"Why One of the Richest Countries on Earth Is So Poor: The Facts that Drive the Sanders Revolt"
"The United States is among the richest countries in all of history. But if you're not a corporate or political elite, you'd never know it.
In the world working people inhabit, our infrastructure is collapsing, our schools are laying off teachers, our drinking water is barely potable, our cities are facing bankruptcy, and our public and private pension funds are nearing collapse. We - consumers, students, and homeowners - are loaded with crushing debt, but our real wages haven't risen since the 1970s.
How can we be so rich and still have such poor services, so much debt and such stagnant incomes?
The answer: runaway inequality - the ever-increasing gap in income and wealth between the super-rich and the rest of us."
snip
"Most Americans believe that the U.S. has the most upward mobility and highest standard of living in the world. We think that the U.S. is the fairest nation on Earth, offering the best prospects for everyday people. (And for anyone who isn't moving up, it's their own fault.)
But the facts in this book will undermine that perspective. While America may have had the most prosperous working class from World War II to 1980, it doesn't anymore. In fact, today the U.S. is the most unequal country in the developed world. We have the most child poverty and homelessness. We have more people in prison than China and Russia. And Americans are less upwardly mobile than most Europeans.
We'll see that our public services don't stack up either. Our health care costs more, covers fewer people and produces worse outcomes. And we are nearly last among developed nations in energy effi¬ciency and overall infrastructure.
No question about it, the top 1 percent never had it so good. But the rest of us are losing sight of the American Dream as runaway inequality accelerates."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/why-the-richest-country-o_b_8316102.html
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These were excerpts from the HuffPo article on the book "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice"
All I can add is AMEN, brother. AMEN. Well, OK, I can add this --- the bottom 40% of Armerican families are suffering. The Top 1% is doing fantastic. People might argue "but the MEDIAN income has risen!", but looking more closely shows more accurately who has benefited and who has been left behind.
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Before Reagan and financialization capitalism was much more about having the freedom to open your own business and be your own boss. That was enough to make a lot of people happy. (Try that today in competition with Walmart. 
) After Reagan and financialization it became largely about greed: serving (wealthy) corporate investors and amassing ever greater fortunes--leading to globalization and closing down thousands of factories employing millions at good wages and moving them to cheap labor markets offshore. The transition to the capitalism of supergreed was a mistake IMO. It's arguable that this transition was implicity racist in that virtually all of those wealthy corporate investors were white while the decent-paying jobs shipped offshore were good options for minorities and the poor who liked working with their hands or could not afford an expensive education.
The downward slide began on 1/20/81 and no one has tried seriously to stop is since. Until Bernie.
Americans are more likely than Europeans to believe that they live in a middle-class society, even though income is really much less equally distributed here than in Europe. I’ve truncated the table to show the comparison between the U.S. and France: the French think they live in a hierarchical pyramid when they are in reality mostly middle-class, Americans are the opposite.
Americans vastly underestimate inequality in their own society – and when asked to choose an ideal wealth distribution, say that they like Sweden.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/20/inequality-delusions/
Krugman posted this in August 2014. "Americans are more likely than Europeans to believe that they live in a middle-class society" though the opposite is true. The French, and perhaps other Europeans, are just the opposite. They think that inequality is terrible in their country when, in fact, it is not.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not
clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
