Welcome to the New Middle Class Under an American Oligarchy
Susanne Posel (OC) : According to the Harvard School of Business (HSB) newly published report there is a continual widening of the wealth gap in America that is “unsustainable”.
Nearly 2,000 Harvard alumni were surveyed about such issues as te future of corporations and global competiveness. The report states:
• By 2017, corporations will become more competitive
• 27% predict workers will “enjoy higher pay”
• 41% foresee wages and benefits dropping
Shockingly, during the last 5 years, as the stock market has risen in value, the “median household income” has remained “below pre-recession levels” and it is this gap between corporate worth and workers that is “unsustainable”.
The report warns: “We see a need for business leaders to act — to move from an opportunistic patchwork of projects toward strategic, collaborative efforts that make the average American productive enough to command higher wages even in competitive global labor markets. Without such actions, the U.S. economy will continue to do only half its job, with many citizens struggling.”
Earlier this year, it was established in a Princeton study that the US is actually an oligarchy with the rich and powerful elite as dominant.
The Princeton researchers wrote: “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
According to the study: “A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favor) is adopted only about 18% of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favor) is adopted about 45% of the time.”
However, “when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”
In conclusion: “Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
Just as in the developing world, Americans may have to get used to earning between $4 and $13 per day.
After almost 3 decades of globalization, the middle class has been down-graded to those who are earning just slightly above poverty levels.
Richard Freeman, economist at Harvard University, wrote a paper in 2006 entitled, “The Great Doubling: The Challenge of the New Global Labor Market” which outlined how “almost all at once in the 1990s, China, India, and the ex-Soviet bloc joined the global economy and the entire world came together into a single economic world based on capitalism and markets.”
The combination becomes a new proletariat class that fuels the markets and capitalism.
These groups are easily moved into assumed service-orientated work to the benefit of those who own the corporations providing employment to the “new middle class”.
In the future, what is considered acceptable living conditions and comforts are plummeting as a bar falling to the ground. Socially this downward turn is widely complied with under the thumb of crowd psychology.
Global unemployment has increased by 5 million from 2013 and this “current trend indicate the number of unemployed will increase in coming years and is expected to reach 215 million by 2018.”
Susanne Posel, Occupy Corporatism
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