https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2022/11/omni-economic-inequalitypoverty-usa-and.html
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.
(#1 July 13, 2013)
“…if way to the Better there be,
it exacts a full look at the Worst.”
—Thomas Hardy
Contents: Social and Economic Justice #2
Struggle for Justice USA
Campus Equity Week UAF 2013
Peace Alliance, Restorative Justice
EPA, Environmental Justice
Economic Inequality USA
Chris Hedges. Father Michael Doyle in Camden, N.J.
Unequal Pay
Bryan Stevenson. Just Mercy
Taibbi. The Divide
The Rich: 12 Own $1 Trillion
TEXTS
GLOBAL JUSTICE HISTORY OF STRUGGLE
Roth, Review of Galeano, Calendar of Human History
STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE USA
Campus Equity Week Thank You
| Karen Lentz Madison | 2:53 PM (4 hours ago) | ||
| to me, Mike4777, frencha, Robert, riggings.robyn, Hallie, Marsellis, gladystiffany, Les, Jeannie |
Hello CEW Forum Attendees,
I wanted to thank you for participating in the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education and the New Faculty Majority’s awareness campaign forum on the pervasiveness of the for-profit mentality in higher education.
Of all we said yesterday, I think Dr. Wade’s comment was most significant: What can we do?
Dr. R. Madison pointed out that it is impossible for someone teaching four classes a semester or at various institutions to have the time to be the same sort of teacher as one who teaches two classes a semester and therefore has time to research and work individually with students.
Yet, students pay the same tuition for a class taught by either faculty member. New Faculty Majority believes that teaching conditions are student learning conditions, and that students deserve better.
So what can we do? Students can demand transparency about what the profit is and where it is going—the difference between what they pay for a class and their return. They can let their parents know what is going on, and, in turn, parents can contact their legislators to find out why the “consumer” is getting the “bait and switch” treatment.
Teachers can become more knowledgeable about the financial mire that too many of their students are becoming trapped in and talk openly about the system and its dangers. And together, as Aaron Calafato and Robert Kennedy said, we can raise our hands and say, “This is not right.”
Campus Equity Week comes once a year, and this was our first year at UARK to participate. I hope you will join us next year and send me ideas about what you would like to see as a CEW activity.
In the meantime, join OMNI UA and OMNI locally and New Faculty Majority nationally. All three groups care about issues concerning UARK students and faculty alike and are inclusive of anyone who believes in equity.
Thank you Alex for this terrific link: Robinson, Robert. Changing Education Paradigms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U. And thanks to Robyn and Michael from OMNI UA who gave me great links, but I can’t find them now to send you (sorry!). Thanks to Gladys Tiffany and Dr. Dick Bennett from OMNI who brought snacks and, most importantly, their support.
Attached is a list of the books I displayed yesterday, should you be interested.
Regards,
Karen Madison
K. L. Madison, Ph.D.
MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession, Chair
New Faculty Majority, Board Member
College English Association, Past President
OMNI UA, Faculty Advisor
UARK Department of English, Honors Undergraduate Advisor
“Still nursing the unconquerable hope, / Still clutching the inviolable shade. . . .”
YouTube – Videos from this email
| View This Message As a Webpage Restorative Justice on The Rise Weekly Telecast Dialogue & Podcast This Week: Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative ►SIGN UP HERE (FREE) This Thursday Dec. 5th 5pm Pacific/8p Eastern *To stream audio online, simply click “Audio Download”. To save/download, right-click or ctrl-click if Mac, and select “Save File As”. From various media with Bryan Stevenson: · TED Talk: “We Need to Talk About an Injustice” · Moyers & Company · Rachel Maddow (On Eric Holder and Mass Incarceration) Take advantage of over 100 interview archives relating to restorative justice’s rise in the US and beyond and join the dialogue everyThursday–get inspired by local and national wayshowers and find out how to start moving in your own community. Get the latest cross spectrum info from the powerful array of guests and hear from peers and peacebuilders like yourself. Media does matter–and this public virtual forum and resource library is making huge waves on local and national levels because of YOU. In the spirit of true justice, Molly Rowan Leach Restorative Justice Fellow, Peace Alliance |
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
EPA PLAN EJ 2014 AT A GLANCE, GOV for the People
Plan EJ 2014 is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s roadmap to integrating environmental justice into its programs and policies. The year marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 12898 on environmental justice. Plan EJ 2014 seeks to:
Protect the environment and health in overburdened communities.
