Activists: inequality is a legal, institutional choice that can be revisited through resistance

Al Jazeera has a short article by a couple of global justice activists and well known justice scholar Thomas Pogge, about growing global wealth inequality, the role of law and legal institutions in fostering and protecting the status quo for those who benefit from it, and the rise in information and collaboration that is empowering resistance from civil society:

The scale of inequality and poverty can appear overwhelming and unchangeable. Yet it is not inevitable. It is the outcome of active choices by people who make and enforce the rules we all live by: rules about global trade, banking, loans, investment, taxes, working conditions, land, food, health and education. These rules are made by people and people can change them.

...Right now, there is a special moment of opportunity. Throughout the world, citizens have access to information in ways once unimaginable. Affordable technologies are revolutionising our ability to communicate with one another and act collectively. The opportunities for new citizen-powered movements to become catalysts for change have never been greater than today. Powerful elites are losing the structural advantages they once enjoyed of being able to maintain secrecy, restrict information and suppress popular movements.  

The authors are launching an activist initiative entitled /The Rules.  This is something to watch as the activists circle around international tax--a technical expertise-laden field that has not worked out important questions of justice in any kind of coherent matter. When Lennon sang about power to the people he did not mention tax havens, but global tax avoidance and evasion appear to be front and center of popular resistance to status quo legal regimes today.

Gender pay gap begins one year out of college

From Salon:

A report from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) flagged by Raw Story found that a gender earning gap usually occurs just one year after graduates leave college, with men making an average of $42,918 one year after graduation while women make an average of $35,296. The report, “Graduating to a pay gap” notes: 

“Graduating to a pay gap” finds that women working full time already earn less than their male counterparts do just one year after college graduation. Taking a closer look at the data, we find that women’s choices—college major, occupation, hours at work—do account for part of the pay gap. But about one-third of the gap remains unexplained, suggesting that bias and discrimination are still problems in the workplace.

More at the link.

Why inequality matters

A free ebook, of interest.

h/t, Richard Murphy.

So much for the end of men

NPR has a story on the college payoff, showing that while students pay much more for a college education in the U.S. than they do in most other countries, they also get a bigger return on their investment.  But for me the big story is the enormous gender difference in that payoff.  Wow!  There continues to be a huge premium for maleness across the globe, but it is striking indeed how much more being male in America gets you:

And what explains why college costs more for women in the U.S., Germany, and Canada?  It can't be a base price differential along gender lines, I would think (lawsuit, anyone?), so is it that men are given more scholarships?

The story points us to this study from Indiana University with more detail on the gender gap, including this chart showing that women must obtain associate's degrees to match the salary levels of men with high school degrees:  

I can't see how this information in any way squares with the notion that women are pulling ahead of men. 

Expensive to be poor: dental edition

From Propublica, a look at dental treatment for the poor.  First, medicaid pays so little that many dentists won't accept medicaid patients at all; second, when they do accept these patients, they exploit them ruthlessly to extract every possible dollar, either from medicaid or the patients themselves or both.  For those without access to dentists, the Romney plan (emergency room care for all) doesn't appear quite workable:

Not that many dentists actually accept Medicaid. There are some states where the reimbursement rates are so low that even the chains don't go there. Like in Florida, for example, the Medicaid rates are so low there that chains don't really even bother. So children end up going to the emergency room because they have a toothache and there's nothing else they can do. They end up in hospitals to treat a tooth. 

There was a famous case in Maryland where a 10-year-old boy had a toothache and it was abscessed and he ended up dying because he didn't have a dentist.

But for those lucky enough to find a dentist who will take them on, the situation seems only marginally better: instead of dying, you get this:

We looked at two of the larger [dental] chains, and found evidence that these companies were putting pressure on their dentists to produce at certain revenue targets, thus encouraging them to do procedures that may have been unnecessary.

... One of the chains focused on kids on Medicaid, and the reimbursement rates for Medicaid are pretty low. So in order to get a lot of revenue from these patients they were doing things like taking x-rays that were not needed, or putting stainless steel crowns instead of fillings on their teeth. They could make twice as much money from Medicaid on these crowns versus just putting a filling on a tooth. Kids were getting treatments that they really didn't need.

...We had one example of an 87-year-old woman who had already been to the dentist and she went in to have two teeth pulled, thinking it would be cheaper at [New York-based] Aspen Dental. Instead they looked at her mouth and they came up with a treatment plan that was going to cost $8,000. They convinced her though hard-sell tactics to borrow that money through a credit card, and something like $2,000 of that was just to clean her teeth. (Aspen Dental's response is here.)

