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	<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; Class</title>
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	<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; World Socialist Party (US) 2010 </copyright>
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		<title>World Socialist Party (US)</title>
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	<itunes:author>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:author>
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		<itunes:name>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:name>
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		<item>
		<title>What&#8217;s Being Rich?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/whats-being-rich/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/whats-being-rich/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2012 22:21:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2513</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Fiscal Times published an article arguing that a family with an income of $250,000 per year is not really rich. When taxes, housing costs, college costs for children and so on are accounted for, even those with an income five times the median family income are just barely getting by, it said. Later the Fiscal Times reported that a study recently found that a middle class family needs at least $150,000 of income just to cover the basics. Subsequently, The New York Times published an article sympathizing with the plight of those making only $250,000. They are certainly not poor, but neither are they rich in any meaningful sense of the term, it said. Gallup Poll asked people how much money they would need to consider themselves rich. The answers were surprisingly varied. Some 18 percent of people would need less than $60,000 per year of income; 12 percent said between $60,000 and $99,999; 23 percent said between $100,000 and $150,000; 18 percent said between $150,001 and $299,999; 11 percent said $1 million; and 4 percent said more than $1 million. The median income, the exact middle of the distribution of responses, was $150,000. Women, the elderly, non-college graduates, [...]


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		<title>US Wages Down</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/2492/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/2492/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 06:42:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2492</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Young workers see pay shrink in United States. The Economic Policy Institute think tank found that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage for male college graduates aged 23 to 29 dropped 11% over the past decade to $21.68 in 2011. For female college graduates of the same age, the average wage is down 7.6% to $18.80. For the entire working population, average hourly wages have risen modestly over the past 10 years. But that is partly because many of the lowest-paid workers have lost their jobs and are no longer included in the average.&#8221;People who normally make below-average wages are not working,&#8221; said Bart Hobijn, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. &#8221;That raises the average wage.&#8221; For men with only high school degrees, aged 19 to 25, the average wage is down 10% from a decade ago to $11.68. For women in the same category, the average has declined 9.2% to $9.92 Downward pressure on wages is likely to persist as long as unemployment remains high. In recessions, employers rarely cut wages for their long-standing workers, though they often impose wage freezes or grant below inflation-rate ones. No related posts.


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		<title>Our Plutocracy</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/our-plutocracy/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/our-plutocracy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:43:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2486</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Recently, the New York Times praised Chelsea Clinton&#8217;s current successes and commitment to public service. Ms. Clinton is the daughter of current U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. The Times reported Ms. Clinton is making the sacrifice of leading us because she feels a responsibility to serve the public good and &#8220;hopes to make a positive, productive contribution.&#8221; Ms. Clinton&#8217;s newsworthy steps toward public service, noted by the NYT, include: meeting people such as Elton John and Richard Gere, taking a public role with her father&#8217;s Clinton Global Initiative, presenting an award to her mother at Diane Von Furstenberg&#8217;s International Women&#8217;s Day event, and hosting her father&#8217;s 65th birthday at a Clinton Foundation Hollywood benefit with fellow guests Lady Gaga and Bono. Ms. Clinton&#8217;s board of directors seat at media conglomerate IAC, alongside former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and former Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman, was also described. Ms. Clinton&#8217;s IAC position pays $50,000 a year, plus a $250,000 grant of restricted stock. Mentioned too was Ms. Clinton&#8217;s joining NBC News as a special correspondent, after her advisers arranged interviews with top network executives. The NYT didn&#8217;t question why a 30-ish year old (with [...]


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		<title>Pigs, fat cats or scapegoats?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/pigs-fat-cats-or-scapegoats/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/pigs-fat-cats-or-scapegoats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 03 Mar 2012 04:24:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2480</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Bankers are unpopular. Not the ordinary bank teller or the back-up IT staff, but the directors and top managers who award themselves huge salaries and big bonuses. They are so unpopular, in fact, that the chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, Stephen Hester, has been forced to give up a bonus of nearly £1m while his predecessor, Sir Fred Goodwin, has been stripped of his knighthood. The banks defend themselves by arguing that they bring &#8220;wealth&#8221; into Britain, and pay a considerable amount of tax on it. Some even describe themselves as &#8220;wealth creators&#8221;. This is absurd. What banks do is compete for a share of the pool of wealth already created by the productive sections of the world’s working class, wealth which is extracted from them as surplus value. They can be more or less successful in doing this. Banks situated in Britain can channel some of the world&#8217;s surplus value this way which might otherwise have gone elsewhere, but this is capturing surplus value rather than creating wealth. In this way, banks do bring profits to Britain and the taxes they pay on it help finance the capitalist state. It&#8217;s an argument that carries some weight with [...]


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		<title>The 99%</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/12/the-99/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/12/the-99/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 24 Dec 2011 04:56:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Left]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2400</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[SO PROCLAIM some of those who called for the occupation of Wall Street, explaining: “We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we’re working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent”. A powerful appeal &#8211; the sort of thing we might say ourselves. But who are “the other 1 percent” that are getting the best of everything? According to WeAreThe99percent, “they are the banks, the mortgage  industry, the insurance industry”, by which they presumably mean the rich people who own and control these financial corporations. But is that all of them? Apparently. But if so, this is wrong. In 2010 CoreData research calculated that the number of millionaires (defi ned as those having a £1 million in addition to their principal residence) in Britain was 284,317 or 1.1 percent of households. So, the figure of 1 percent of those who benefi t from the present system is more or less correct. However: “The study found [...]


