U.S. Pensions Plundered By Corporate Greed

Title: U.S. Pensions Plundered By Corporate Greed, Author Says

Source: Yahoo Finance

Date: September 26, 2011

From the article:

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman, noted in a piece last week titled "The Social Contract," that while the middle gets squeezed, the rich keep getting richer in both real and relative terms.

"...the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn't changed —show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That's growth, but it's slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II. Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn't a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million."

If the average worker didn't have enough to worry about, Ellen Schultz - an award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers -- says that in some instances the fat paychecks of the top paid executives are coming directly out of the pocket of average workers.

The Drudge Report Trumpets the Concentration of Wealth

This is what the Drudge Report web site looks like today:



The main link in red leads to this article:

Census: US poverty rate swells to nearly 1 in 6

The ranks of U.S. poor swelled to nearly 1 in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment woes left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in over two decades.

Another link:

U.S. Poverty Climbed to 17-Year High in 2010 as Household Income Fell

The U.S. poverty rate rose to the highest level in almost two decades and household income fell in 2010, underscoring the lingering impact of the worst economic slump in seven decades.

Data released by the Census Bureau today showed the proportion of people living in poverty climbed to 15.1 percent last year from 14.3 percent in 2009, and median household income declined 2.3 percent. The number of Americans living in poverty was the highest in the 52 years since the Census Bureau began gathering that statistic. Those figures may have worsened in recent months as the economy weakened.

This is exactly what would be expected when the wealth of the nation is concentrating. Since the Drudge Report is a staunch proponent of policies that help wealth to concentrate, we must assume that this home page for Drudge is good news - a mark of accomplishment. Poverty is the expected and desired result of policies that concentrate wealth.