"The widening divide in incomes between the poor and rich
poses the most likely threat to the global economy over the next decade"
according to the World Economic…
We just witnessed the birthday of Martin Luther King and we saw further evidence
of the continued repugican inability to deal with the reality of his
message and what that message means in the face of continued inequality.
Gallup is reporting that “Two out of three Americans are dissatisfied with the way income
and wealth are currently distributed in the U.S. This includes
three-fourths of Democrats and 54% of repugicans.”
Thanks to the Occupy Movement, we’re all familiar by now with the concept of the 99 percent
and the 1 percent. And the diagram below,
which appeared in The Atlantic, quite clearly explains the source of this dissatisfaction:
This is a big deal.
Bloomberg reported
on January 16 that, “The widening divide in incomes between the poor
and rich poses the most likely threat to the global economy over the
next decade, according to the
World Economic Forum,” which is a bunch of rich people at a posh resort talking about poor people.
But how can people be unhappy with something Faux News insists does not exist?
Media Matters explains that,
Faux News talking heads have repeatedly attempted to
downplay income inequality, claiming that it doesn’t exist, that it is
unfixable, or that it’s a distraction from other issues. Nevertheless,
the network still blamed the widening income gap on President Obama and
what one Faux shill called “Obamanomics.”
Media Matters provides a helpful sampling of Faux News’ “fair and balanced” reporting on the subject:
Faux talking heads have repeatedly dismissed concerns over
growing income inequality in the United States. Faux shill Doug
McKelway once claimed it was merely “class resentment,” that exists
because “some people are better, smarter, harder-working, or luckier
than others.” Swill O’Really called it “bull.” When the network has
acknowledged income inequality, its contributors have claimed that there
is “no way” growing inequality is “going to be stopped,” that
attempting to reverse it will result in “chronic unemployment,” and that
the Obama administration’s focus on closing the income gap is merely a
“distraction.”
Resentment. Distraction. So does it exist, or doesn’t it?
Wingnut talking head David Brooks,
as Wonkette explained last week,
“has decided to take on the topic of income inequality, and has
concluded that 1) income inequality is not actually a problem, and 2) if
it were, we shouldn’t solve it by giving poor people more money, and
also 3) the growing income of the 1% has nothing to do with the
shrinking incomes of the rest of us.”
If giving poor people more money doesn’t help (as bizarre an argument as has ever been advanced –
Robert Reich, writing at HuffPo, calls it “utter ignorance”), neither does this sort of verbal diarrhea. In fact,
studies show that giving poor people money does help.
President Barack Obama clearly feels such a thing as income inequality exists. As
Media Matters goes on to explain,
In December 2013, President Obama declared that reversing
the widening gap in income inequality — the distribution of economic
gains to a small percentage of the population, which, in this case,
favors the very wealthy — is “the defining challenge of our time,” and
began unveiling a legislative agenda aimed at addressing that trend.
So the defining challenge of our time doesn’t exist, Faux News insists, but if it does, it’s Obama’s fault.
But as Paul Krugman explained in
The New York Times in September of 2012,
And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any
of his policies, those same repugicans are pointing to disappointing
job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.
Think of it as a two-part strategy. First, obstruct any and all
efforts to strengthen the economy, then exploit the economy’s weakness
for political gain. If this strategy sounds cynical, that’s because it
is.
[...]
[T]he reality [is] that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S.
fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by repugican stonewalling.
On Monday, Faux News tried to sweep away the controversy
by appealing to the status quo and employing some highly questionable
logic in explaining to us What Obama doesn’t get about income
inequality:
Disparities between rich and poor are as ancient as
civilization, but in modern democracies, this condition is exacerbated
by globalization and technologies that drive it.
Wngnuts seem to have a difficult time with the concept that the
vast majority of the nation’s wealth in concentrated in the hands of
the very few. And it’s not just the United States. As
The LA Times reported Monday, “The 85 richest people on Earth now have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the global population, the
Oxfam report says.
The bottom half of the population — about 3.5 billion
people — account for about $1.7 trillion, or about 0.7% of the world’s
wealth, according to the Oxfam report, titled “Working for the Few.”
That’s the same amount of wealth attributed to the world’s 85 richest people.
But if the United States is not alone, it is a major mover in this trend in income redistribution. Reports
The LA Times:
Oxfam said the United States has led a worldwide growth in wealth concentration.
The percentage of income held by the richest 1% in the U.S. has grown
nearly 150% from 1980 through 2012. That small elite has received 95%
of wealth created since 2009, after the financial crisis, while the
bottom 90% of Americans have become poorer, Oxfam said.
The New York Times reported in October 2012 that, “
Income inequality has soared to the highest levels since
the Great Depression.”