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		<title>Manufacturing the News</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/11/manufacturing-the-news/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/11/manufacturing-the-news/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 26 Nov 2011 01:28:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Joe Hopkins</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World Socialist Perspective]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News manufacturing report media organized shapes status quo]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2299</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Mark Fishman, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, investigated routine news production by examining the work practices of reporters and other news workers. His research findings were published by the University of Texas Press in 1980 in a book entitled Manufacturing the News. At the beginning of his book, Fishman touches on the practical mode of social reproduction by quoting from W. I. Thomas, The Child in America (1928): &#8220;Our picture of how the world works is integrally tied to how we work in the world. By acting in accordance with our conception of the way things are, we concertedly make them the way they are, whether we are treating pieces of paper as money, conducting a routine conversation, or electing a president&#8221; (p. 3). The research setting &#8220;At the time of the study (1973-74), the Purissima (California) Record held a virtual monopoly over news consumption in both the city of Purissima (population 75,000) and its metropolitan environs (population 150,000). The paper&#8217;s daily circulation of 45,000 approximated the number of households in the metropolitan area&#8230; Its news department consisted of 57 full-time reporters, editors, and photographers&#8211;at least four times the news gathering resources of [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Class against class</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/06/class-against-class/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/06/class-against-class/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:55:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2277</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It’s exploitation that causes workers’ problems. On an ultra-simplistic level we could say that capitalism in the persona of capitalists uses capital (in its basic form, money) to make a profit. By utilising capital in the form of property, equipment, machinery, investment or speculation the capitalist needs to employ members of the working class in order to increase the original capital for the benefit of the capitalist. This can only be done if the workers agree knowingly or unknowingly to their own exploitation. Why exploitation? In the monetary world society we live in everyone has a need for money on a regular ongoing basis in order to secure the essentials of life. By accepting employment workers undertake to work (knowingly or unknowingly) part of the time for their own remuneration and part of the time in order to meet the capitalist’s need for reinvestment in their business and to augment their accumulation of profit. There are three elements to the capitalist’s expectation in relation to employees. First, workers must be paid sufficient remuneration to keep them returning to work; the terms and conditions of work may change depending on the available source of labour. Second, the capitalist’s own ongoing costs [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Not So Socially Mobile</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/08/not-so-socially-mobile/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/08/not-so-socially-mobile/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:29:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1647</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;poverty status at birth is linked to worse adult outcomes&#8221; An estimated 14.1 million Americans under age 18 are poor. The longer a child is poor, the worse his or her adult outcomes. Childhood poverty rates, according to the U.S. Census Bureau says the report, have ranged between 15 and 23% over the past four decades. Children who are born into poverty have much higher rates of economic and educational difficulties in their adult years. According to a study from the Urban Institute &#8220;Childhood Poverty Persistence&#8230;&#8221; by Ratcliffe and McKernan, 49% of American babies born into poor families will be poor for at least half their childhoods. •13% of all children (40% of black children and 8% of white children) are born poor. •37% of children live in poverty for at least a year before reaching age 18. •10% of children spend at least half their childhood years (9 years or longer) in poverty. •Black children are 9 times more likely than white children to be poor for at least three-quarters of their childhoods; 18% versus 2%. •69% of black children and 31% of white children who are poor at birth stay poor for least half their childhoods. No related [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Life is sweet for the rich</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/07/life-is-sweet-for-the-rich/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/07/life-is-sweet-for-the-rich/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:38:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1609</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From MarketWatch.com Tiffany &#38; Co says sales at its flagship New York store jumped 26% in the first quarter. International luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy whose brands range from Fendi to Givenchy to Moet &#38; Chandon Champagne, plus, of course, Vuitton bags says U.S. sales boomed 20% in the first quarter, including a remarkable 58% boost for sales of jewelry and expensive watches like Tag Heuer. the Swiss watch federation says exports of luxury watches (those $2,000 &#8220;timepieces&#8221;) to the U.S. rose 12% in May and are now ahead 9% for the year. Super-luxury goods purveyor Richemont which owns such brands as Cartier, Dunhill, and Van Cleef &#38; Arpels says U.S. sales are up. The Sunseeker Club in New York, America&#8217;s biggest dealership in the multi-million dollar British luxury power boats say business is strong again. Those who have the money to spend, they say, are spending it. The truth is, this is a great time in which to be rich. According to consultants Cap Gemini, the wealthy saw their net worth bounce back sharply last year. And while those with $1 million or more did pretty well, the real story was the boom among the ultra rich: [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Suffer, little children</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/05/suffer-little-children/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/05/suffer-little-children/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 01:42:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1552</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One thing I am certain of is that I would give my life for my children, such is the power of my feelings for them. I did not take to the nappy changing or the enforced insomnia and as they grew older I resigned myself to the fact that during their teens I was embarrassment personified to them; so much so that I had to drop them a few hundred yards from the school gates in case &#8216;someone might think they knew me&#8217;. I tried to explain that for the past fourteen years their mother had led me to believe that I was their father, particularly in financial matters, so it was not unreasonable to conclude that I did know them. They have now reached their twenties and, it would be fair to say, have come a full circle and I don&#8217;t think I would be unduly flattering myself if I say that they are slightly proud of me. Given the bond between parents and their children why is it, then, that those who have power and control over our society fail to comprehend that the untold damage wrought on our fragile environment will be there as a legacy for [...]


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