Empower communities to take action to improve their health and
environment.
Establish partnerships with local, state, tribal, and federal governments and organizations to achieve healthy and sustainable communities.
MORE http://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/resources/policy/plan-ej-2014/plan-ej-rulemaking-2011-09.pdf
UNJUST LEGAL SYSTEM
BOOK REVIEW
Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
Reviewed By TED CONOVEROCT. 17, 2014
Continue reading the main story
Unfairness in the Justice system is a major theme of our age. DNA analysis exposes false convictions, it seems, on a weekly basis. The predominance of racial minorities in jails and prisons suggests systemic bias. Sentencing guidelines born of the war on drugs look increasingly draconian. Studies cast doubt on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Even the states that still kill people appear to have forgotten how; lately executions have been botched to horrific effect.
This news reaches citizens in articles and television spots about mistreated individuals. But Just Mercy, a memoir, aggregates and personalizes the struggle against injustice in the story of one activist lawyer.
Bryan Stevenson grew up poor in Delaware. His great-grandparents had been slaves in Virginia. His grandfather was murdered in a Philadelphia housing project when Stevenson was a teenager. Stevenson attended Eastern College (now Eastern University), a Christian institution outside Philadelphia, and then Harvard Law School. Afterward he began representing poor clients in the South, first in Georgia and then in Alabama, where he was a co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.
“Just Mercy” focuses mainly on that work, and those clients. Its narrative backbone is the story of Walter McMillian, whom Stevenson began representing in the late 1980s when he was on death row for killing a young white woman in Monroeville, Ala., the hometown of Harper Lee. Monroeville has long promoted its connection to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which is about a black man falsely accused of the rape of a white woman. As Stevenson writes, “Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root.” Walter McMillian had never heard of the book, and had scarcely been in trouble with the law. He had, however, been having an affair with a white woman, and Stevenson makes a persuasive case that it made McMillian, who cut timber for a living, vulnerable to prosecution.
. MORE http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/just-mercy-by-bryan-stevenson.html?_r=0
ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, POVERTY
| The Good Priest” by Chris Hedges. Nov. 13, 2022 Father Michael Doyle, who died on November 8 at his parish house in Camden, New Jersey, infused his Christianity with his goodness. That goodness showed us what it means to live a life of faith. SAVE ▷ LISTEN Father Michael Doyle – by Mr. Fish Subscribed During the two years the cartoonist Joe Sacco and I spent on our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, written out of the poorest pockets of America, we invariably encountered heroic men and women who — against overwhelming odds — rose up to fight lonely and often losing battles on behalf of the oppressed. Bill Means, Charlie Abourezk and Leonard Crow Dog in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Larry Gibson and Judy Bonds in the coal fields of West Virginia. Lucas Benitez, Laura Germano and Greg Abbot in the produce fields of Florida. The men and women in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. When set against the crushing poverty, environmental degradation, corporate abuse and despair they opposed, the victories they amassed were often miniscule. And yet, to them, and to the people they were able to support, these victories were immense. They kept alive kindness, community, decency, hope and justice. They provided another way to speak about the world. They reminded us that our primary task in life is to care for others. These moral giants, by their very presence and steadfast refusal to surrender, damned the avarice, lust for power, hedonism and violence that define corporate culture. Joe and I met Father Michael Doyle in Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest cities and most dangerous in the United States. Father Doyle, an Irish priest and poet with ruddy cheeks and snow white hair, ran the Sacred Heart Church in one of the city’s bleakest corners. He died at the age of 88 on November 4th in the church’s parish house. “I haven’t heard God speak in a burning bush, but I hear Him speak from the burning issues of the day, and they are all in Camden,” he told us. [To read the entire essay click on title or link at end.] Father Doyle was a member of the Camden 28, a group of left-wing Catholics and anti-war activists who, in 1971, planned and executed a raid to destroy draft files on the Camden draft board. The defendants were arrested but acquitted when it was found that the FBI, which had an informant in the group, had provided tools for the break-in and facilitated the logistics. “What do you do when a child is on fire in a war that was a mistake and you can’t extinguish the flame — the napalm flame — with water or anything else?” he said in his closing statement at the trial. “What do you do about that? What do you do with an old man whose bones are splintered by anti-personnel weapons in a war that was a mistake? We have no answer to that. There is no answer in the law for a child on fire in a war that was