December 23, 2012

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Learned Social Classism, Is Working Even Ethical?

November 25, 2012 By 6 Comments

As explained in the article Learning Careerism As A Moral Reward System; our society, specifically our education system teaches and prepared us for a careerist lifestyle. Or simply put, working for money is considered success in our societies.

But not only does it teach us to work for currency. Just as we are put down in school for having poor grades, in society we are put down and even ridiculed, almost as criminals, for having low paid jobs, and even more so for having no paid job at all.

This video shows how people are eager to help someone until people assume they are homeless, and that the homeless are also more eager to help people in need:

We live in a society where those with the most important jobs to our survival work long hours, often physically tiring and are not paid very much. There are only a few kinds of workers that we really need, farmers/food producers, construction/manufacturers, delivery, maintenance/repair, and public services such as hospital workers and good police.

As time goes on there is more automation, so there are less jobs available but more people and so more food, building, maintenance, healthcare, and so on is required. However farmers are being paid less as time goes on, many selling their farms to get a different job, as their valuable work doesn’t even pay the bills. Construction workers, store workers, repair services and delivery are often paid low or minimum wage. Construction or farm work is much physically harder than sitting in an office trading stocks, yet those people are praised because they make more money.

There are often stories of fire-fighters and medical workers on strike because they are on a low wage or have poor quality working conditions, but these are the true heroes of our society, these people save us from death. Farmers, medical workers and fire-fighters should be the highest rewarded and praised workers of society, not some of the least.

We should also give more credit to those who are building and maintaining places for us to live comfortably in.

It is shameful that the harder a job is, the less money the workers will make, and those who make the most money in society actually have the easier jobs and often work the least.

In our society even these workers that we require for survival are not made a priority, money is. We are taught that if we work hard we can get a good job, and a good job pays well, most people still believe this and look up to those with ‘well-paid’ jobs and look down on those with a low paid job or those who are considered poor.

The truth is that in almost all cases the LESS-ethical the persons job, the more money they will earn. We could consider the most ethical of all work to be charity work, helping those with less, yet most of this work is either volunteer work or paid minimum wage. Those without jobs at all are looked down on, even when they volunteer to do charity work. Looked down on by those who mess around with numbers to make bigger numbers (trading stocks and shares), or managers; people who make sure that other people work so that they can take a larger cut.

Our parents tried to teach us good ethics and morals, but then they told us to obey at school, which taught us that these twisted careerist ideologies were moral and ethical.

Those without any paid employment, often also without any debt are sometimes homeless, and our society also tells us that they are homeless because they are drug addicts or alcoholics, and therefore we should not help them, even though many of these people are not drug-addicts or alcoholics, and if they are, it is often a sickness that is created by the world they live in, they simply didn’t have enough money or got kicked out by an ex-partner. Relationship breakdown and illness can happen to anyone.

So we have those who work very unethical jobs making ridiculously high amounts of money, those looked down on for having low paid work, even though it is physically more productive, those who are ridiculed for not having a ‘paid’ job or claiming some kind of state benefit, and then the homeless who cannot even apply for many kinds of state benefits or most jobs because they cannot complete the forms without a valid address, and often an email address or phone number; sometimes even the phone number must be a landline number, and of course to apply for a job most of the time these days a printed Résumé/CV is required.

Amnesty international reported that approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. are homeless, many of them veterans. It is worth noting that, at the same time, there are 18.5 million vacant homes in the country.

AP also reports that nearly 1 in 2 Americans have fallen into poverty.

CBS News reports that “According to a new report out this past week, poverty in America has reached its highest level since 1965″.

So as a whole this brings up a question, apart from a few specific careers, is paid work ethical? How many ethical jobs do you know that are helping people to survive or live comfortably and are not profiting some corporation, or share holders, sat back, relaxing, watching the money you make entering their bank accounts.

When we do get paid, a high percentage of that money gets cut to go to government as income tax, however we give them another chunk of money from VAT, another tax, then depending on where you live there are multiple other taxes such as state tax, council tax, road tax, import tax, property tax, inheritance tax, and so on…

Click for larger image

Filed Under: Banks, Consumerism, Corporations, Economy, Employment, Equality, Featured, Financial Crisis, Housing, Income Inequality, Money, Poverty, Safety, Taxes, Unions, Welfare Benefits

Learning Careerism As A Moral Reward System

November 17, 2012 By 2 Comments

The concepts of consumerism and careerism are predominant in first world countries, and are increasing in countries with less “advanced” economies too, but why?

The definition of careerism or a careerist is “the characteristics associated with one who advances his career even at the expense of his pride and dignity.” Simply looking at this definition, many of us instantly assume ‘it has nothing to do with my career’.

Image source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1026998/Parents-told-attend-Maths-lessons-children-improve-primary-results.html

As a child we are brought up by our parents or carers, usually with a mixture of two learning methodologies, the first of which is a reward based learning system, where a child is rewarded for doing good and importantly, doing as they are told. The second is the opposite side of the same coin, a punishment based system, punished for disobeying and for doing bad. In general parents try to give children the best morals and ethics that they are able to comprehend for themselves.

Image source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/27/florida-education-model-reform

However that same parent then tells the child to do as they are told at school. The child goes to school and learns a very systematic, rigid and standardised education without much flexibility, creativity, play, freedom, and importantly, without parental guidance. Parents tend to assume that the governments education programmes have our children’s futures and interests at heart, usually the teachers also believe this.

When we reach 11/12 in the USA people are moved from Elementary school to Middle School, until 14/15 where people are moved to High School. Typically in the UK children go to Secondary School from 10/11/12 until 15/16, why change schools, and why between 10 and 12?

Some school uniforms also represent “smart” worker clothing. (Image from: https://www.theuniformshoponline.co.uk/secondary-school-uniforms.php)

Puberty, during this time of questioning, rebelling against our parents as authority figures to find our own path, we are given alternative answers by our new schools. A lot of these school changes are careerist ideologies, once we reach these ages we are taught that we need to get the grades to get a job because having a job is successful; the better the grades the better the career and pay, right?

In the USA this is pushed even farther as children must pass tests to even get to the next grade/school year, a very early way of learning a careerist promotion based system and also something that appears to be non-optional. Those who do not follow these rules are ridiculed as they are held back, just as people in society are ridiculed for having a low paid job or no job at all.

The poor or jobless considered by many of the rich, the media and the government to be worthless people of society that do not deserve, because they haven’t worked enough.. Even when these people volunteer to do charitable work they are perceived as some kind of hippie scum.

