6 Ways the 7th Richest Man in America Has Screwed the Poor

AlterNet / By Tana Ganeva

6 Ways the 7th Richest Man in America Has Screwed the Poor

Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaves behind one of the biggest wealth gaps in the country.

 

Photo Credit: AFP

March 22, 2013  |  

 

The following piece is part of AlterNet's series on poverty, Hard Times, USA. 
Earlier this month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg perfectly described a day in the life of your average homeless New Yorker. “You can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we've got to give you shelter," he said on his radio show, addressing the record rate of homelessness in the city.

50,000 people, including 21,000 children, are currently crowded into the city's emergency shelters, a 61 percent rise from when the Mayor took office, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. 

Last month, the Mayor had assured reporters that "Nobody's sleeping on the streets," a claim easily refuted by a look at the city's homelessness statistics and/or going outside in New York. As it turns out, the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) had recently suspended a program making it easier for homeless families to get into shelters when the temperature dips below freezing. The DHS did not share this information widely; it came to light after a New York Daily News report highlighted the case of 23 year-old Junior Clarke, who told the News that he, his wife, and 4 year-old daughter were turned away from the city's intake center on a freezing day. When they refused to leave, staff threatened to call the police.

“They tried to make us leave and we refused,” Clarke told the Daily News.  “You know some people leave, walk away and go sleep on the train with their families.”

As the 7th richest man in America finishes his final term in office, he leaves behind one of the biggest wealth gaps in the country:  income inequality in Manhattan is the second worst in the US, according to the New York Times. New York's poverty rate has risen to the highest level in a decade, the Times also noted. 1 in 3 New York kids live below the poverty line. In parts of the Bronx, two thirds of residents live in areas of extreme poverty.

At the start of his second term, the Mayor raised the hopes of advocates for the poor by expanding the definition of poverty to account for the high cost of living in the city. But as sociologist Francis Fox Piven told the Gotham Gazette, "If we thought a new measure would mean more generous policies, we were wrong."
In fact, many Mayoral actions have significantly worsened the lives of the poor. Here's a look at some of his greatest hits.

1. Booting Homeless Families from Priority Access to Housing Aid

At the start of his second term, the Mayor promised to reduce the rate of individual and family homelessness in the city by two-thirds in 5 years. Today, there are as many homeless New Yorkers as during the height of the Great Depression, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. The Mayor blames the recession and, strangely, the Coalition for the Homeless itself, but homelessness advocates point to a series of ill-advised policy decisions that separated homeless families from the government aid that had kept many of them housed.
In 2005, the administration cut homeless families' priority access to Section 8 federal housing aid. In its place, DHS came up with Housing Stability Plus, a program designed to fire up homeless families' magic bootstrap powers by making aid temporary and contingent on work requirements. Families were only eligible if they were on Public Assistance but they also had to work, which counterproductively meant that if one parent got a full-time job they could lose their housing. A 2007 Coalition report found that families were being funneled into slumlord properties, where kids could build character by overcoming hardships like rat infestations and lead in the walls. The Advantage program, another impermanent rental subsidy that restricted rental help to 2 years, followed. Despite the administration's efforts, the rate of homelessness continued to climb as families ran out of Advantage subsidies without substantially improving their economic situation and had no choice but to return to shelter.

Half of the program's costs were paid by New York state. When Governor Cuomo cut off funds, the Bloomberg administration scrapped the whole thing, leaving the city with no permanent housing plan for the city's neediest families.

2. No Plan to Address Homelessness

That didn't go well! This week, a report by Coalition for the Homeless found that as of November, 2,818 former Advantage families had returned to a shelter.  A quarter of the families going into the city's shelters are former Advantage users, which explains, in part, why the rate of homelessness is high as during the 1930s.

The Mayor's current plan seems to consist of saying out-of-touch-rich-guy things (" ... it is a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before," Bloomberg said when asked why homeless families were staying in shelters so long), and opening up emergency shelters. Spending on temporary shelter has jumped 30 percent since 2008, according to the Independent Budget Office. 
If the Mayor had his way though, the best strategy for lowering the cost of shelter is to let fewer people stay in them. At a press conference defending his large soda ban, the Mayor philosophized about the responsibility we have to take care of one another. Minutes later he warned that the city's policy of housing the homeless threatened to set off mass unrest.

