Widening gap between rich and poor

"How many more times will it be necessary to repeat that the most destructive weapon of mass destruction in the world today is poverty?" said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula daSilva, who has campaigned for a worldwide assault on poverty since taking office in 2003.

In 2002, the median salary for CEOs at the top 100 U.S. corporations was $33.4 million. At the average large company in the U.S., the top dog pocketed $5.2 million. That means median CEO pay at large companies was a whopping $1,017 an hour.

The 13,000 richest families in the U.S. now have almost as much income as the 20 million poorest. "And those 13,000 families have incomes 300 times that of average families," liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine. Today, the gap between the haves and the have-nots in U.S. society is as great as ever.

In the mid-1990s, the United Nations published a report showing that the U.S. had already become the most class-stratified society among all the advanced industrial countries. Now, wealth in the U.S. is even more concentrated in the hands of a few. "It’s remarkable how little growth has trickled down to ordinary families," Krugman explained.

This vast inequality today is part of a trend that grew throughout the 1990s. In the era of corporate globalization, billions of workers and poor people around the world learned that a country’s economic growth does not automatically result in rising standards of living for the majority. The U.S. ruling class lives well--as do the ruling classes of the less-developed countries--because workers everywhere are exploited. - Excerpts from an article by Tom Lewis