How do these dentists sleep at night?  Well, they have big loans to pay off, you see:

These days, when dentists get out of dental school, they often owe anywhere between $200,000 and $300,000 dollars. Dental school is actually more expensive than medical school. So they come out with these huge debts, in a lot of cases they can't really afford to start their own practice. 

These dental chains hire people, a lot of the time right out of dental school, and they pay fairly decent salaries and they have a bonus system where the more work you do on a patient the more you get paid. That's true for a private dentist as well, but the difference is that these companies are owned by private equity firms, and they're managed in a different way. You have people who are not dentists coming up with a business plan that's based on metrics. They try to get new patients in who haven't been to the dentist in a while, and they've already calculated how much revenue the average new patient should generate. 

If you happen to go in and you don't really have anything wrong with your mouth and you're a new patient you're not fitting the model. That creates pressure for the dentists to find things that are 'wrong.'

The report goes on to show that the problems are mostly undetected because there is insufficient oversight.  A scholar who works on corruption in governance once told me that the recipe for corruption is greed plus opportunity.  You can't stop greed, he said--that's human nature.  But society has got to find ways to curb opportunity.  That's after all one of the main reasons to form a society at all--namely, to curb the human animal's propensity to exploit and destroy one another for personal gain.  For more on this issue, you can watch "Dollars and Dentists" at PBS.

How the Wealth Gap Damages Democracy

Pacific Standard reviews Inequality and Instability by James K. Galbraith and Affluence & Influence, by Martin Gilen:

Gilens and James K. Galbraith are among the few experts who’ve been working on the subject for more than a decade. Their conclusions reinforce the fears of those of us who’ve suspected that inequality is a blight on American society. Indeed, the damage to democratic values is not in some distant dystopian future: Gilens states plainly that the relationship between the policy desires of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population and actual federal public policy over recent decades “often corresponded more closely to a plutocracy than to a democracy.”

...Galbraith believes that recent volatility in inequality levels stems almost entirely from the increased accumulation of wealth among those working at the top of the technology and finance sectors.

The biggest problem, he insists, is that in recent decades, we seem to have forgotten how to grow the economy except by increasing inequality. The result has been a series of bubbles, and bubbles always cause damage when they pop.

...Gilens’s concerns are different, more pessimistic. He maintains that the poor and middle class have precious little representation in federal policymaking. Surveying a 40-year period, he finds that legislative outcomes almost never correspond to the public opinion preferences of the poor (at least when their expressed interests differ from those of the rich), whereas they much more frequently match the policy preferences of the wealthiest 10 percent. He does not flinch from the harsh conclusion: “The complete lack of government responsiveness to the preferences of the poor is disturbing and seems consistent only with the most cynical views of American politics.”  

 I haven't read either book yet but both sound worth reading.

Moving McJobs-ward: more jobs but smaller paychecks, plus stagnation in pay equity

There's always plenty of talk about how many jobs have been saved or created but not nearly enough of what kind of jobs there are.  That's because quantity is relatively much easier to articulate than quantity and by articulate I mean "use for political purposes."  But today, NPR has this:

and this:

NPR says nothing about the gender pay gap, but isn't it amazing that since...oh, somewhere in the late 80s I guess (the graph inexplicably has no bottom axis but indicates it covers 1967-2011, but the tick marks don't seem to add up right), the two lines stop slowly coming together as they had been, and start moving up and down in sync, apparently perfectly preserving the inequality?

Also for the top chart, I note that of all male workers, 71% are currently in full time jobs now, versus 68% in 1967, while for female workers about 60% are currently full time, versus 43% in 1967.

NPR's  point is that "while high unemployment remains a big problem for the U.S. labor market, it's not the only problem. There's also a long-term stagnation in real earnings for people who have jobs."

Moreover one full time job with middle class wages, sick pay, vacation pay, health care benefits, and a pension plan is not equal to one part time job at minimum wage with no benefits of any kind.  And the trend is indeed McJobs-ward.  Yet the raw number is the primary message of the monthly obsession over job creation/savings.

Signs you are the 1%: credible fear of thronging marauders.

