As the anti-Wall Street protests against social inequality and the tyranny of the financial oligarchy spread across the US, a new study released Monday documents the devastating decline in working class living standards over the past four years.
The study, authored by two former US Census Bureau officials, concludes that inflation-adjusted median household income plunged 9.8 percent from December 2007, the official start of the recession, to June of 2011. Moreover, household income fell more than twice as rapidly during the Obama “recovery,” which began in June of 2009, than during the 18 months of official recession.
According to authors Gordon W. Green Jr. and John F. Coder, median real household income fell 3.2 percent during the official recession, a dramatic decline, but one far surpassed by the additional 6.7 percent drop between June 2009 and June of this year.
Calling the nearly 10 percent decline over a three-and-a-half year period “a significant reduction in the American standard of living,” the report notes that while wage gains outpaced inflation during the recession itself, wages failed to keep pace with inflation during the so-called “recovery.” (The report is available at www.sentierresearch.com and a graph here).
Green and Coder attribute the sharp fall in household income for the majority of Americans largely to continued mass unemployment. The New York Times, in a front-page article on their report Monday, notes the staggering increase in the average duration of joblessness.
When the recession was said to have begun in December 2007, the figure was 16.6 weeks. It had increased to 24.1 weeks by June of 2009, when the recession supposedly ended. Last month, according to the Labor Department employment report released on Friday, the average duration of unemployment had reached 40.5 weeks, the longest in 63 years.
The Times cites a separate study by Henry S. Farber, a Princeton University economics professor, which found that workers who lost jobs during the recession and later found work again earned an average of 17.5 percent less in their new jobs than in the ones they had lost.
Over the same period, bankers and corporate CEOs have grown richer than ever, thanks to trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, unlimited cheap loans from the Federal Reserve Board, and the refusal of the Obama administration to prosecute the Wall Street criminals responsible for the financial meltdown or implement any real banking reform.
The growing numbers of people participating in the anti-Wall Street protests and the millions more in the US and around the world who sympathize with them must recognize that the impoverishment of the majority and further enrichment of the top 1 percent are not simply the result of impersonal economic forces. They are the result of the calculated and deliberate policies of the American ruling class and the Obama administration, its loyal servant.
Ever since coming to office, Obama has devoted his administration’s policies to protecting and increasing the wealth of the financial elite. He has refused to implement any programs to hire unemployed workers or provide significant relief to the victims of the depression—those who have lost their homes to foreclosure, those whose incomes have been devastated by unemployment, those students who face crushing debts and soaring tuition costs, etc.
via www.wsws.org
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