The Femitist

elledark:

Americas Inequality is worse than Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt

What’s behind the protests in Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt—and the growing unrest in several other Arab states? A whole host of things, actually, but one of the most glaring seems to be the shocking, ever-increasing disparity between the wealthy and the needy of those nations.

“They all want the same,” Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the Middle East says of the demonstrators. “They’re all protesting about growing inequalities, they’re all protesting against growing nepotism. The top of the pyramid was getting richer and richer.”

It makes perfect sense: The rich can only exploit the poor to get richer for so long before the underclass revolts. It may take centuries, but it’s bound to give eventually. That inevitability should be a cause for concern for America.

The fact is that the inequality in the United States is not only drastically worse than Egypt’s, it’s also worse than Tunisia’s and Yemen’s as well. The U.S. is officially ranked as the 42nd most unequal country in the world, which makes it more unequal than Tunisia (the 62nd) Yemen (the 76th) and Egypt (the 90th)

According to the Congressional Budget Office, “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.” Income inequality in the United States is now the worst it’s been in nearly 100 years, and worse still is that it’s getting more pronounced all the time.

Demands for change are sweeping the middle-east. Ordinary people there have had enough and aren’t willing to take any more. How long before we see people in America demanding a fairer share of the nations wealth too ? How long before they demand that the two political parties, which both serve the corporate agenda, serve the people of America instead ?

The tens of thousands demonstrating in Wisconsin against the right-wing union-bashers may just be the start. Perhaps American people have, like those in the middle east, finally found a backbone and a voice. Lets hope so.

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