Growing Inquality = A Less Healthy Nation
There’s income inquality and then there’s total net worth inequality. Both are large, and growing, but a New York Times analysis of Federal Reserve data shows the gaping gulf in net worth between the 1 percent and the rest of us.
To qualify for the elite status of 1 percent in annual income, an individual makes somewhere in the mid-$300,000s per year (or way more like Mitt!). For net worth, the 1 percent threshold for net worth in the Fed data was nearly $8.4 million, or 69 times the median household’s net holdings of $121,000. (Because he’s worth roughly $250 million, Mitt Romney has no trouble fitting into the 1 percent in either category.)
Loads of cash, the study found, not only results in personal yachts, fourth and fifth homes and multiple cars with drivers, but in better health.
About 90 percent of the 1 percenters describe themselves as being in excellent or good health, compared with 75 percent of everybody else. About 85 percent expect to live into their 80s, compared with 68 percent of everybody else.
The rich are different from you and me–they live long, health lives because they can afford them.
New Mexicans Up, Up and Away to Highlight Jobs Crisis
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Andy Richards on our Field Communications staff files this report.
Wow! Take a look at these photos from the America Wants to Work event in New Mexico over the weekend!
The jobs crisis is so urgent that working families in New Mexico are literally going to new heights to get the message out that lawmakers need to be focused on creating and protecting good jobs. This weekend, as part of the huge Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, jobless New Mexicans and workers from across the state will launch a hot air balloon every day during the nine day festival draped with a 40 foot banner brandishing a message all Americans agree upon: “America Wants to Work: Good Jobs Now.”
LeRoy Apodaca, an unemployed Working America member and active participant in New Mexico Wants to Work—a program that has been organizing unemployed workers since January—will be one of the dozens of jobless New Mexicans who will be there Saturday.
I have been unemployed for over 2 years. I want to work, but finding a job these days is difficult. We are asking our elected officials to focus on job creation and make that their most important issue.
Sadly, Apodaca’s story is similar to millions of other jobless workers across the country. Read the rest of this entry »
Seven Questions for Ben Bernanke
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is poised to become the first chairman of the Fed to hold a public press conference, following a meeting of the powerful Federal Open Market Committee that sets short-term interest rates. Many are asking whether this is a unique peek into the traditionally closed-door discussions of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), whose policy affects so many lives, or simply a public relations exercise.
But behind the political speculation, there are real implications for working people in what the FOMC will decide. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, the Fed has worked diligently to keep both long-term and short-term interest rates low to try to encourage economic growth and job creation. But now the Federal Reserve is under immense pressure by some in Congress and within the Fed itself to raise rates, even though economic growth is still painfully weak and there are five job seekers for every job opening.
Federal Reserve Should Bail Out Main Street, Not Wall Street
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The Federal Reserve’s announcement this week that it will purchase $600 billion of Treasury debt, also known as “treasuries,” to help stimulate the economy should be a wake-up call to lawmakers that government needs to spend more, not less, to create jobs, economists say.
Here’s Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI):
[The Fed purchase] is a welcome acknowledgement that the economy needs more help.…Congress should follow the Fed’s lead and provide this needed support, starting with an extension to unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of this month.
House Republican Agenda: Make Big Banks More Profitable
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When the Republicans take over the U.S. House in January, one of the first things on their agenda is payback to those who helped get them in office: Wall Street.
And they’ve already announced one way they plan to do that.
The financial reform legislation that President Obama signed into law in July gave regulators a significant tool to rein in gambling by big Wall Street banks. The “Volcker Rule,” named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker who proposed it, is aimed at preventing Big Banks from speculating on securities or other complex financial products (a.k.a. “proprietary trading”) and putting strict limits on their ability to bet on hedge funds and private equity funds.
Dean Baker: Recession Didn’t Have to Happen
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If the Federal Reserve had done its job, the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s would not have occurred. Rather than heeding warnings that the sharp upturn in the housing market was a bubble that inevitably would bust, economists at the Fed ignored all the warning signs, says Dean Baker in a Point of View (POV) guest column at the AFL-CIO website.
