As we speak, the divide between rich and poor is widening. mainly because the middle class is disappearing into the clutches of poverty…..
New studies reveal that the social divide between rich and poor in the US has grown much starker in the current economic crisis, and that even before it hit the country was the most unequal of the advanced economies, with great wealth and extreme poverty having become virtually hereditary conditions.
President Barack Obama has done nothing to reverse decades of wage stagnation, mounting poverty, and attacks on the social welfare system. On the contrary, following George W. Bush, he has seized on the crisis to redistribute wealth to a tiny financial elite through the ongoing bailout of the finance industry.
This demonstrates a fundamental political reality: no reform that benefits the broad masses can come from a government and two-party system so openly in the clutches of Wall Street. The financial aristocracy’s grip over all the levers of state power must be broken.
The sharp polarization that reveals itself in fabulous wealth for a handful, on the one hand, and unemployment, wage cuts, homelessness and hunger for broad layers of working people on the other, marks an intensification of longer-term trends.
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “While many middle-income families have lost jobs, homes, and retirement savings during the latest recession, their economic woes date back much further.” In the 30 years before 2008—the onset of the current crisis—nearly 35 percent of total income growth in the US was cornered by the top one-tenth of 1 percent of income earners. The bottom 90 percent shared only 15.9 percent of income growth in the same period.
The vast polarization of wealth in the US will only intensify. According to the Obama administration’s rosy economic estimates, unemployment will not return to its pre-crash levels before the end of the decade. More realistic observers, however, acknowledge that mass unemployment will be a fixture of US life, and higher-paying jobs destroyed in the recession will never return. Combined with declining home values, skyrocketing health care and higher education costs, chronically high unemployment will result in steadily rising poverty.
Obama defends these obscene pay packages. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth,” he said of the eight-figure rewards for the same financial executives whose firms have benefited from trillions in taxpayer support. “That is part of the free-market system.”
In fact “most of the American people” not only begrudge these ill-gotten gains. They wonder why they have yet to see news footage of bankers and traders arrested and hauled from their plush offices. Now working class anger is becoming increasingly trained on the political system, which, as a year’s experience with the Obama administration has taught, does the bidding of Wall Street regardless of which party controls the White House and Congress.
I would like to thank Tom Eley of wsws.org for excerpts in this piece….
All the news is that the middle clkass is taking it in the butt…..while the wealthy (which is normal) get all the benefits and the bailouts…….as a reader of my blog, Terrant of My Corner To Vent (go to blogroll to get there) has observed that the US is starting to look a lot like Latin America where the middle class is small or non-existent……of course this means nothing to you if you are one of the wealthy……but the middle class needs to find someone, anyone that will watch their backs for them….Washington is NO help at all….
The “middle classes” ALWAYS pick up the tab – for the poor and indolent (because their better natures are appealed to) and for the rich (who – just like the more uncrupulous poor – get away with anything and everything simply because they CAN).
We’re back to the human nature thing!
The fact is that the middle classes are the only ones that actually work, so who else IS going to pay?
Just one small point – the middle classes are VITAL to the corporations and the economy of every country with a capitalist democracy – without them, they ain’t got no customers!! Check out what’s happening to India which is developing a HUGE new middle class and their economy is powering ahead!
Yes they are essential….consumption must continue or the system will crap out…..and there is my problem with this….the corporations are playing a deadly game, deadly for them…….they are trying and succeeding at making profits without making anything….that can continue for only so long before the whole system crashes around their heads….
India’s middle class is growing at the expense of that of the US…outsourcing….sorry I am pissy on that subject……
I don’t know why you’re upset by the India thing – the fact is they do it BETTER and they live in the REAL world and compete! It’s no good bitching about cheap labour and all the rest. Do what you (as a nation) do best and do it BETTER than anyone else, not cheaper!
For instance, the US threw away it’s great chance to continue leading the whole goddamned world – YOU could now be running lunar based industries and space travel for almost everyone on Earth and with close to a monopoly – but you as a nation turned away from it with typical myopia. Thirty years head start and you ignored it!
The old order is dying and the old democracies are going with it. Just like the Roman empire (which to me equates roughly to today’s US) and old Egypt (where almost everyone wound up as state slaves) the old western democracies are declining and being replaced by India and China. Just as the great civilisations in South America died out, so will those in NORTH America. Just as the British empire bit the dust, so will the rest of Europe in time.
History repeats and we all learn nada!
Yes…you are naturally correct….I am blaming everyone else for the failures of the government…..it is a hard habit to break…..the problem is that most of the wheeler dealers wanted to do it the lazy greedy way…..tried to create wealth without any investment in substance….and now it has biten us in the ass…..and once again you are right….this too will die out……the space thing…..GOD YES we missed that boat altogether in the name of a space based weapon system….