It’s important to note that government taxes and bank’s debt interest are two other ways of getting something without working for it.

Monopoly Money

All along our parents tried to teach us good morals and ethics; what is good and what is bad. Schooling takes over and teaches us that more obeying and work is good, and anything else is bad. By the time we leave school we have learned that working is good and money is a replacement of our parents reward based system.

There’s no longer a reward based system for doing good, now there is only a reward based system of working for currency by obeying. Numbers printed on paper or a computer screen. This is now where our morals are firmly based in society.

Continues to: Learned Social Classism, Is Working Even Ethical?

Filed Under: Consumerism, Economy, Education, Equality, Featured, Income Inequality, Money, Poverty, Taxes, Welfare Benefits

The Truth About Diamonds…

June 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My name is Chris Everard - I have spent 17 years travelling to eleven countries investigating and reporting on how the super-wealthy families - who have become known as ‘the illuminati’ to many - gain their riches… I have established a monthly magazine which publishes fully illustrated reports and iBook/articles about the Aristocratic-Royal Elite, cover-ups, secret episodes of world history and other matters which are ignored by the mainstream media. FEED YOUR BRAIN MAGAZINE refuses all big corporate advertising and is instead funded by it’s readers via subscriptions. It gives us the the kind of editorial freedom which, say, the BBC do not have - for example, the Director General of the BBC is actually appointed by the Queen…

In this DIAMOND JUBILEE year, I decided to publish investigations into the DIAMOND industry - every diamond on the planet has been the result of some form of exploitation of people or the environment…

You can get a free copy of FEED YOUR BRAIN MAGAZINE by submitting your email in the little box at https://www.FeedYourBrainMagazine.com/ - this is a snippet of the kind of research and investigation I publish each month….

In the 40 years between 1952 - 1992 the Queen avoided paying tax. Does she really have any respect for the British people? She has almost completely avoided paying any contribution towards the upkeep of Britain. Now take a close look - a really close look - at her facial expressions on those rare occasions when the royal family step out onto the balcony at Buckingham Palace. Complete and utter control of the BBC newsfeeds has allowed - up until now - a very effective ‘news blackout’ on the investments of the royals - and their attitude towards the British working class…
Some of the Queen’s most important investments have been in the Nuclear electric industries… and DIAMONDS…

Fortunes have been made and lost in the age-old trading of diamonds. Three of the world’s largest diamonds are owned by the British Queen - whose real name is Elizabeth Saxe Coburg und Gotha (her name is not really ‘Windsor’ - that is a ‘styled’ title-name). The combined value of these diamonds is in excess of $1,000million dollars - perhaps as much as $2,000 million. If these diamonds were re-cut and sold, the accrued fund of money could be placed in a high return deposit savings account, producing an annual income which would provide enough cash to provide the National Health Service with Scanners and dialysis machines FOREVER. Additionally, African & Indian communities in the areas where the diamonds were originally discovered would also benefit from an annual income.

Diamonds are NOT rare - at the African Ekati diamond mine, they are transported on conveyer belts - in giant heaps. A direct result of diamond mining is the diversion of rivers to allow for the mining of alluvial diamond deposits. When the mine is depleted, the rivers are not redirected to their original courses, which in turn results in the pollution of waters and destruction of surrounding flora and fauna. The mining activities also degrade the surrounding land by increasing atmospheric air pollution, contaminating surface and ground water and increasing soil erosion and leaching. The pollution is, in the most extreme cases, leading to desertification and permanently changing land use from agriculture to waste, rendering it useless to traditional inhabitants when the diamonds have all been mined. In the short run the inhabitants of the region are suffering from sickness and disease related to contaminated drinking water supplies. Such diseases include dissentry, Malaria, schistosamiases and Biomphalaria pfeiffer. Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the Congo and Angola are the foremost sources for diamonds in Africa - all these countries have been thrown into civil war and chaos by British Military forces & mercenaries. The ensuing chaos guarantees that the diamond mining can go on unhindered by democratically elected leaders demanding a fair cut of the profits for the African people. The royal elite have mountains of diamonds in stock and carefully control the sale & distribution, giving the impression that diamonds are ‘rare’.


Just recently, Sierra Leone erupted into what the BBC described as “civil war”. The truth is that most of these ‘turf wars’ play into the hands of diamond prospectors, with the displacement of millions of Africans quite - just by chance, of course - enabling mining companies to set up shop, their facilities looking like high security prisons which mar the natural beauty of the landscape and strip the subterranean strata using high powered water hoses and acids in search of yet more shiny transparent crystals. There is, without question, a strange paradox, that many African villages rely on a single standpipe of water, whilst just yards away, high powered water hoses flush diamonds underground by workers who have to suffer the indignity of anal probes and x-rays as they leave their workplace, the bosses making sure that none of their modern slaves have swallowed a small uncut gem to allay the horrendous inequality of their society. (below): The Indian Koh-I-Nor diamond set into a platinum crown owned by Queen Elzabeth’s dead mother.

The royal greed for diamonds has scarred our wonderful planet. In Kimberly, South Africa, we see an abandoned mine which was dug by hand using local labourers who were paid pennies for their hard work in arduous conditions. The giant hole left behind after the royal-elite diamond traders moved on to trash yet another landscape could easily be converted into a hydro-electric power station to benefit the local community. It was abandoned in 1914.

The Russian ROMANOV royal family are cousins to the British-Bavarian house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Windsor. An orgy of top soil washing and feverish mining has left ridiculously huge chasms and black holes in the Rusiian countryside. A mine at Mirney in Siberia is 1,200 meters in diametre and more than 500 meters deep. The royals have left a giant sink hole at Yellowknife in Canada - a territory stolen from First Nation Canadian Indians - which is so big it can be seen from space. The Diavik diamond mine could easily be converted into a marine biology research station - but like so many other diamond mines, it will probably be left as an ugly scar on our planet.

In the 1930s, a third of British children suffered growth defects caused by malnutrition. This is the era in which queen Elizabeth II grew up - whilst beggars and child prostitutes fought hand and mouth for food and favour from the rich outside the walls of royal palaces, the young Elizabeth was being groomed to take her place as an adult princess - she had her own child sized six-roomed thatched cottage in the garden of the Royal Lodge at Royal Windsor Great Park (situated near Windsor Castle). The London Times reported; ‘The Small House is fully furnished with running water, electric light, and a wireless.’ Architect John Nash rebuilt the Royal Lodge for King George IV and it became one of the Queen Mother’s many homes. She died there, aged 101, after a century of indulgence, fine champagne and enjoying whole-body blood transfusions at the tax payer’s expense.

