The One Percent Scrambles to Maintain Profits – and Order

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/05

“The next few months will be crucial for avoiding a dramatic downturn in employment and a further significant aggravation of social unrest.”

That’s is the first sentence in a report released this week by the International Labor Organization studying the effects of the economic crisis and its impact on global labor markets. On the one hand, it sounds like common sense: as working and poor people see their livelihoods wracked by joblessness and social cuts while the rich enjoy lavish wealth, low taxes and increased profits, popular anger begins to boil over.



But sometimes it takes an agency of the United Nations to spell out logic that is more elusive for the ruling one percent – that class of CEOs and policymakers which persists on cutting costs and expanding profits while sitting on mountains of capital.

As a share of GDP, corporate profits in the U.S. are at their highest levels since 1950. Last week the Congressional Budget Office reported that between 1979 and 2007 the income for the top 1 percent rose 275 percent while income for the bottom 20 percent rose only 18 percent. And that data, which predates the record unemployment, home foreclosures and rising poverty brought on by the Great Recession, dramatically understates where economic inequality stands today. At the same time, a report this week revealed that 30 of some of the largest corporations in the country paid no income taxes between 2008 and 2010.

More at the link --