Surviving Capitalism (Not) : America’s decade of declining real wages

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, November 23, 2014

America’s decade of declining real wages

Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review.

The fundamental nature of capitalism is for a small class of people ("owners", capitalists, investors, etc) to exploit both people and the environment as much as possible in order to acquire more wealth and its concomitant power. Other factors being equal, this dynamic functions much like compound interest in that the more wealth/power that is obtained, the increase of both accelerates over time. In this neoliberal stage of capitalism we are seeing and experiencing the results that are recorded in hard data provided in this article.