boutons_deux
07-02-2013, 11:33 AM
Big Lie: America Doesn't Have #1 Richest Middle-Class in the World...We're Ranked 27th!
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/URW83lMvrneYqwWf_fDidPxc2ib6LflMAiSvwew4jY90vqa2DC XYQHnoP4_wrCVfwxEd8GjoZRUcHlFMnMtPuBMJxTcCi4-LFvELvIK12fbvXVNOABYG2uqlrbhE0dscLA
Why?
Here's a starter list:
We don't have real universal healthcare. We pay more and still have poorer health outcomes than all other industrialized countries. Should a serious illness strike, we also can become impoverished.
Weak labor laws undermine unions and give large corporations more power to keep wages and benefits down. Unions now represent less than 7 percent of all private sector workers, the lowest ever recorded.
Our minimum wage is pathetic, especially in comparison to other developed nations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country). (We're # 13.) Nobody can live decently on $7.25 an hour. Our poverty-level minimum wage puts downward pressure on the wages of all working people. And while we secure important victories for a few unpaid sick days, most other developed nations provide a month of guaranteed paid vacations as well as many paid sick days.
Wall Street is out of control. Once deregulation started 30 years ago, money has gushed to the top as Wall Street was free to find more and more unethical ways to fleece us.
Higher education puts our kids into debt. In most other countries higher education is practically tuition-free. Indebted students are not likely to accumulate wealth anytime soon.
It's hard to improve your station in life if you're in prison, often due to drug-related charges that don't even exist in other developed nations. In fact, we have the largest prison population in the entire world, and we have the highest percentage of minorities imprisoned. “In major cities across the country, 80% of young African Americans now have criminal records” (from Michelle Alexander's 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness).
Our tax structures favor the rich and their corporations that no longer pay their fair share. They move money to foreign tax havens, they create and use tax loopholes, and they fight to make sure the source of most of their wealth—capital gains—is taxed at low rates. Meanwhile the rest of us are pressed to make up the difference or suffer deteriorating public services.
The wealthy dominate politics. Nowhere else in the developed world are the rich and their corporations able to buy elections with such impunity.
Big Money dominates the media. The real story about how we're getting ripped off is hidden in a blizzard of BS that comes from all the major media outlets...brought to you by....
America encourages globalization of production so that workers here are in constant competition with the lower-wage workers all over the world as well as with highly automated techonologies.
Guess which one had the biggest impact on the growing split between the 1 percent and the 99 percent?
Financialization!
What is that? Economist Gerald Epstein offers us a working definition (http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/programs/globalization/financialization/chapter1.pdf):
"Financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies."
This includes such trends as:
The corporate change during the 1980s to make shareholder value the ultimate goal.
The deregulation of Wall Street that allowed for the creation of a vast array of new financial instruments for gambling.
Allowing private equity firm to buy companies, load them up with debt, extract enormous returns, and then kiss them goodbye.
The growth of hedge funds that suck productive wealth out of the economy.
The myriad of barely regulated world financial markets that finance the globalization of production, combined with so-called "free trade" agreements.
The increased share of all corporate profits that go to the financial sector.
The ever increasing size of too-big-to-fail banks.
The fact that many of our best students rush to Wall Street instead of careers in science, medicine or education.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/americas-middle-class-27th-richest?paging=off
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/URW83lMvrneYqwWf_fDidPxc2ib6LflMAiSvwew4jY90vqa2DC XYQHnoP4_wrCVfwxEd8GjoZRUcHlFMnMtPuBMJxTcCi4-LFvELvIK12fbvXVNOABYG2uqlrbhE0dscLA
Why?
Here's a starter list:
We don't have real universal healthcare. We pay more and still have poorer health outcomes than all other industrialized countries. Should a serious illness strike, we also can become impoverished.
Weak labor laws undermine unions and give large corporations more power to keep wages and benefits down. Unions now represent less than 7 percent of all private sector workers, the lowest ever recorded.
Our minimum wage is pathetic, especially in comparison to other developed nations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country). (We're # 13.) Nobody can live decently on $7.25 an hour. Our poverty-level minimum wage puts downward pressure on the wages of all working people. And while we secure important victories for a few unpaid sick days, most other developed nations provide a month of guaranteed paid vacations as well as many paid sick days.
Wall Street is out of control. Once deregulation started 30 years ago, money has gushed to the top as Wall Street was free to find more and more unethical ways to fleece us.
Higher education puts our kids into debt. In most other countries higher education is practically tuition-free. Indebted students are not likely to accumulate wealth anytime soon.
It's hard to improve your station in life if you're in prison, often due to drug-related charges that don't even exist in other developed nations. In fact, we have the largest prison population in the entire world, and we have the highest percentage of minorities imprisoned. “In major cities across the country, 80% of young African Americans now have criminal records” (from Michelle Alexander's 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness).
Our tax structures favor the rich and their corporations that no longer pay their fair share. They move money to foreign tax havens, they create and use tax loopholes, and they fight to make sure the source of most of their wealth—capital gains—is taxed at low rates. Meanwhile the rest of us are pressed to make up the difference or suffer deteriorating public services.
The wealthy dominate politics. Nowhere else in the developed world are the rich and their corporations able to buy elections with such impunity.
Big Money dominates the media. The real story about how we're getting ripped off is hidden in a blizzard of BS that comes from all the major media outlets...brought to you by....
America encourages globalization of production so that workers here are in constant competition with the lower-wage workers all over the world as well as with highly automated techonologies.
Guess which one had the biggest impact on the growing split between the 1 percent and the 99 percent?
Financialization!
What is that? Economist Gerald Epstein offers us a working definition (http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/programs/globalization/financialization/chapter1.pdf):
"Financialization means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies."
This includes such trends as:
The corporate change during the 1980s to make shareholder value the ultimate goal.
The deregulation of Wall Street that allowed for the creation of a vast array of new financial instruments for gambling.
Allowing private equity firm to buy companies, load them up with debt, extract enormous returns, and then kiss them goodbye.
The growth of hedge funds that suck productive wealth out of the economy.
The myriad of barely regulated world financial markets that finance the globalization of production, combined with so-called "free trade" agreements.
The increased share of all corporate profits that go to the financial sector.
The ever increasing size of too-big-to-fail banks.
The fact that many of our best students rush to Wall Street instead of careers in science, medicine or education.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/americas-middle-class-27th-richest?paging=off