The Weaver's Web

elledark:

Bernie Sanders - The American People Are Angry

One of Washingtons’s very few honest politicians, Senator Bernie Sanders, delivered a blistering Labor Day critique of the USA’s failed economic policies and obscene inequality of wealth. He said ..

“The American people are angry because they see the great middle class of this country collapsing, poverty increasing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else grow wider.  They are angry because they see this great country, which so many of our veterans fought for and died for, becoming an oligarchy - a nation where our economic and political life are controlled by a handful of billionaire families. 

In the United States today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income since the 1920s.  Today, the wealthiest 400 individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of America - 150 million people. 

Today, the six heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune own more wealth than the bottom 30 percent.

Today, the top one percent own 40 percent of all wealth, while the bottom sixty percent owns less than 2 percent.  Incredibly, the bottom 40 percent of all Americans own just 3/10ths of one percent of the wealth of the country.

According to a new study from the Federal Reserve, median net worth for middle class families dropped by nearly 40 percent from 2007-2010.  That’s the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle class family.

The distribution of income is even worse.  If you can believe it, the last study on this subject showed that in 2010, 93 percent of all new income created from the previous year went to the top one percent, while the bottom 99 percent of people had the privilege of enjoying the remaining 7 percent. In other words, the rich are getting much richer while almost everyone else is falling behind.

Not only is this inequality of wealth and income morally grotesque, it is bad economic policy.  If working families are deeply in debt, and have little or no income to spend on goods and services, how can we expand the economy and create the millions of jobs we desperately need?  There is a limit as to how many yachts, mansions, limos and fancy jewelry the super-rich can buy.  We need to put income into the hands of working families.”

 (extract from Bernie Sanders Labor Day message .. full text here)

Bernie Sanders—we need more like him.