http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/23-11
Published on Tuesday, August 23, 2011 by In These Times
America’s Rampant Inequality Impossible to Deny
by Roger Bybee
The CIA ranks the country 64th, behind Ivory Coast and Uganda—but Fox's banshees still scream 'class warfare' when Warren Buffet wants to tax the rich.
For years, America’s super-rich and their allies in Congress and the media have tried to deny that a tiny elite was growing astronomically wealthy at the expense of the vast majority of Americans.
But the vast gaping canyon between the richest 1 percent and Corporate America, on the one hand, and the rest of us on the other, has become so large and well-documented that denial no longer works. The ideological combat gets especially intense when it turns to the relatively minimal taxes that corporations and the rich pay.
What defense can be offered when billionaire investor Warren Buffet
admits that he pays a 15 percent capital-gains rate on most of his income, while everyone else in his office (including the secretary) pays a considerably higher rate?
What can the pundits of the Right say when a corporation like General Electric makes $14.2 billion in profits in 2010 and not only pays no federal income taxes, but collects $3.2 billion in tax credits to lower future tax bills? Well, on Fox at least, they go on the offensive, accusing critics of the wealthy of cruel “demonizing."
The Right has a lot to justify: The gap between the top 1 percent and the majority is now so vast that three Citibank analysts in 2005 created a new term to describe the situation: "plutonomy.” (Which Don Peck insightfully
explains in
The Atlantic.)
The inequalities in income and wealth have become so stark that America is increasingly no longer recognizable as the middle-class society in which many of us grew up. Where Americans once condescendingly mocked the gross inequalities so evident in the “banana republics” of Latin America, the United States is now far more unequal than most Latin nations.
Significantly, the plight of the broad American middle class has been closely
linked to the fate of the labor movement as it has come under siege in the last 35 years. While many middle-class people have long resented the gains made by blue-collar workers who often lacked higher education, the fact remains that as labor has lost ground in terms of real wages, so has the middle class....
