This is what happens when the “Dean of American Journalism” gets really pissed-off at the status quo. Bill Moyers is unrelenting. (ALSO SEE: Bill Moyers w/Paul Krugman: “What the 1% Don't Want You to Know”.)
And, it’s a beautiful thing…
Government Is Now a Protection Racket for the 1%
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Video Essay
TruthOut
Tuesday, 22 April 2014 10:35
A new report shows that top CEOs were paid 331 times more than the average US worker in 2013. At the same time, the poorest fifth of Americans paid an average tax rate of 11 percent while the richest one percent contributed half that rate at state and local levels. In this essay, Bill reflects on the forces that are causing inequality to skyrocket, why it matters and where we’re headed in the future.
Government Is Now a Protection Racket for the 1%
The evidence of income inequality just keeps mounting...
...Our now infamous one percent own more than 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, the bottom 40 percent of the country is in debt. Just this past Tuesday, the 15th of April — Tax Day — the AFL-CIO reported that last year the chief executive officers of 350 top American corporations were paid 331 times more money than the average US worker. Those executives made an average of $11.7 million dollars compared to the average worker who earned $35,239 dollars...
Here’s more, directly from BillMoyers.com…
Government = Protection Racket for the 1 Percent
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
April 21, 2014
…Inequality is what has turned Washington into a protection racket for the one percent. It buys all those goodies from government: Tax breaks. Tax havens (which allow corporations and the rich to park their money in a no-tax zone). Loopholes. Favors like carried interest. And so on. As Paul Krugman writes in his New York Review of Books essay on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “We now know both that the United States has a much more unequal distribution of income than other advanced countries and that much of this difference in outcomes can be attributed directly to government action.”
Recently, researchers at Connecticut’s Trinity College ploughed through the data and concluded that the US Senate is responsive to the policy preferences of the rich, ignoring the poor. And now there’s that big study coming out in the fall from scholars at Princeton and Northwestern universities, based on data collected between 1981 and 2002. Their conclusion: “America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened… The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Instead, policy tends “to tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations.”
Last month, Matea Gold of The Washington Post reported on a pair of political science graduate students who released a study confirming that money does equal access in Washington. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman drafted two form letters asking 191 members of Congress for a meeting to discuss a certain piece of legislation. One email said “active political donors” would be present; the second email said only that a group of “local constituents” would be at the meeting.
One guess as to which emails got the most response…
I know you’ll find this “absolutely shocking,” but we’re informed that:
“…more than five times as many legislators or their chiefs of staff offered to set up meetings with active donors than with local constituents. Why is it not corruption when the selling of access to our public officials upends the very core of representative government? When money talks and you have none, how can you believe in democracy?”
Moyers and Winship conclude…
Sad, that it’s come to this. The drift toward oligarchy that Thomas Piketty describes in his formidable new book on capital has become a mad dash. It will overrun us, unless we stop it.
(Bold type is diarist's emphasis.)
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UPDATE: 4/22/14 6:30PM (EDT): (A BIG h/t to Kossack Jim P, in the comments.)
This is excellent news!
Thomas Piketty Is No. 1 On Amazon Right Now
Emily Cohn
Huffington Post
Posted: 04/22/2014 10:22 am EDT Updated: 04/22/2014 1:59 pm EDT
The number-one book on Amazon.com isn't a guide to green juice or an erotic romance novel. No, the top seller on Amazon right now is a 700-page book, translated from French, about rising inequality and the state of modern capitalism.
In what may be a hint of widespread anxiety about the foundations of the U.S. economy, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," which is currently sold out on Amazon, is beating books like the science fiction mega-hit "Divergent" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Goldfinch." Also in the top five on Amazon is Michael Lewis's latest, "Flash Boys," about high-frequency trading on Wall Street.
Piketty's book, which is also a New York Times best-seller, challenges the conservative economic theory of trickle-down economics, or the belief that a rising tide lifts all boats. In Piketty's view, backed by centuries of data on wealth and economic growth, the typical outcome of unfettered capitalism is rising income inequality. Piketty says the world's biggest economies have to do something, like impose a global tax on capital, to stop it. As Piketty said in an interview with HuffPost Live last week, income inequality is only getting started, and this century could look a lot more like the deeply unequal 18th and 19th centuries than the more-egalitarian 20th…
END OF UPDATE
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Moyers isn’t the only one “going to the mattresses.”
Moyers’ has been referencing French economist Thomas Piketty’s “watershed” book on income inequality, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," by Thomas Piketty (translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 685 pp., $39.95), for awhile now, and here’s the intro excerpt from Paul Krugman’s extensive, must-read review in the New York Review of Books, from its May 8th, 2014 edition, via BillMoyers.com…
Paul Krugman: Why We’re in a New Gilded Age
by Paul Krugman
New York Review of Books (May 8th, 2014 edition, via BillMoyers.com)
April 16, 2014
This piece was first published in The New York Review of Books.
Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age — or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque — defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” But it has only become a commonplace thanks to Piketty’s work. In particular, he and a few colleagues (notably Anthony Atkinson at Oxford and Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley) have pioneered statistical techniques that make it possible to track the concentration of income and wealth deep into the past — back to the early 20th century for America and Britain, and all the way to the late eighteenth century for France.
The result has been a revolution in our understanding of long-term trends in inequality…
…
…The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.
It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story in rising inequality. And this discovery came with a second revelation: talk of a second Gilded Age, which might have seemed like hyperbole, was nothing of the kind. In America in particular the share of national income going to the top one percent has followed a great U-shaped arc. Before World War I the one percent received around a fifth of total income in both Britain and the United States. By 1950 that share had been cut by more than half. But since 1980 the one percent has seen its income share surge again — and in the United States it’s back to what it was a century ago.
Still, today’s economic elite is very different from that of the 19th century, isn’t it? Back then, great wealth tended to be inherited; aren’t today’s economic elite people who earned their position? Well, Piketty tells us that this isn’t as true as you think, and that in any case this state of affairs may prove no more durable than the middle-class society that flourished for a generation after World War II. The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to 19th-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.
It’s a remarkable claim — and precisely because it’s so remarkable, it needs to be examined carefully and critically. Before I get into that, however, let me say right away that Piketty has written a truly superb book. It’s a work that melds grand historical sweep — when was the last time you heard an economist invoke Jane Austen and Balzac? — with painstaking data analysis. And even though Piketty mocks the economics profession for its “childish passion for mathematics,” underlying his discussion is a tour de force of economic modeling, an approach that integrates the analysis of economic growth with that of the distribution of income and wealth. This is a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics.
1.
What do we know about economic inequality, and about when do we know it? Until the Piketty revolution swept through the field, most of what we knew about income and wealth inequality came from surveys, in which randomly chosen households are asked to fill in a questionnaire, and their answers are tallied up to produce a statistical portrait of the whole…
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There’s more discussion on the Moyers/Krugman/Piketty story in last night's Open Thread by Meteor Blades: “Open thread for night owls: Bill Moyers interviews Paul Krugman about Thomas Piketty's new book.”
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