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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!" Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!" ShareNew 0 by HeartlandLiberal Mon Nov 08, 2010 at 03:48:41 AM PST This is a long and complex speech by Moyers. On the one hand, it is rewarding, in that it lays out the issues in such crystal clarity. On the other hand, it is pretty darned depressing, because it lays out the issues with such brutal clarity. Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!" Excerpts below the fold. * HeartlandLiberal's diary :: :: * This is a long speech by Moyers, but I urge you to read it. It is depressing, but it puts so much into context about what has gone wrong in this nation in the past 30 years in the conduct of our economy, and its devastating effect on working Americans. Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series. But the speech goes far beyond a discussion of journalism. Moyers goes into depth and detail, outlining the redistribution of wealth that has occurred in this nation, and the tragic outsourcing of jobs and moving of manufacturing out of America. As a result, we have an America where in the last election hidden and undisclosed money was paid out like this: The Federal Election Commission says that two years ago 97% of groups paying for election ads disclosed the names of their donors. This year it’s only 32%. He deals in facts, like this: From 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too – from $17,719 to $30,941. That’s a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars. But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years. That’s wage repression. And profits are made by short term acts that increase the amount on hand and flow of cash, not on infrastructure and the underlying soundness of the job and manufacturing structure. That’s how financial capitalism works today: Conserving cash rather than bolstering hiring and production; investing in their own shares to prop up their share prices and make their stock more attractive to Wall Street. To hell with everyone else. Hear the chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Ethan Harris, who told the Times: "There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy. Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits." Or the chief economist for Credit Suisse in New York, Neal Soss: As companies have wrung more savings out of their work forces, causing wages and salaries barely to budge from recession lows, "profits have staged a vigorous recovery, jumping 40 percent between late 2008 and the first quarter of 2010." Just this morning the New York Times reports that the private equity business is roaring back: "While it remains difficult to get a mortgage to buy a home or to get a loan to fund a small business, yield-starved investors are creating a robust market for corporate bonds and loans." If this were a functioning democracy, our financial institutions would be helping everyday Americans and businesses get the mortgages and loans – the capital – they need to keep going; they’re not, even as the financiers are reaping robust awards. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But he’s run off with all the toys. The tragedy is, this house of cards will eventually collapses, but not until after it has destroyed the middle class and the American dream of a decent wage, a home that is owned, and a promise of security into old age. That we are at a defining moment in our history in this regard is clear, when you see even Nicolas Kristoff writing as he did recently. But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse. The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent. ... The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings. ... So in this postelection landscape, let’s not aggravate income gaps that already would make a Latin American caudillo proud. To me, we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant. Our Banana Republic It seems it is finally becoming clear to more and more that this issue of the income inequality is the one issue underlying much that has gone wrong, and threatens to go even more wrong, with our society. In 1915, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin named Willford I. King published The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. The United States was displacing Great Britain as the world's wealthiest nation, but detailed information about its economy was not yet readily available; the federal government wouldn't start collecting such data in any systematic way until the 1930s. One of King's purposes was to reassure the public that all Americans were sharing in the country's newfound wealth. King was somewhat troubled to find that the richest 1 percent possessed about 15 percent of the nation's income. (A more authoritative subsequent calculation puts the figure slightly higher, at about 18 percent.) ... That was when the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation's income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income. What caused this to happen? ... It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is," Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth—the "seven fat years" and the " long boom." Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads. The United States of Inequality. Introducing the Great Divergence
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#1. To: tom007 (#0)
I refuse to read anything written by or about a one time lap dog of Lyndon Johnson.
#2. To: Cynicom, tom007, 4 (#1)
What is the dollar amount necessary to be included in the top one percent? Does anyone know? Or is this a number like the true cost of zero's trip?
Well, Moyers ought to know what's going on as he was Director of the CFR from 1967-1974.
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