The Rich Are Making the Poor Poorer

By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation.

A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass. A great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor.

Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a "Marxist." If only. I've never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem. But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.

As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent." Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."

But the moderate-to-conservative economic thinkers who long refused to think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out by Roger Lowenstein in an essay in the same issue of the New York Times magazine that features Larry Summers' sobered mood.

Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?

(entire article @ link below)

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/53962/

There are only two kinds of people you need to worry about. The Greedy and the Needy. And the Greedy create the needy.

"he that has the gold, makes all the rules."

a little ghetto philosophy for you this fine morning.

But that's probably because it's such a close social network.

and it drives managers of businesses nuts. People job hop from shitty job to shitty job. People move in on a $99 move-in special and then move out, and into another $99 move-in special. Sell crack to rich kids from the suburbs, it goes on...

In a very high transient tourist area, if you don't like an arrogant gringo, you just hang with your friends and ignore him, instead of wait on him. The supervisors will back you up, because they're probably in the circle of friends socializing with you.

Or, if you sell your property to a gringo, you add an attachment that says that your family is allowed to have a squatter field on the property and that he can only hire from that family for help in caring for the land.

I laugh each time my brother-in-law, the ex-Wal Mart manager, comes back with airs of superiority about how backward "my" country is in "getting it" when it comes to capitalist ventures. I'm the one who had to tell him that those waiters that didn't serve him that night, did it because they didn't like him, not because they didn't see the $4.00 tip they missed.

have drank my spit in restaurants.

Nice cool, water. Yeah, right sucka!

For the most part, I think the poor in America are very intimidated when it comes to playing these comeback tricks on the rich. Mostly, I think they take things out on other races in their own social class. If they can't make it up the ladder, they'll make sure noone else can either.

and trust me, the gall, arrogance and pomposity of the behavior from those who got it made it well earned.

It was a couple of out literally thousands who earned it. If we had been in the street and they had treated me that way, as they say in my neighborhood, "I'da knocked a mothafucka out!"

I'm not sure what changed. Maybe the separation between the poor and rich neighborhoods got wider.

I think the rich just geographically separate themselves from the poor for the most part.

Rich people from around here are terrified to even step foot in the inner-city (Dayton). I'll walk or ride anywhere. I ain't got not beef with noone, and amazingly, always get treated well (it's called respecting people - they always give it back twofold or more).

I use to walk passed the bad asses in my neighborhood and was always left alone. I was a bit of a tomboy and showed no fear. My girl friend, however, who was white and prissy always trembled when she walked passed them. I think one of them even finally tried to corner her at school.

I don't fully understand what set them off, but I do know that the few times I had a conversation with the pre-gangstas, they always broke their tough guy look and almost came across like altar boys. I'm not saying that they wouldn't take advantage of a crime of opportunity, I'm just saying that there was a part of them that would have remained civil, if their world would have allowed it. Who knows what horrors they had to deal with at home, and once they attracted the attention of the authorities, in my neighborhood, their fate was sealed.

But that the rich make the rules in order to become predators upon the poor/middle class. For example they make student loan policies which give them huge returns but leave the middle class student indentured for most of his life.

:donut:

the world? I mean, you can't just create money; it has to be based on something.

If this is true than no wonder the poor get poor and the middle class get poor when the top 1% decides they need a 7 figure bonus for running a company that makes a marginal profit.

My brother is a blue collar Delphi employee. Over the past few years many of their top executives have been investigated for a variety of "accounting problems." These executives all got richer while laying off thousands and steering the company into bankruptcy.

Meanwhile blaming all the corporate misfortunes on their unionized workers.

The Delphi plant near my home now stand mostly empty and rotting. The workers who remain were mostly hired as contract employees who enjoy very few so-called union protections. One of them pulled her car over to the side of the road and crawled under a stopped train for fear of getting fired for being late getting back from her lunch hour. Another relative who was hired as a contract worker stated that her supervisor was prone to openly gloating aloud how any one of them could be shown the door at any minute for any reason or no reason at all.

My brother recently told me that currently, if someone gets injured on the job, they are written up. If they get injured a second time, they are suspended for 3 days without pay. He and others now keep first aid supplies in their tool benches and hope that any injuries they get will be small enough to hide the blood and treat themselves.

At one time you couldn't have found a more dedicated or devoted worker than my brother. The company adopted many of his suggestions for increasing efficiency, some of which saved them millions of dollars.

At one time people like him were the backbone of a solid middle class. Now, witnessing such spectacles as watching his fellow workers have to pack up an entire assembly line to be shipped to Mexico, facing the probable imminent closure of the factory, he could give a shit.

As a young European immigrant our grandfather moved to Flint for the usual reasons. When he applied for a factory job, he was taken out to the factory floor where a man, who appeared to be in his early 60s, was lifting and stacking heavy engine parts. My grandfather was asked, "can you lift these?" He demonstrated that he could, whereupon the older man was told he no longer had a job and to vacate the premises.

Just like that.

My grandfather was always haunted by the image of the older worker being summarily dismissed. A few years later he participated in the sit-down strikes which were supposed to make sure that kind of scenario and other abuses could never happen again.

One good thing though -- this brother of mine is now a former rightwinger.
Last time politics came up he disavowed both political parties, saying only that both were right about some things and wrong about other things.

vote people like Bush into office because "he's a good christian", they deserve everything they get. Sorry if it is harsh, but that is my opinion. People will not learn to not vote against their own personal interests until they suffer true consequences for their decisions.