a mistake.” He organized a memorial service for 300 young men from South Jersey killed in the Vietnam war. Years later, he would still carry a card with the name of one of those killed, Lawrence J. Virgilio from Camden. The bishops were not pleased. He was fired from Holy Spirit High School near Atlantic City where he taught and transferred to Sacred Heart, a run-down and neglected parish, in 1974. He had to chop firewood to heat the church. It was meant to be a punishment, a demotion, but Father Doyle saw it as the greatest blessing of his life. “I’ve failed…nicely,” he joked. He called Camden “a concentration camp for the poor” and saw the city as a template for all that had gone wrong in America. He likened the suffering around him to the crucified Christ, nailed to “the cross of awfully polluted air” and “the broken sidewalks, the broken lives, the ugly scenes that wail for beautification, the dilapidated houses that must be restored for the children.” “Camden is a casualty of capitalism,” he said as we sat drinking tea one afternoon. “It’s what falls off the truck and can’t get back on the truck. It is a sad stage we are in. There is a meanness that has raised its ugly head in the soul of America. Bobby Kennedy, even Lyndon Johnson, spoke about the poor. Now you can’t say the word poor and get elected. Let the poor suffer. They’re not important. Let the train roll over them.” “Today’s a very hard time to be poor,” he went on. “Because you know you’re poor. You hear people my age get up and say, ‘We were poor. We put cardboard in our shoes’. But we didn’t know we were poor. Today you do. And how do you know you’re poor? Your television shows you you’re poor. So it’s very easy to build up anger in, say, a high-voltage kid of 17. He knows he’s poor. He looks at the TV. ‘All these people have everything. I have nothing’. And so he’s very angry. This is violence. I’m not talking about a violent show. I’m talking about the violence that rises out of the marketing that shows the kid what he could have. This creates a huge anger that explodes, easily. That I discovered very quickly when I came to Camden. The anger is so near the surface. You rub it and it explodes. There’s no respect for you if you have no money. The constant assault of the marketers is never-ending.” “I grew up in Ireland,” he went on. “We had the songs of our struggle. It was clear who we were struggling against. It was the money crowd. But people here can’t see the enemy. You can’t challenge what you can’t see. Greed, prejudice and injustice, you can’t get at it. There’s no head. There’s no clarity. So you take it out on your neighbor. It’s horrendous what people do.” He saw the United States as cursed by the war industry and American militarism, a curse that would doom it. The billions diverted to endless wars meant those around him went hungry. He prayed with his congregation that America will one day “come to the front lines of our cities to protect our children, not with guns, but hammers and saws and jobs and tools of transformation.” “A child in Camden could teach the proud missile makers a lesson,” he said. “‘Take my hand,’ the little Camden child says, ‘and walk with me. Walk my streets to school. Will your bombs save me? If you want to defend me, come and live on my block.’” He knew this was the end of the American empire, but he did not understand why it had to go out with such cruelty. What kind of a country, he asked, allowed people to die or go bankrupt because they were unable to pay for medical care? “Capitalists shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the medical industry,” he said. “What they do is evil. Greed is venomous.” “The history books are littered with the ruins of fallen empires,” he said. “A fellow I knew, a blue-collar fellow, he worked with the navy, had to go over with some work crew to Italy. He sent me a card with a picture of the Colosseum. He wrote, ‘I went to the Colosseum, but all I saw were two cats fighting in the weeds.’ It was, when you think about the mighty Caesars, what ancient Rome had been, quite profound.” Father Doyle loved literature, especially Irish literature, and poetry, which he wrote and included in his letters. He was close friends with the local poet Nick Virgilio, whose brother he had memorialized years earlier and whose haikus captured the desperation of Camden: the prostituted women knitting baby booties on the bus; sitting alone as he ordered eggs and toast in an undertone on Thanksgiving; the latch key children “exploring the wild on public television”; the frozen body of a drunk found on a winter morning in a cardboard box labeled “Fragile: Do Not Crush”; as well as his lamentations for his older brother killed in Vietnam. Nick wrote what could be the city’s epithet: the sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold In 1989, Nick died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., at the taping of an interview for CBS Nightwatch. Father Doyle rode in the hearse that brought Nick’s body back to Camden, the head of his deceased friend thumping softly against the back partition. He built him a gravestone in the shape of a slender granite podium in Harleigh cemetery, where Walt Whitman, who Father Doyle could quote from memory, is also buried. He had one of Nick’s haiku poems carved on it: lily: out of the water… out of itself [You can listen to Martin Sheen read from Father Doyle’s letters in the documentary “Poet of Poverty.”] Father Doyle organized and attended a soup kitchen every Saturday where he would sit at the