Home » Posts tagged 'inequality' (Page 7)

Tag Archives: inequality

The resistance will take the form of subverting the signifiers of wealth that exemplify the few who have benefited so greatly while everyone else lost ground.

It’s time to trade in your Jag, Mercedes, BMW (and maybe your Prius, Volvo, Lexus, etc.) before the Days of Rage start. As I’ve explained before ( As the “Prosperity” Tide Recedes, the Ugly Reality of Wealth Inequality Is Exposed), the rage of the masses who have been losing ground while the Financier Oligarchs, the New Nobility and the technocrat class reap immense gains for decades has been suppressed by the dream that they too could join the Upper Caste.

But once the realistic odds of that happening (low) sink in, the Days of Rage will begin. For those still who don’t know the facts of rising inequality, here’s what you need to know.

The top 1% skim 23% of all income:

While the top 5% has enjoyed substantial income gains over the past 45 years, adjusted for inflation, the bottom 90% have lost ground:

The last time there was mass unrest in America was the civil rights/Vietnam War era. The power of the civil rights movement arose from the core injustice of segregation (separate and unequal) and institutionalized racism/bias. This institutionalized injustice drew people from all classes and ethnicities into the streets, where they were promptly beaten by police.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As the “Prosperity” Tide Recedes, the Ugly Reality of Wealth Inequality Is Exposed

September 18, 2015

As the “Prosperity” Tide Recedes, the Ugly Reality of Wealth Inequality Is Exposed

This chart of median household income illustrates why so many of us feel poorer–we are poorer in terms of the purchasing power of our income.

A rising tide raises all boats, from rowboats to yachts–this is the narrative of “prosperity.”

A rising tide is also the political cover for rising inequality: if the guy in the rowboat makes $100 more a month, he feels like he’s participating in the prosperity.

Meanwhile, the guy in the speedboat is making $1,000 more a month and the guy in the yacht is making $1 million more a month.

But this doesn’t bother the guy in the rowboat, for two reasons:

1. He thinks of himself as a guy who is currently in a rowboat on his way to buying a speedboat

2. Studies have found that our sense of wealth and “falling behind” is not defined by our actual increases in income or wealth, but by how we’re doing relative to our peer group. If everyone else in rowboats is making $200 more a month in the rising tide of prosperity, the guy making only $100 more feels like he’s falling behind–even if his absolute income and wealth is rising.

Conversely, if his peers are all suffering declines in income while his income is holding steady, he feels like he’s doing pretty well for himself, even though his income is stagnant.

The fact that the wealthy are gaining far more in “prosperity” in both absolute and relative terms doesn’t bother him as long as he’s doing as well or better as his peers and feels he has a chance to eventually move up from a rowboat to a speedboat.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

August 26, 2015

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

A documentary about simple living, permaculture, and local economy as a response to global crises.

The dominant mode of global development today seeks to universalise high-consumption consumer lifestyles, but this has produced perverse inequalities of wealth and – to an extent that is no longer possible to ignore – is environmentally catastrophic. We are called on to take shorter showers, recycle, buy ‘green’ products, and turn the lights off when we leave the room, but these measures are grossly inadequate. We need more fundamental change – personally, culturally, and structurally.

The purpose of the documentary is to envision a way of life that positively responds to the overlapping global crises of climate change, peak oil, economic collapse, and consumerism. Genuine progress today means building a new, more resilient world based on permaculture, simple living, renewable energy, and localised economies.Most of all, we need to reimagine the good life beyond consumer culture and begin building a world that supports a simpler way of life. This does not mean hardship or deprivation. It means focusing on having enough, for everyone, forever.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Property Rights, Inequality and Commons

June 20, 2015

Property Rights, Inequality and Commons

I recently spoke at a conference, “Property and Inequality in the 21st Century,” hosted by The Common Core of European Private Law, an annual gathering of legal scholars, mostly from Europe. They had asked me how the commons might be a force for reducing inequality. Below are my remarks, “The Commons as a Tool for Sharing the Wealth.” The conference was held at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, on June 12-13, 2015.

