INEQUALITY

The top 1% owns 40% yet the poor get poorer

The bottom half of the world's population own just 1.1 per cent of global wealth, while the top one per cent controls 39.9 per cent - Thomas Pogge

Since 2001, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, "funded by all willing governments and devoted to combating diseases that kill 4.4 million people each year'', has committed about US$12.6 billion and spent about US$8.6 billion. This expenditure comes to roughly US$220 per fatality, yet between 2001 and 2009 the US government alone has spent US$944 billion on the War on Terror. "This amount comes to roughly US$314 million per US fatality - over a million times more per fatality."

360 million - have died from hunger and remediable diseases in peacetime in the 20 years since the end of the Cold War than perished in wars, civil wars and Government repression over the entire 20th century. If someone who is sincerely convinced that every abortion constitutes the destruction of an innocent human life is rational in campaigning against abortion then the needless deaths of the unborn children constitute a moral evil, so, too, must the needless deaths of innocent children through poverty. Eighteen million people, many of them children, die every year from poverty-related causes. Why aren't pro-life anti-abortion people actively campaigning to end it?

The U.S. unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent in November 2010, and the number of unemployed persons was 15 million in November, among whom, 41.9 percent were jobless for 27 weeks and more. Some 6.3 million people have been out of work and looking for a job for more than six months. About half of the fall in the jobless rate during the last four months was caused by Americans who gave up looking for work and left the labor force. To collect those benefits, the jobless must show that they are searching for work, and the longer people are without a job, the less time they spend looking.

A total of 44 million Americans found themselves in poverty in 2009, four million more than that of 2008. The share of residents in poverty climbed to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest level recorded since 1994.14.7 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2009, an increase of almost 30 percent since 2006.The number of families in homeless shelters increased 7 percent to 170,129 from fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year 2009.The number of Americans without health insurance increased from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009, the ninth consecutive annual rise, which accounted for 16.7 percent of the total U.S. population.

Here are some more facts:

• The richest 1 percent of Americans took 23.5 percent of all the country’s income in 2007. In 1976 they got only 8.9 percent. Gross domestic income was $14 trillion in 2007.

• The lowest fifth on the income ladder saw a decrease in income of 4.1 percent between 1979 and 2008. In the same period, the incomes of the top five percent increased 73 percent.

• The richest 1 percent of US households in 2007 owned 33.8 percent of the nation’s private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.

• The Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans own about as much wealth as the poorest 50 percent of American households.

Currently the top 10 percent of income earners in the US own 70 percent of the wealth, and the wealthiest 5 percent own more than the bottom 95 percent, according to a Federal Reserve Study. The ratio of average CEO pay to worker pay in the US shot up from a mere 301-to-1 in 2003 to 431-to-1 in 2004. The average CEO now earns $11.8 million per year, versus the paltry $27,460 for the average worker. As America tries to grapple with soaring healthcare costs and lack of universal coverage, UnitedHealth Group CEO William McGuire received an obscene $124.8 million in compensation in 2005. http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0124/p09s01-coop.html

Santa Cruz, California, city officials are calling for "shared sacrifice": Since 2003, top management pay grew on average by 28 percent, adjusted for 16 percent inflation over those years, a real INCREASE of 12 percent. Meanwhile, the city's civilian non-management staff -- temporary and permanent -- saw wage increases totaling 13 percent over those same years; 15 percent less than top management pay. Adjusted for inflation, a real DECREASE of 3 percent. http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/opinion/ci_17813261