Since the 1800s, the British-Bavarian royal sovereign houses have been asset stripping Africa and India and building vast estates which are now almost impossible to value accurately. Their investments are global, with rumours suggesting that Queensland in Australia is actually owned by the royal Crown Estates (perhaps that would explain the reason for it’s name), and every building in Regent Street in central London is owned by the Crown Estates. Officially, the Crown Estates are custodians, merely owning properties on behalf of the British people - but that, as far as I am concerned, is nothing but window dressing and political double-speak - as at no time in history has any of the Crown Estates been sold off in order to build hospitals or fund public services. On the rare occasions when there are sell-offs, they are usually Leasehold, and the properties eventually return back to the Crown.

From 1953 up until 1992, the monarchy paid not a single penny in tax. More than 2,400 tax rises took place in that period, with the cost of goods being ramped due to massive amounts of duty being levied on them.
In 1992, a paltry £1million was begrudgingly handed over in ‘tax’ - perhaps this is the reason why the queen described 1992 as her “Anus Horribilis”. In the same year, a mysterious fire at Windsor Castle resulted in taxpayers being told that they would have no less than £30 Million taken from their wage packets to pay for the damage! Ten years later, in 2002, the Queen apparently was not required to pay tax on the cash bequeathed in her mother’s will. The Queen Mother often gave the impression that she was ‘broke’. But she owned not one, but TWO castles! Allegedly, £140 million was placed in Swiss Trusts for the benefit of her grandchildren… If true, then this shows that the Queen Mum was one of the wealthiest people in the world. She was allegedly in debt due to horse racing gambling fetishes - if this is true, then surely a 100 year old woman would not have needed TWO castles and one of these giant estates could have been commercialised or sold off or rented out as a hotel to take the burden off her ‘debts’.

THE CROWN’S ESTATES
So, let us now take a closer look at these so called ‘Crown Estates’… What we have here is a portfolio of some of the world’s most famous landmarks and buildings worth a conservative £6 billion, with urban properties valued at £4.2 billion, and rural holdings valued at £919.5 million; and an annual profit of £226.5 million - that’s almost £1 million profit per day earned from rental and lease incomes. The majority of the estate’s income is derived from urban cities - most notably properties in central London. The Crown’s estate also owns 272,000 acres (110,000 hectares) of agricultural land and forest, and, wait for it, more than half of the UK’s foreshore - beaches, ports, promenades, piers etc. It also includes Ascot racecourse and the aforementioned Windsor Great Park… I think you’re beginning to get the ‘big picture’…
This cosy little arrangement, where vast amounts of tax free cash is paid directly into the bank accounts of Royals has continued, with every succeeding sovereign renewing the arrangement made between King George III and Parliament and is now recognised as “an integral part of the Constitution [which] would be difficult to abandon”. That is, of course, an odd term - as Britain does not have an official ‘Constitution’.

The Crown Estates has an interesting history, where various monarchs have played a kind of ‘soft shoe shuffle’ moving assets in and out of the Crown Estates portfolio as and when their heavy drinking/heavy gambling/heavy tipping (delete as appropriate) habits needed. Upon King George III’s accession of the throne he ‘surrendered’ the income from the Crown lands to Parliament in return for a fixed civil list. What this means is that to this day there very often is a minister inside the Cabinet Office who is described as ‘Minister Without Portfolio’ and it is this minister’s responsibility to manage the Crown Estates. Old King George surrendered to parliamentary control the hereditary excise duties, post office revenues, and “the small branches” of hereditary revenue including rents of the Crown lands in England, (which amounted at that time to about £11,000) and was granted a ‘civil list’ annuity of £800,000 for the support of his household and the expenses of civil government, subject to the payment of certain annuities to members of the royal family. So, in other words, he forewent the few tens of thousands of peasant rents the Crown Estates were levying, handed over control to a puppet minister, and in exchange picked up nearly a £1 million tax free sum every 12 months. However, although the king had retained large hereditary revenues, his income proved insufficient for his expensive life style! Why? Because he used to reward friends with bribes and lavish gifts! Debts amounting to over £3 million during the course of King George’s reign were paid by Parliament, and the civil list annuity was then increased from time to time - leading to the situation we have today, where vast mortgages and massive ‘salaries’ are now paid to more than two dozen Royals who have seldom had ‘normal’ jobs.

55% of Britain’s foreshore is owned and operated by the Crown Estates - permission has been granted time and time again for ugly and dangerous nuclear reactors which belch radioactive waste into the English channel, North Sea and Irish Sea.

Filed Under: Africa, Banks, Corruption, Housing, Illuminati, Income Inequality, Nuclear, Poverty, Royal Family, Russia, Taxes, United Kingdom, War

Where Does Your State Rank In Equal Pay?

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

by on April 17, 2012

Today marks Equal Pay Day and an opportunity to take a closer look as the wage disparities between the genders. The bottom line: the wage gap is real and it is persistent.

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) released a new state-by-state report on equal pay rankings, along with an interactive map that shows wage disparities in each state. How does your state rate? Some of the rankings may surprise you.

Overall the wage gap is the narrowest in Washington D.C., where women earn 91 cents on the dollar to men and worst in Wyoming where women make just 64 percent of men’s earnings. As expected, the numbers get worse when you account for race. African American and Hispanic women earn much less–just 70 percent and 61 percent of what white men on average earn. Nationally women earn just 77 percent of their male peers.

This discrepancy in pay costs working women and their families tens of thousands of dollars a year. It directly impacts women’s retirement security and ability to save for emergencies and college and it reinforces an outdated and offensive world view that women’s work is simply not of the same value as men’s.

Source: https://www.care2.com/causes/where-does-your-state-rank-in-equal-pay.html

Filed Under: Economy, Equality, Income Inequality, Money, Sexism, USA, Women

Tax squeeze for families set to come into effect

April 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

By ITN on 5th April, 2012

 

Up to a million families with children in the UK will lose £511 a year under a squeeze to the tax and benefit system, a think tank has revealed.
© Reuters/Toby Melville

© Reuters/Toby Melville

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said cuts of over £2 billion will come into effect over Easter, prompting anti-poverty campaigners to brand the start of the financial year “Bad Friday”.

Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls dubbed the revelations a “tax credits bombshell” on Thursday, adding: “For all the Government’s talk about increasing the personal allowance, these independent figures show that while they may be giving with one hand they are taking much more away with the other.

“That is why families with children will be an average of £511 a year worse from tomorrow.”

Child Poverty Action Group chief executive Alison Garnham added: “Some of the poorest working families will lose thousands of pounds from their annual income, leaving them in a desperate struggle to pay for basics like groceries, clothes and household bills.”

Labour said Government numbers suggested over 850,000 families will lose their child tax credit, worth around £545 per year, from the start of the financial year.

Another 212,000 couples earning under £17,000 a year would lose working tax credit unless they were able to work for longer, Labour said.

Source: https://www.itn.co.uk/uk/42664/120405TAX

Filed Under: Debt, Economy, Income Inequality, Money, Taxes, United Kingdom, Welfare Benefits

Gerald Celente: We’re Going Into An Economic 9/11

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The new job numbers are out for the month of November. The Labor Department announced that unemployment is declining and was 8.6 percent for last month.

Roughly 120 thousand private jobs were created in the month of November, but critics say retail and hospitality jobs aren’t the type of jobs America needs.

Others say that this doesn’t make up for the new people joining the workforce.

Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal, sounds off on the issue.

 

Filed Under: 9/11, Banks, Debt, Economy, Financial Crisis, Income Inequality, Money, USA

Destroying Empires 101

December 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Every military strategist and war time general knows never to attack an empire head on. You destroy it from the inside out. You cut off supply lines (sanctions), cause civil unrest or civil war by funding both sides (Sunni and Shiite in Iraq), and instill economic destruction and slavery with usery (interest on top of interest to make freedom from debt impossible).

This financial situation we are in is no accident. How can it be? With the supposed best and the brightest Harvard and Yale educated minds making life changing decisions on our behalf, how can they be wrong so often? How can they be so ignorant or naive as not to learn from the past? How can the state of our country and many others around the world be an “accident”? The answer of course is, it can’t be.

If you overspend and have problems paying your bills during a particular month and one of those bills goes into collections, do you do the same thing next month? No, you make sure you don’t repeat that same mistake. Guess what? There is a really good chance you never even went to Harvard or Yale, and you figured that out all by yourself. Imagine that?

Obama’s brilliant answer to this problem was to put the very bankers that caused this situation in charge of the banking industry and to impose (I’m trying not to laugh as I type this) “unprecedented regulatory reform” over Wall Street.

Roosevelt did almost the exact same thing after Hoover left office as to “ensure nothing like this would ever happen again”. But yet here we are “again” albeit with one great difference. That difference is the peoples’ ability to be self sufficient. In the late 20′s and 30′s, people had the ability to farm, to manufacture useful items with their hands, to barter. Their dollars were backed in gold. That was until 1934 when the government ordered all citizens to surrender their gold in the name of “stabilizing markets“. Coincidentally, gold spiked $15 per oz. after the confiscation. Nice profit, too bad it wasn’t in the hands of the people. Most people posses none of those skills, so what will they do?

I understand that its hard to accept the idea of our current situation as being one of intent, but it’s time we do. The sooner we come to this realization, and accept it, the easier it will be to deal with what’s coming.

Filed Under: Banks, Employment, Income Inequality, USA Tagged With:

29 Amazing Stats Which Prove That The Rich Are Getting Richer And The Poor Are Getting Poorer

December 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In the United States today, there is one group of people that is actually living the American Dream. The ultra-wealthy have seen their incomes absolutely explode over the past three decades. Meanwhile, the U.S. middle class has been steadily declining and the ranks of the poor have been swelling. But this is what always happens when an economy becomes highly centralized.

Today, gigantic corporations and “too big to fail” banks totally dominate our economic system. The whole game is rigged. Our system is now designed to funnel wealth away from the bottom 90 percent of the population and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy. When you allow a handful of giant entities to run everything, it is going to inevitably create a situation where there are a small number of very big winners and a massive amount of losers. In America today, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Yes, there will always be poor people. Yes, those that work really hard and produce something of great value for society should be greatly rewarded.

The way that our system should work is that it should empower individuals and small businesses to come up with new ideas, start companies, create jobs and produce massive amounts of new wealth. But instead, the number of small businesses in America is rapidly declining. The giant banks and the giant corporations that run everything are constantly running around stomping all of the “little guys” out of existence. This has created an environment where the rich are constantly getting richer and the poor are constantly getting poorer.

Just take a look at banking. The “too big to fail” banks just keep getting bigger and bigger. Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets. Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.

If you can believe it, the “big six” U.S. banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo) now control assets equivalent to approximately 60 percent of America’s gross national product.

But this isn’t just the case in the financial world. The truth is that wherever you look big corporations are getting bigger. This has caused our economy to become very highly centralized, and these monolithic entities are basically gigantic magnets that suck up as much wealth and power as they can.

Meanwhile, life is getting really tough for the “average joe” on the street.

The following are 29 amazing stats that prove that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer in America….

#1 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

#2 According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1979 and 2007 income growth for the top 1 percent of all U.S. income earners was an astounding 390 percent. For the bottom 90 percent, income growth was only 5 percent over that same time period.

#3 According to a joint House and Senate report entitled “Income Inequality and the Great Recession“, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States brought in a total of 10.0 percent of all income in 1980, but by the time 2008 had rolled around that figure had skyrocketed to 21.0 percent.

#4 According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 1 percent is the only group that saw its share of our national income increase between 1979 and 2007.

#5 The wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans now own more than a third of all the wealth in the United States.

#6 More than 50 percent of all stocks and bonds are owned by just 1 percent of the population.

#7 The poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#8 The top 0.01% of all Americans make an average of $27,342,212. The bottom 90% make an average of $31,244.

#9 Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty. Today,15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty.

#10 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 6.7% of all Americans are living in “extreme poverty”, and that is the highest level that has ever been recorded before.

#11 Back in 2001, the ratio of wages to GDP was sitting at approximately 49 percent. Today, it has fallen all the way down to about 44 percent.

#12 According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.

#13 According to Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, about 53 percent of all income went to the middle class back in the 1970s, but today only about 46 percent of all income does.

#14 In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”. By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in “middle class neighborhoods”.

#15 According to a recent report produced by Pew Charitable Trusts, approximately one out of every three Americans that grew up in a middle class household has slipped down the income ladder.

#16 According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of all income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of all Americans.

