Trotterstan
22-06-2004, 05:27
For full article head to http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0406/S00179.htm
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are you better off than you were 25 years ago?
The media doesn’t even ask this question, but if it did here are just a few of things it would discover, much of it easily retrievable from its own clip files:
- “The traditional pension, an employee benefit that was widely available until the early 1980's has been vanishing from the American workplace ever since. More than two-thirds of older households - those headed by people 47 to 64 - had someone earning a pension in 1983. By 2001, fewer than half did” – New York Times
- In the 1980s about two-thirds of corporations included health care benefits with their pensions. Today only about a third do.
- In April 2004, the nation’s trade gap hit a record $48 billion, precisely the sort of thing extreme capitalism, free trade, and globalization was supposed to prevent.
- The top one percent’s share of household wealth had dropped from 1929 to 1981 from 44% to 27%. By 1998 it was back up to 39%.
- “The Congressional Budget Office says the income gap in the United States is now the widest in 75 years. While the richest one percent of the U.S. population saw its financial wealth grow 109 percent from 1983 to 2001, the bottom two-fifths watched as its wealth fell 46 percent” - CBS
- “[Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University] found that the average net worth of an older household grew 44 percent, adjusted for inflation, from 1983 to 2001, to $673,000. But much of that growth was in the accounts of the richest households, which pushed the averages up. When Mr. Wolff looked at the net worth of the median older household - the one at the midpoint of the economic ladder, a better indicator of what is typical - the picture changed. That figure declined by 2.2 percent, or $4,000, during the period, to $199,900. For a generation to emerge from two bullish decades with less wealth than its parents had ‘is remarkable,’ Mr. Wolff said. Based on economic growth and market returns over those 18 years, he said, their wealth "should be up around 30 or 40 percent." – New York Times
- Meanwhile, for households of all ages, between 1983 and 1998 the average household net worth of the poorest 40% in the U.S. declined 76%.
- “The biggest indicator of a healthy society - average life expectancy - dropped. People in the U.S. now don't live even as long as people in Costa Rica. Meanwhile the U.S. infant mortality rate has risen, so much so Cuba has a better success rate of bringing healthy children into the world.” – CBS
- In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the news media in America. By 2002, six corporations did.
- Between 1981 and 1997, children 3-12 spent 25% less time playing, an hour less a week eating meals, one-half hour less a week sitting and talking with someone at home.
- The number of Americans without health insurance climbed 33 percent during the 1990's, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
- Farmers in 1999 were getting 36% less for their products in real dollars than in 1984.
- In 1980 there were less than 500,000 people in prison in the U.S. By 2000 there were two million. In 1980, 8% of the prisoners were there for drug offenses; by 1998, 28% were.
- Ninety percent of young white male workers are now doing worse than they would have 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the income of a recent male high school graduate declined 28% between 1973 and 1997.
- Wages for the bottom 10% of all wage earners fell by 9.3% between 1979 and 1999
- Median student-loan debt, 1977: $2,000. 1997: $15,000
- Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1980: 42 to 1. Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1998: 419 to 1. Annual pay of a factory worker if it had kept pace with executive salaries: $110,000
- In 1977, the disclosed wealth of the top ten senators was $133 million. In 2001 it was $1.83 billion.
- In 1982, U.S. foreign debt was less than 5% of GDP; by 2002 it was almost 25%
- Between 1973 and 2001, the incomes of the poorest 20% went up 14%, that of the 20% in the middle went up 19%, but the richest 5% went up 87%.
- The real value of the minimum wage peaked in 1969 at over $7 an hour. Its real value is now at $5 an hour.
- Eighty-six percent of stock market gains between 1989 and 1997 flowed to the top ten percent of households while 42 percent went to the most well-to-do one percent.
- In 1998 the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings.
- Two-thirds of American households headed by a person between the ages of 47 and 64 in 1998 had the same pension wealth or less in real dollars than they did in 1983. Almost 20% of all near-retiree households could expect to retire in poverty.
- 1973 to 1995 was the only time in American history that real earnings declined.
