The economy for 90% does not work

There are 6 million corporations in America, but 2,600 of them, a tiny number out of 6 million, own 80 percent of the business assets in America.- LINK

Let me give you a stunning number I reported the other day. From 1966 – when Lyndon Johnson was president to 2011, 45 years later, the bottom 90 percent of Americans’ average income, as reported on tax returns, went up by a stunning $59 almost no change at all. If you measure that $59 increase for the vast majority of Americans as one inch, then on the same scale, the incomes of those in the top ten percent went up by 168 feet. The top one percent, 888 feet. The plutocrats the Mitt Romney crowd, the top one percent of the top one percent? Their incomes rose by almost five miles relative to that one inch.

JH: That is remarkable. We are talking about an economy that simply doesn’t work for 90% of working-people in this country.

DCJ: My latest book, The Fine Print , looks at this in a different way. The first two books – Perfectly Legal is about taxes, Free Lunch is about all the subsidies we give to rich people. The Fine Print is about all these laws the mainstream media has either not reported on, or reported on in the most superficial and disconnected ways, that are designed to destroy market competition and replace it with monopolies, oligopolies, duopolies -- with rules that allow the biggest companies to raise prices and reduce services.

DCJ: Let me give you a real killer number here. If you can get a law passed to collect a penny a day from everybody in America -- and I show how one industry did this, the pipeline industry got themselves exempted from the corporate income tax, but they still get to collect it in their monopoly rates – if you can get a penny a day from everybody in America, at the end of the year you’ll have over a billion dollars.

What this is about is very simple. If you can get the rules rewritten in your favor... that means you can raise prices, you can refuse service wherever it’s not profitable. You could refuse services as long as you don’t say, “I don’t want to serve you because you’re a lesbian,” or, “You belong to the wrong religion,” you can refuse service.

You know, Americans had be sold on this notion that we are number one in the world. But by some measures, our healthcare system is behind Cuba. We pay almost the highest prices in the world for our Internet. If you buy a triple-play package from one of the American cable or telephone companies – Internet, cable TV and telephone on average, you pay $160 a month with taxes. If you go to France, the same package is $40 to $70. There are some variations, but the range is $40 to $70. By the way, here you get one foreign country to call for free. There you get 70. Here you get American television. There you get worldwide television. Here you get an Internet that’s the equivalent of a two-lane Irish road, where you have to stop and wait every now and then, because the sheep are on the path. There you get an information superhighway.

We are now 29th in the world in the speed of our Internet. We are behind Bulgaria, of all places.

We are falling behind left and right. We have a Congress that just cut money for scientific research. We’ve got people who are idiots. I mean that word very clearly, “idiots,” like Sarah Palin going around saying, “Why are we paying for fruit fly research?” Anybody who understands science knows that massive advancements in human knowledge – knowledge that has saved lives -- has come from studying fruit flies. If you’re an idiot like Sarah Palin, if you’re Donald Trump, if you’re Senator Cruz from Texas, then you don’t get it.

We really have to get a society that’s based on science and knowledge, that has an economic system that’s based on competitive markets with protections for consumers. While the rest of the world’s going to run right by us, we’re falling behind!

Elizabeth Warren was the only senator on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, aside from the chair and ranking minority, to show up at last Thursday’s hearing on indexing the minimum wage to inflation. 

This was unfortunate for the two witnesses representing the National Restaurant Association in opposition of the idea, because it meant that every 15 minutes it was Warren’s turn to ask questions again. 

She carved them up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Has their association ever, in its history, supported an increase in the minimum wage, Warren asked — and if not, why not. 

http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/153162-mrs-warren-goes-to-washington/#ixzz2OL9NSGyW