I am going to apologize in advance for bringing zombies into this discussion.  But first, this:

“The rich are always afraid. I saw robbers in a bad year once rush into the gate of the great house and the slaves and the concubines and even the Old Mistress herself ran hither and thither and each had a treasure that she thrust into some secret place already planned."

That is from Pearl Buck's The Good Earth (1931).  Now comes this story from NY Magazine:

..."It's incredible, right?" shouts Jeff Greene over the roar of the two-seater dune buggy's motor. "It's 55 acres!" Still in his whites from this morning's tennis match, he's giving a personal tour of his Sag Harbor estate, barreling at 30 miles per hour through the vast forest of scrubby pines and soft moss of its gated grounds. ... Greene made his fortune in real estate, and he’s never been shy about showing it off. “Having money is great,” he says. “It’s fun. The more the better.” ...  “I wish we could spend more time here,” he says. “Honestly, we have so many great homes.

He cuts the engine, and for a moment the only sound is the waves lapping peacefully against the shore. Greene gazes across the bay at the multi-million-dollar houses peeking from behind the trees. I assume he’s quietly contemplating acquiring even more of the shoreline, but then he says something surprising. “If somebody wanted to go after a rich person,” he observes, “they have got their pick of the litter out here.” 

 It’s not a stretch to say many residents of Park Avenue harbor vivid fears of a populist revolt like the one seen in The Dark Knight Rises, in which they cower miserably under their sideboards while ragged hordes plunder the silver.

“This is my fear, and it’s a real, legitimate fear,” Greene says, revving up the engine. “You have this huge, huge class of people who are impoverished. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we will build a class of poor people that will take over this country, and the country will not look like what it does today. It will be a different economy, rights, all that stuff will be different.” 

...He and Mei-Sze plan on rebuilding as soon as they are done with their renovation in Palm Beach. He's not sure what he wants it to look like, but one thing is likely: The new property will have gates. "You're in Palm Beach, you're in the Hamptons, you think you're so secure," Greene says. "Do you really think if you had 50,000 angry people coming across the river, you think you're safe?"

This speaks volumes about what it means to be free.  Fear, even if irrational, is driving the superrich to wall themselves off from society, fearful of a day of reckoning that must eventually destroy their careful efforts to hoard.  Can anyone really be free in a society which allows the haves to amass such wealth that the resulting disparity creates a credible safety threat from the have-nots?

Now for the zombies.

In the final scenes of the second season of the Walking Dead, the camera pans out to show the survivors huddled around a fire, thinking about what they are going to do to protect themselves from the coming zombie onslaught.  A dim but unmistakable picture emerges that the group is not too far from what looks to be an enormous and well protected prison complex.  One leaves the season with the question of whether barricading the group behind a big enough wall will ensure their survival.  Can they survive behind the wall, and for how long?  How will they feed themselves?  What kind of life can they hope to rebuild there?  The alternative is finding a way to live out in the open without being detected as prey by the vast and apparently growing population of zombies (an alternative suggested by the extremely disturbing and creepy entourage that rescues another of the survivors that had been separated from the group).

We may look back and wonder what on earth sustained the zombie craze that has currently infected all levels of social discourse today, even among academics (besides the sheer silliness of the whole venture).  Perhaps the growing sense of unease about what happens in a world defined by absolute social stratification drives some of the allure. 

Wealth disparity pyramid

I wish this diagram would draw the rest of the picture, i.e., the enormous block holding up the rest of the pyramid, but this is a powerful visual in any event:

From TJN via Richard Murphy.

The private sector really is doing ok, or, why workers collaborate in their own self-destruction

If by private sector you mean US corporations, which are making more profit than ever:

From Business Insider.  But not if by private sector you mean wage earners.  As we know median wages have plunged in the US; this article shows that in addition wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low:

The author comments that "[o]ne reason companies are so profitable is that they're paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP. And that, in turn, is one reason the economy is so weak: Those "wages" are other companies' revenue."


The juxtaposition thus paints a zero-sum picture: that as wages fall, corporate profits rise.  We've seen other charts that show corporations and managers claiming most or all productivity gains over the last several decades at least.

Richard Murphy responds: "the reason why we have a crisis is that the wealthiest and companies got too rich whilst most got left behind so the wealthiest and companies lent the rest of us their excess wealth through debt arrangements which people could not repay."

