Inequality

On average, women are paid nearly 23 percent less than men and in countries like Turkey, the gap can be as much as 75 percent.

LOS ANGELES — California is a state with two faces. One face wears a beaming, optimistic smile — reflecting pride in its sprawling coastline, its natural beauty. Its entertainment industry makes the state a cultural superpower, while its tech sector attracts millennial entrepreneurs and talent from across the world. With its ethnic diversity, liberal urban elites and politicians, this isn’t Trumplandia, USA; this is the Golden State, filled with industrious and creative drivers of American success.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Barriers to equality pose threats to democracy in the U.S. as the country remains segregated along racial lines and child poverty worsens, according to study made public Tuesday that examines the nation 50 years after the release of the landmark 1968 Kerner Report.

INDIANAPOLIS – The morning commute in this landlocked Midwestern city is an obstacle course of potholes, buckled pavement, and shards of fugitive cement. Like infantrymen navigating a minefield, motorists swerve and stop, and zig and zag in rush hour traffic to avoid the peril from below.

The year 2017 will go down as a particularly tough one for ordinary citizens, particularly in the global South. A sharp rise in government restrictions on fundamental freedoms across regions, as well as in levels of inequality, played a big part in that negative review.
According to a recent Oxfam report, 1% of the world’s richest elites now own 82% of the world’s wealth, with a dollar billionaire having been created every two days in 2017.

In December last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued a statement on his 15-day fact-finding mission of some of the U.S.’s poorest neighborhoods.   Alston, the author of the quoted phrase in the excerpt, is an Australian who is a professor of law at New York University.  During his mission, he visited Alabama, California, West Virginia, Texas, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico.

A new billionaire was created every two days last year and now, according to Oxfam, just 42 individuals own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.7 billion people.
(COMMONDREAMS) — Call it the ‘Year of the Billionaire.’

Book review: Against Meritocracy. Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility by Jo Littler
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
December 2017-January 2018
The concept of meritocracy – “a system structured around advancement of people who are selected on the basis of individual achievement” – has been a powerful idea in post-war industrialised societies, especially in the more economically unequal US and UK.

Inequality is a policy choice. Governments can close the gap between rich and poor, and some are already doing so
The post ‘Inequality is not inevitable, it’s a choice’ appeared first on Positive News.

America has the greatest inequalities, highest mortality rate, most regressive taxes, and largest public subsidies for bankers and billionaires of any developed capitalist country.
In this essay we will discuss the socio-economic roots of inequalities and the relation between the concentration of wealth and the downward mobility of the working and salaried classes.
The post How Billionaires Become Billionaires appeared first on BSNEWS.