We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Economic winners and losers in the US since 2007

To access the source of these graphs from postings by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review Blog, click here and here

Economists love to make charts, but there are two I found today which really portrays what you probably suspected was happening in the US. Since they crashed the economy (2007-2008) with their housing bubble, distorting the economy with accelerated military spending, and gambling with their new, exotic financial instruments, our rich masters in the capitalist ruling class have gotten much richer and the rest of us much poorer. Warren Buffet was absolutely correct when he said even as early as 2006 that "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.” The question I have for my readers in the 99 Percent is how much longer are we going to passively submit to this war on our lives?



Although economists at this website are great at producing such charts, they are rather empty-headed when it comes to interpreting them. It is said that a picture can convey a thousand words, but these graphs suggest a far greater number of words. 

In my ramblings on the world wide web this morning, I found what I believe to be an adequate interpretation of these charts. This is a piece written by Christopher Ketcham written in the autumn of 2010 and published a year later in Orion magazine. It is entitled "The Reign of the One Percenters". I highly recommend it.