We have the greatest income inequality in our nation’s history, but for some strange reason people are incredibly misinformed about who has the most stuff. Take a look at this chart from “a paper called “Building a Better America One Wealth Quintile at a Time” by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton.”
As you can see, most people, regardless of political ideology or party affiliation or income level, are under the impression that there is a vast middle class (60% of the people) that owns roughly 40% or so of the wealth in America, with the wealthiest 20% owning slightly less than 60%. The truth?
The richest 20 percent, represented by that blue line, has about 85 percent of the wealth. The next richest 20 percent, represented by that red line, has about 10 percent of the wealth. And the remaining three-fifths of America shares a tiny sliver of the country’s wealth.
Yet even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Because the highest 1% of income earners in America (income, not total assets) received 75% of the income gains from 2002 to 2006. Everybody else, 99% of Americans, received the remaining 25%. Now look at these pie charts on net wealth from “Wealth, Income, and Power” by G. William Domhoff, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz:
As you can see, as of 2007, the top 1% had 35% of the Net Worth and 43% of the Financial Wealth in America. The top 10% had 73% of the Net Worth, and a whopping 83% of the Financial Wealth. The bottom 90% had 27% of the net worth (most of it tied up in their home equity) and only 17% of the Financial Wealth.
Of course, those figures don’t include the results of the Great Recession that began December 2007 with the collapse of the housing market in which the lower 90% of Americans suffered the greatest loss of wealth and income and jobs.
So why the misconception by the majority of Americans that the people in the bottom 90% of income and wealth (however you measure that) have a much larger share of our “Ownership Society” than they actually do? I think one has to look squarely at the major news media, many of whom fit within the wealthiest 10% of Americans. They simply don’t get out of their encapsulated havens to report on the real, in your face effects of the economic policies of the four presidents who preceded Obama, three of whom were Republicans.
It’s telling that until very recently, major media figures simply didn’t go out in the field and report on the devastation wrought by this economy on the lower 90% of individuals and families who don’t share the same level of income, wealth, fame and status as our media mouthpieces:
In the green room before taping Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday, I [Arianna Huffington] had an unexpected conversation with my fellow panelist Joe Klein. He’d just finished a cross-country road trip, getting an up-close look at lives that “have been ripped up by the economic devastation of recent years.” He embarked on the trip, he wrote, because “I really don’t trust the things I’ve been seeing on TV and reading in the papers.”
The trip had been an eye-opener. “The people I met never talked about the things the Washington press does,” he told me. The disconnect between the focus of his fellow reporters and the focus of the people he met on his travels was “transformational.” “My sense of what’s important has changed in a big way,” he said. […]
In the final post of his trek, Klein came to this conclusion: “One thing I realized on this trip was how much time I spend immersed in the media back home — reading newspapers and blogs and books, watching TV — and how little time I spend immersed in other people.”
In truth, this isn’t particularly shocking to those of us who follow the mainstream media, whether the newspapers, television news or major blogs like Politico. We know they have been living in their own cloud cuckoo land for some time now.
And when you toss in Fox News, a news organization in name only, which every day literally creates its own false reality through propaganda, hate speech and lies of commission and omission in order to divide and polarize our nation and promote conservative and Republican policies that favor the Super Rich and Mega-Corporations at the expense of everyone else, it should come as no shock to anyone that most Americans have no clue how much they have lost in terms of wealth and income over the last three decades.
Which is one reason we as a nation have arrived at the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in, both politically and economically. We have been misled by fools and propagandists posing as honest objective journalists and reporters for too long. And the misinformation and outright lies in many cases to which they have been an active party, have allowed the Wealthy and Big Corporations to corrupt our politics and impose a regimes that is driven us to the brink of collapse, all while they lined their pockets from the public purse and from the inaction of government to oversee their activities and prevent their financial shenanigans (and in many cases outright fraud).
That the Democratic Party was for too long complicit in this exercise, trolling for the same lobbyist cash that has always fueled the Republicans, is a failure of epic proportions, for it took decades to set the table from which the rich now feast while the rest of us beg for scraps from their table.
Much of the failure of Obama to meet the progressive expectations is a result of a political climate and an institutional structure skewed to benefit those who can “pay to play.” To a large extent, the fact that Obama has accomplished as much as he has is a minor miracle, but 2 years is not enough time to reverse the appallingly unjust and divisive course that Ronald Reagan first set this nation upon 30 years ago, aided and abetted by a “liberal media” too afraid to challenge his “Morning in America” fantasy, to expose his many lies about the role of government and to confront his use of race and class to achieve his ends.
What Reagan began, every other President, to some degree or another has continued. Yes, Clinton raised taxes and balanced the budget, but he also signed into law with the support of the Republicans NAFTA, the Telecommunications Act and the final dismantling of the critical financial reforms put into place by FDR. That these were the culmination of a dream longed for years by Wall Street and the other major industries was not the result of bad luck or random chance. It was accomplished by design.
In 1932, FDR took advantage of a new information technology, radio, to reach the broad masses of Americans and speak over the heads of the Wall Street Titans and Big Business interests who opposed him. It is our challenge today, to use the new information technologies of our time, to speak over the heads of all those who oppose economic fairness and justice in America today. Until we accomplish that goal and get politicians truly committed to a progressive program of economic and government reform, our fellow citizens will remain in their current condition of enforced ignorance, and their lives and ours will remain subject to the whims of those who have the money, or as FDR rightly labeled them “Economic Royalists” and “The Money Power.”
