From Alternet today:
The following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the "hard news"
stories the media has a responsibility to report. But the
business-oriented press generally avoids them.
1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got Almost None of It.That's
an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people who already
own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For them, the average gain
was well over a million dollars, tax-free as long as they don't cash it
in. Details available
here.
2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum-Wage WorkersA recent
report stated
that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a
one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair market rent. There are
3.6 million such workers, and their total (combined) 2013 earnings is less than the 2013 stock market gains of just
eight Americans, all of whom
take more than their share from society: the four Waltons, the two Kochs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett.
3. News Sources Speak for the 5%It
would be refreshing to read an honest editorial: "We dearly value the 5
to 7 percent of our readers who make a lot of money and believe that
their growing riches are helping everyone else."
Instead, the business media seems unable to differentiate between the top 5 percent and the rest of society. The
Wall Street Journal exclaimed, "Middle-class Americans have more buying power than ever before," and then went on to
sputter: "What Recession?...The economy has bounced back from recession, unemployment has declined.."
The
Chicago Tribune may
be even further out of touch with its less privileged readers, asking
them: "What's so terrible about the infusion of so much money into the
presidential campaign?"
4. TV News Dumbed Down for American ViewersA 2009 survey by the
European Journal of Communication compared
the U.S. to Denmark, Finland and the UK in the awareness and reporting
of domestic vs. international news, and of "hard" news (politics, public
administration, the economy, science, technology) vs. "soft" news
(celebrities, human interest, sports and entertainment). The results:
- Americans [are] especially uninformed about international public affairs.
- American respondents also underperformed in relation to domestic-related hard news stories.
- American television reports much less international news than Finnish, Danish and British television;
- American television network newscasts also report much less hard news than Finnish and Danish television.
Surprisingly,
the report states that "our sample of American newspapers was more
oriented towards hard news than their counterparts in the European
countries." Too bad Americans are reading fewer newspapers.
5. News Execs among White Male Boomers Who Owe Trillions to SocietyThe
hype about the "self-made man" is fantasy. In the early 1970s, we
privileged white males were spirited out of college to waiting jobs in
management and finance, technology was inventing new ways for us to make
money, tax rates were about to tumble, and visions of bonuses and
capital gains danced in our heads.
While we were in school the
Defense Department had been preparing the Internet for Microsoft and
Apple, the National Science Foundation was funding the
Digital Library Initiative research that would be adopted as the Google model, and the
National Institute of Health was
doing the early laboratory testing for companies like Merck and Pfizer.
Government research labs and public universities trained thousands of
chemists, physicists, chip designers, programmers, engineers, production
line workers, market analysts, testers, troubleshooters, etc.
All we created on our own was a disdainful attitude, like that of
Steve Jobs: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
6. Funding Plummets for Schools and Pensions as Corporations Stop Paying TaxesThree separate studies have
shown that corporations pay less than half of their required state
taxes, which are the main source of K-12 educational funding and a
significant part of pension funding. Most recently, the
report, "The
Disappearing Corporate Tax Base" found that the percentage of corporate
profits paid as state income taxes has dropped from 7 percent in 1980
to about 3 percent today.
7. Companies Based in the U.S. Paying Most of Their Taxes OverseasCitigroup had
42% of its 2011-'13 revenue in North America (almost all U.S.) and made
$32 billion in profits, but received a U.S. current income tax benefit
all three years.
Pfizer had
40% of its 2011-'13 revenues and nearly half of its physical assets in
the U.S., but declared almost $10 billion in U.S. losses to go along
with nearly $50 billion in foreign profits.
In 2013
Exxon had about
43% of management,
36% of sales, 40% of long-lived assets, and 70-90% of its productive
oil and gas wells in the U.S., yet only paid about 2 percent of its
total income in U.S. income taxes, and most of that was something called
a "theoretical" tax.
8. Restaurant Servers Go Without Raise for 30 YearsAn evaluation by
Michelle Chen showed
that the minimum wage for tipped workers has been approximately $2 an
hour since the 1980s. She also notes that about 40 percent of these
workers are people of color, and about two-thirds are women.
Reuters