Wonkette
Of America’s many great achievements in this young century, nothing can really top the savage rape and murder of the American Dream. Nobody really mentions it anymore, but ancient texts refer to this notion that everyone, through hard work, could become free and happy through the earning of riches, and then their kids would do even better, etc. Well, it is no longer true. Since the year 2000, only the wealthy have made more money. Everybody else is fucked, and the divide is rapidly getting wider. This is the conclusion of a three-year study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a communist-terrorist group consisting of the United States and other rich nations.
The gap between America’s rich and poor has been growing for decades — since the Reagan Era, specifically — but the lopsided prosperity of the Clinton years did trickle down a little bit to the poor, and the middle class was barely holding on to its shaky rung of the ladder. Those minimal gains were violently reversed beginning in 2001, when what’s-his-name and the gang took over the country.
Now, the poor have some new friends, as “the gap also increased between the rich and the middle class.”
But how does America compare to the other OECD nations?
The United States is the country with the highest inequality level and poverty rate across the OECD, Mexico and Turkey excepted. Since 2000, income inequality has increased rapidly, continuing a long-term trend that goes back to the 1970s.
Rich households in America have been leaving both middle and poorer income groups behind. This has happened in many countries, but nowhere has this trend been so stark as in the United States. The average income of the richest 10% is US$93,000 in purchasing power parities, the highest level in the OECD. However, the poorest 10% of the US citizens have an income of US$5,800 per year — about 20% lower than the average for OECD countries.
Huzzah! We are doing a bit better than Mexico and Turkey!
Whatever its historical flaws and prejudices against various races and women, the American ideal was that you could achieve things regardless of your class or background, as opposed to entrenched aristocratic, class and caste-based societies where your lot in life was determined by birth.
But mobility is no longer a regular part of American life. You have a much better chance of going from poor to rich in Old Europe Viking Lands such as Denmark and Sweden!
The gap is even bigger when it comes to U.S. Wealth, as opposed to earned income. The top 10% of Americans hold 71% of all wealth, while the top 1% alone holds up to 33% of all the nation’s wealth.
So, who cares, right? Actually, you should care a lot — especially if you’re in the lucky Top 10%. Those bitters are growing in number, and growing in bitterness.
Launching the report in Paris, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría warned of the dangers posed by inequality and the need for governments to tackle it. “Growing inequality is divisive. It polarises societies, it divides regions within countries, and it carves up the world between rich and poor. Greater income inequality stifles upward mobility between generations, making it harder for talented and hard-working people to get the rewards they deserve. Ignoring increasing inequality is not an option.”A key driver of income inequality has been the number of low-skilled and poorly educated who are out of work.
You know what this is describing: a Sarah Palin rally. At some point, these people are going to put down the remote and pick up their guns and start hunting rich people. And they’re not going to get anywhere close to Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, so you’re going to look like a pretty good target, sitting there at the Starbucks with your $3 coffee and your MacBook and new Prius in the parking lot.
Income inequality and poverty rising in most OECD countries [OECD]
Study shows gap growing between rich and poor [AP]
Bah! I enjoy my serfdom.
Listen, strange women flyin’ in choppers distributin’ guns is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical arctic ceremony.
Only Leonard Cohen can save us now.
Please, next time you want to post something, please check with my secretary first.
But I deserve my $53 million bonus in addition to my $2 million salary. I worked really hard stealing I mean “handling” all of your investments for you people.
Maybe if we would stop TAXING THE MIDDLE CLASS FOR SOCIALIST PROGRAMS LIKE SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WE WOULDN’T HAVE THIS PROBLEM.
Also, using all caps makes me right… Sarah Palin said so.
Lemmy said it best: “Eat the Rich.”
This is why I only drink organic coffee from Lot 44.
…no wonder “Joe the Plumber” is pissed!
I get it! The dirt-poor areas are the “Real America” these nutjobs have been talking about, and the places like suburban Phoenix, exurban Anchorage, and Northern Virginia where the people with actual money and power live are the “fake America” — wait, what?
No mention of the Mexicans stealin our jobs in that article.
So, the bitterz go out and vote every 4 years against their own finacial well-being? No one said the Rethugs weren’t ‘tarded..
Oh, and the image is TFDF..
Ha ha, jokes on you, my Prius was new last year.
…I envision a future where “Whole Foods Markets” and Starbucks are car bombed by bible toting bitters. Someone please hold me!
I always did real shitty in history, mainly because I can’t remember dates and stuff, but the one thing I do remember being taught is that no country can maintain peace and stability without a large, relatively satisfied middle class. I don’t understand where all these rich bitches think they’ll go when even the uppity, intellectual-elites start rioting for their bread. Am I paranoid?
See, suckers keep following the American dream by buying lottery tickets, or heading to scam-artist investment seminars down by the airport, or trying to invent some sort of shit - anything that involves getting a lot of money really quickly. All awful ideas.