tables with about a hundred people, many of whom were destitute and homeless. He recruited volunteers from the suburbs, most of whom were white, to cook and serve his guests. “You have dignity at a table when you’re sharing food,” he said. He spoke frequently about death, perhaps because in Camden, it is a daily reality. He loved the story of two old men in Ireland who spent their lives together until one fell deathly ill and told his friend he didn’t think he would be getting up, that he had always known when he started out where he was going, but now he didn’t. “But John,” his friend replied, “when you were coming, you didn’t know where you’re going and didn’t it turn out alright?” “The same God that was there when you slithered into this world will be there when you slither out of it,” Father Doyle told me. And yet, no matter how bleak, there were always unexpected flashes of joy and hope, gifts of grace. “One day God sent a message from of all places Arlington Street, and it brightened up the doorway of my mind,” he wrote. “On Arlington, in the awful heat, on that Godforsaken street without light or life, ugly, urban decay at levels straining the imagination, seven children were splashing in cascading water like shining wet dolphins in the sun. Somehow, they had hauled a discarded hot tub from Adventure Spas on Chelton Avenue, opened a fire hydrant and the powerful pressure sent the water upward on an old sheet of plywood into the tub and sent the children into ecstasies of delight in spite of all the awful misery around them…Nothing could daunt the wild surge of their young lives and hopes. What is it about hope? Does its real inspiration only rise out of the tragic emptiness to take its pure and unsupported stand against all odds?” These moments of grace sustained him even as he acknowledged that everything he had spent his life fighting for had gotten worse. They affirmed that no matter how bleak the world around us, death and despair do not have the final word. Time will slowly erode the memory of this priest, as it erodes all memory, until he becomes a ghostly remnant of another era, a name adorned on a plaque. But what will endure is what mattered to him most, the life force to which he dedicated his existence. Share The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. |
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| Liz Theoharis, The Poverty of the Political Mind October 27, 2022 Yep, in a world in which inflation and oil prices reached disastrous levels this year, the latest polls seem to indicate that the Republicans may be taking advantage of that reality — or do I mean un-reality? — just as the midterm elections loom. Forget the fact that, as a “conservative” British prime minister demonstrated strikingly just weeks ago, the political right has less than nothing to offer Americans, economically speaking. Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be relying on abortion to carry the day on November 8th. And — much as I support them on that issue — that’s too bad. Really it is! Senator Bernie Sanders is preparing to “blitz” the country during the final two election weekends, saying just that. And it’s true, the Democrats can’t let the acolytes of America’s very own potential autocrat (and you know just whom I mean) claim that they can offer an answer to this country’s economic problems. As Sanders put it earlier this month, It would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered… We have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the modern history of this country, with three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of our nation. Is there one Republican prepared to raise taxes on billionaires, or do they want to make a bad situation worse by extending Trump’s tax breaks for the rich and repealing the estate tax? He’s exactly right, of course. But tell that to America’s billionaires, including (again) you know who, and their party. In the meantime, if you want a sense of just what that inequality truly means for so many tens of millions of Americans, consider the latest piece on poverty in history’s richest nation by TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and author of We Cry Justice. There oughta be a law, don’t you think? Tom The Quality (or Inequality) of Life Assessing the True Extent of Poverty in the Richest Nation on Earth By Liz Theoharis Ours is an ever more unequal world, even if that subject is ever less attended to in this country. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Reverend Martin Luther King wrote tellingly, “The prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. A people who began a national life inspired by a vision of a society of brotherhood can redeem itself. But redemption can come only through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.” Neither exists in this country. Rather than an honest sense of self-awareness when it comes to poverty in the United States, policymakers in Washington and so many states continue to legislate as if inequality weren’t an emergency for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of us. When it comes to accurately diagnosing what ails America, let alone prescribing a cure, those with the power and resources to lift the load of poverty have fallen desperately short of the mark. Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
“El crecimiento se va a detener, por una razón o por otra,” Contexto y Acción, July 21, 2022.
“Fifty Years After ‘The Limits to Growth’: Dennis Meadows interviewed by Juan Bordera.”