"You're gonna see an uprising here," he said. "The public cannot afford to continue to do what we've been doing with homeless where everybody has a right to shelter, whether they need it or not. The public at some point is going to say to their elected officials: 'I don't want to pay anymore," he said.

Although the Department of Homeless services can deny families shelter -- only 35 percent of families that apply for shelter are accepted -- they don't have the same luck with homeless individuals because of various state and city laws that require the city to house any individual who asks for shelter.

Meanwhile, a plan by City Council members Christine Quinn and Annabel Palma to move homeless families into permanent housing instead of putting them in expensive emergency shelters is gathering dust. They suggest re-prioritizing shelter residents in the allocation of federal housing subsidies, and adding a rental assistance program similar to Advantage. So far, the administration seems intent to leave the problem to the next guy.

3. Crushing the Living Wage Laws

Contrary to nasty stereotypes, many people without permanent housing have jobs; they just don't earn enough to support life in one of the costliest American cities.

The campaign for a living wage in New York famously united clergy, antipoverty advocates, and unions. A large majority of City Council members stood behind the two bills. The widespread support was not surprising, since it's pretty hard to come up with a convincing opposition to the measures, which simply demanded that development projects that receive more than $1 million in taxpayer subsidies pay their workers a decent wage: 10 dollars an hour with health insurance, or $11.50 without.

Advocates pointed out that developers who underpaid their workers were being subsidized by taxpayers twice: once when they got the initial public money and again when their workers were forced to resort to food stamps, housing aid, and other social services in order to survive on their measly earnings. The city had already been more than kind to developers, with business tax subsidies growing by 180 percent in the past decade, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute. 
While the Mayor enthusiastically supported that government intrusion into the market, he deemed the living wage to be an unacceptable government overreach. The measures were "a throwback to the era when government viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked, rather than a garden to be cultivated," the Mayor mused poetically. But things were serious. "The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn't work out so well," he warned on his radio show. 

When the City Council overwhelmingly passed the legislation, the Mayor vetoed it. When the Council overrode his veto, the Mayor actually sued the City Council to prevent the measures from taking effect. In the meantime, Council member Christine Quinn got busy weakening the measure. In the end, the legislation applied to only 400 or 500 workers, reported the New York Times, allowing companies like Fresh Direct, which was about to receive a $100-million package of tax breaks for moving to the Bronx, to underpay their workers in peace.

4. Budget Cuts

At the start of his second term, the Mayor launched an anti-poverty initiative that consisted of a series of pilot programs, many of them privately funded. They included job training and teaching poor families how to save money. The administration also introduced conditional cash transfers, rewarding families that met goals like going to the doctor, school attendance for the kids or even getting a library card. The money could certainly make a short-term difference for families that participated but antipoverty advocates argued that the cash transfers and other programs were too small to address the root causes of poverty like high rates of unemployment, skyrocketing rents and low wages. (Cash transfer was abandoned when it showed little impact on the behavior of participants.) 

At the same time that the Mayor was introducing and then giving up on untested programs, the administration's proposed budget cuts ended up primarily impacting public services that helped the poor. An analysis by the Gotham Gazette found that programs aiding the city's poor and working class residents -- including those providing child care, health, education and homeless services "have lost a disproportionate number of workers -- 6 percent to more than 26 percent of their staffs." They point out that at the same time the police department "lost fewer than 3 percent of its uniformed officers, and the corrections department has actually increased its uniformed staffing by 2 percent."

Every year, like clockwork, the Mayor's proposed budget contains massive proposed cuts to programs that help poor kids and parents, like child care and after school programs. Between 2007 and 2011 more than 40,000 subsidized child services spots were canned, according to the Center for New York City Affairs. "This year, the slots face the guillotine once again, with a $60 million cut to afterschool programs in Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget, and another $77 million to child care services," writes Abigail Kramer Child Welfare Watch.

