IMPEACH BUSH
IMPEACH CHENEY
A "WAL-MART" ECONOMY DOESN'T WORK
Wal-Mart has probably been the model for greedy capitalists everywhere. Keep those wages low! Keep unions out! Don't provide any benefits to your employees! But a Wal-Mart style economy is catching up even with Wal-Mart. As more and more of us slide out of the middle class, we don't have the means to buy the things that keep the economy moving. We of the working class have been subsidizing the wealthy for years with low wages and high productivity, but things are changing. This article by Barbara Ehrenreich is at www.commondreams.org:
Consider how we got into the current credit crisis in the first place, through defaults on subprime mortgages. These went to plenty of affluent folks and have wreaked havoc in gated communities. But overall, subprime loans were designed for, and snapped up by, the poor. According to a recent study from United for a Fair Economy, 55 percent of subprime loans went to African Americans and 17 percent to whites. Among whites, they went far more frequently to low-income people than to the wealthy — 39 percent compared with 24 percent. Hence the subprime industry’s noble boasts about providing the opportunity for home ownership to people who might otherwise have been excluded from it.
And why were so many Americans poor enough to turn to subprime mortgages and other dodgy credit schemes? The chief reasons are low wages and job insecurity. Chronically low wages afflict about 25 to 30 percent of the population — more than twice the 12 percent the federal government counts as “poor.” And even earnings in the six-figure range can be canceled overnight when an employer downsizes or outsources, leaving a family without income or health insurance.
For years now, we’ve had a solution, or at least a substitute, for low wages and unreliable jobs: easy credit. Payday loans, rent-to-buy furniture and exorbitant credit card interest rates for the poor were just the beginning. In its May cover story on “The Poverty Business,” BusinessWeek
