vikaryan
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Australian Politics
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Between 1993 and 2011, in the US, average incomes grew a modest 13.1 percent in total but the average income of the poorest 99 percent — that is, everyone up to families making about $ 370,000 a year — grew by only 5.8 percent.
That gap is a measure of just how much the top one percent are making. Workers’ share of the US national income was 62 percent before the crash of 2008. It is now about 59 percent of GDP. Average household incomes are lower than before the recession as inequality rises.
It is a glaring paradox that the US stock market has risen by more than 50 percent since the crisis, while median earnings have declined. Obscene wealth begets political power: plutocrats can buy up newspapers and television channels, and fund political campaigns, parties and lobbying. In the US, one has to be a millionaire to be president and, in addition, have the backing of many billionaires. Democracy can be bought and sold to the advantage of the highest bidder.
The myth of social mobility has been exposed for what it is: a cynical lie. Rich parents have rich children. The ruling class is a self-perpetuating elite, entirely divorced from the rest of society. Access to higher education is increasingly expensive. Graduates find themselves saddled with enormous debts averaging $ 25,000 per student and are often unable to find jobs in the career of their choice — if they can find a job at all. The ladder to advancement has been kicked away. Hundreds of thousands of university graduates are serving hamburgers in McDonalds or stocking shelves in supermarkets. The situation confronting the US youth today is statistically similar to that faced by youth in the Arab world before the explosion of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.
The US dream has turned into the US nightmare. “In 50 short years, debt has gone from being a luxury for a few to a convenience for many to an addiction for most to a disease for all,” James Butler wrote in an Independent Voters Network (IVN) op-ed. “It is a virus that has spread to every aspect of our economy, from a consumer using a credit card to buy a $ 0.75 candy bar in a vending machine to a government borrowing $ 17 trillion to keep the lights on.”
The masses are prepared to make sacrifices on condition that the cause is just and the sacrifices are the same for all, but nobody is willing to make sacrifices to save the bankers, and there is no question of equality of sacrifice. In the midst of a crisis, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Another Credit Suisse report published some interesting figures on unequal distribution of wealth. It revealed that at the top end, 32 million people control $ 98.7 trillion. That means that 41 percent of the world’s wealth is in the hands of 0.7 percent of the total adult population. Those with a personal fortune of $ 100,000 to $ 1 million account for 7.7 percent of the population, controlling some $ 101.8 trillion, representing 42.3 percent of the world’s wealth. At the other extreme, 3.2 billion people control a mere $ 7.3 trillion. This means that 68.7 percent of the world’s adult population controls just three percent of its wealth. This means that the richest 0.7 percent of the world’s adult population have a combined personal wealth 14 times larger than the poorest 68 percent. “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital” (Capital Volume One, Chapter 25).
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/29-Jun-2014/inequality-on-the-verge-of-social-explosion
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