Above: In his second inaugural address, President Franklin Roosevelt said "I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day...I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children...I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." Between FDR's speech and 1981 we made great progress. Thanks to New Deal policies and infrastructure the middle-class grew like never before or since. WPA poster image provided courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
You might be living in a plutocracy if...
...Bill Moyers says you are.
In a great op-ed titled, "The Great American Class War: Plutocracy Versus Democracy," Moyers writes:
"Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality."
(The study Moyers refers to can be found here: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf)
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