Originally published: CTXT (Contexto y Acción) on July 21, 2022 by Juan Bordera & Ferran Puig Vilar (more by CTXT (Contexto y Acción)) (Posted Aug 10, 2022)
Climate Change, Health, Inequality, Political EconomyGlobalCommentary, InterviewDennis Meadows, Featured
Runaway inflation. War. Increasingly severe energy problems. Earlier and more powerful heat waves. Arrests of scientists. Setbacks in women’s rights taking us back 50 years… Exactly 50 years. Does all this have any connection?
Actually, yes, it does.
This year is special. It is the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important works of the 20th century. The Limits to Growth. That work which, as early as 1972, gave a clear warning that the planet had limits and little time to face them. For this reason, one of the main authors, Dennis Meadows, has been giving interviews to some of the most important media in the world, such as Le Monde, or the Suddeutsche Zeitung. . . .
JB: According to the HANDY model, a fundamental parameter for causing collapses is inequality, which increases in parallel to the lack of trust among peers, another reason for a collapse. The design of our economic system causes both to increase every year. And it makes it impossible to adjust to the limits, because the elite–which is usually detached from reality and therefore does not detect the alarms–is the one that serves as a model. How to untangle such a mess?
DM: The truth is not to be found in a few equations, obviously. It is to be found in history. And our history over thousands of years shows that the powerful seek more power, and have an easier time finding it because of their situation–it’s a positive feedback loop. In system dynamics this is called “success for the already successful”. We rarely deviate from this phenomenon.
No one can untangle this tangle. I don’t think there is any action or law that can do that. In a few cultures, however, evolved redistribution mechanisms have been seen. In the northwest of the United States there are some tribes that have a custom called “Potlatch”, a ceremony in which the chiefs of the tribe, the richest, would give away part of their possessions–I’m simplifying for sure. In Buddhism there is also a tradition of material detachment in many of its practitioners. But these are rare exceptions. In our world the tendency is to accumulate power and, as you say, that helps to be detached from reality. Then you may end up with a collapse–even of your power–and everything starts all over again. It’s a process that happens in response to limits.
And inequality is growing in all countries.
JB: To what extent are the elites anticipating the mathematical need for greater equality and preparing for it? Or, are they just planning their own survival?
DM: Well, one cannot properly speak of “elites”. Some elites are concerned and doing all they can to reduce inequality, others are not even thinking about it–probably the majority–and others are working to make it bigger and bigger. There is certainly no trend towards reducing inequality. . . . .
GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE
EDUARDO GALEANO, CHILDREN OF THE DAYS: A CALENDAR OF HUMAN HISTORY. (2011 Spanish) Nation Books, 2015. Rev.: Andy Lee Roth, “The Man Who Won’t Let Us Forget: Eduardo Galeano Knew That Justice Relies on Knowing Our History.” Yes! (Fall 2015). Historical vignettes each connected to a specific day in the year. Galeano authored the famous indictment of US exploitation of Latin America, Open Veins of Latin America (1971). The Guardian called him “the poet laureate of the anti-globalisation movement.” –Dick.
The word barely uttered by neoclassical economists (even when they’re talking “inequality”)
| Monthly Review Press press@monthlyreview.org via gmail.mcsv.net 1-21-22 | 7:45 AM (22 minutes ago) | ||
| …new from Monthly Review Press Broaching that word hardly an economist dares utter… The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society—and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. A mere nine months into the lockdown, the net worth of the infamous Forbes 400 increased by one trillion dollars; At the same time, mass unemployment imperiled or erased the fragile right to quality health care for a substantial number of people living in states without Medicaid. In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illuminates the monstrous polarities which define our times— and reveals them as the very same structures of power at the foundations of the class system under today’s capitalism. GET YOUR COPY OF Inequality, Class, and Economics HERE From the Introduction: The crisis underlying all other crises The net worth of the 650 billionaires now in the United States increased by $1 trillion (from $3 to $4 trillion) during the nine months of the Covid-19 pandemic from March to December 2020. Meanwhile, working-class unemployment kept wages and benefits at rock bottom, imperiling or erasing for a significant number of people their fragile right to quality health care as well, based as it was partly on employment (in states without Medicaid). U. S. poverty rose by the largest rate in a single year since it began to be tracked sixty years ago, from 9.3 percent in June 2020 to 11.7 percent in November…..poverty in the United States increased substantially during the pandemic. There has been about a 20 percent increase in the official poverty rate. The latter rate has remained within a range of a few percentage points on either side of 12–13 percent since 1972… Learn more continued…. But has it not always been so? Inequality such as seen in the United States today is not all that unusual historically. Greater