Baker is co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and author of several books and the popular blog Beat the Press. He will speak tonight about his new book, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., at 6:30 p.m. For more information, call 202-387-7638.
Baker says there was more behind the near-collapse than greed and incredible economic mismanagement.
Wall Street greed has received considerable attention—but the failure of those in policy-making positions is still not fully appreciated.
Showdown in Chicago: Thousands Protest Bankers
UPDATE: Check out photos and a video from today’s rally.
More than 5,000 people are packing the streets of downtown Chicago this morning, chanting, marching and rallying against Big Bankers and financial institutions that have taken taxpayer money and are using it to give big bonuses to CEOs and to lobby against financial reforms that would ensure they don’t go back on the public dole.
The crowd is marching to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the American Bankers Association meeting, to protest the banking industry’s greed and irresponsibility that crippled our economy, leaving millions of workers behind.
After the house of cards they built collapsed, bankers and the financial industry took $700 billion in taxpayer funds for a bailout. But rather than reform their failed practices, they want to go back to business as usual—with the chance of again precipitating another financial collapse and need for taxpayer bailout in coming years.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who is joining union members and allies at today’s events, has a clear message to bankers: You work for us.
Showdown in Chicago
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I’m in Chicago for the American Bankers Association meeting. Oddly, I haven’t been invited to the Roaring ’20s dance party I hear they’re having.
Why wouldn’t they celebrate the era of wild money and hot times (which slid into the Great Depression)? After all, the bankers are doing well these days.
They’re doing well because after financial institutions caused the global economic crisis, we bailed them out, to the tune of some $700 billion.
Now they’re in good enough shape to pay the suits $7 billion in bonuses for driving working families and our economy to our knees—to the verge of a second full-fledged depression.
Things might be turning around for the bankers, but for the rest of us, unemployment heads toward 10 percent and home foreclosures continue to devastate families and communities. Working families have lost health care, pensions and savings—and in exchange we’ve gotten predatory lending, outrageous overdraft fees and sky-high credit card interest rates.
Wall Street Won’t Do Right. Now They Have To
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So, Wall Street CEOs didn’t figure out on their own that when they take taxpayer money, they have a moral obligation to help the overall economy with their $700 billion public-funded bailout rather than single-mindedly line their own pockets with billions of dollars in salaries, bonuses and other ego-inflating perks.
Funny how “moral obligation” and “Wall Street” tend to be mutually exclusive terms.
Wall Street CEOs wouldn’t do it on their own. So now they have to.
Dancing with Jay and Daisy
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When you’re a member of the American Bankers Association (ABA) meeting in Chicago amid the worst U.S. jobless crisis and most disastrous economy since the 1930s Depression, what’s the logical move to make?
Dress up in a Roaring ’20s costume and party like it’s 1929.
Proving yet again that not only do taxpayer-bailed-out CEOs have no shame, word has it that they plan to flaunt their taxpayer-fueled wealth in our faces, the ABA is sponsoring its Roaring ’20s party in conjunction with its Oct. 27–29 meeting.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will lead thousands of mad-as-hell Americans in a rally outside the ABA meeting on Oct. 27, demanding financial reform and re-regulation that will allow us to rebuild our communities, our lives and our economy.
(If you’re in Chicago, join us Oct. 27 at 10:30 a.m. CST. The march departs from the corner of East Wacker Drive and Stetson Avenue. After about a 15-minute march, the rally will be outside the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers at 301 E. North Water St.)
Because when they’re not stocking up on Jay and Daisy attire, Big Bankers and financial institutions are using the $700 billion in taxpayer bailout money to attack proposals like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would actually help working people while decreasing the chance of another Big Bank-fueled financial meltdown. Of course, they’re not using all of our money to fight reform. Some of it—about $7 billion—is going to bonuses for top CEOs.