Here’s what you do, miserable peasants. Create a child with a large, wide-shouldered Samoan woman. Feed that child nothing but meat and protein powder until they become bulky and stout, like a walking appliance. Get that kid into the NFL as a defensive lineman. Live off the million bucks a year. Once they retire at 32 from massive concussions, don’t let the money stop there. Breed that child like a prized racehorse out to stud with various fat chicks in order to create even bulkier grandchildren, become the agent of these grandkids, and ride that gravy train out into the sunset.
I see an uneasy alliance between the hipsters & trustafarians and the drug dealers. Keep the bitters at bay, in exchange for steady customers for your weed, blow, heroin and e.
The geeks, of course, will fuck the bitters in the ear by hacking their communications networks. But they’ll live underground anyway, not needing sunlight and knowing how to operate high tech HVAC equipment.
So, basically, as long as we can keep the robots neutral, we win.
Forget “Hope” and “Change,” the masses should vote for a campaign with simple French Revolutionary values:
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Guillotine
I will fight to the death for my cappuccino. I will rage insensibly for my Prius. I will battle to the gates of hell for my city, and I will destroy the fabric of middle America with my rising income. Bring it on, bible belt. Bring it on southern American mockery. We shall overcome you, even though we are also fucked.
I for one will be hunting the rich for both sport and food!
Even poor people hate the poor.
Mr. President, have pity on the working man.
You rent out alpacas to Palin tards even they don’t want to be dateless on the weekends.
Also, to stay safe, wealthy Americans might just need to adopt a few habits of their counterparts in Brazil, including helicopter commuting, bulletproof business suits, and flamethrowers on their luxury SUVs…
America’s middle class has vanished so completely it has surpassed the vacuum of space and the recently discovered numeral 0 as Pure Nothingness.
Gack! So many words… Hard to read… Bleh.
On a serious note, I think that the continued development of electronic media, principaly internet, has and will continue to provide an avenue for just about anyone to succeed in a more balanced global market… done.
BOOBIES!!!
“The United States is the country with the highest inequality level and poverty rate across the OECD, Mexico and Turkey excepted. Since 2000, income inequality has increased rapidly, continuing a long-term trend that goes back to the 1970s.”
Yeah, baby! As George Bush noted about the US and pollution “We’re number 1!!”
At some point, these people are going to put down the remote and pick up their guns and start hunting rich people.
I don’t know. The GOP has done a pretty good job sapping these people (the poor) of all hope. They are apathetic and bitter, and when they do get angry, their anger is pointed in the wrong direction–squarely at “The Other”. Thus, instead of attacking McCain for continuing a tax policy that favors the wealthy, the Morans at these rallies scream “terrorist” and “kill him”.
I read “What’s the Matter with Kansas”, but I think a recent article in the New Yorker on Ohio voters presented a much more disturbing picture of why the poor and disenfranchised in the US vote for GOP candidates that continue to push “trickle down” economic packages that have proven to be a detriment to the poor:
…Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment that—during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated—the Democratic Party was no longer much help to them…Having earlier moved to the right for economic reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there because of the rising prominence of social issues—Thomas Frank’s argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class because these voters no longer believed the Party’s central tenet—that government could restore a sense of economic security.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/13/081013fa_fact_packer?currentPage=2
Baahhh. This report was released in Socialist Paris. Nothing to see here.
You can never take our FREEDOM FRIES!!!!!!!
Every sperm is sacred, people. Remember that always.
Being American, and therefore a fat slob with the attention span of a fruit fly, I stopped reading at “Mexico and Turkey” and just started craving burritos. Cause I’m a patriot like that.
Oh, and my husband and I have noted for a few years now how the Bush Admin has proudly been returning us to the 1890s, when people knew their places, dammit, and the enviroment was there solely for our exploitation. Shortsightedness among those making the rules (those with the gold) never goes out of style.
I for one am not surprised. Was like that in the various non US American revolutions where the angriest bitterest and meanest bitterz who look and smell a lot like Madame Defarge took offense at anyone who had a scrap of bread more than they did.
Sorry about the middle class middleism but there is a fucking reason why many poor bitterz are poor bitterz.
Mission Accomplished incompetent hack overlords!
I think I’ve earned my squalor.
ha ha ha poor people SUCK!
Larry Fine:
Interviewer: Why do you rob banks?
Willie Sutton: Because that’s where the money is.
Sussemilch: ++
If Barry loses, i’m moving to France. I will drink cheap wine, smoke Gauloises and bitch.
petite brawnley: Not true. No country can maintain peace, stability *and democracy* without a sizable stable middle class. As all those South American banana republics learned it’s easy to maintain a relatively peaceful and stable country with violent repression funded by the CIA.
John McCain collects Social Security.