- By the turn of the century poor black families were working 190 hours more a year – and poor white families 22 hours more -- than in 1979 for roughly the same pay.
- The two richest men in America -- Bill Gates and Warren Buffet -- own more assets than the bottom 45% of the country.
****************
Economic deterioration is not the only damage done by a quarter century of extreme capitalism. Money, after all, is just another form of power, the type you can carry around in your pocket. Once you accept the idea that power in one form is its own justification, there is nothing to stop the principle from extending to every aspect of life. The elements of extreme capitalism – including winner take all, damn the damage, zero tolerance for those who can’t make you richer, contempt for activities without monetary profit, disrespect for the less fortunate – spread like a virus to our communities, our schools, our police departments, and our foreign policy.
Here is only a partial list of the other pain that resulted:
- Anti-trust laws, once considered the great mediator of commercial excess, have been steadily eroded.
- Organized labor has become a mere shadow of its former self; the rights of workers are damaged in ways that would have caused national turmoil had they been attempted when America was still a social democracy.
- Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. per capita spending on schools increased 32%. The per capita spending on prisons grew 189%
- California built 21 prisons between 1980 and 1998; it built just one college.
- From the inauguration of a full-scale war on drugs in 1985 to 1998, the number of deaths per 100,000 for drug-induced causes almost doubled. In other words, having a drug war proved twice as deadly as not having one.
- Employers have become notoriously less loyal to their workers forcing an increasing number to become economic nomads. This not only creates burdens for the individual but disrupts the stability of communities.
- Despite the endless talk of free markets, those doing the talking have jammed Washington with thousands of additional lobbyists whose job it is to make damn sure that such free markets don’t exist.
- As media has become increasingly monopolized, the cultural choices of Americans have become more limited as have the possibilities for artists who might supply those choices. It is not an accident that America has produced so little significant art, music, or theater since 1980; extreme capitalism has no interest in it.
- There has been a massive shift towards the language of capitalism in all aspects of our conversation and speech, making our words more clichéd, less meaningful, less enjoyable, and less human. To an extraordinary degree we now speak to each as salesmen rather than as fellow citizens. This makes for a pretty seedy culture, full of insincerity and deceit while short on cooperation, individual creativity and shared goals.
- The age of Social Security coverage is rising as the public is being taught not to expect that either Social Security or Medicare will continue to serve as they do at present.
- There has been a dramatic increase in homelessness.
- Efforts to control individual rebellions against the banal and life-draining culture of extreme capitalism have produced increasingly authoritarian, militaristic and punitive tactics such as the war on drugs, zero tolerance, and the conversion of public schools into quasi-detention centers. We drug our students for daring to be restless, the very students who, in another time, would have become the creators, the thinkers and the wise that a society so badly needs.
- Advertising has invaded every aspect of our life making existence increasingly one long commercial.
- Our environment has steadily and dangerously deteriorated, but extreme capitalism has taught us not to care and so we approach crises like an oil shortage critically unprepared.
- Medicine has been converted from a public service to a corporate exploitive enterprise.
- The number of laws in our society has exploded, bearing little relationship to population growth, cultural complexity or any other rational factor. The number of lawyers have grown with it; in Washington there are nearly seven times as many attorneys as three decades ago. It now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.
- Our public school system has steadily declined, all the more so as corporate and bureaucratic principles are laid on top of on the very non-corporate business of teaching.
- We increasingly use corporatized prisons without adequate public supervision and prison slave labor to serve corporate interests.
- Our voting turnout has declined.
- Corruption, both corporate and political, has increased to the point that it is no longer deviation but an assumed part of our culture. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.
- Employing the techniques and goals of corporate monopolization to our foreign policy we have become more hated and fearful than at any time in our history. We have reacted with a spiral of panicked and brutal responses that have simply made things we worse.
- We have lost interest in our Constitution and democratic ideals and have made our government serve first and mainly the interests of our largest corporations. There is a technical name for this: it is called corporatism or fascism. None of this has made us happier, wealthier, healthier, safer or better custodians of this land to pass on our children. We lack glory, gladness, grace and decency, having traded them in for tricks, treachery and greed.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are you better off than you were 25 years ago?
