Side by side with the sweeping growth in social misery and
destitution has been the vast expansion in wealth of the super-rich. The
world’s billionaires have had their combined net worth double since
2009, according to a report published earlier this month by UBS and
Wealth-X. Even though the United States has only 4.4 percent of the
world’s population, it has a third of the world’s billionaires,
according to Forbes.
Global Research, November 25, 2013
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 16,000 for the first
time ever Thursday, in the seventh consecutive week of gains. This feat
was immediately followed by another milestone: the S&P 500 index
closed at 1,804, the first time the index has closed above 1,800 in
history.
The Dow is up by 24 percent over the past year, having doubled since 2009. The S&P 500 is likewise up by 28 percent.
Far from expressing a genuine and healthy economic recovery, however,
the rise in the stock market has paralleled a vast expansion of social
misery and an unprecedented expansion of social inequality.
 |
Occupy Wall Street: Wall St under "Lockdown" - Near Zuccotti Park,
Oct 2011. (Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
The number of people receiving assistance under the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has climbed from 28.2 million in
2008 to 47.7 million in April 2013, an increase of seventy percent. Far
from decreasing, this number continues to swell, with over 1 million new
food stamp recipients added between 2012 and 2013.
The reason for this vast increase in destitution is not hard to find:
between 2007 and 2012, the median household income in the United States
had plummeted by 8.3 percent. The precipitous fall was due to a
combination of a sharp fall in the percentage of the population that is
employed, and a fall in wages. The percentage of the US working-age
population that has a job has fallen by 4.6 percent since 2008, while
manufacturing wages have fallen three percent since May 2009.
A report in October by the National Center for Homeless Education,
based on figures provided by the US Department of Education, found that
over 1.1 million children enrolled in public schools were homeless at
some point in 2011-2012, 72 percent higher than before the onset of the
economic crisis.
Side by side with the sweeping growth in social misery and
destitution has been the vast expansion in wealth of the super-rich. The
world’s billionaires have had their combined net worth double since
2009, according to a report published earlier this month by UBS and
Wealth-X. Even though the United States has only 4.4 percent of the
world’s population, it has a third of the world’s billionaires,
according to Forbes.
 |
Occupy Wall Street: Zuccotti Park, Oct 2011.
(Photo: Ronald Jackson) |
Since 2009, the richest one percent has captured a staggering 95
percent of all income gains, while the bottom 95 percent have seen their
incomes stagnate, According to a report issued by University of
California Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez earlier this year.
US income inequality grew four times faster in the first three years
of the Obama administration than under Bush, according to figures
published Saturday in the New York Times. As the newspaper reports,
“From 2001 through 2008, during the George W. Bush administration,” the
ratio of mean (average) to median income “grew at 0.28 percentage points
per year. From 2009 through 2011, the latest year for which the data is
available, the ratio increased 1.14 percentage points annually, or
roughly four times faster.”
