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Here is Columbia University Professor Robert Lieberman commenting in the highly regarded journal Foreign Affairs on the politico-economic war being waged by wealthy elites:
The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost -- the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security, and opportunity -- will never return. They are probably right.
And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else's income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.
Read the entire article @ Foreign Affairs
[ h/t BLCKDGRD ]
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2 comments:
Someday maybe people will wake up and say enough's enough! We seem to be piping to a dead city, there will probably be no pied-piper to lead us out of this one unless we all wake up together, as Joyce said of history, together...
Yet, this time, it must be a planetary transformation, not just a priveledged group. Will that ever happen? Will it happen in our time? The older I get the drift between pessimism and hope always spins itself out in between rage and cynical despari; yet, I keep hoping that the regular joe on the street will get it and emancipate himself through solidarity from the system of capital and regain the ability to bargain with his neighbor for a world that is fit for his children, grandchildren and the all those other creatures we share this planet with...
I know what you mean. But I see little in the way of creating new value-systems that would help us make that transition.
perhaps, as Nietzsche suggested, we have not yet suffered enough that we take comsic contingency seriously?
How many will have to perish for us to "see" and actually understand our hubris?
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