TIRED of INEQUALITY? Get used to it. Things look like they're only gonna get worse.

[Octafish]

44. The social chasm in America

Jerry White
wsws.org, 13 September 2013

EXCERPT...

The new report on social inequality emerged as the American ruling class set out to launch another war in the Middle East. As the Obama administration sought to mobilize the propaganda apparatus for war, it encountered something that had not been expected: overwhelming opposition from the American people. Amidst a media propaganda blitz, opinion polls show that the percentage of the population that supports war ranges from a third to merely 10 percent.

The two phenomena are connected. The conflict that has emerged between, on the one hand, the drive by the ruling class to launch a new war with incalculable consequences and, on the other, the sentiments of the American people, is an initial political expression of the vast social gulf revealed in the report by Saez.

The current levels of social inequality are a culmination of a decades-long social counterrevolution. From the late 1970s onward, the American ruling class has responded to the decline in its world position through militarism abroad and class war at home.

Wealth has been redistributed from the working class to the rich through a policy of deindustrialization, accompanied by the most parasitic forms of financial speculation. From 1980 to the present, the share of income going to the top one percent has more than doubled, from less than 10 percent to more than 20 percent. This process has only accelerated since 2008.

The working class as a whole faces a future of mass unemployment and poverty-level wages, with the younger generation hit particularly hard. Between 2000 and 2011, inflation-adjusted wages fell 13 percent for recent high school graduates and 8 percent among recent college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The percentage of recent college graduates with employer-paid health care also dropped by half between 1989 and 2011.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/13/pers-s13.html

As long as they're democratic, I'm for social progress, call is socialism, New Deal, progress, income redistribution, of whatever the plutocrats label it.