Oxfam has published a report about economic inequality entitled Working For The Few which everyone should read carefully. Trust me, it will be time well spent.
The report describes an increasingly perilous global situation and provides some very worrisome statistics. Quoting from the report:
* Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population. * The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population. * The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world. * Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years. * The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012. * In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer. Americans should find the data in the last bullet particularly alarming. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke of "government of the people, by the people, for the people," but the last bullet means we effectively now have government for the wealthy. That despite the efforts of a progressive president and his allies in Congress, the laws and policies of the government still yielded an outcome which strongly favored the wealthy over the middle class and the poor. That despite attempts by progressives to reverse the trend, conservatives in Congress managed to thwart those efforts enough to keep the fundamental trajectory toward greater inequality intact. This is alarming indeed.