[quote=paramount]What Russel Brand speaks of is class struggle/warfare which has been going on since the earliest civilization.
I think progress has been made (at least in the US); I’m just an average joe and my life is quite comfortable.[/quote]
You think this is “progress”?
WASHINGTON — The gulf between the richest 1 percent and the rest of America is the widest it’s been since the Roaring ’20s.
The very wealthiest Americans earned more than 19 percent of the country’s household income last year — their biggest share since 1928, the year before the stock market crash. And the top 10 percent captured a record 48.2 percent of total earnings last year.
U.S. income inequality has been growing for almost three decades. And it grew again last year, according to an analysis of Internal Revenue Service figures dating to 1913 by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Paris School of Economics and Oxford University.
One of them, Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez, said the incomes of the richest Americans surged last year in part because they cashed in stock holdings to avoid higher capital gains taxes that took effect in January.
In 2012, the incomes of the top 1 percent rose nearly 20 percent compared with a 1 percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.
The richest Americans were hit hard by the financial crisis. Their incomes fell more than 36 percent in the Great Recession of 2007-09 as stock prices plummeted. Incomes for the bottom 99 percent fell just 11.6 percent, according to the analysis.
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I included that last paragraph because it’s extremely important. Contrary to your claims about pensioners, paramount, the reason for all of the bailouts and asset price manipulations is that the wealthy elite control our economy and political system (not the workers, as you like to claim). The huge wealth/income gap has been growing because our legislators have been bought by the wealthy and have done everything possible to create the tremendous (and ever-growing) wealth/income imbalance.
If we had allowed the “financial crisis” and asset price deflation to run its course while providing jobs programs for workers and nationalizing the banking industry (as necessary), our economy would now be in a much stronger, more sustainable place, IMHO.