Thank you for inviting me to speak today about the relationship between property law and inequality – a topic that receives far too little attention. This should not be surprising. Now that free-market ideology has become the default worldview and political consensus around the world, private property is seen as synonymous with freedom, economic growth and human progress.

Oh yes, there is this nasty side issue known as inequality. Malcontents like the Occupy movement and renegade economists like Thomas Pikketty have brought this problem to the fore after years of neglect. Their success has been quite an achievement because for years the very existence of inequality has been portrayed as an accident, an aberration, a mysterious and shadowy guest at the grand banquet of human progress.

I wish to argue that hunger, poverty, inadequate education and medical care, and assaults on human dignity and human rights, are not bugs in the system. They arefeatures. Indeed, market ideologues often argue that such deprivations are a necessary incentive to human enterprise and economic growth; poverty is supposedly needed to spur people to escape through the work ethic and entrepreneurialism.

Property rights lie at the heart of this dynamic because they are a vital tool for defining and patrolling the boundaries of private wealth, and for justifying the inevitably unequal outcomes. So it’s important that we focus on the role of property rights in producing social inequality – without ignoring the many other forces, including social practice, culture and politics, that also play important roles.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oops! Philly Fed Admits QE widens inequality

June 11, 2015

Oops! Philly Fed Admits QE widens inequality

Once again, the Federal Reserve proves that it’s the last one to know everything that we knew already. Today’s stunning announcement: The Philadelphia Fed admits they (“may have”) made the wealthy wealthier and Main Street poorer.

Oops. Sorry America.

The Philly Fed insists that “redistributing wealth” to the wealthy isn’t the main idea, but just a potential side effect of stimulus that they can’t do much about.

“Monetary policy currently implemented by the Federal Reserve and other major central banks is not intended to benefit one segment of the population at the expense of another by redistributing income and wealth,” …

“However, it is probably impossible to avoid the redistributive consequences of monetary policy”.

We’re shocked. Shocked, we tell you. It turns out that handing out free money, buying worthless assets at face value and allowing a small cabal of private banks the sole right to access your magic free-money window, “may” have given some financial advantages to “one segment of the population”. But that’s just a side effect of saving the “economy”.

Of course, it’s not just the bankers. The 1% also happen to hold vastly more financial assets than the lower 99% — so they may directly benefit from financial asset-inflating monetary policy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity

June 9, 2015

Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity

With over 93 million unemployed working age adults in America and the economy beginning to go negative again, if you are fortunate enough to have a job it may not last much longer. It is easy to keep a positive attitude about the economy when you get a paycheck every week but life after the paychecks stop will change your outlook a great deal. That is the reality that is about to overtake the working class in the coming months.

The primary mechanism that has tipped the economy onto a downhill trajectory is the route that circulating money has taken in the past few decades. In the past much of the money was kept in circulation in the local economy resulting in the creation of many local jobs. With the new corporate model, most of the profit is siphoned out of the local economy and goes to wall street profiteers. This has resulted in the destruction of many local jobs while the few at the top of the wealth pyramid get richer much faster as time goes on.

The only way a nation can maintain a middle class is to keep money circulating in the local arena. The lack of this local circulation has finally caught up to the middle class and it has begun to shrink at an alarming rate. If the corporate model plays out to the end, it will mean the total destruction of the middle class and the beginnings of a two tiered system where there are a few very wealthy persons lording over a very large poverty stricken majority. That is where we are heading.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Neo-feudal USA: The death of democracy — Gerald Celente

May 28, 2015

Neo-feudal USA: The death of democracy — Gerald Celente

Neither a conspiracy nor conjecture: By every quantitative measure, 21st century America has degenerated from being the beacon of democracy to a neo-feudal state.  From crime and punishment to the vast wealth and income-inequality gap, the rules are different for the political elite and economic nobility than they are for the common man bound to live by the letter of the law and brought to justice for minor infractions — all while political insiders, corporate charlatans and financial bandits are left free to rape, pillage and plunder.