Now consider Yves Smith's post today in response to sociologist Claude Fischer, who asks "Why Don't Americans Take Vacations?" and answers with rugged individualism and something about the American way.  Nonsense, says Yves, the right answer is, because of a systemic and steady diet of anti-labor propaganda.  Yves points us to a related article of interest by Mark Ames from 2006, "We're not going on a summer holiday," which says:

vacation time has been slowly disappearing for American workers ever since the Reagan Revolution, which ushered in a violent shift in corporate culture away from the paternalistic post-New Deal model towards the current stock-price-is-God model. According to Harvard economist Juliet Schor, in the 30 years before Reagan's presidency American workers were getting more and more vacation time; however, in the 1980s, that trend suddenly reversed. By the time Reagan left office, Americans got three and a half fewer days off per year, on average.

Ames says at the same time corporate managers have vastly increased their leisure time and pursuits.  A glance at the FT's How to Spend It can certainly confirm the market for vacation by the ultra-rich.  For Ames the most amazing aspect is that

the designated victims in this drama - America's workers - are such willing collaborators in their own existential demise.

...according to a New York Times article, British workers get more than 50% more paid holiday per year than Americans, while the French and Italians get almost twice what the Americans get. The average American's response is neither admiration nor envy, but rather a kind of sick pride in their own wretchedness, combined with righteous contempt for their European worker counterparts, whom most Americans see as morally degenerate precisely because they have more leisure time, more job security, health benefits and other advantages. 

We have seen a related version of this in the public outrage ginned up over the "generous" health and pension packages of public sector employees that has allowed conservative governors to eviscerate worker's benefits and their rights in the process--c.f. Wisconsin.   A constant stream of propaganda tells us that public sector workers must be stripped of their many unearned and undeserved benefits.  There is no equally powerful alternative stream of propaganda demanding better health and pension benefits for all workers.   There is no alternative stream painting a picture of life as an American worker when wages stabilise to global median levels.  The result seems to perfectly illustrate Ames' willing collaboration in self-destruction.

Class Mobility in the U.S.

Bruce Bartlett sees some movement in the top and bottom quintiles and notes:

It is indisputable that the distribution of income in the United States has become more unequal. However, many economists say they believe that turnover among both the poor and the rich substantially mitigates its impact. If everyone remained in the same income bracket year after year, the negative effects of inequality would be far worse.

Middle class wipe out

40% drop in the median income in the past four years.  It looks like this:

via Slate, who attributes the result to declining wages and incomes, the stock market crash, and the bursting of the housing bubble.  The stock market and housing crash might be considered one-offs (if you're an eternal optimist) but declining wages looks to be structural and endearing in nature, and in fact should worsen because labor is engaged in a global competition, with the result, as we have seen, that productivity gains have not gone to workers:

via politics of equality blog.

Things economists say about happiness

From Derek Thompson, things that economists have shown tend to make people and countries happier:

• being richer, but only up to about $75k or so, after that, not so much
• living in a democracy
• working more but not too much
• being self-employed

And things that economists have shown tend to make people and countries unhappier:

• inequality
• unemployment
• inflation
• working too much
• commuting too much
• carrying too much debt

On philanthropy, and why free speech is expensive

This is an interesting story by Curtis White, who was asked by Orion magazine, a not for profit, to write about philanthropy in the USA.  White was hesitant: "From the first I was dubious about the assignment. I said, “Not-for-profit organizations like you cannot afford to attack philanthropy because if you attack one foundation you may as well attack them all. You’ll be cutting your own throat.”  He forged ahead anyway, until the editor that asked him to contribute left the organization and the new editor's view was that "publishing the essay would be an exercise in “self-mutilation.”"  But there's an internet, so it gets published anyway.  White says:

In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter.  For those who would like what they say to matter, freedom of speech is very expensive. It is for this reason that organizations with a strong sense of public mission but not much money are dependent on the “blonde child of capitalism,” private philanthropy. This dependence is true for both conservative and progressive causes, but there is an important difference in the philanthropic cultures that they appeal to.

The conservative foundations happily fund “big picture” work.  They are eager to be the means for disseminating free market, anti-government ideology. Hence the steady growth and influence of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in Media, the American Majority Institute, the Cato Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institute, and on (and frighteningly) on.

On the other hand, progressive foundations may understand that the organizations they fund have visions, but it’s not the vision that they will give money to. In fact, foundations are so reluctant to fund “public advocacy” of progressive ideas that it is almost as if they were afraid to do so. If there is need for a vision the foundation itself will provide it. Unfortunately, according to one source, the foundation’s vision too often amounts to this: “If we had enough money, and access to enough markets, and enough technological expertise, we could solve all the problems.” The source concludes that such a vision “doesn’t address sociological and spiritual problems.”

