Class Warfare?
The subject phrase here is a no-no in our public discourse, but 'class warfare' is precisely what we are seeing in the rapid escalation in the growing gaps in wealth and income in this country between the bulk of us -- 80% or more struggling to make it -- and the CEOs granting themselves huge outlays of funds, shaping corporate policies to maximize their returns or stock benefits rather than socially beneficial products and services. One does not need a Paul Krugman article -- almost any of them now in the NY Times -- to follow this outrage into area after area -- student tuitions and loan burdens, cuts in medical benefits and destruction of pension systems, sabotage of all sorts of social support systems ranging from Medicaid, heating and housing supports -- even to food stamps! Rip off is the name of the game, as one corporate scandal after another erupts. And we are persuading an entire generation coming along that the only way to make it is to cheat the system, as they watch others doing the same.
I happened to have done my dissertation in philosophy of law under one of our most noted scholars, Ernest Nagel, back in the early 1960s. My subject was property theory -- rights and duties -- which got me into various economic and resource allocation areas of that time. What I discovered then and what is true now is that those who control the political system divide the resources as they will. Work -- as even our founding father, Ben Franklin, acknowledged -- has little to do with economic success. One needs to know the rules of the game to make it big time. Those who do not are most likely to fall by the wayside -- how many are going to win the big lottery in comparison with those fiddling stock prices and/or real estate values?
Woe to those who fall by the wayside now! Marx suggested that when a sufficiently small number of capitalists owned nearly all of the wealth, a revolution would be inevitable.
See Krugman's words of today ("Graduates Versus Oligarchs") on this subject excerpted from today's column:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/opinion/27krugman.html?th&emc=th
(unfortunately not accessible by non subscribers to the Times)
"That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
"I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.
"The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
"So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
"A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.
"But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.
"Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year."
..................................
If Marx is not your man, try Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: "Property is theft!" Now we may need to add the qualifier that our corporate leaders are increasingly the thieves?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
I happened to have done my dissertation in philosophy of law under one of our most noted scholars, Ernest Nagel, back in the early 1960s. My subject was property theory -- rights and duties -- which got me into various economic and resource allocation areas of that time. What I discovered then and what is true now is that those who control the political system divide the resources as they will. Work -- as even our founding father, Ben Franklin, acknowledged -- has little to do with economic success. One needs to know the rules of the game to make it big time. Those who do not are most likely to fall by the wayside -- how many are going to win the big lottery in comparison with those fiddling stock prices and/or real estate values?
Woe to those who fall by the wayside now! Marx suggested that when a sufficiently small number of capitalists owned nearly all of the wealth, a revolution would be inevitable.
See Krugman's words of today ("Graduates Versus Oligarchs") on this subject excerpted from today's column:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/opinion/27krugman.html?th&emc=th
(unfortunately not accessible by non subscribers to the Times)
"That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
"I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.
"The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
"So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
"A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.
"But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.
"Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year."
..................................
If Marx is not your man, try Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: "Property is theft!" Now we may need to add the qualifier that our corporate leaders are increasingly the thieves?
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort
to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy)
--
Ed Kent 718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net
posted by Ed Kent at 10:31 AM
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