| OT - A Comment from Ralph Nader - America as Plutocracy [message #224469] |
Fr, 17 Februar 2006 12:01 |
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Here’s a headline from Tuesday’s New York Times:
U.S. Royalty Plan To Give Windfall to Oil Companies, $7 Billion Over
Five Years
And now, guess which topic will get more attention from the mainstream
media:
Dick Cheney’s birdshot.
Or
Exxon’s illegitimate, staggering profits?
You got it.
The growing divide between rich and poor is the 900-pound gorilla in the
room.
On the whole, the mainstream media ignores it, because increasingly, the
media executives and editors are part of the ruling elite.
The leading Democrats ignore it for the same reason.
That leaves us.
We raised it during the 2004 campaign because, as former Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis put it:
"We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have
democracy, but we cannot have both."
Did you know?
Top executives now make more in a day than the average worker makes in a
year.
Plutocracy: 1. The rule or power of wealth or the wealthy; 2. A
government or state in which the wealthy class rules. 3. A class for
group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.
(Webster's Unabridged Dictionary)
Of the world's 100 largest economies, 47 are nations, and 53 are
corporations.
Seventy-five percent of major corporations hire a union-busting firm to
stop employees from forming a union.
Stretch limousines are longer, yet more people are homeless.
Thirty zip codes in America have become fabulously wealthy.
Meanwhile, whole urban and rural communities are languishing in poverty,
crumbling infrastructure, growing economic insecurity and fear.
"Inherited economic power is as inconsistent with the ideals of this
generation as inherited political power was inconsistent with the ideals
of the generation which established our government."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
Born on home plate -- Forty-two percent of those listed have inherited
sufficient wealth to rank among the Forbes 400.
[Economic Apartheid in America]
In 1999, the 225 richest had a combined wealth of $1 trillion. That's
equal to the combined annual income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest
people.
The richest 10 percent of the world's population receives 49.6 percent of
the total world income.
The bottom 60 percent receives 13.9 percent of the world's income.
The wealth of the world's three most well-to-do individuals now exceeds
the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries.
Half of the world's population of six billion live on less than $2 a day,
while 1.3 billion get by on less than $1 a day.
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