A homeless man sleeps on the street near an outdoor cafe in New York City. (Image: BillMoyers.com)
Even though French economist Thomas Piketty has made an air-tight case that we’re heading toward levels of inequality not seen since the days of the 19th century robber barons, right-wing conservatives haven’t stopped lying about what’s happening and what to do about it.
Herewith, the four biggest right-wing lies about inequality, followed by the truth.
Lie number one: The rich and CEOs are America’s job creators. S
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The "middle class" has atrophied into the 10% of households just below the top 10%.
 The truth is painfully obvious: a middle class lifestyle is unaffordable to all but the top 20%. This reality is destabilizing to the current arrangement, i.e. debt-based consumerism a.k.a. neofeudal state-cartel capitalism, so it i
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The Number Of Working Age Americans Without A Job Has Risen By 27 MILLION Since 2000
 By Michael Snyder, on May 4th, 2014
 Did you know that there are nearly 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now? And 20 percent
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Everyone is reading Piketty wrong — including Piketty!
Want to really shut down the chief engine generating inequality? Forget the author's solution and do this instead
 As everybody now knows, r>g. That is, under capitalism’s natural pressures, wealth tends to concentrate. We have a convincingly large data set to show it, thanks to Thomas Piketty, whose 700-page economics tome “Capital in the 21st Century” is beating out Colton Burpo on Amazon.
Capital assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, land, patents, &c.) yield returns (profits, dividends, inte
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The Power of Piketty’s ‘Capital’
A brilliant book has named the problem of our time. But will anything change?
I f you were among those who followed the reports on French economist Thomas Piketty’s US book tour in support of his university-press-published, 696-page, Marxism-tinged treatise on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century and taxed your brain trying to recall a remotely recent antecedent for the ensuing excitement, well, relax; there isn’t any.
No less rema
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Straight into the Fox News buzzsaw: Why elite, billionaire liberalism always backfires
Liberals rejoice. The former mayor of New York City, megabillionaire Michael Bloomberg, recently announced to the New York Times that he will spend some $50 million dollars on an effort to confront the National Rifle Association and advance background-check legislation for gun buyers. I’m a strong supporter of gun control, so hooray, I guess.
What made the story worth noting was when the paper asked Bloomberg, one of the wealthiest men in the world, how much he planned to spend on the matter, and he tossed the $50 million figure out as if he were describing the tip he left on a restaurant ch
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All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars
Former managing director of Goldman Sachs – and head of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London (Nomi Prins) - notes:
Throughout the century that I examined, which began with the Panic of 1907 … what I found by accessing the archives of each president is that through many events and periods, particular bankers were in constant communication [with the White House] — not just about financial and economic policy, and by extension trade policy, but also about aspects of World War I, or World War II, or the Cold War, in terms of the expansion that America was undergoing as a superpower in the world, politically, buoyed by the financial expansion of the banking community.
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In the begi
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 Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age—or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque—defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” But it has only become a commonplace thanks to Piketty’s work. In particular, he and a few colleagues (notably Anthony Atkinson at Oxford and Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley) have pioneered statistical techniques that make it possible to track the concentration of income and w
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From high hopes to low wages: What happened to the American Dream?
Ideas about prosperity have become increasingly polarized over the past half-century — and we're paying the price
 America has frequently been referred to as the land of opportunity. Horace Greeley’s famous advice, “Go West, young man” and seek your fortune, illustrates the dream of nearly unlimited opportunity. The availability of opportunities has been viewed historically as a key building block upon which individuals and familie
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Wall Street bonuses now third highest on record after 15% jump in 2013The average bonus paid to securities industry employees in New York City grew 15% last year to more than $164,000 The $26.7bn in bonuses Wall Street banks handed out in 2013 would be enough to more than double the pay for all 1,085,000 full-time US minimum wage workers.
The average bonus paid to securities industry employees in New York City grew 15% last year to more than $164,000, the largest average Wall Street bonus since the 2008 financial crisis and the third highest on record, New York’s state comptroller reported Wednesday. The securities industry has been profitable for five consecutive years, Comptroller Thomas DiNapo
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