And then there's this:

One of the most maddening experiences for those who seek the support of private philanthropy is the lack of transparency, that is, the difficulty of knowing why the foundation makes the decisions it makes. In fact, most foundations treat this “lack” as a kind of privilege: our reasons are our own.  One of the devices employed by philanthropy for maintaining this privilege is what I call the mystique of the foundation’s Secret Wisdom. 

So you want to ask, “What do you know that I don’t know?  What do you know that makes your decisions wise?”  The closest thing to an answer you’re likely to hear is something like this: “The staff met with some Board members last night to discuss your proposal, and we’re very interested in it.  But we don’t think that you have the capacity [a useful bit of jargon that means essentially that the organization should give up on what it thought it was going to do] to achieve these goals.  So what we’d suggest is that you define a smaller project that will allow you to test your abilities [read: allow you to do something that you have little interest in but that will suck up valuable staff time like a Hoover].  Meanwhile, we’d like to meet with your Board in six months and see where you are.”

And on you go one year at a time. But cheer up, you’ve made your budget for the year! 

More at the link.  The article demonstrates why accountability is not just an issue for government.  If government is going to subsidize and defer social goals to philanthropy to solve, then it becomes very important how philanthropy works, and who decides which issues matter and are worthy of support and which do not and are not, and what goals those working in philanthropic organizations actually seek to serve.

Insider trading: Facebook edition

From Matt Taibbi: regular investors got their now customary late-to-the-party treatment from Facebook, and some are suing.  But by now we know the game is rigged to favor the big, well-connected investor.

...virtually every week now we see stories like this that hint at a kind of two-tiered market system – in which most of the real action takes place inside an unregulated black-box network of connected insiders who don’t disclose their relationships or their interests, while everyone else, i.e. the regular suckers, live in the more tightly-policed world of prospectuses and quarterly reporting and so on. 

All of these stories suggest that Wall Street is increasingly turning into a giant favor-and-front-running factory, where the big banks and broker-dealers that channel vast streams of crucial non-public information (about the markets generally and their clients specifically) are also trading for their own accounts, and sharing information with a select group of "preferred investors," who in turn help the TBTF banks move markets in this or that desired direction by jumping on or off various pigpiles at the right times. 

Sooner or later, people are going to clue into the fact that one or two big banks, acting in concert with a choice assortment of unscrupulous "preferred investors," can at least temporarily prop up or topple just about anything they want, from Greece to Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers. And if you can move markets and bet on them at the same time, it's impossible to not make tons of money, which incidentally is made at everyone else's expense.

This connects the dots between the farcical nature of SEC disclosure and the systemic problem of highly unequal access to the capital markets.  Maybe shareholders would benefit from more comprehensive SEC disclosure, but the unequal access problem cannot likely be fixed.  Ordinary investors are trapped with no where to invest without behind the scenes rigging ensuring high risk and low probability of returns.  Does the ordinary investor go back to storing her bank notes in the mattress?

You can see inequality from space

The difference in rich and poor neighborhoods is visually apparent, as shown by Tim De Chant:

Here is a comparison of west Oakland, CA vs Piedmont:

More visual comparisons at the link.  Jess Zimmerman comments, with several additional links: "Since trees increase property values, this is a classic case of the rich being given whatever they need to get richer. And considering the other things trees do for us, it’s also a case of the rich getting to be smarter, cooler, and have fewer allergies."

Predator Nation

From the writer of Inside Job, the multiple award-winning documentary on the financial crisis, comes a follow-on book:

Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators’ path to conquest.
     Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.

• Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.
• The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
• Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
• Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies. 

If you’re smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren’t rich, you’re now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York.
This radical shift did not happen by accident.   

Ferguson shows how, since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, both major political parties have become captives of the moneyed elite.  It was the Clinton administration that dismantled the regulatory controls that protected the average citizen from avaricious financiers.  It was the Bush team that destroyed the federal revenue base with its grotesquely skewed tax cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama White House that has allowed financial criminals to continue to operate unchecked, even after supposed “reforms” installed after the collapse of 2008.  

Predator Nation reveals how once-revered figures like Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became mere courtiers to the elite.  Based on many newly released court filings, it details the extent of the crimes—there is no other word—committed in the frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial crisis.  And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for how we might take back our country and the American dream.

