I read Stiglitz 1% article and found it prescient. I wrote a book last summer about clas warfare that covers this subject and much more. What is sad is that because our media is corporate control most of the evil and shenanigans at the top is shut out. It is for this reason that the bottom 95% continue to vote against their own interest.
I love that those that pilfer the middle class get further tax breaks then tells the middle class we have an entitlement problem. They have said it so much that most take it at face value. We do not have an entitlement problem, we have a mal-taxation, revenue, evil wealth allocation problem.
Until Americans do their homework the fraud will continue. .
My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
Book’s Webpage: http://bit.ly/9sJpA1 – Twitter: http://twitter.com/egbertowillies
How the Richest "1 Percent" Keep Rewarding Themselves for Epic Failure
Linda Keenan and Janine R. Wedel Posted: 04/ 7/11 08:34 AM ET
No, this was no April Fool’s Joke, said the outraged Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell. Transocean, which owned and operated the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig, put out filings April 1, stating that it had actually had its "best year in safety performance" and was rewarding its executives with bonuses. Never mind those pictures of viscous Gulf water and oil-slimed wildlife. Only after The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, among others, eviscerated Transocean did the company announce that the safety bonuses would instead go to families of the workers who died in the rig explosion. Lest you think this is a full mea culpa, Forbes‘ Jeff McMahon points out that 5 executives will still get $650,000, bonus money that is not attached to safety goals.
Surely without the hue and cry these executives would have gotten away with it. Their attempt to snatch personal gain from the jaws of epic defeat is just the latest assault on common sense by the "1 percent", as economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz describes America’s super-elite in a new Vanity Fair piece called "Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%."
He examines the roots behind the vast increase in income inequality in recent decades. It is surely no coincidence that during this same period, a new breed of power broker has emerged, players who shape public policy to fit their own, not fully disclosed, private agendas while purportedly working in the public interest. These unregistered agents of influence evade registration and oversight: Janine calls them shadow lobbyists. And when their policy influence leads to real-world trauma for the other 99 percent, these power brokers don’t generally slink into obscurity. They continue demanding high-profile rewards, and often getting them.
Stiglitz describes well the intertwining of state and private power, a key theme in Janine’s Shadow Elite:
Linda Keenan: How the Richest "1 Percent" Keep Rewarding Themselves for Epic Failure