inequality than ours today has come and gone in societies many times, including in our own past, and for reasons well appreciated. From that lofty perspective, what is happening today is just more of the same old same old, with human civilization merely returning to what would seem its primary business: class hierarchy that is structured more or less rigidly for the glory of privileged elites… In the United States, the relatively egalitarian post–Second World War period up to the late 1970s was one in which all income groups’ living standards rose about equally. The rich did not get richer relative to the poor and the rest did not get poorer. Today that seems to have been an exception to the normal drift of our history. As the now increasing disparity between the rich and the rest progresses, it is difficult to sustain the pretense any longer that ours is a classless society. But in that more congenial time, not only did most of the world’s advanced market economies experience uninterrupted high rates of growth unlike anything seen before or since, in each country, growth was shared among its population. The social democracies of Europe worked to redistribute the gains from growth away from those who would normally have monopolized them and down to the middle- and lower-income classes. In the United States, all income classes participated roughly equally in the unprecedented material bounty. This was a consequence partly of extensions of the Social Security system, of the War on Poverty and the efforts to lessen racial disparities in the 1960s, of a historically exceptional balance in American labor-management relations, and of strong economic growth itself, which helped to keep unemployment low. Looking at the steady growth of those times, many believed capitalist economic policymaking had finally matured into a mere management science. It appeared that economics had become, as J. M. Keynes had hoped, a kind of “humble and competent” trade peopled by trusted social engineers…. Class and Power Since all boats were being lifted on the rising tide, mainstream economists found little of interest in the subject of income and wealth distribution. Few seemed to care much about why some boats were so enormous while most were pretty small, why some others were barely large enough to hold their passengers, and why some others failed even to float despite the apparently benign flow of things… GET YOUR COPY More than merely a diagnosis Schutz defines the five social structures of power at the foundations of the class system and capitalism today. Employers’ power is the linchpin of that system, but the power of professionals in all fields, the power exerted by some businesses over others, political power, and the power of cultural institutions, especially the mass media and education, are also critical for the class system today. Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Schutz offers prescriptions that can genuinely address the steepening and hardening of class boundaries. Inequality, Class, and Economics pushes past economists’ studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last. “Eric Shutz acts as a Public Intellectual, much like Paul M. Sweezy, Paul Baran and C Wright Mills before him, in explaining the world’s greater concentrations of power and inequality that reduce the quality of life and standard of living of the vast majority of citizens—as well as the quality of the biosocial environment.” —Dr Phillip Anthony O’Hara, Global Political Economy Research Unit (GPERU) and winner of “Book of the Year” and “Research Article of the Year” from the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) |
“A disturbing milestone”: America’s top 12 plutocrats now own $1 Trillion in wealth. Mronline.org (8-22-20).
New figures from the Institute for Policy Studies show that, despite a pandemic that has stunted the economy for months, America’s billionaire class is becoming richer than ever, adding nearly $700 billion to their fortune since the nationwide lockdown in March. | more…
“A disturbing milestone”: America’s top 12 plutocrats now own $1 Trillion in wealth
Posted Aug 21, 2020 by Alan MacLeod
Capitalism , Economic Theory , Financialization , Global Economic Crisis United States Newswire
Originally published: MintPress (August 19, 2020) |
F or the first time in history, the 12 richest individuals in the United States collectively hold over $1 trillion in wealth. New figures from the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) show that, despite a pandemic that has stunted the economy for months, America’s billionaire class is becoming richer than ever, adding nearly $700 billion to their fortune since the nationwide lockdown in March, now holding $1.015 trillion. Speaking with MintPress today, the IPS’ Chuck Collins described his findings as a “disturbing milestone in the history of extreme inequality in the U.S.” adding:
This despotic dozen has tremendous power and wealth related to their control of the technological platforms and digital commons that we all depend on.
Included on the list are figures like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest living individual, who has nearly doubled his fortune to an estimated $189 billion, and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, who saw his personal net worth triple to $73 billion in the last six months.
The news of these billionaires’ growing fortunes comes amid record stock market gains. Yesterday, the S&P 500, an index measuring the performance of America’s 500 largest corporations, reached an all time high, closing at 3,389.78, breaking the previous record set in February.