If you haven't seen Inside Job, you should; you can watch it on Netflix.  It features a number of uncomfortable interviews with people who ought to have known better.

Holding public office is very rewarding

“I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I’ve done reasonably well since then."  So says Bill Clinton, and it's because public service might not pay well while you're in office but it comes with rich rewards thereafter, mainly from speaking fees (we already know that another equally lucrative alternative is becoming a lobbyist).   From Matt Stoller:

Most activists and political operatives are under a delusion about American politics, which goes as follows.  Politicians will do *anything* to get reelected, and they will pander, beg, borrow, lie, cheat and steal, just to stay in office.  It’s all about their job.

This is 100% wrong.  The dirty secret of American politics is that, for most politicians, getting elected is just not that important.  What matters is post-election employment.  It’s all about staying in the elite political class, which means being respected in a dense network of corporate-funded think tanks, high-powered law firms, banks, defense contractors, prestigious universities, and corporations.  If you run a campaign based on populist themes, that’s a threat to your post-election employment prospects. 

... Running as a vague populist is manageable, as long as you’re lying to voters.  If you actually go after powerful interests while in office, then you better win, because if you don’t, you’ll have basically nowhere to go.  And if you lose, but you were a team player, then you’ll have plenty of money and opportunity.  The most lucrative scenario is to win and be a team player, which is what Bill and Hillary Clinton did.  The Clinton’s are the best at the political game – it’s not a coincidence that deregulation accelerated in the late 1990s, as Clinton and his whole team began thinking about their post-Presidential prospects.

...Speaking fee money isn’t just money, it is easy money.  In one appearance, for one hour, Clinton can make $125,000 to $500,000.  At an hourly rate, that’s between $250 million to $1 billion annually.  It isn’t the case that Clinton is a billionaire, but it is the case that Clinton can, whenever he wants, make money as quickly and as easily as a billionaire.  He is awash in cash, and cash is useful.  Cash finances his lifestyle.  Cash helped backstop his wife’s Presidential campaign when it was on the ropes.

That's one way that holding office pays.  But there are others.  Last month Catherine Rampell asked, "is the socioeconomic gap between American politicians and their constituents really unusually wide?"  Answer: yes, definitely.  She compared Obama income vs average American (20:1) to Romney income vs. average American (500:1), and compared that with politicians vs. constituents through history.  She linked to a 2011 article by Eric Lichtblau, in which he said:

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

He discusses why there is a growing gap between Congress members and average Americans, and suggests that one reason is the high cost of obtaining political office itself: since it costs so much to get in, people who can't bankroll their own campaigns or have rich friends to help do so are discouraged from seeking office.  But more troubling, once in office, people tend to get really rich.  One reason could be the speaking fees.  Another is the lavish attention of lobbyists.  Finally, Lichtblau reminds us of the study that shows Congress members are in all probability serial inside traders:

In a study completed [in 2011], Mr. Ziobrowski at Georgia State and his colleagues found that House members saw the stocks they owned outperform the market by 6 percent a year. Their research from several years ago found that senators did even better, at 12 percent above average. The researchers attributed the performance to a “significant information advantage” that lawmakers hold by virtue of their positions and the fact that they are not bound by insider-trading law. 

 No insider trading restrictions, no really effective means to stop lobbyists from enriching politicians, either celebrity status or a lobbying position guaranteed on exit.  This is a lot to worry about.

Preserving inequality is expensive

Bullet proof car kits a hit in Brazil.  The social cost of inequality seems demonstrably high when elites feel the need to assemble mobile security bubbles around themselves.

It's very expensive to be poor in America

This article by Barbara Ehrenreich seems to be the best response I've seen yet to the self-serving and completely tone-deaf tome written by Bain partner Edward Conard, which I don't want to link to for fear of driving him more traffic and more revenues from book sales.  Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America) lays out many of the common ways it costs more to be poor, from outright wage fraud and chiseling to explicit poverty penalties in the justice system.  Her conclusion:

I could propose all kinds of policies to curb the ongoing predation on the poor. Limits on usury should be reinstated. Theft should be taken seriously even when it’s committed by millionaire employers. No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on. These are no-brainers, and should take precedence over any long term talk about generating jobs or strengthening the safety net. Before we can “do something” for the poor, there are some things we need to stop doing to them.