real commitment, and in working-class households it undoubtedly pushes up against food expenses, rent, the electricity bill and other basic necessities. Thus it is a genuine challenge for states to drive lottery expenses among the poor any higher, even with the most well-executed advertising campaigns. In response, the New York state lottery has taken a new approach to advertising in the hopes of broadening its customer base.

Who Needs a Boss?

March 26, 2014 Sheila Dewan, ://www.nytimes.com Create! Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy, Inequality, Worker Rights and Jobs

Support for full-fledged co-ops has inched into the mainstream as communities have grown weary of waiting for private investors to create good jobs — or sick of watching them take jobs away. In Cleveland in 2009, hospitals and a university gave seed money to a new group of businesses, the Evergreen Cooperatives, and now contract with them for laundry, energy retrofits and fresh produce. Last month, a government commission in Wales announced that “conventional approaches to economic development” were insufficient; it needed cooperatives. That same month, the New York City Council held a hearing called “Worker Cooperatives — Is This a Model That Can Lift Families Out of Poverty?”

Hiding the Poor: The Most Class-Segregated US Cities

March 25, 2014 Richard Florida, www.theatlanticcities.com Educate! Class, Inequality, Poverty

Poverty in America is an enormous problem. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15 percent of Americans, or 46.5 million people, lived below the poverty line in 2012. And the poor are increasingly isolated across America. As Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff have documented, between 1970 and 2009 the proportion of poor families living in poor neighborhoods more than doubled, from 8 to 18 percent. And the trend shows no signs of abating. This increasing concentration of poverty poses a host of problems to communities. Less advantaged communities suffer not just from a lack of economic resources but from everything from higher crime and drop-out rates to higher rates of infant mortality and chronic disease.

The National Consensus to End Wealth Inequality Builds

March 23, 2014 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese www.alternet.org Educate! Inequality

And, people are also talking about the need for a guaranteed national income. The realities of technology replacing jobs, jobs being shipped overseas and the downward spiral of income require us to find new ways to provide income. A guaranteed national income would be one way to provide an economic foundation for every resident and make sure that we all benefitted from the growth in the economy. How to fund such a program? Many ways have been suggested, but one that should be considered is treating government funding of businesses as taxpayer investment so that taxpayers benefit as the GDP expands. The hundreds of billions in federal dollars and trillions of Federal Reserve dollars that have been given to the big banks should be seen as taxpayer investment, not corporate welfare and we should all profit, not just the 1/10th of 1 percent who receives those dollars.

TPP Would Deepen Income Divide

March 21, 2014 Roger Bybee, www.dollarsandsense.org Educate! Inequality, Poverty, TPP

“Those at the top have never done better,” President Obama ruefully acknowledged in his January 28 State of the Union speech. “But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened.” Yet, moments later, Obama heartily endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which as drafted directly reflects the demands of “those at the top” and would, if passed, severely intensify the very inequality spotlighted by the president. The TPP would provide transnational corporations with easier access to cheap labor in Pacific Rim nations and new power to trump public-interest protections—on labor, food safety, drug prices, financial regulation, domestic procurement laws, and a host of others—established over the last century by democratic governments.

Why Inequality Matters: It’s Not Only Poverty

March 20, 2014 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, www.theguardian.com Educate! Inequality

In the aftermath of the financial crash and the emergence of Occupy, there has been a resurgence of interest in inequality. According to Barack Obama, income inequality is the "defining challenge of our times", while Pope Francis states that "inequality is the roots of social ills". The effects of inequality are not confined to the poor. A growing body of research shows that inequality damages the social fabric of the whole society. When he found how far up the income scale the health effects of inequality went, Harvard professor Ichiro Kawachi, one of the foremost researchers in this field, described inequality as a social pollutant.

National Consensus On Inequality Deepens Post Occupy Encampments

March 19, 2014 Penny Lewis, www.washingtonspectator.org Resist! Inequality

In the years since the destruction of the occupations, this critique of inequality has only broadened and deepened in the U.S. Occupy should claim credit for getting it on the map, while political iterations old and new have been keeping it there. Today, the fight against inequality is taking greater institutional shape, and seemingly exerting more leverage, in places inspired by Occupy but moving beyond its initial tactics. All day, and all week, more people are talking about inequality and directly fighting against it. And workplace by workplace, franchise by franchise, ordinance by ordinance, council member by council member, co-op by co-op, the struggle continues.

U.S. Poverty Crisis Cries Out For Sixties Style Direct Action

March 1, 2014 Sherwood Ross, www.opednews.com Resist! Hunger, Inequality, Poverty

This is a nation whose people are sliding into decline with 46 million already sunk below the poverty line. Here are just a few of the stats: African-Americans(AA) poverty rates 27%, nearly triple those of whites (10%); AA's---making up 14% of the population yet comprising 28% of those on food stamps; AA's comprising 40% of those in prison, about 1 million out of a total of 2.3 million; wirh about 33% of all Hispanics and AA's living in substandard housing compared with 14% of poor whites.) The question today is not "What is the problem?" We all know the stats. We have walked the mean streets. We have seen the unemployed panhandling on the street corners. Some hardy souls among us have even visited the prisons. The question is, "What is the solution?" The answer is nothing is left to us but non-violent direct action.

The United States Of Poverty And Inequality

February 22, 2014 Jon Queally, www.commondreams.org Educate! Finance and the Economy, Inequality

From 1979 to 2011, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent, while the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent. Over the last three decades the wealth of the nation's very richest 1% has grown ten times that of the average worker and over that time period that same tiny elite has captured more than half of the entire income increases, leaving the bottom 99% to divide the remaining gains. This is all based on a new state-level study, The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, which looks at how inequality has seized hold of the national economy both in the generation leading up to the great recession of 2008 and in the several years following where a so-called "recovery" was experienced by the financial elite while the majority of U.S. population continues to claw its way back. “The levels of inequality we are seeing across the country provide more proof that the economy is not working for the vast majority of Americans and has not for decades,” said Mark Price.

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