Just sayin’.
Bostoprov: Always announce that you’re unable to read!
tiger: I will wait out the next US Civil War in Paris, too!
i’m movin’ to france.
Yay! I’m in the top 10% in income! My net worth is probably positive… a little… so I’m probably in the top 50% there. What a wonderful world! Of course I spent the last moneyz I have until payday today at lunch… What, are the Mexicans and Turks hunting cats in the streets?
On the bright side, if things continue to get worse, we may be due for an old fashioned french-style beheadin’. I’m drawing up plans for a 21st century guillotine. The blade is the American flag!
Mobility, bah! Who needs it? Besides, the “American Dream” has always been just that: a dream. It is a tasty trope fed to the socio-economically stratified masses in order to shut us up.
Also, the American Dream has died before (see 1920s and 1930s, for starters). Haven’t you people read “Gatsby”?
rev_matt_y: But, it is worth remembering that almost everyone in the U.S. pretends that they are “Middle Class.” Yes, it will be difficult maintaining that illusion in the economic hard times coming, but polls conducted in the mid-1930s (i.e. during the Great Depression) indicated that about 80% of Americans still considered themselves to be “Middle Class”…
Well I’m proud to be an American,
Where at least I know I’m free,
And I won’t forget the men who died
So I could play the lottery.
grendel: get out of my head grendel.
Neon Trotsky: Clearly, the poor should all move to Britain, where everyone considers themselves ‘working class’ since it’s embarrassing to be ‘middle class’ - that should solve the problem!
NoWireHangers:
After months of studying the candidates’ economic plans, we have determined that one of them, and only one, can be relied on to complete the destruction of capitalism. With high hopes and great confidence, the Socialist International Conspiracy endorses John McCain!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/report-from-the-socialist_b_136514.html
Yeah, okay. So maybe we’re all poor now. But at least we still gots guns and gays can’t marry, right?
Fun Times Accomplished.
I still have the American Dream. It involves George Clooney and an eagle feather.
Gopherit: We are the new middle class, previously known as the working poor.
Neon Trotsky: Well as long as you’re being sandwiched fucked between a pile of poor bitters who don’t pay taxes and a pile of fat cats who don’t pay taxes, there is technically still a middle class.
“The average income of the richest 10% is US$93,000 in purchasing power parities, the highest level in the OECD”
These numbers can’t be right. I make more than that and there is no way in the world that I am in the top 10%. I’m solidly middle class and, most days, I’m lucky if I don’t feel like I’m slipping slowly into the lower class.
NoWireHangers: So, throw the bums out, and off with their heads? Me likes.
citizen kang: are you married?
Sussemilch:
You beat me to the Holy Grail quote *envy
Citizen Kang: Welcome to the club, we have jackets… wait, what’s that? Oh, yeah, we sold the jackets to pay the rent… Sorry, you’ll have to wrap yourself in hobo robes.
Citizen Kang: I’m in this boat with you. God help us all if I’m in the top 10%. We eat peanut butter sandwiches 4 nights a week and are considering taking a hatchet to the kitchen table for firewood this winter to make ends meet.
“It’s a Third World after all…….”
Deepthroat: Haha… medium income jobs will now get us laid… The new middle class will be managing M’Lords tenant farmers and raping the farmer’s wives.
Citizen Kang: yeah, it is geographic, too. $93K in the DC metro area is not $93K in Ithaca, NY.
So does this mean I should stop taking my Whole Foods reuseable grocery bag into WalMart?
What the poor need to jog them out of their shiftless ways are role models of bootstrapping upward mobility, like George Bush and John McCain. And maybe Mitt.
I forget who said it, but there is a certain Pol Pot flavor to some of this Palin rhetoric. She hasn’t quite said that educated urbanites must be destroyed, but I think the difference might be that we’re just getting past an easy credit era and Cambodia was blasted ruin.
For this one picture alone,Python (Monty), I shall be a lifelong reader and contributor.
(sniffle….)
tiger: Ken Layne: dougbob: It ain’t France but I will open our Madrid home to the Wonkette faithful if the unthinkable happens. We can paint “Guernica” by numbers and watch the Bitters burn.
Citizen Kang: So do you live on the East Coast or the West Coast? B/c I know the feeling.
Yea, and that’s why patriots like John McCooter needs to win this election. He understands that our homegrown American racism and regional splits are all that is left to divide the proletariat and keep us from turning into a neo-marxist communistic socialist regime. He get its it: There’s nothing that makes a white rural bitter with a dime feel better than a darkie with a nickel. Vote McCorpse/apPalin and rest easy, my friends…
interesting.. i was doing some research yesterday on bonnie and clyde for halloween costume purposes and because i believe everything i read on teh intarwebnetz, i went straight for wikipedia. anywho, the last sentiment on the infamous duo seemed currently relevant:
According to Geringer, Bonnie appealed to the out of work and generally disenfranchised third of America shattered by the Depression, who saw the duo as a Robin Hood-like couple striking blows at an uncaring government.
perhaps a neo-gun-totin’ romeo and juliet would cure (or at least entertain) what ails us.
