The cause of Inequality, Sam will not like this hard truth.

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

These are not welfare cheats, these are people with jobs.

Inequality can be social, economic and democratic, but at its heart it is about the exercise of power, who has it and who doesn't, writes Tim Dunlop.

• The 6 heirs to the Walmart retail fortune in the US have a net worth greater than the bottom 40 per cent of the US population.
• One of their Walmart stores recently ran a charity drive asking customers to donate food in order to help ... their store's employees. Yes, they were begging their customers for food to help their staff.

Clearly, when big, successful businesses are paying such low wages that they find it necessary to ask for donations of food from customers in order to help out their employees, we have crossed the line between good economic management and social pathology

A society that allows a situation like this to exist is plain and simple sick, and showing the advanced signs of democratic decay.

Such decay doesn't just happen in a vacuum: this sort of growing inequality - and it is a worldwide phenomenon in developed countries, including Australia - happens because politicians make choices.

And the choices they make are what they are because those making them are more influenced by the rich and powerful than they are by the rank and file.

This in turn happens because the institutions that allow all of us to have a say in policy - everything from political parties to sections of the media - are no longer representative of the broader public but have become captives of powerful special interests.

It is not just a case of direct economic policies lowering taxes on the wealthy and redistributing national wealth upwards - though that happens in spades.

Something more insidious is at work. The very tools we use to assert ourselves as citizens against these special interests are themselves attacked and undermined.

In the US, not only does corporate money corrupt the legislative process, but there are concerted efforts to rig the game before anyone actually gets to Congress. This is done by gerrymandering congressional districts and by enforcing voter identification laws aimed at discouraging disadvantaged groups from voting at all.

More ... http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-11-2...ic-one/5122022


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