#17 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

#18 According to a recent report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.

#19 Last year, 2.6 million more Americans dropped into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

#20 Between 1991 and 2007 the number of Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 that filed for bankruptcy rose by a staggering 178 percent.

#21 Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.

#22 The poverty rate for children living in the United States rose to 22% in 2010.

#23 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#24 The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.

#25 We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year.

#26 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

#27 The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer on a global scale as well. According to Credit Suisse, those with a household net worth of a million dollars or more control 38.5% of all the wealth in the world. Last year, that figure was at 35.6%. As you can see, it is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.

#28 According to the same Credit Suisse study just mentioned, the bottom two-thirds of the global population controls just 3.3% of all the wealth.

#29 If you can believe it, more than 3 billion people currently live on less than 2 dollar a day.

Unless something changes, the income inequality that we are seeing all over the world is just going to get worse and worse and worse.

In a previous article, I discussed a recent University of Zurich study that found that a “super-entity” made up of 147 gigantic corporations basically dominates the entire global economy….

“Corporations not only completely dominate the U.S. economy, they also completely dominate the global economy as well. A newly released University of Zurich study examined more than 43,000 major multinational corporations. The study discovered a vast web of interlocking ownerships that is controlled by a “core” of 1,318 giant corporations.

But that “core” itself is controlled by a “super-entity” of 147 monolithic corporations that are very, very tightly knit. As a recent article in NewScientist noted, these 147 corporations control approximately 40 percent of all the wealth in the entire network”

These ultra-powerful corporations make a very limited number of people very, very wealthy.

But those of us that are not connected to “the system” are finding it increasingly difficult to survive.

Once upon a time, the United States had a thriving middle class unlike anything the world had ever seen.

But now millions of families are scratching and clawing in a desperate attempt to stay afloat.

Just check out what happened in south Florida on Wednesday. Thousands were lined up for a chance at free food. In fact, people were lining up as early as last Friday to get a voucher for five bags of groceries….

By mid-morning, thousands waited in a line which wrapped around the block outside the voucher distribution location. Concerned about safety, the City of Miami Police Department was in attendance to keep order and look after the sick and elderly.

Those who received a voucher Wednesday will return on December 14th and exchange it for bags of food.

Each voucher can be redeemed for five bags of groceries worth $120.

Can you believe that?

Can you believe that there are American families that would stay in line for five days just to get some bags of free groceries?

Sadly, we are starting to see scenes like this all over the nation.

For example, approximately 10,000 people lined up for free turkey dinners in the Los Angeles area last week.

As the U.S. economy continues to decline, people are going to start becoming even more desperate. In some cities we will eventually see rioting and chaos.

Meanwhile, the gigantic corporations that dominate our economy will just keep getting even bigger and even more powerful. They will pay their executives even larger bonuses and they will ship our jobs out of the country at an even faster rate.

This is not how our system is supposed to work. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended.

But until dramatic changes happen, the rich will just keep getting richer and the poor will just keep getting poorer.

Source: https://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/29-amazing-stats-which-prove-that-the-rich-are-getting-richer-and-the-poor-are-getting-poorer

Filed Under: Banks, Income Inequality, Poverty, USA

‘Occupy Together’: The Movement Grows to Stop Bankers’ World War III

November 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

Over the past two weeks the ravaged North African nation of Libya and the burgeoning ‘Occupy …’ movement have been much in the news through both billions-dollar Corporate Stream Media (CSM) and through genuinely alternative Internet channels.

A revealing number of factors connect the now war-torn Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (“State of the Masses”) and its ‘Green Revolution’, both nurtured by the Jamahiriya’s unofficial leader Muammar Qadddafi, with principles and aspirations expressed by many in the ‘Occupy …’ movement.

Before its devastation under bombing by the North American Treaty Organization (NATO), Libya had many of the social programs and remedies that many in the ‘Occupy’ movements call for.

That is, Libya’s Jamahiriya was pretty much the real deal as a counter and threat to the greed and ‘GLOBAL’ agenda (please see the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ below) of the thieving, totalitarian financiers whom the ‘Occupy’ movement opposes. How the Jamahiriya was treated by those financiers’ war-machine and their Corporate Stream Media, fed by organizations such as CANVAS (again please see below) should be a lesson to us all.

Libya Rally

Let’s first look at what’s been done in Libya this year and over the four preceding decades. On October 31, 2011, NATO ostensibly ended its campaign of aerial and ground attacks in Libya, 11 days after the murder of the Jamahiriya’s unofficial leader, Muammar Qaddafi.

NATO’s overt campaign began more than seven months ago, March 19, with the launch of 110 United States’ Tomahawk missiles against military and civilian targets in the nation of about 6.7 million. According to Libya’s new, NATO-backed, ostensible Government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), by mid-September the war against the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had caused more than 30,000 civilian deaths; other estimates double this number of civilians killed. (1) NATO’s own count of its aerial bombing is more than 26,000 sorties (a sortie is each aircraft in a mission) and more than ’9600 strike missions’, each mission delivering ‘an average of four bombs per attack’. Effects on Libyan civilians can be seen in several videos online, as they lament the NATO bombings and delebrate and their Jamahiriya government.

NATO’s bombing reached Libya’s “great man-made river”, ‘the world’s largest irrigation project’, in July. Its devastation of both Libya’s standard of living (the highest in North Africa) and of Libya’s direct democracy through the Jamahiriya’s 34-years-standing ‘Basic People’s Congresses’ intensified with British and Qatari soldiers’ and NTC forces’ attack of Tripoli in late August.

For a summary of Libya before NATO’s devastations, you can check out one of many pro-Jamahiriya videos on YouTube, ‘Shocking Truth About Gaddafi–what you don’t know’, 7:24 in length. It gives an overview of ‘Green Revolution’ accomplishments since 1969. It’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=aXQxTv3nB14

In relation to ‘Occupy Wall Street’, we should bear in mind that the entirety of NATO’s overt campaign in Libya, as demanded by President Barack Obama of the United States, President Nikolas Sarkozy of France, and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, gained credibility through lies put forth in February 2011 onFacebook and Twitter accounts ostensibly belonging to activists guided by a group based in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, CANVAS, a group preceded by its members’ earlier, more well-known Otpor, and that Otpor/CANVAS methods of protest and clenched-fist logos figure prominently in the ‘Occupy …’ movement.

Another excellent video, ‘US Orchestrates Regime Change in Libya Using Social Media’, shows how this Big Lie through ‘social media’ plays.

