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Just finished reading Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington. The book does an excellent job of showing how we got into our present difficulties, and offers several solutions to help get us out. One of the hardest parts of writing this post is deciding what not to quote from this book, as I took 15 pages of notes. Here are a few juicy tidbits:
• Forty years ago, top executives at S&P 500 companies made an average of thirty times what their workers did—now they make three hundred times what their workers make.
• From 1945 to the 1970s, a period characterized by widespread economic prosperity, the wealthiest Americans grew richer at a rate almost identical to that of America’s lower and middle classes. From factory employees to chief executives, Americans experienced a doubling of income. By the end of the 1980s, however, things had changed drastically, with the income of the wealthy skyrocketing while the rest of the country lagged far behind. What happened? Did middle-class Americans lose their mojo? Or had rich Americans unexpectedly come upon the economic equivalent of the Fountain of Youth—a Fountain of Wealth? They had, but rather than Ponce de León, it was Ronald Reagan who led the income-boosting expedition, marching into Washington under the banner of lowering the taxes of America’s moneyed elite.
• Perhaps no company exemplifies the corporate class/middle class double standard more than KBR/Halliburton. The company got billions from U.S. taxpayers, then turned around and used a Cayman Islands address to reduce its expenses.
• America has more people living behind bars than any other country. …Time after time, when the choice has come down to books versus bars, our political leaders have chosen to build bigger prisons rather than figure out how to send fewer kids to them.
• That’s something else that the mining, oil, and financial industries share: the revolving door between regulators and those they’re supposed to be regulating. The names of the Wall Streeters who have moved into positions of power in Washington are familiar: Hank Paulson, Robert Rubin, Josh Bolten, Neel Kashkari, Mark Patterson—and that’s just from Goldman Sachs.
• Bush v. Gore ushered in the CEO president and his CEO VP. They promptly threw open the White House doors to their corporate cronies from Enron and Halliburton and declared open season on the interests of the average American. The Enronization of our economy was under way.
• Right after President Obama’s election, Rahm Emanuel famously declared, “Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities for big things.” But since the financial meltdown, it is actually the very people who created the crisis who have taken advantage of it and achieved “big things”—especially big profits and bonuses.
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