What should have been headline news and met with outrage last Wednesday barely made the front page of newspapers or the top of broadcast news. Deemed not as important as the murder of a wealthy family who lived near Vice President Biden, or the motorcycle gang war that left nine dead, five of the world’s largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, pleaded guilty to felony charges for rigging the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange markets.

Regardless of “brazenly illegal behavior” on a “massive scale,” the trend is clear: Despite a long track record of “breathtaking flagrancy” of stealing billions, the government, in case after case, gently hits banks with a slap-on-the-wrist fine — and not one top bankster is sent to jail.  It’s the same with whistleblowers and those who leak government information — more of whom the Obama Administration has sent to prison that all presidents combined. And when Washington insider, former general and CIA Director David Petraeus is caught giving his mistress classified material for her book, a small fine and no prison time result.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Crazy-Making Economy’s Endgame: Festering Frustration Seeking an Outlet

May 23, 2015

Our Crazy-Making Economy’s Endgame: Festering Frustration Seeking an Outlet

The consequence of policies that exacerbate injustice, inequality and double-bind demands is a madness that will find a social and economic outlet somewhere, sometime.

We all know crazy-makers: people who make contradictory claims about reality, who say one thing and do another, who change their stories constantly to justify their own pursuit of self-interest, who demand the impossible of others while giving themselves unlimited excuses.

When they can’t change reality to suit their purposes, they change their accounts of reality, and stick with the revised stories even when they are contradictory.

This describes the entire financial structure of the U.S.: crazy-making.

We all know the U.S. economy is diseased, and the Powers That Be are attempting to mask the sickness with contradictory accounts of reality.

To get ahead, you need a 4-year college diploma. But oops, the student debt you’ll need to shoulder acts as a brake on getting ahead. And it turns out many of those who became debt-serfs to get a diploma actually end up in jobs that don’t require a college education.

One reality–soaring student loan debt and diminishing value of the product, a college diploma–and two contradictory stories.

Systems theorist/anthropologist Gregory Bateson developed (with others) the concept of double bind, a psychological and social conflict in which contradictory demands generate a form of schizophrenia:

Unlike the usual no-win situation, the subject has difficulty in defining the exact nature of the paradoxical situation in which he or she is caught. The contradiction may be unexpressed in its immediate context and therefore invisible to external observers, only becoming evident when a prior communication is considered.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Economic inequality: 10 reasons why we can’t beat it

May 22, 2015

Economic inequality: 10 reasons why we can’t beat it

Even the OECD says inequality is bad. But making it go away is much tougher

It almost feels like an old story. Ever since the economy crashed in 2008 a growing chorus of voices has warned that inequality was wiping out the middle class and damaging society.

This week the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the rich countries` think-tank, made headlines for declaring that growing inequality is not only bad for social cohesion, but is actually cutting points off economic growth.

If we all agree, why is it such an intractable problem? The story is complex, but here are just a few reasons why inequality is so hard to fix.

1. Equality where?

While inequality within rich countries has been getting worse, many point out that global inequality has been shrinking.

Countries like the U.S. and Canada used to consume a majority of the world’s wealth. As the rich and middle class in places like China and India get a bigger piece of the action, some argue that morally, increasing global equality outweighs a relative decline in wealth by some people in the rich world.

2. Free trade and globalization

The push to create open trade between countries means that the low- and unskilled workers of rich countries are increasingly competing directly with workers in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and India. Even within North America, industrial jobs often move to where wages are lowest, meaning middle class industrial jobs disappear.

