Krugman: Our Invisible Rich

[eridani]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/opinion/paul-krugman-our-invisible-rich.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0

I don’t think the poor are invisible today, even though you sometimes hear assertions that they aren’t really living in poverty — hey, some of them have Xboxes! Instead, these days it’s the rich who are invisible.

But wait — isn’t half our TV programming devoted to breathless portrayal of the real or imagined lifestyles of the rich and fatuous? Yes, but that’s celebrity culture, and it doesn’t mean that the public has a good sense either of who the rich are or of how much money they make. In fact, most Americans have no idea just how unequal our society has become.

The latest piece of evidence to that effect is a survey asking people in various countries how much they thought top executives of major companies make relative to unskilled workers. In the United States the median respondent believed that chief executives make about 30 times as much as their employees, which was roughly true in the 1960s — but since then the gap has soared, so that today chief executives earn something like 300 times as much as ordinary workers.

So Americans have no idea how much the Masters of the Universe are paid, a finding very much in line with evidence that Americans vastly underestimate the concentration of wealth at the top.

[CrispyQ]

1. Here is a great video with fab graphics that show just how bad the inequality is.

Unfortunately, most people will not spend the 6 minutes to watch it.

[Crewleader]

2. Posted on facebook by Robert Reich

Fifty years ago, the Free Speech movement was born at the University of California at Berkeley, where I teach. 1964 was also the year the Civil Rights Act was enacted. The following year came the Voting Rights Act. America still had a long way to go, but seemed committed to enhancing the voices of people who for too long had been silenced by repression in all its forms.

Fast forward: The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom half put together, and the Supreme Court has determined money is speech and corporations are people under the First Amendment. As a result, big money is now engulfing our democracy and drowning out the voices of average Americans. And the Court has also decided the Voting Rights Act no longer constrains many states with long histories of discrimination from erecting new barriers to voting, which they're busily doing. Have we advanced over the last half century?

https://www.facebook.com/RBReich