The media doesn’t even ask this question, but if it did here are just a few of things it would discover, much of it easily retrievable from its own clip files:
- “The traditional pension, an employee benefit that was widely available until the early 1980's has been vanishing from the American workplace ever since. More than two-thirds of older households - those headed by people 47 to 64 - had someone earning a pension in 1983. By 2001, fewer than half did” – New York Times
- In the 1980s about two-thirds of corporations included health care benefits with their pensions. Today only about a third do.
- In April 2004, the nation’s trade gap hit a record $48 billion, precisely the sort of thing extreme capitalism, free trade, and globalization was supposed to prevent.
- The top one percent’s share of household wealth had dropped from 1929 to 1981 from 44% to 27%. By 1998 it was back up to 39%.
- “The Congressional Budget Office says the income gap in the United States is now the widest in 75 years. While the richest one percent of the U.S. population saw its financial wealth grow 109 percent from 1983 to 2001, the bottom two-fifths watched as its wealth fell 46 percent” - CBS
- “[Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University] found that the average net worth of an older household grew 44 percent, adjusted for inflation, from 1983 to 2001, to $673,000. But much of that growth was in the accounts of the richest households, which pushed the averages up. When Mr. Wolff looked at the net worth of the median older household - the one at the midpoint of the economic ladder, a better indicator of what is typical - the picture changed. That figure declined by 2.2 percent, or $4,000, during the period, to $199,900. For a generation to emerge from two bullish decades with less wealth than its parents had ‘is remarkable,’ Mr. Wolff said. Based on economic growth and market returns over those 18 years, he said, their wealth "should be up around 30 or 40 percent." – New York Times
- Meanwhile, for households of all ages, between 1983 and 1998 the average household net worth of the poorest 40% in the U.S. declined 76%.
- “The biggest indicator of a healthy society - average life expectancy - dropped. People in the U.S. now don't live even as long as people in Costa Rica. Meanwhile the U.S. infant mortality rate has risen, so much so Cuba has a better success rate of bringing healthy children into the world.” – CBS
- In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the news media in America. By 2002, six corporations did.
- Between 1981 and 1997, children 3-12 spent 25% less time playing, an hour less a week eating meals, one-half hour less a week sitting and talking with someone at home.
- The number of Americans without health insurance climbed 33 percent during the 1990's, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
- Farmers in 1999 were getting 36% less for their products in real dollars than in 1984.
- In 1980 there were less than 500,000 people in prison in the U.S. By 2000 there were two million. In 1980, 8% of the prisoners were there for drug offenses; by 1998, 28% were.
- Ninety percent of young white male workers are now doing worse than they would have 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the income of a recent male high school graduate declined 28% between 1973 and 1997.
- Wages for the bottom 10% of all wage earners fell by 9.3% between 1979 and 1999
- Median student-loan debt, 1977: $2,000. 1997: $15,000
- Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1980: 42 to 1. Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1998: 419 to 1. Annual pay of a factory worker if it had kept pace with executive salaries: $110,000
- In 1977, the disclosed wealth of the top ten senators was $133 million. In 2001 it was $1.83 billion.
- In 1982, U.S. foreign debt was less than 5% of GDP; by 2002 it was almost 25%
- Between 1973 and 2001, the incomes of the poorest 20% went up 14%, that of the 20% in the middle went up 19%, but the richest 5% went up 87%.
- The real value of the minimum wage peaked in 1969 at over $7 an hour. Its real value is now at $5 an hour.
- Eighty-six percent of stock market gains between 1989 and 1997 flowed to the top ten percent of households while 42 percent went to the most well-to-do one percent.
- In 1998 the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings.
- Two-thirds of American households headed by a person between the ages of 47 and 64 in 1998 had the same pension wealth or less in real dollars than they did in 1983. Almost 20% of all near-retiree households could expect to retire in poverty.
- 1973 to 1995 was the only time in American history that real earnings declined.
- By the turn of the century poor black families were working 190 hours more a year – and poor white families 22 hours more -- than in 1979 for roughly the same pay.