5. Affordable Housing for Rich People

One area the administration has been willing to spend money is in building affordable housing in the city. The New Housing Marketplace Plan, a multi-billion dollar investment, is expected to produce up to 140,000 housing units (the initial goal was 165,000). Small snag: many will only be affordable for upper-income people. A new report prepared by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development found that two thirds of the new spaces cost too much for most neighborhood residents. In half of the districts surveyed, the majority of units are too expensive for residents that make the neighborhood's median income (the administration disputes their conclusions). "The typical Bronx household would have to make 1.5 times its income in order to be able to afford the majority of the affordable housing built in the Bronx," they write. As Eric Jaffe points out in Atlantic Cities, "In general terms, the affordable housing plan did create low-income housing, but it was upper-low-income housing."

For example, an "affordable housing" apartment built in Central Harlem costs $1,492, most likely to be rented by a relatively high income person. In contrast, the report points to another 3 bedroom apartment in the neighborhood, built in collaboration with a non-profit, which rents for $531.

The plan certainly isn't ideal for poor residents being priced out of their neighborhoods. As Alyssa Katz points out in the American Prospect, even if the housing units provided by the initiative served low-income people, they would not make up for the impact of gentrification. "New York is losing far more than it's building to deregulation and gentrification. According to the Community Service Society, every year nearly 60,000 apartments become too expensive for the poorest two-fifths of city residents to afford. "

While gentrification is often seen as being inevitable, it's strongly shaped by city policy, and the Bloomberg administration has been an especially ardent advocate of redevelopment. In the past decade the city has rezoned a record number of neighborhoods, which allows developers to come in and build expensive new apartments or fill a street with H&Ms and Old Navys.   While in many cases neighborhood change can be positive, advocates for lower-income people and protestors of gentrification say that despite big promises made at city meetings, development is rarely met with matching measures that ensure residents can stay in the neighborhood.

6. Stop and frisk

The NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy essentially makes it a crime to be a poor black or Latino person in New York (the policy is currently the target of a large class action lawsuit). The shocking stats have become familiar: 5 million stops in the last decade, close to 90% of them minorities. Only 1 in 1,000 stops yields a gun, undermining the Mayor's contention that the policy plays an essential role in keeping guns off the streets.  But as AlterNet's Kristen Gwynne has reported, stats somberly repeated by the New York Times mask the horrific on-the-ground experience of the department's violent policing: the cold numbers obscure what it's like to have a cop touch your penis while your girlfriend watches.

Gwynne has also documented how aggressive enforcement of so-called "quality of life laws" in poor neighborhoods  -- like riding your bike on the sidewalk  -- sucks kids into the criminal justice system:

A “Quality of life” summons for disorderly conduct may seem like no big deal, but young people in the South Bronx told me that misdemeanor summonses are so often handed to them that they “lose track” and miss a court date. Next thing they know, a stop-and-frisk turns up a warrant for arrest, and they are hauled down to the precinct. The $25 fine quickly turns into $100, stacking up to exorbitant fees for crimes prosecuted almost exclusively in low-income neighborhoods of color.

One can see how fining low-income people hundreds of dollars for riding their bikes on the sidewalk doesn't ease their path out of poverty. Also, probably pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is more complicated when going to school or work involves being yelled at, fondled, cited, or arrested by police.

Tana Ganeva is AlterNet's managing editor. Follow her on Twitter or email her at tana@alternet.org.

Chomsky: Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose Common Good

Visions

AlterNet / By Noam Chomsky

Chomsky: Corporations and the Richest Americans Viscerally Oppose Common Good

The Masters of Mankind want us to become the "stupid nation," in the interests of their short-term gain -- damn the consequences. 

March 7, 2013  |   

The following is Part I of the transcript of a recent speech delivered by Noam Chomsky in February. AlterNet will publish Part II on Sunday, March 10.

Whether public education contributes to the Common Good depends, of course, on what kind of education it is, to whom it is available, and what we take to be the Common Good. There’s no need to tarry on the fact that these are highly contested  matters, have been throughout history, and continue to be so today. 

One of the great achievements of American democracy has been the introduction of mass public education, from children to advanced research universities. And  in some respects that leadership position has been maintained. Unfortunately, not all. Public education is under serious attack, one component of the attack on any  rational and humane concept of the Common Good, sometimes in ways that are  not only shocking, but also spell disaster for the species. 

All of this falls within the  general assault on the population in the past generation, the so-called “neoliberal era.” I’ll return to these matters, of great significance and import. 