The most famous killing in the Libyan war is that of Muammar Qaddafi, author of the ‘Green Book’ of the Jamahiriya and founder of Libya’s ‘Green Revolution.’ Scores of Internet postings repeat footage of the 69-year-old, reeling and unarmed, as he’s beaten, reviled and perhaps sodomized by NTC fighters on October 20. The mob’s ‘capture’ of Qaddafi came after his convoy was attacked by a French fighter-jet and U.S. drone, as an excellent summary by Martin Iqbal of NATO involvement in the invasion of Libya relates. It’s available on the website theempirestrikesblack.com.

A further horror followed the mob’s beating of Muammar Qaddafi. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton learned of the leader’s death during her stop in Afghanistan, two days after she’d visited Libya. Sitting before a Cable News Network (CNN) interviewer, the Secretary of State said, “We came, we saw, he died“, laughed, and clapped her hands.

The two Two Comments (most approved by viewers’ votes) on this Youtube clip of Hillary Clinton’s hand-clapping response, seen by 196,100 viewers as of October 31, 2011, are ‘A Demon’ and ‘wow, she truly is a disgusting pig.’ (13) Another video of the Secretary of State’s response, from the channel PlanetEarthAwakens01, features these two comments: ‘evil at the helm of the country. I understand why Americans are on strike’ and ‘Power to the people!! I am 99%’ (14)

Hidden Connections

What do horrors of and from NATO’s attack on Libya have to do with the burgeoning, wonderfully rebellious, creative and staunch movement that began with the encampment of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in Lower Manhattan on September 17? What does Libya’s Jamahiriya, that ‘State of the Masses’ and its ‘Green Revolution’. have to do with the ‘Occupy …’ movement?

Let’s try a quick overview of ‘Occupy …’ The movement that’s become ‘Occupy Together’ and ‘Occupy Everything’ now has more than 1000 offshoots across the modern, industrial world. It represents a decades-overdue protest by working-class and middle-class people, the ’99%’, against their exploitation, marginalization and impoverishment under a broken-down system of financial and technological tyranny that enriches a relative few, the “1%’, as its debt-swelling, Bank-feeding national Governments rob hundreds of millions across the Western world of homes, jobs, education, health-care, and dignity. Individuals’ statements from their struggling in the United States are eloquent.(15)

On March 12, 2011, a collaboration between David DeGraw’s ampedstatus.org and a sub-group of Anonymous “hactivists” ‘announced their first operation’ by posting a video on Youtube. The announcement began: ‘We are a decentralized non-violent resistance movement, which seeks to restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.’ It continued: ‘Above all, we aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlements and World Bank…. Until our demands are met and a rule of law is restored, we will engage in a relentless campaign of non-violent, peaceful, civil disobedience. ‘ (16)

To me, participants in the ‘Occupy …’ movement compose the brightest hope that’s arisen in the Western world since 1967. Their courage and fellow-feeling, their principles of a voice for all through their Popular General Assemblies, their industry and organization, and their refusal to buckle under repression from Police and other forces, invalidate memes spread by billions-dollar Corporate Stream Media (CSM) over the past 30 years.

Young people in the West are NOT apathetic. Working-class people are NOT beaten down. Masses of us SEE and RESIST our plight under a Ruling Few. Resistance is essential and we can become our own government. (17)

The courage, compassion and resourcefulness of participants in the ‘Occupy …’ camps remind me of what natives and more than a million volunteers to post-flood New Orleans since September 2005 have accomplished in this city.

Everyday people, the ’99%’, can, if given tools of the 21st century, act far more effectively and sensitively to solve problems in their local environments than can centralized Governments that are bought and bent, one way or another, toward serving supranational Corporations’ global interests. Direct democracy is especially preferable to Government under unaccountable private Central Banks such as the United States’ Federal Reserve System (18)

A similar understanding animated Muammar Qaddafi when the ‘Basic People’s Congresses’ formed for direct democracy through local councils during 1977 in Libya’s ‘Green Revolution.’ Such understanding was moving Muammar Qaddafi toward even more radical surrender of State power and sharing of wealth in the years just before NATO’s invasion of Libya.

According to the United States’ Congressional Research Service on February 18, 2011: ‘In March 2008, [Colonel Qaddafi] announced his intention to dissolve most government administrative bodies and institute a Wealth Distribution Program whereby state oil revenues would be distributed to citizens on a monthly basis for them to administer personally, in cooperation, and via local committees.’ (19) (20)

Other aspects of the ‘Occupy …’ movement are less promising than the courage, insight and creativity shown by majorities of people in their camps.

Origins and graphics of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ link to a well-funded group of self-described “revolutionaries” who are based in Belgrade, belonging first to Otpor(Resistance) and then to CANVAS (the Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies. For 12 years Otpor and then CANVAS has served interests of the supranational financial tyranny that early statements of ‘OWS’ determinedly oppose.

Otpor began in Serbia in 1999 as students grouping against the regime and re-election of Slobodan Milosevic. According to the New York Times, Otporreceived training from retired U.S. Army Colonel Robert Helvey and substantial funding from the more than $30 million thrown against Milosevic by the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID) and the U.S-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Republican Institute. Otpor also learned methodology from books written by Gene Sharp, a Harvard professor who founded the Albert Einstein Institution that retired Colonel Helvey later served as President. (21) Financier George Soros funded the publication and distribution of Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy in 1993, as noted in the 27-minue documentary “The Revolution Business” by Journeyman Pictures (22).

NATO’s campaign against post-Yugoslavia Serbia in the latter 1990s was also called by it and the United Nations ‘humanitarian intervention.’ Its bombing during these years also struck non-military targets, including the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and killed thousands of civilians. (23)

The former Yugoslavia has another parallel with NATO-ravaged Libya. In 1990 the Yugoslavia of which Serbia was then part controlled its finances through a State-owned Central Bank. It was one of eight nations on Earth with State-owned Central Banks. Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, and the Sudan were the other seven nations and all eight nations were on the United States Clinton Administration’s list of ‘Rogue States.’ Four have since been invaded by Anglo-American forces (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia) and the remaining four are threatened with such attack (Cuba, Iran, Syria, the Sudan). (24)

A brief but far-ranging article by Ellen Brown from last April, published ontruthout.org, asks ‘Libya: All About Oil, or All About Banking?” It notes that Libya’s ‘rebel’ National Transitional Council declared its own private Central Bank, allowing seizure of Libyan resources and savings, after less than one month of inconclusive fighting on the ground. The article is at https://truth-out.org/libya-all-about-oil-or-all-about-banking/1302678000.