- The two richest men in America -- Bill Gates and Warren Buffet -- own more assets than the bottom 45% of the country.
****************
Economic deterioration is not the only damage done by a quarter century of extreme capitalism. Money, after all, is just another form of power, the type you can carry around in your pocket. Once you accept the idea that power in one form is its own justification, there is nothing to stop the principle from extending to every aspect of life. The elements of extreme capitalism – including winner take all, damn the damage, zero tolerance for those who can’t make you richer, contempt for activities without monetary profit, disrespect for the less fortunate – spread like a virus to our communities, our schools, our police departments, and our foreign policy.
Here is only a partial list of the other pain that resulted:
- Anti-trust laws, once considered the great mediator of commercial excess, have been steadily eroded.
- Organized labor has become a mere shadow of its former self; the rights of workers are damaged in ways that would have caused national turmoil had they been attempted when America was still a social democracy.
- Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. per capita spending on schools increased 32%. The per capita spending on prisons grew 189%
- California built 21 prisons between 1980 and 1998; it built just one college.
- From the inauguration of a full-scale war on drugs in 1985 to 1998, the number of deaths per 100,000 for drug-induced causes almost doubled. In other words, having a drug war proved twice as deadly as not having one.
- Employers have become notoriously less loyal to their workers forcing an increasing number to become economic nomads. This not only creates burdens for the individual but disrupts the stability of communities.
- Despite the endless talk of free markets, those doing the talking have jammed Washington with thousands of additional lobbyists whose job it is to make damn sure that such free markets don’t exist.
- As media has become increasingly monopolized, the cultural choices of Americans have become more limited as have the possibilities for artists who might supply those choices. It is not an accident that America has produced so little significant art, music, or theater since 1980; extreme capitalism has no interest in it.
- There has been a massive shift towards the language of capitalism in all aspects of our conversation and speech, making our words more clichéd, less meaningful, less enjoyable, and less human. To an extraordinary degree we now speak to each as salesmen rather than as fellow citizens. This makes for a pretty seedy culture, full of insincerity and deceit while short on cooperation, individual creativity and shared goals.
- The age of Social Security coverage is rising as the public is being taught not to expect that either Social Security or Medicare will continue to serve as they do at present.
- There has been a dramatic increase in homelessness.
- Efforts to control individual rebellions against the banal and life-draining culture of extreme capitalism have produced increasingly authoritarian, militaristic and punitive tactics such as the war on drugs, zero tolerance, and the conversion of public schools into quasi-detention centers. We drug our students for daring to be restless, the very students who, in another time, would have become the creators, the thinkers and the wise that a society so badly needs.
- Advertising has invaded every aspect of our life making existence increasingly one long commercial.
- Our environment has steadily and dangerously deteriorated, but extreme capitalism has taught us not to care and so we approach crises like an oil shortage critically unprepared.
- Medicine has been converted from a public service to a corporate exploitive enterprise.
- The number of laws in our society has exploded, bearing little relationship to population growth, cultural complexity or any other rational factor. The number of lawyers have grown with it; in Washington there are nearly seven times as many attorneys as three decades ago. It now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance.
- Our public school system has steadily declined, all the more so as corporate and bureaucratic principles are laid on top of on the very non-corporate business of teaching.
- We increasingly use corporatized prisons without adequate public supervision and prison slave labor to serve corporate interests.
- Our voting turnout has declined.
- Corruption, both corporate and political, has increased to the point that it is no longer deviation but an assumed part of our culture. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.
- Employing the techniques and goals of corporate monopolization to our foreign policy we have become more hated and fearful than at any time in our history. We have reacted with a spiral of panicked and brutal responses that have simply made things we worse.
- We have lost interest in our Constitution and democratic ideals and have made our government serve first and mainly the interests of our largest corporations. There is a technical name for this: it is called corporatism or fascism. None of this has made us happier, wealthier, healthier, safer or better custodians of this land to pass on our children. We lack glory, gladness, grace and decency, having traded them in for tricks, treachery and greed.