Sometimes the attacks on education and on the Common Good are very closely  linked. One current illustration is the “Environmental Literacy Improvement Act” that is being proposed to legislatures by ALEC, the American Legislative  Exchange Council, a corporate-funded lobby that designs legislation to serve the  needs of the corporate sector and extreme wealth. This act mandates “balanced”  teaching of climate science in K-12 classrooms.” 

“Balanced teaching” is a code  phrase that refers to teaching climate change denial, to “balance” authentic climate  science – what you read in science journals. It is analogous to the “balanced  teaching” advocated by creationists to enable the teaching of “creation science” in  public schools. Legislation based on ALEC models has already been introduced in  several states. 

The ALEC legislation is based on a project of the Heartland Institute, a corporate-funded Institute dedicated to rejection of the scientific consensus on the  climate. The Institute project calls for a “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12  Classrooms,” which aims to teach that there is “a major controversy over whether  or not humans are changing the weather.” Of course, all of this is dressed up in  rhetoric about teaching critical thinking, and so on. It is much like the current  assault on teaching children about evolution and science quite generally. 

There is indeed a controversy: on one side, the overwhelming majority of  scientists, all of the world’s major National Academies of Science, the professional  science journals, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) : all agree that global warming is taking place, that there is a substantial human  component, and that the situation is serious and perhaps dire, and that very soon,  maybe within decades, the world might reach a tipping point where the process  will escalate sharply and will be irreversible, with very severe effects on the   possibility of decent human survival. 

It is rare to find such consensus on complex  scientific issues. 

True, it is not unanimous. Media reports commonly present a controversy between  the overwhelming scientific consensus on one side, and skeptics on the other, including some quite respected scientists who caution that much is unknown –  which means that things might not be as bad as thought or they might be worse:  only the first alternative is brought up. Omitted from the contrived debate is a  much larger group of skeptics: highly regarded climate scientists who regard the  regular reports of the IPCC as much too conservative: the Climate Change group  at my own university, MIT, for example. And they have repeatedly been proven  correct, unfortunately. But they are scarcely part of the public debate, though very  prominent in the scientific literature. 

The Heartland Institute and ALEC are part of a huge campaign by corporate  lobbies to try to sow doubt about the near-unanimous consensus of scientists that  human activities are having a major impact on global warming with truly ominous  implications. The campaign was openly announced, including the lobbying  organizations of the fossil fuel industry, the American Chamber of Commerce (the  main business lobby) and others. It has had an effect on public opinion, though  careful studies show that public opinion remains much closer to the scientific  consensus than policy is. That is undoubtedly why major sectors of the corporate  world are launching their attack on the educational system, to try to counter the  dangerous tendency of the public to pay attention to the conclusions of scientific  research.

You probably heard that at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting a  few weeks ago, Gov. Bobby Jindal warned the leadership that “We must stop being the stupid party…We must stop insulting the intelligence of voters.” ALEC  and its corporate backers, in contrast, want the country to be "the stupid nation” –  which may encourage them to join the stupid party that Jindal warned about. 

The major science journals give a sense of how surreal all of this is. Take Science, the major US scientific weekly. A few weeks ago it had three news items side by side. One reported that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the US, continuing  a long trend. The second reported a new study by the US Global Climate Change  Research Program providing additional evidence for rapid climate change as the  result of human activities, and discussing likely severe impacts. The third reported  the new appointments to chair the committees on science policy chosen by the  House of Representatives, where a minority of voters elected a large majority of  Republicans thanks to the shredding of the political system. 

In Pennsylvania, for  example, a considerably majority voted for Democrats but they won just over one-third of House seats. All three of the new chairs deny that humans contribute to climate  change, two deny that it is even taken place, one is a longtime advocate for the  fossil fuel industry. The same issue of the journal has a technical article with new  evidence that the irreversible tipping point may be ominously close. 

For those whom Adam Smith called the "Masters of Mankind,” it is important  that we must become the stupid nation in the interests of their short-term gain,  damn the consequences. These are essential properties of contemporary market  fundamentalist doctrines. ALEC and its corporate sponsors understand the  importance of ensuring that public education train children to belong to the stupid  nation, and not be misled by science and rationality. 

This is far from the only case of sharp divergence between public opinion and  public policy. That tells us a lot about the current state of American democracy,  and what that means for us and the world. The corporate assault on education and  independent thought, of which this is only one striking illustration, tells us a good deal more. 

