Stagnant Wages for the Last 20 Years (Technology Caused): The ‘have-nots’ of the world are over the wealth gap
The ‘have-nots’ of the world are over the wealth gap
A
wealthy, well-connected parent is accused of creating awards and credits for
her spoiled teenage daughter, who otherwise lacked the grades to get into her
preferred college.
Not only is the daughter accepted — she gets multiple
scholarships, money that could have, should have, gone to a needy student.
Felicity Huffman? Lori Loughlin?
Nope.
This particular case is exploding right now
in South Korea, where it has come to epitomize the gap between the haves and
have-nots. There are riots in the streets and demands for the president — who
ran and won on abolishing income inequality, and whose former justice minister
is the girl’s father — to resign.
“We have grown up believing that everyone
will have the same opportunities to enter good universities as long as we work
hard,” one South Korean college student told the New York Times. “But we learned
through this scandal that such a rule doesn’t apply in reality.”
Other countries are exploding in even greater
rage, sparked by one final indignity visited upon the have-nots.
Chile is
literally on fire, amid violent protests sparked after their
billionaire president announced a subway fare hike. This is a country where the
average income is $807 a month, a wage that has stagnated as the cost of
everything else, from food to gas to electricity to mass transit, keeps going
up.
“The people who govern the country seem to be
living in a different world from the rest of us,” one protester said. “The
metro fare was just the detonator.”
Eleven people died there in riots last
weekend.
In Haiti, at least 18 people have died since riots
and protests broke out six weeks ago. The precipitating event
was a gas shortage, but this, of course, is not the reason.
“We are in misery and we are starving,”
protester Jean Claude told Reuters. “We cannot stand it anymore.”
More than 50 percent of Haitians live on
about $2 a month. Tens of thousands of protesters are storming the rich,
burning tires in wealthy enclaves. And it’s not just the poor who are rioting —
it’s academics, businesspeople, artists, intellectuals. These protesters, too,
want their president out.
Beirut is burning, too, as are other areas of Lebanon, as
protesters demand an overthrow of the government. The final indignity? A likely
tax on apps.
“Sunni, Shia, Christian or Druze, it doesn’t
matter — our pain is one and the same,” a protester told CNN. “This is my first
time at a protest and it’s because I am so fed up.”
Sound familiar? Here at home, we see the
ever-widening gap in our wealthiest cities — New York, San Francisco, LA —
which are suffering
from homeless crises of epic proportions. Forty percent of Americans
don’t have $400 saved in case of emergency. Last year, 68 percent couldn’t
afford a recreational activity — from a vacation to concerts to a professional
sporting event to even dinner or a movie — for lack of funds.
This year, the Census Bureau reported that
the gap between the rich and poor has hit its highest level in the 50-plus
years since they began marking it. Adjusting for inflation, the average
household income is the same as it was 20 years ago. The average American can’t
afford to buy a house in 70 percent of the country.
The last time America saw anything resembling
mass outrage over the economy was more than 10 years ago, when Occupy Wall
Street — born of the financial crisis — sparked, sputtered and flamed out. Now,
we vent our outrage on Twitter or Facebook, which commodify our dissent and
sell it back to us.
And on Sunday, after serving her very light
sentence for scamming her daughter’s way into college, actress Felicity
Huffman, wealthy and famous, is set
to be released from a relatively comfy federal prison.
One day early. Those breaks for the rich —
they just never end.
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