![]() And he said to me, you know, and he's a specialist in income inequality.Īnd he said, "When you go to think tanks you say you'd like to do a study about poverty, they say, 'That's fine. One of the economists I talk to he works for the World Bank. You know, I think because it is still a taboo in American political life and in American cultural life. Why are the two candidates not talking about inequality growing at breakneck speed? Income inequality has soared to the highest level since the Great Depression, with the top one percent taking 93 percent of the income earned in the first year after the recovery, the first full year after the recovery. Who can forget his 2009 article on "The Great American Bubble Machine," which described investment bank Goldman Sachs as quote, "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”? ![]() We're joined by the perceptive and merciless Matt Taibbi, who has made the magazine Rolling Stone a go-to source for understanding the financial scandals that roil America. Once deputy editor of The Globe and Mail in Canada and a correspondent for The Financial Times and The Economist, she is now the editor of Thomson Reuters Digital. Its author is Chrystia Freeland, whose journalism is steeped in years of covering robber barons from Russia to Mexico and India. So just in time, if not too late, comes this definitive examination of inequality: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. And not even by Barack Obama, whose party once fought for working men and women against the economic royalists. Not by Mitt Romney, who is the embodiment of the predatory world of financial capitalism. But in neither of the two presidential debates so far has the vastness of this astounding inequality gap been discussed. At no time in modern history has the top one hundredth of one percent owned more of our wealth or paid so low a tax rate. The median income for the bottom 20% last year was less than $9,000, while the top one percent of New Yorkers has an average annual income of $2.2 million.Īcross America, this divide between the superrich and everyone else has become a yawning chasm and studies indicate it may stifle jobs and growth for years to come. Of America's 25 largest cities, New York is now the most unequal. This, in a city where economic inequality rivals that of a third-world country. What “amounts to a public subsidy,” says the indignant city comptroller, "for a luxury golf course." Good grief. ![]() Simultaneously, the powers-that-be have just awarded Donald Trump - yes, that Donald Trump - the right to run a golf course in the Bronx which taxpayers are spending at least $97 million to build. Others, more modest, range in price from $45 million to more than 50 million. At least of two of the apartments are under contract for more than $90 million each. The New York Times has dubbed it "the global billionaires club," and for good reason. When finished, this high rise among high rises will tower a thousand feet, the tallest residential building in the city. Walk out to the street in front of our office and turn right and you can see the symbol of it: a fancy new skyscraper going up two blocks away. The new Gilded Age is roaring down on us, an uncaged tiger on a rampage.
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