The Peasants Need Pitchforks

AFP image

Robert Scheer
TruthDig

A “working class hero,” John Lennon told us in his song of that title, “is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you’re so clever and classless and free/ But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: “Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.”

Our Banana Republic

Anthony Freda Illustration

Nicholas D. Kristof
NY Times

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

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Incomes Fall, Consumer Spending Weakest in 3 Months

Activist Post

Only a few days after the U.S. government reported that the economy expanded 2% in the third quarter on consumer spending, where they claimed that, "Household purchases, about 70 percent of the economy, rose at a 2.6 percent pace, the best quarter of the recovery that began in June 2009," a new conflicting report says otherwise.

A new report in the Associated Press titledSeptember consumer spending weak while incomes dip seems to directly contradict last weeks uplifting news:

Americans slowed their spending in September to the weakest pace in three months and their incomes fell for the first time in 14 months.

The Commerce Department says personal spending rose at an annual rate of 0.2 percent in September. That's below the 0.5 percent gains recorded in July and August. Incomes actually fell 0.1 percent in September, following a 0.4 percent rise in August that had been pushed higher by the return of extended unemployment benefits.

The weak growth in spending and incomes underscored how fragile the economy remains. Consumers facing high unemployment remain reluctant to spend.

With incomes falling for the first time in 14 months, consumer confidence has fallen to its 2010 lows. The Reuters/University of Michigan index of consumer sentiment fell to 67.7 from 68.2 last month.

Reuters Consumer Confidence Index

These conflicting stories, both derived from the same Commerce Department data, clearly shows a desperate attempt to massage the numbers as favorably as possible.  Meanwhile the bottom continues to fall out of the main street economy as Income inequality in America is at the highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking household income data in 1967, according to Reuters.  It must be election season to have such neurotic headlines.

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