Otpor’s reach became international and in 2003 it grew into CANVAS, the Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions And Strategies. It received more funding from the International Republican Institute, Freedom House, the NED, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Its leaders guided activists in regions of the former Soviet Union–Georgia s ‘Rose Revolution’ of 2003 and Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004. A thorough study of Otpor/CANVAS work in the former Soviet Union, written by Jonathan Mowat in 2005,refers in its title to covert dynamics that he sees: ‘Coup d’état in Disguise: Washington’s New World Order “Democratization” Template’. (25)

Contrary of CANVAS slogans, the ‘Color ‘Revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine did NOT result in anything like more power to their places’ people. They resulted in Governments as corrupt as their predecessors. They also resulted in much less local and national control of resources and infrastructure under ‘Shock’ programs stipulated by the International Monetary Fund for loans. In 2011 Ukraine asked the International Monetary Fund to let it ‘delay raising household gas prices’, a price-increase that was part of IMF conditions for a $15.15 billion loan, while Georgia was asking the IMF for another loan

Said ‘Shock’ programs to poor and struggling societies were initially authored by a Harvard-educated economist, Jeffrey Sachs. Jeffrey Sachs continues to fill many roles. The 56-year-old is now Professor in two Schools at Columbia University, Director of the Earth Institute, Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary Ban Ki-Moon, a Commissioner of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development, and a partner with George Soros in Millennium Villages and in the Institute for New Economic Thinking (26)

Jeffrey Sachs twice addressed ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in October 2011, soon after release of his latest book, The Price of Civilization, offering praise and advice. He implausibly included himself among the working-class and needy by repeating “We are the the 99%.” (27)

On October 24, 2011 Canadian publication Adbusters, a publicizing sponsor of ’Occupy Wall Street’ since last Summer, urged ‘OWS’ and the ‘Occupy’ movement as a whole to endorse a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ of 0.05% on strictly speculative financial transactions and to do so by time of the G20 meeting of 20 major industrial nations this coming weekend.

The ‘Robin Hood Tax’ is as yet a vague though slickly packaged creation. Its British website declares it ‘A tax on Banks that would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change, here and abroad.’ Another statement on this site says: ‘Turning A GLOBAL CRISIS into A GLOBAL OPPORTUNITY’. Among the Robin Hood Tax’s existing endorsers are President Nikolas Sarkozy of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Adair Turner (Chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and the International Committee on Climate Change), Paul Krugman of the Nobel Prize and New York Times, Bill Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, George Soros, and (yet another multi-billionaire beneficiary of partnerships with the Rockefeller and Rothschild families) Warren Buffet.

The Robin Hood Tax has a projected ‘GLOBAL’ yield of $1.3 trillion. Non-endorsers of it ask: to what and whom will it ‘give billions’? The World Bank is one supposed administrator. Given its endorsers and its ‘GLOBAL’ framing, isn’t this ‘Robin Hood Tax’ most likely to be one more dodge and snare toward gulling and fleecing masses, small businesses and working-class people, through a tax that goes somewhere far away from local administration and needs? (28)

Adbusters was a secondary initiator of ‘Occupy Wall Street’, according to earlier ‘OWS’ organizer David DeGraw of ampedstatus.org. (29) Adbusters is a relatively small recipient and funder within a supranational chain of obliging donations between very wealthy Foundations. Between 1996-2003 the Canada-basedAdbusters received $334,217 from the U.S.-based Tides Foundation (30). On its side, up the chain of tax-evading exchange, the Tides Foundation, a far more endowed non-profit, received $23.988,039 from George Soros’ Open Society Institute alone between 1997-2005. At the end of 2003 the net worth of the 501c3Tides Foundation was $145,439,750. (31)

Let’s return to the “revolutionaries” from Belgrade. After Georgia and Ukraine, the clenched-fist logo of Otpor/CANVAS showed up in CANVAS-advised opposition to the democratically elected Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, as Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez displayed in a 2007 TV broadcast. (32)

Otpor/CANVAS went on to guide activists in Tunisia’s ‘Jasmine Revolution’ and Egypt’s ‘Lotus Revolution’ of late 2010 and early 2011 (33).

Where do these ‘Color Revolutions’ of the MENA (MIddle East North Africa) region stand now? Their currently dominant results In Egypt and Tunisia are not promising for direct democracy or freedom or prosperity for their places’ people.

Martial law continues in Egypt under the NATO-approved successor to Hosni Mobarak, 76-year-old Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. ‘Egypt’s Military Expands Power, Raises Alarms’, says the New York Times on October 14, 2011. (34) Tunisia’s elections of October 2011 produced decisive victory for the Islamist party led by Rachid al-Ghahannuchi, who has previous declared a fatwa that all Muslims should summarily kill all Israelis in Israel. ( (35)

In short, Egypt and Tunisia now appear more inclined to instability and civil and external warfare than they were one year ago. Thus their statuses more serve the interests of the supranational Banks that finance warfare and that seek more of global control for their super-exploitative but irremediably debt-ridden system. These Banks and their partners in nations’ private Central Banks and their overseeing Bank of International Settlements seek cover from their manifold failings through ‘GLOBAL’ measures such as the Robin Hood Tax. They’re absolutely inimical to people’s general well-being everywhere.

Occupy Melbourne

Returning once more to our Belgrade-based “revolutionaries”, Otpor/CANVASalso trained activists in the anti-Qaddafi Libyan Youth Movement as to uses of ‘social media’. (36)

As observed above, lies broadcast through impossibly located and obviously falseFacebook and Twitter accounts claim to report Government massacres in Benghazi and Tripoli that never happened. These non-existent “crimes against humanity” by “the dictator Qaddafi” then became a much-amplified Big Lie through the services of CNN, al Jazeera, Fox News, et cetera of the Corporate Stream Media. Thus the Jamahiriya ‘State of the Masses’ and its assets (oil, gold, water, a State-owned Central Bank) were set up for United Nations’ ‘humanitarian intervention’ and NATO strikes. (37)

The Example of Libya’s ‘Green Revolution’

Here are factors that connect aspirations of many in the ‘Occupy …’ movement with accomplishments of Libya’s Jamahiriya.

