UK workers wages down four successive years; UL superrich gain 18% 2010-11

[Hannah Bell]

If further proof was required to refute Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion that all in the UK are suffering his government’s austerity measures equally, one need look no further than the latest Sunday Times Rich List.

Times journalist Philip Beresford describes how “Britain’s super rich are making light of the age of austerity, achieving an 18% rise in their collective wealth over the past year”...The economic crash of 2008 initially reduced the incomes and wealth of the super rich, whose limited losses could be noted in the 2009 list. But working in connivance with first the Labour government, which handed over nearly £1 trillion in public funds to the banks, and now the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, it has prospered by shifting the burden of losses onto the backs of working people.

While British workers’ wages are set to slip for four consecutive years, the first time this has happened since the first “Great Depression” of the 1870’s, the wealth of the super rich is going stratospheric. The economic fortunes and share of total wealth held by the British masses and that held by a mere fraction of the top 1 percent are heading in opposite directions.

Heads the financial oligarchy win, tails the masses lose. The financial activities that made them filthy rich caused an economic crash, from which they then benefited still further by driving down wages, cutting workforces and clearing out competition.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/rich-m14.shtml

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[dkf]

2. Yes the stock market has recovered a lot of it's losses.

Fidelity just reported that it's 401ks are at all time highs. Our state employee pension system is also near it's highs. So yes the rich have regained most of what they lost like most people in the stock market.

Let's put it this way...if the rich weren't close to their highs then pensions wouldn't be either which would put state budgets and state workers in even more of a bind.

Celebrate the rise in the stock market. It will allow people to retire and will generate capital gains taxes.