This is not class warfare, however, this redistributing of wealth so
that the few rich have it all and everyone else has nothing. And this IS
a redistribution of wealth, as
the Oxfam report makes clear:
The share of wealth owned by the richest 1% since 1980
expanded in all but two of the 26 nations tracked by researchers in the
World Top Incomes Database.
Yet repugicans are determined that we understand that taking wealth
away from everyone else and concentrating it in the hands of a few is
not class warfare. But any attempt to change how this wealth is
distributed, such as giving some of that wealth back to the 99% IS class
warfare.
Even while crying class warfare, repugicans like to insist, as does
Faux News, that there is no problem and that people are happy with what
they have.
This is nothing new, unfortunately. Wingnuts, married to the
preservation of the status quo, seem to think that everybody else likes
the status quo too. “Capitalist evangelist” Wayne Allen Root opined on Faux News last week
that Americans have historically not had any problems with income
inequality and that despite this inequality, America became an economic
powerhouse. Why mess with the status quo?
These are, unsurprisingly, the same attitudes expressed by wingnuts like Edmund Burke about the French Revolution, where
income inequality led to the beheading of the king of France. Burke made
the same mistake wingnuts make today, that most are content to
have less.
For Burke, a wingut, people were not really unhappy
but for a few radicals whom he called “insects of the hour”:
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the
field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great
cattle, repose beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and
are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the
only inhabitants of the field, that of course they are many in number;
or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre,
hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
The starving, abused poor of 21st century America, no less than the
starving, abused peasants of 18th century France, are, to wingnut deluded
minds, nothing more than “the loud and troublesome insects of the hour.”
Revolution and change are, no surprise, the enemy of what wingnuts
think of as “liberty.”
Wingnuts, guardians of the status quo, hate change, of course. For example, Faux News said on Monday
that, “High talk about social justice, widening economic opportunities,
and income redistribution makes liberal politicians media darlings and
wins elections, but such demagoguery does little to fill the belly of
the poor.”
Needless to say, the “free enterprise marketplace” that has created
this income inequality in the first place, isn’t going to put food in
anyone’s belly. Writing at Forbes on Monday,
Ralph Benko believes that repugicans have the advantage
in the income inequality debate but somehow fails to mention that repugicans have failed to give us even one piece of job creation
legislation. And don’t be fooled by
some recent repugican rhetoric in favor of minimum wage hikes. In fact, repugican legislation seems
determined to take food out of those bellies. If the repugican has an anti-poverty agenda, it seems to be to make poor people go away by just dying already.
If the repugican cabal has an agenda at all, it is focused on opposition to
Obama; at this point, if they can’t beat him politically, they seem to
be willing – in the time honored fashion of lynching the black man – to kill him instead. It is hard to see how that will help the economy, or create jobs, or feed the poor.
But as the Gallup poll clearly shows, Americans are not happy to have
less. They are not happy that a few people have it all while they have
nothing. This is not natural and it is not only dangerous for people, it
is dangerous for the body politic and for the health of the nation, and
by extension, the world. Everyone is better off – including the rich –
when everybody gets a piece of the pie. Let’s face it: the 1 percent
can’t run the country by themselves if the 99 percent are dead through
starvation and disease.
Pope Francis
spoke out yesterday
via address read by Cardinal Peter Turkson at the World Economic Forum
against “an economy of exclusion and inequality.” See, even the Pope
says so. Not the anti-capitalist message repugicans want to hear. Worse
yet for the status quo set, “An unfettered devotion to market
economics” is, said the Pope, a “new tyranny.”
Everyone seems to notice there is a problem except repugicans, who steadfastly close their eyes to radical things like facts.
Clearly, wingnuts have not put a lot of thought into this
subject. As Robert Reich said in speaking of David Brooks, “wingnut
thinker” is an oxymoron and the facts prove him right. If people don’t
get paid enough to live (they call it a “living wage” for a reason)
people will not only be able to buy enough food to eat but they won’t be
able to buy all that crap Walmart sells, and then where will rich folks
like the Waltons be? They need customers, and their customer base is
not the 1 percent. Let’s face it: San Francisco 49ers head coach John
Harbaugh
can’t buy enough pleated khaki pants to keep Walmart afloat on his own.
America, and the world, need a return to a time when income
inequality was low; we do not need to skip over that period to the
Gilded Age, a time when it was high, as we have done. The American
people are not grasshoppers or annoying insects calling for attention.
They are people with real problems, problems exacerbated by the widening
gap between the rich and the poor. It is time for the rich to wake up
and realize they are driving America – and the world – into a
non-sustainable future. There may be guillotines in their future, but as
the poor and starving know, there are worse things than guillotines.
Today is - Robert Burns Day 