3. Automation

Even in developing countries, manufacturers are replacing jobs withrobots and automation. Here in North America, computerized processes are already taking jobs done by factory workers, clerical workers and even professionals as clever software learns to search legal titles and write simple news stories.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“We Reached The Tipping Point”: Income Inequality Is Highest Since Records Began

May 21, 2015

“We Reached The Tipping Point”: Income Inequality Is Highest Since Records Began

While soaring stock prices do nothing to boost the economy, because as 7 years of hard facts have shown, the only thing “trickle down” QE has done is forced economists to jump the shark and demand not one but two seasonal adjustments to goal seek collapsing economic data, the S&P hitting new all time highs on a daily basis has certainly succeeded in one thing: pushing inequality around the globe, and especially in the US, to new record highs.

And earlier today the latest OECD report confirmed just that, when it reported that gap between the rich and poor in most of the world’s advanced economies is at record levels.

In most of the 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development the income gap is at its highest level in three decades, with the richest 10 percent of the population earning 9.6 times the income of the poorest 10 percent.

In the 1980s this ratio stood at 7 to 1, the OECD said in a report.

The wealth gap is even larger, with the top 1 percent owning 18 percent and the 40 percent only 3 percent of household wealth in 2012.

“We have reached a tipping point. Inequality in OECD countries is at its highest since records began,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria.

Keep in mind this only looks at earnings, which have actually slowed down in recent years, and ignores the massive imbalance in accumulated assets: assets which almost exclusively are controlled by the top 10%. As for the bottom 10%, 50% and even 90%? Well they have “liabilities.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seven Things You Need to Know About Inequality

May 19, 2015

Seven Things You Need to Know About Inequality

The gap between rich and poor is growing, but there are solutions, says The Tyee’s author of ‘A Better Place on Earth.

In recent weeks I’ve had the chance to talk at launches in Victoria and Vancouver about economic inequality and my bestselling book A Better Place on Earth: The Search for Fairness in Super Unequal British Columbia.

There’s been attention from Global News, the Vancouver Sun, CBC radio, CKNW and other media outlets. B.C. Booklook said I should be gagged for spreading “malicious truths.”

Following are seven key facts I think you should know about the growing gap between rich and poor in B.C. and elsewhere:

1. Inequality has been rising for three decades: Anyone in a city in British Columbia is well aware that while some people have wealth counted in the billions of dollars, others sleep in doorways and eat from food banks. What we know from experience is borne out by statistics, which show that inequality has grown in Canada, like in much of the economically developed world, since the 1980s. In B.C. the gap has grown even faster, with inequality spiking from below the Canadian average to well above it in the early 2000s. The top 10 per cent now hold 56.2 per cent of the wealth in the province, the biggest share anywhere in Canada.

2. High inequality has many consequences: Research from around the world shows that greater inequality is associated with all kinds of negatives, including worse health outcomes, poorer education, more teen pregnancy, greater substance abuse, higher rates of mental illness and higher levels of incarceration. It is also linked to reduced opportunity, where children are likely to be stuck in the same income bracket as their parents. Inequality makes economies weaker, since many people in the bottom and middle tiers lack buying power. It is frequently cited by economists as a key reason why the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis has been so lacklustre. We’re all affected.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Resentful Rage: Stage-4 of Cancerous Inequality

May 9, 2015

Resentful Rage: Stage-4 of Cancerous Inequality

White America’s ugliest, uncompassionate, punitive face came to life in 1994 politics as Bill Clinton signed the incommensurable largest crime bill Congress had ever legislated: the Violent Crime Control Act; now, in retrospect, perhaps the most anti human rights legislation in modern times, not just in the US but throughout the civilized world.

Clinton reasoned signing this bill as remedy to his view that gangs and drugs had taken over the streets of America and undermined its schools. But more than Clinton’s flawed reasoning; it has been rationalized politics which has cost the nation, and continues to cost, hundreds of billions of dollars by incarcerating a third of the male black population in their prime, productive years; that, while giving police a stronger arm, inviting all too often an aggressive conduct from people in uniform already predisposed to exceed of their own accord the force required in exercising their honorable mission to protect and serve us all.

America’s uniquely irrational behavior among civilized nations, whether or not a product of our diverse multi-racial society, has not served the country well during the past two decades adding the social problems created by racial inequality to an ever-widening economic inequality among Americans that Ronald Reagan legated to us.

