Many people imagine that a country run on the lines of the American republic is a democratic state, that the institutions of America are democratic institutions, that the spirit of such a state is the democratic spirit, and that the philosophy of such a state – the “Rights of Man” is the democratic philosophy. All of which ideas are wrong. The common meaning of the term “democracy”, a form of society in which supreme power is lodged in the hands of the people – is correct enough as far as it goes, and is sufficient in all that it...
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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...
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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.”People who normally make below-average wages are...
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The United States of America has been under one-party rule since its birth at the drafting of the Constitution. This document was drawn up by a small group of men (the founding “fathers”) representing four major economic interests – money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and shipping. In the conclusion to his classic work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Charles A. Beard reports the results of his extensive research: The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond...
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The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up by the US government reported at the end of January. They concluded that the crisis of 2007 and 2008 was the result of “human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire”, but “of human mistakes, misjudgments, and misdeeds” and so avoidable. Obviously, the crisis was the outcome, even if unintended, of decisions by humans to behave in particular ways, but that’s not at issue. We need to know why the economic decision-makers involved took the decisions they did. What was the context of their decisions? What were...
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CBS News reports that although the basic pay for members of Congress is $174,000, nearly half — 261, to be exact — are millionaires (there are 535 total members of the House and Senate). Just 1 percent of Americans overall can say the same. 55 members had an average calculated wealth of $10 million or more in 2009. While the economy has generally faltered over the past two years, congressional members actually saw their collective personal wealth increase by more than 16 percent between 2008 and 2009. The wealthiest member of Congress is Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose holdings...
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There is a class war – the war of the rich on the poor – and the rich are winning. That war has been going on for years. Look at the facts – facts the rich and their false paid prophets do not want people to know. The truth is that in the US have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer. Poor Getting Poorer: Facts The official US poverty numbers show we now have the highest number of poor people in 51 years. The official US poverty rate is 14.3 percent or 43.6 million people...
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“poverty status at birth is linked to worse adult outcomes” 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 “Childhood Poverty Persistence…” by Ratcliffe and McKernan, 49% of American babies born into poor families will...
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Socialists often meet with the argument that while capitalism may have been a terrible system in the past, with the awful gap between rich and poor, today we are gradually improving things and such inequalities no longer exists. So what do the anti-socialists make of these recent statistics? “The rich-poor gap also widened with the nation’s top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute. One side statistic supplied by the IRS: there are now 47,000 Americans worth $20 million or more, an all-time high.” (San Francisco...
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Written by a friends of the WSP. You can contact them here. Not our perspective but important information. On Wednesday, March 18, 2009 a comrade and I drove from San Francisco to investigate the tent city in Sacramento that we had been hearing so much about in the bourgeois media. It had been covered in most daily city papers in the U.S. like the New York and Los Angeles Times, on radio by NPR and elsewhere, and on TV everywhere from local new broadcasts to a special expose for Oprah Winfrey’s show. Television crews from Germany, Switzerland and the U.K. had covered it...
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