Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. - Robert Reich Blog
Stephan: Robert Reich, in my opinion is correct in his assessment of what has happened to our economy, and the fact that it has only one social priority, the gratification of greed through greater profits, regardless of the effects on societal wellbeing.
Cartoon by Robert Reich
Wall Street may be having a bad week, but top bankers are doing wonderfully well. After a blockbuster year, the five biggest Wall Street banks just paid out $142 billion in bonuses and compensation for 2021. This was $18 billion more than in 2020. JPMorgan Chase reported record profits, and Citigroup’s annual profit more than doubled. Let me remind you (as if you need reminding) that 2020 and 2021 were not exactly blockbuster years for the rest of America.
In the first three decades after World War II, American companies made money by making things, selling them at a profit, and investing the profits in additional productive capacity. This helped create the largest middle class the world had ever seen. In those years, the financial sector accounted for 15 percent of U.S. corporate profits.
Then something happened. By the mid-1980s, the financial sector claimed 30 percent of corporate profits. By 2001, 40 percent — more than four times the profits made in all U.S. manufacturing.
Why this dramatic change? Indulge me a moment as I quote from a […]
Stephan: This is how bizarre wealth inequality has become in the United States. As I have been telling my readers for several years nowthis inequality has become so great that, as this report describes, the rich, the middle class, and the poor live in different worlds and find it hard to even conceptualize what those other worlds are like.
The average family income of a University of Pennsylvania student is $195,500. Credit: Hannah Beier/Reuters
It’s an average American salary. What could it be? $800,000?
It costs over $100,000 a year to attend the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I don’t know what you get for that money exactly but insights into the everyday economy clearly aren’t on the syllabus. Nina Strohminger, an assistant professor at Wharton School recently asked her students how much they reckoned the average American makes a year. A quarter of the class, she reported in a viral tweet, thought it was over six figures; one student thought it was $800,000. The real figure? Around $53,838, according to figures from the Social Security Administration (SSA) last year.
Now, clearly, this is just an informal poll broadcast on Twitter; it’s not a peer-reviewed scientific study. Still, it touched a nerve with a lot of people because it’s a reflection of the fact that the super-rich seem to live on a completely different planet than everyone else. According to data […]
Stephan: Very few seem to connect what employers are saying about their need to hire new people, and what those applying for those jobs report. I see this as yet another example of the wealth inequality trend.
illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty
If you believe reports from employers, they’re desperate to find good workers but can’t lure them at any price. Talk to job seekers, though, or existing employees at those same companies, and you’ll hear a different story.
From job seekers’ perspectives, companies do have plenty of vacancies, but they haven’t adjusted to the massive sea change the job market has undergone in the past two years. They’re offering laughably low salaries although candidates can command far more, or requiring years of experience for “entry-level” jobs, and they’re still operating on a model of underpaying and overworking at a time when workers have much better options.
These accounts are pretty typical of what I’m hearing from job seekers, as well as from employees at companies that say they’re having trouble hiring:
• “I’ve lost count of the job ads I’ve seen that want 5–8 years of experience (in a fairly unique field) but are only paying $17–18/hour in high cost of living areas and where the job is in-person. I imagine the employers […]
Elizabeth Claire Alberts , Staff Writer - Mongabay
Stephan: No nation in the world, and certainly not the United States, is taking the human pollution of the earth seriously enough. We need to undergo a massive change in the technologies we employ. Now humans treat the earth as an exploitable bank account left to us by a rich uncle. As this report spells out it is literally destroying the earth's ecosystems. We need to enter a new epoch where every technology is considered first from the perspective of its impact on the matrix of life.
Plastic pollution in the ocean. Credit: Naja Bertolt Jensen / Unsplash.
A new study has found that the release of novel entities — artificial chemicals and other human-made pollutants — has accelerated to a point that we have crossed a “planetary boundary,” threatening the entire Earth operating system, along with humanity.
The study authors argue that the breach of this critical planetary boundary has occurred because the rate at which novel entities are being developed and produced by industry exceeds governments’ ability to assess risk and monitor impacts.
There are about 350,000 different types of artificial chemicals currently on the international market, with production of existing and new synthetic chemicals set to substantially increase in the coming decades.
While many of these substances have been shown to negatively affect the natural world and human health, the vast majority have yet to be evaluated, with their interactions and impacts poorly understood or completely unknown.
Many thousands of human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants are circulating throughout our world, with new ones entering production all the time […]
Stephan: The American Illness Profit System that passes for healthcare in the United States is in grievous trouble, as virtually every authority in the healthcare field is saying in speeches, academic papers, and general readership articles. We need universal birthright publicly funded healthcare, like the rest of the developed world. It will be vastly cheaper, and much more effective and fair. Can we get to this given the fact that members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican are essentially working for the corporate owners of the Illness Profit System? I don't think so with the Congress we have now, which is why if you are a citizen of the United States you need to make your voice heard in anyway you can, demanding a complete restructuring of American healthcare.
(From left to right) Carrie Cochran-McClain, Chief Policy Officer at National Rural Health Association; Dr. Adam Myers, Senior Vice President and Chief Clinical Transformation Officer; Stacey D. Stewart, President and CEO of March of Dimes
The U.S. health care system has become too complicated, expensive and inaccessible for many Americans. Despite the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, which pushed the percentage of the U.S. population with access to and enrollment in either private or public sector health insurance to more than 91 percent, affordability remains a crucial barrier to accessing care. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, per capita health spending increased about six-fold in the last half-century, from $1,848 in 1970 to $11,582 in 2019 (adjusted for inflation).
This cost is economically unfeasible for everyone — whether insured, uninsured or underinsured. Without access to quality health care at an affordable price, taxpayers pick up the tab for the cost while individuals and communities pay by way of poor health outcomes. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that half of […]