Libya’s ‘Green Revolution’ began with Muammar Qaddafi’s seizing power with a coup against King Idris in 1969. According to Michel Chossudovsky, the reliable editor of globalresearch.ca, in his article of September 21, 2011, ‘Destroying a Country’s Standard of Living: What Libya Had Achieved, What Has Been Destroyed’, by 2010 Libya had the following benefits and standards.

•Free education from kindergarten-age through University for all of its citizens

•Free health-care for all its citizens

•National literacy of above 89% and rising–99.9% among youth

•A teacher to student ratio of one to seventeen in primary Schools

•Nutrition per individual of more than 3000 calories per day. (38)

Libya’s Jamahiriya also provided:

•Free farmland. equipment and seeds to any citizen committed to farming the apportioned land

•$50,000 toward housing for any newly married couple

•Free electricity

•Free water (much of it through the ‘World’s Largest Man-made River’)

•Guaranteed employment and housing (no urban homelessness

•Women with the right to drive a car and divorce a husband and receive connubial property after divorce.

Libyans in the Jamahiriya ‘State of the Masses’) also enjoyed:

•34 years of direct democracy through ‘Basic People’s Congresses’ of local popular councils

•The prospect of even more radical (“to the roots”) democracy through a proposal by tribesman Muammar Qaddafi in 2008 that would further reduce centralized Government control and more empower its people through direct deposit of oil revenues. Qaddafi’s proposal was described thus by United States’Congressional Research Service on February 18, 2011: ‘In March 2008, [Colonel Qaddafi] announced his intention to dissolve most government administrative bodies and institute a Wealth Distribution Program whereby state oil revenues would be distributed to citizens on a monthly basis for them to administer personally, in cooperation, and via local committees. Citing popular criticism of government performance in a long, wide ranging speech, [he] repeatedly stated that the traditional state would soon be “dead” in Libya and that direct rule by citizens would be accomplished through the distribution of oil revenues. (39)

Perhaps most important as regards Libyan people’s well-being and their freedom from debt, Libya had:

•A Central Bank that was 100% owned and controlled by its Jamahiriya government and that observed State and Islamic law by offering interest-free loans to its people

•144 tons of gold.

Source:

https://www.puppetgov.com/2011/11/09/occupy-together-movement-grows-stop-bankers-world-war-iii-3

Filed Under: Imperialism, Income Inequality, Libya, Media, Military, Occupy, Propaganda, Symbolism, Tyranny, USA, Weapons

Class Segregation: Rich Hunker Down in Wealthy Enclaves — Leaving the Rest of America’s Neighborhoods to Deteriorate

November 29, 2011 By 1 Comment

America’s rich haven’t just become richer, according to a new study. They’ve become far more likely to live among their own kind.

Just 40 years ago, most Americans rubbed elbows with neighbors from a fairly wide cross-section of income levels. But today’s rich, Census data show, are keeping everyone else at arm’s length — and more.

How many neighborhoods have you ever seen with oodles of rich residents — and poor schools? Or, vice versa, how many neighborhoods do you know with lots of poor people and richly appointed schools?Silly questions. We all know the answers. Kids in affluent neighborhoods don’t go to schools with leaky roofs, tattered textbooks, and uncertified teachers. Kids in poor neighborhoods do. And what goes for schools, of course, goes for every other public service as well — from parks and libraries to road repair and garbage pick-up. You’re going to be much better off, as a person of modest means, if some of your neighbors have more substantial means.

Back in 1970, the vast majority of Americans lived in neighborhoods that did mix people of substantial and modest means. No more. In fact, says a new study just released by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University, the share of Americans living amid intense income segregation has more than doubled.America’s rich haven’t just become richer, show the study data from Stanford University sociologists Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. They’ve become far more likely to live among their own kind. The same for the poor.Reardon and Bischoff have gone through Census data from all the U.S. metro areas with populations over 500,000. They define as “affluent” those neighborhoods where most families have incomes that run at least 50 percent over the typical family income of the entire metro area.

Poor neighborhoods have most families making less than two-thirds the metro median income.

In 2007, in the nation’s most typical metro areas, neighborhoods that rated as affluent in the Stanford research schema had over half their families making over $112,500. Poor neighborhoods had over half their families making under $50,000.Nearly one out of three families in America’s large metropolitan areas, the Stanford analysts found, spent 2007 in either a severely segregated rich or a severely segregated poor neighborhood.In 1970, by contrast, only one in seven American families lived in neighborhoods that rated as segregated rich or poor.In that same year, 65 percent of Americans lived in neighborhoods where over half the resident families rated as middle income. By 2007, that share of Americans living in middle-class neighborhoods had dropped to 44 percent.

The isolation of America’s rich, the authors of this new income segregation study note, is actually getting more intense than the isolation of the poor. And that isolation, they point out, deeply matters.“The increasing concentration of income and wealth in a small number of neighborhoods,” the two authors note, “results in greater disadvantages for the remaining neighborhoods where low- and middle-income families live.”New Jersey hosts some of the nation’s most income-segregated areas, and this segregation, Newark Star-Ledger commentator Tom Moran observed last week, is taking an ever heavier toll on our political psyche.Growing income segregation, explains Moran, “means people of different means don’t rub elbows as much, their kids don’t play together as much, the parents don’t chat over the back yard fence.

In this segregated environment, people know less and less about people not like themselves. They more easily embrace stereotypes. Politicians from neighborhoods where rich people only interact with other rich people will gravitate more glibly to mean-spirited austerity budget cutbacks.These pols don’t see the threats austerity poses to the well-being of real people with real needs. They see instead the “lazy” poor.This phenomenon has been swirling around the U.S. political scene ever since modern American inequality first began skyrocketing in the 1980s. In 1991, Robert Reich, soon to become the U.S. secretary of labor, gave the phenomenon a label: the “secession of the successful.”America’s top earners, Reich would note, “feel increasingly justified in paying only what is necessary to insure that everyone in their community is sufficiently well educated and has access to the public services they need to succeed.”The nation’s “stark political challenge in the decades ahead,” Reich added back in 1991, will be trying to reaffirm that we remain “a society whose members have abiding obligations to one another.”

We are, the new Stanford data tell us, most definitely losing that challenge.

Source:

https://www.alternet.org/economy/153213/class_segregation:_rich_hunker_down_in_wealthy_enclaves_-_leaving_the_rest_of_america’s_neighborhoods_to_deteriorate

Filed Under: Capitalism, Financial Crisis, Housing, Income Inequality, Money, USA Tagged With: , ,
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