*cue bonnie tyler*
Deepthroat:
It depends, is your User ID descriptive? In other words, are you a shadowy figure leaking explosive confidential information capable of bringing down the administration? If it is, then yes, I’m totally single.
Oh, the same applies if your name is code for bj’s.
j6n:
I live in the suburbs in southern California. However, I work in Newport Beach across from the Fashion Island and from the look of the parking lot you’d think this economic meltdown was a concern only for the middle class and the poor. Oh, wait…
I forsee a lot of new “ridin’ the rails” songs bein’ written around urban campfires in the immediate future. I welcome our new hobo overlords!
Well shit. I can’t even afford a decent torch. I only have a tube sock on a marshmallow stick.
I’m totes going be mocked by teh bitterz with their fancy wood torches at the next angry mob meeting…
Neon Trotsky: Dust off that old copy of E.P. Thompson you haven’t read since you were an undergrad. What we consider “middle class” over here is what everyone else in the world would consider “working class.”
NoWireHangers: EXACTLY. Anger is, and always will be, skillfully directed at poor minorities and immigrants. I see a greater chance of the US behaving like Germany after WWI than like France during the fall of Louis XVI.
what happened to the healthy “smoky and the bandit/convoy” fuck the police sentiment of the middle American working class? Beaufort T. “poppy bush” justice and junior have really fucked over the “real Americans” and they seem to be taking it. I mean come on people, they are thirsty in Atlanta, and there is beer in Texarkana.
Citizen Kang: And I live in the NJ suburbs. I have a 3 bedroom cape that I could fit into the garage of an equivalently priced house in OH. Hence the $$$ disparity of “middle class” from region to region.
j6n: My bro-in-law paid one half the assessed value of our two-bedroom condo in Alexandria, VA for his three-bedroom two bath house with several wooded acres and a barn in west-central PA.
oh, and he shoots his permitted number of deer per year right near his house (legally, not in the neighbor’s yard), so spends nothing on meat all year. The man lives cheap
No matter what they take from us, we’ll always have our Monty Python quotes. Chins up, people!
Citizen Kang: Ditto. It’s the freakin house payments….and gas….and alimony….and insurance….wait….I AM poor
I’m really kinda depressed now to know that I am a dirty hobo compared to the rich fat-cats who troll wonkette! Seriously, I make like half of that in CENTRAL PA!!! And i’m trying to move back to DC, but all the jobs I’m seeing there pay EVEN LESS! Why does America hate me?
plastic_jesus:
Like “Take this job and shove it!”? They did…to China.
mattbolt: Hey! Lottery tickets are my new investment plan!
But seriously, I’m currently reading Joe Beageant’s “Deer Hunting With Jesus,” which speaks of this very issue (wealthy/poor gap, not lottery tickets)
Citizen Kang: Dear god I hope your joking. Otherwise I’m gonna take my 27 thou a year, 55 hours a week non-profit-help-the-working-people job and just die of rage and shame right now.
Deepthroat: Here here… take heart, it’s got to be better than michigan.
HomoPolitico:
There, there…think of it this way: When the dollar devalues to nothing we’ll all be equal, just as the good Lord intended, and isn’t that a comforting thought? As it stands right now the only difference is taking home Hormel canned beans instead Krogers canned beans.
Deepthroat:
Move over to the left coast and I’d be more than willing to put a cardboard box addition onto my home/refrigerator packing crate for you to live in while you search for work as a filthy lobbyist.
BobLoblawLawBlog: Hooray for waiting out the Civil War in Madrid. What is that tapas place on the little triangular block about a block off Paseo del Prado? I will live in an apartment over that place.
WonksRunAmuck:
Ah, but it’s a great time to be house-hunting here…
Fortunately, my occupation as a Prodigal Son is a movable feast. I can go bankrupt anywhere. I choose to live in fake America because you see more boobies here.
Urbanachiever: Deer Hunting with Jesus is a solid, if depressing, piece of book.
Outstando: ah, but don’t let the FCC catch you showing them on prime time.
mattbolt: Damn! That’s the last time I post my business plan online!
Hah! While I own a MacBook as of yesterday, I don’t own a Prius, and I brew my own elitist coffee. That, and I’m heavily armed, so it’s likely I’ll end up accidentally shooting myself long before the poor(er) come for me.
I know where there is a decommissioned cold war telecommunications bunker sitting empty. It is my right as an American to be able to occupy former high security underground facilities to stave off the attack of the bitters. If they come at me with torches, I’ll just swing the microwave dishes around their direction. Then they will be crispy bitters.