In climate policy, the US lags behind other countries. Quotes a current scientific  review: “109 countries have enacted some form of policy regarding renewable  power, and 118 countries have set targets for renewable energy. In contrast,  the United States has no adopted any consistent and stable set of policies at the  national level to foster the use of renewable energy” or adopted other means  that are being pursued by countries that do have national policies. Some things are being done in the US, but sporadically, and with no organized national  commitment. That’s no slight problem for us, and for the world, in the light of  the great predominance of American power – declining to be sure as power is  diversified internationally, but still unchallenged. 

There are other respects in which the concept of Common Good that has come  to dominate policy – but not opinion -- in the US is diverging from the affluent  developed societies of the OECD, and many others. A recent OECD study  shows that the US ranks 27th  out of 31 countries in measures of social justice,  barely above Mexico. It ranks 21st in inequality, poverty, life expectancy, infant  mortality, maternity leave, environmental performance, 18th  in mental health and  19th in welfare of children. Also ranks toward the bottom in high-school dropout  rates and poor student performance in math. 

Figures like these are signs of  very severe systemic disorders; particularly striking because the US is the richest country in the world, with incomparable advantages. 

Another crucial case is healthcare. US costs are about twice the per capita  costs of comparable countries, and outcomes are relatively poor. Studied by  economist Dean Baker reveal that the deficit that obsesses the financial sector and  Washington, but not the more realistic public, would be eliminated if we had health care systems similar to other developed societies, hardly a utopian idea. The US  healthcare system deviates from others in that it is largely privatized and lightly  regulated, and – not surprisingly – is highly inefficient and costly. There is an  exception in the US healthcare system: the Veterans Administration, a government  system, much less costly. 

Another partial exception is Medicare, a government-run system, hence with far lower administrative costs and other waste, but still  more costly than it should be because it has to work through the privatized system  and is trapped by the extraordinary political power of the pharmaceutical industry,  which prevents the government from negotiating drug prices so that they are far  higher than in other countries.  

Current policy ideas include proposals to increase age eligibility to cut costs:  actually it increases costs (along with penalizing mostly working people) by  shifting from a relatively efficient system to a highly inefficient privatized one. But  the costs are transferred to individuals and away from collective action through  taxes. And the concept of the Common Good that is being relentlessly driven into  our heads demands that we focus on our own private gain, and suppress normal  human emotions of solidarity, mutual support and concern for others. That I think  is also an important part of what lies behind the assault on public education and  on Social Security that has been waged by sectors of corporate wealth for years,  on pretexts of cost that cannot be sustained, and against strong public opposition.  

What lies behind these campaigns, I suspect, is that public education and Social S ecurity, like national healthcare, are based on the conception that we care for other people: we care that the disabled widow across town has food to eat, or  that the kids down the street have schooling ("why should I pay taxes for schools? I don’t have kids there"). And beyond that, that we care about the tens of millions are  dying every year because they cannot obtain medical care, or about dying infants,  and others who are vulnerable. 

These conflicts go far back in American history. It’s particularly useful to look  back to the origins of the industrial revolution, in the mid-19th century, when the  country was undergoing enormous social changes as the population was being  driven into the industrial system, which working people bitterly condemned,  because it deprived them of their basic rights as free men and women – not the least  women, the so-called factory girls, who were leaving the farms to the mills. 

It is worth reading the contributions in the press of the time by factory  girls, artisans from Boston, and others. It's also important to note that working- class culture of the time was alive and flourishing. There’s a great book about  the topic by Jonathan Rose, called The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class. It’s a monumental study of the reading habits of the working class of the  day. He contrasts “the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts”  with the “pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy.” 

Pretty much the same  was true in the new working-class towns here, like eastern Massachusetts, where  an Irish blacksmith might hire a young boy to read the classics to him while he  was working. On the farms, the factory girls were reading the best contemporary  literature of the day, what we study as classics. They condemned the industrial  system for depriving them of their freedom and culture. 

This went on for a long  time. I am old enough to remember the atmosphere of the 1930s. A large part of  my family came from the unemployed working-class. Many had barely gone to  school. But they participated in the high culture of the day. They would discuss  the latest Shakespeare plays, concerts of the Budapest String Quartet, different  varieties of psychoanalysis and every conceivable political movement. There was also a very lively workers' education system with which leading scientists  and mathematicians were directly involved. A lot of this has been lost under the relentless assault of the Masters, but it can be recovered and it is not lost forever. 