And as social inequality merges with economic inequality, a synergy of resentful rage is being created in cities and communities largely populated by people of color. Enter the city of Baltimore with a two-thirds black population, America’s problem-du-jour.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Resilience is The New Black

May 8, 2015

Resilience is The New Black

This is another essay from our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III in New Zealand. Nelson is a certified expert in everything to do with resilience, especially how to build a home and a community designed to withstand disasters, be they natural or man-made, an earthquake or Baltimore. Aware that he may rub quite a few people the wrong way, he explains here why he has shifted from seeing what he does in the context of sustainability, to that of resilience. There’s something profoundly dark in that shift, but it’s not all bad.

Nelson Lebo III: Sustainability is so 2007. Those were the heady days before the Global Financial Crisis, before $2-plus/litre petrol here in New Zealand, before the failed Copenhagen Climate Summit, before the Christchurch earthquakes, before the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)…the list continues.

Since 2008, informed conversations on the economy, the environment, and energy have shifted from ‘sustainability’ to ‘resilience’. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this shift, but I’ll focus on just two: undeniable trends and a loss of faith. Let me explain.

Since 2008, most of the pre-existing trends in income inequality, extreme weather events and energy price volatility have ramped up. Sustainability is about halting and reversing these trends, but there is essentially no evidence of that type of progress, and in fact the data shows the opposite.

Plenty of quantitative data exists for the last seven years to document these accelerated trends, the most obvious is the continually widening gap between rich and poor everyone else. The second wave of commentary on the Baltimore riots (after the superficiality of the mainstream media) has been about the lack of economic activity and opportunity in many of the largely African-American neighbourhoods.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

High Levels of Youth Unemployment – and Runaway Inequality – Cause Riots

April 30, 2015

High Levels of Youth Unemployment – and Runaway Inequality – Cause Riots

Recipe For Disaster

We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.

The great American historian Will Grant wrote in 1969:

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

A 2011 study this month by economists Hans-Joachim Voth and Jacopo Ponticelli shows that – from 1919 to the present – austerity has increased the risk of violence and instability.

Peter Turchin (professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and an adjunct professor in the departments of Anthropology and Mathematics at the University of Connecticut) pointed out in 2013 that inequality is cyclical, skyrocketing until – periodically – revolution forces concessions from those who have grabbed all the wealth.

Indeed, leading institutions and economists all over world warn that runaway inequality could cause violence and unrest.

For those who work for a living, the level of inequality in America today is arguably the highest in world history.

A high level of youth unemployment is also a leading cause of riots. As we noted in 2011:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Modern-Day Social Engineers and Inequality

April 12, 2015

Modern-Day Social Engineers and Inequality

Is Inequality a Bad Thing?

We couldn’t believe what we were seeing when coming across the following headline at Reuters recently: “Fed’s Yellen says research needed to understand inequality issue”. Seriously? Maybe we can help the good chairwoman out a bit. First of all, human beings are already born unequal. With that we not only mean that they are born in different social strata, but that they are usually born with unequal talents, brains, physique, and so forth.

Fed chair Janet Yellen – she doesn’t look concerned here, but of course we don’t want her to constantly wear a frown. Anyway, inequality is on her mind she says.

Photo credit: AP

In that sense, inequality is not an “issue”, but simply a fact of life. Ms. Yellen refers of course specifically to inequality in incomes and wealth. This has been an “issue” for etatistes of all stripes for a very long time. However, one must ask: why should it be an issue, if not for envy? Socialism thrives on envy. Its message to its supporters is basically: your fellow men don’t deserve to be wealthier than you are. Therefore, their wealth should be taken from them by force, and distributed “justly”. In actual practice, we usually find that the political representatives of socialism are enjoying capitalist luxuries which will forever remain out of reach for most members of their target audience.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: inequality

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

1. Equality where?

2. Free trade and globalization

3. Automation

Is Inequality a Bad Thing?

Post navigation

Latest Posts