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Bakari Chavanu

50% of All Workers Made Less than $26,000 in 2010 - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atl... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...247059

workers OccupyWallStreet

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 24 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Half of all workers made less than $26,364, the median wage in 2010. That means the typical wage is at its lowest level since 1999, after adjusting for inflation.
  • 2) The number of millionaires increased by about 20 percent.
Bakari Chavanu

The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer | Economy | AlterNet - 1 views

www.alternet.org/...53962

economy OccupyWallStreet

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
  • First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Wal-Mart's founder.
  • All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as I can determine, go to soup kitchens.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
  • It may well turn out to be because Hillary Clinton is, as The Nation reports, "the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry." And who do you think demanded those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- the AFLCIO.
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