The labor press of the early industrial revolution took strong positions on many  issues that should have a resonance today. They took for granted that, as they  put it, those who work in the mills should own them. They condemned wage  labor, which to them was akin to slavery, the only difference being that it was  supposedly temporary. 

This was such a popular view that it was even part of the  program of the Republican Party. It was also a main theme of the huge organized  labor movement that was taking shape, the Knights of Labor, which began to  establish links with the most important popular democratic party in the country’s  history, the Farmers Alliance, later called the Populist movement, which originated  with radical farmers in Texas and then spread through much of the country,  forming collective enterprises, banks and marketing cooperatives and much more,  movements that could have driven the country toward more authentic democracy  if they had not been destroyed, largely by violence – though, interestingly,  similar developments are underway today in the old Rust Belt and elsewhere, very  important for the future, I think. 

The prime target of condemnation in the labor press was what they called “The  New Spirit of the Age: Gain Wealth, Forgetting All But Self.” No efforts have  been spared since then to drive this spirit into people's heads. People must come  to believe that suffering and deprivation result from the failure of individuals, not  the reigning socioeconomic system. There are huge industries devoted to this  task. About one-sixth of the entire US economy is devoted to what's called "marketing,"  which is mostly propaganda. Advertising is described by analysts and the business  literature as a process of fabricating wants – a campaign to drive people to the  superficial things in life, like fashionable consumption, so that they will remain  passive and obedient. 

The schools are also a target. As I mentioned, public mass education was a major  achievement, in which the US was a pioneer. But it had complex characteristics,  rooted in the sharp class conflicts of the day. One goal was to induce farmers  to give up their independence and submit themselves to industrial discipline and  accept what they regarded as wage slavery. That did not pass without notice.  Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that political leaders of his day were calling for  popular education. He concluded that their motivation was fear. The country was  filling up with millions of voters and the Masters realized that one had to therefore  “educate them, to keep them from (our) throats.” 

In other words: educate them  the “right way” -- to be obediently passive and accept their fate as right and just,  conforming to the New Spirit of the Age. Keep their perspectives narrow, their  understanding limited, discourage free and independent thought, instill docility and  obedience to keep them from the Masters' throats. 

This common theme from 150 years ago is inhuman and savage. It also meets  with resistance. And there have been victories. There were many in the struggles  of the 1930s, carried further in the 1960s. But systems of power never walk  away politely. They prepare a new assault. This has in fact been happening since  the early 1970s, based on major changes in the design of the economic system.  

Two crucial changes were financialization, with a huge explosion of speculative  financial flows, and deindustrialization. Production didn't cease. It just began to  be offshored anywhere where you could get terrible working conditions and no  environmental constraints, with huge profits for the Masters. Within the US, that  set off a vicious cycle, leading to sharp concentration of wealth, which translates at  once to concentration of political power, increasingly in the financial sector. That  in turn leads to legislation that carries the vicious cycle forward, including sharp  tax reduction for the rich and deregulation, with repeated financial crises from  the ‘80s, each worse than the last. The current one is so far the worst of all. And  others are likely in what a director of the Bank of England calls a “doom loop.”  

There are solutions, but they do not fit the needs of the Masters, for whom the  crises are no problem. They are bailed out by the Nanny State. Today corporate  profits are breaking new records and the financial managers who created the  current crisis are enjoying huge bonuses.  Meanwhile, for the large majority, wages and income have practically stagnated in  the last 30-odd years. By today, it has reached the point that 400 individuals have more wealth than the bottom 180 million Americans. 

In parallel, the cost of elections has skyrocketed, driving both parties even deeper  into the pockets of those with the money, corporations and the super-rich. Political representatives become even more beholden to those who paid for their victories.  One consequence is that by now, the poorest 70% have literally no influence over  policy. As you move up the income/wealth ladder influence increases, and at the  very top, a tiny percent, the Masters get what they want. 

Copyright Noam Chomsky, 2013. All rights reserved. Permission to republish this text must be granted by the author. 

Noam Chomsky's latest book is Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (Metropolitan Books 2013). He is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT.