The inequality that ate American democracy

New York, NY - In July of 1936, Langston Hughes, the great black American poet first published in Esquire some lines that have never been forgotten.

Among them was this: "Let America Be America Again", a salute to the American dream that had, until then, left poorer Americans and minorities behind.

So memorable was his phrasing that, in 2004, John Kerry adopted it as a campaign slogan in his failed bid for the presidency, Not to be outdone, none other than Rick Santorum used a variant on his website - "Fighting to make America America again".

Sadly, the reality of the disappearing dream Hughes was challenging at the height of the depression is still relevant in this age of the Great Recession. According to two French economists, Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Pikettyn, who study inequality worldwide, America is back at Depression levels.

Reports the New York Times, "their work shows that the top earners in the United States have taken a bigger and bigger share of overall income over the last three decades with inequality nearly as acute as it was before the Great Depression."

Financial journalist Max Keiser, a former stockbroker, who now does hard-hitting financial shows on TV says deep inequality has been building for many years but has not been acted on:

...the inequalities in the US have been building up for decades, just recently they've reached really outrageous proportions - but you have to understand also that there's the inequality between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent, but within the 1 per cent there's an inequality between the top 1 per cent of the 1 per cent and the bottom 99 per cent of the top 1 per cent and they're also at each other's throats trying to change laws and pass legislation to make it easier for them to make more money. So it's not really the 1 per cent, it's not there are a millions of people in the 1 per cent - you only need an income of something like $500,000 or $600,000 or $800,000 dollars a year to be in the 1 per cent.

Former Wall Street executive, and, briefly, President Obama's "Car Czar", Steven Rattner, goes even further, writing "New statistics show an ever more startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else, and the desperate need to address this problem."

"Desperate" is not a term that pops up in most writing about the economy.

"Still more astonishing," he adds, "was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich... The bottom 99 per cent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010 after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 per cent whose average income is $1,018,089 has an 11.6 per cent increase in income."

It is a deplorable situation, agrees Shamus Rahman Khan of Columbia University who says, "We're at levels of inequality that we haven't seen since the end of the gilded age. We're about as unequal as we have ever been."

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/201242118210650523.html