Few Americans, however, are feeling any benefits. The coronavirus pandemic has wrought a terrible economic and social cost on the country, with an estimated 26 million going hungry in the last week, 40 million facing eviction from their homes, and around 55 million filing for unemployment benefits since March. Food banks across the country have seen great increases in demand and, in some cases, are struggling to meet it.
Wages fall as profits soar
President Trump has many times touted the surging stock market as a reflection of his administration’s competence, mirroring the 1950s slogan “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” However, few appear to accept Trump’s word on it. Dean Baker, Senior Economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, D.C., told MintPress that, “Stocks measure the expected value of future corporate profits. With the labor market weak and likely to remain so for a while, wages are likely to lag productivity, which will be good for profits. Also, continued low interest rates mean there are not good alternatives to stock”–something that raises the question of for whom is the economy currently working. “It is a societal failure when so much wealth and power are in so few hands,” said Collins.
The full list of 12 plutocrats and their quickly rising net worth are as follows:
· Jeff Bezos ($189.4 billion)
· Bill Gates ($114 billion)
· Mark Zuckerberg ($95 billion)
· Warren Buffett ($80 billion)
· Elon Musk ($73 billion)
· Steve Ballmer ($71 billion)
· Larrry Ellison ($71 billion)
· Larry Page ($67 billion)
· Sergey Brin ($66 billion)
· Alice Walton ($62 billion)
· Jim Walton ($62 billion)
· Rob Walton ($62 billion)
Of the twelve, five have taken a pledge to give away at least half of their wealth during their lifetimes. But only one of those on the list, business tycoon and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet, has actually seen his net worth decrease in the past six months. Bezos, whom some are predicting will be the world’s first trillionaire, has not, and is asking the public for donations to help his 800,000 employees through the pandemic. One-third of Amazon employees in Arizona are on food stamps, with other states not faring that much better.
While working-class Americans have had to make do with one $1,200 government check, the country’s billionaires have been most carefully looked after. A report from the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan congressional body, found that 82 percent of the tax breaks from the Trump administrations Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act went to those making over $1 million annually, with the super-wealthy feeling the most benefits. And as the government has gone on vacation until September, it is unlikely that any relief will arrive in the near future.
Nevertheless, serious changes are necessary, both over the short and long terms. “Without any significant reforms–which include an excess profits tax, a wealth tax and a progressive estate tax–wealth will continue to concentrate in the hands of a small minority and worsen inequality in the future,” said Collins’ colleague at the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, Omar Ocampo. With Trump promising another large tax cut, the problem of wealth inequality is likely to get worse rather than better.
About Alan MacLeod
Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.
| June 28, 2015 |
| Top CEOs Made 303 Times More Than Typical Workers in 2014 According to a new EPI report, CEOs in the 350 largest U.S. firms were paid an average of $16.3 million in 2014—303 times more than the typical worker. EPI President Lawrence Mishel and Research Assistant Alyssa Davis examine how CEO compensation has increased 997 percent over the last 36 years, a rise nearly double the growth of the stock market. They find that CEOs earn 5.8 times more than wage earners in the top 0.1 percent, which indicates that CEO compensation growth does not simply reflect the increased value of highly paid professionals. In addition, Mishel and Davis explain the study’s focus on the 350 largest U.S. firms, noting that they employ a large number of workers, are the leaders of the business community, and set the standards for pay among execs. Economic Policy Institute, June 28, 2915 |
CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978 Typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during that time
Report • By Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe • August 14, 2019
Summary
What this report finds: The increased focus on growing inequality has led to an increased focus on CEO pay. Corporate boards running America’s largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages. Average pay of CEOs at the top 350 firms in 2018 was $17.2 million—or $14.0 million using a more conservative measure. (Stock options make up a big part of CEO pay packages, and the conservative measure values the options when granted, versus when cashed in, or “realized.”) CEO compensation is very high relative to typical worker compensation (by a ratio of 278-to-1 or 221-to-1). In contrast, the CEO-to-typical-worker compensation ratio (options realized) was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 58-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more—about five times as much—as other earners in the top 0.1%. From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners (339.2%). In contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9%.
Why it matters: Exorbitant CEO pay is a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do away with. CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay, not because they are increasing productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills. This escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1.0% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving less of the fruits of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap between very high earners and the bottom 90%. The economy would suffer no harm if CEOs were paid less (or taxed more).
How we can solve the problem: MORE