That this earnest, wonky, far-from-radical video on wealth and income inequality in the US has been viewed more than four million times perhaps tells us something about the current political zeitgeist.
It seems Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu had something to do with the video’s popularity. Krissy Clark of the public radio program Marketplace reports:
Someone by the name of “politizane” posted the video back in November on YouTube. A reporter from the magazine Mother Jones tracked politizane down a few days ago. He said he wanted to stay anonymous, but described himself as a freelance designer, “from a red state,” who’d been struck by a wealth inequality study he’d read about, conducted by two professors.
Duke Marketing professor Dan Ariely happens to be one of those professors. “I think what made it big,” Ariely says of the video, “was that one of the actors from Star Trek put it on his Facebook.”
That actor, George Takei, who played Sulu on “Star Trek,” told me he posted the video right after the sequester kicked into gear, because he’d been thinking a lot about how the across the board budget cuts might affect an already shrinking middle class.
“I thought that video captured it so visually, so powerfully,” Takei told me. Takei happens to have 3.6 million followers on Facebook, meaning he’s a sort of “super connector” who all by himself can help a video go viral. But it turns out that Takei also found the video through Facebook, in a post that a friend linked to from mashable.com.
Writing at The New Yorker, George Packer has some observations about the apparently permanent gap between ever-rising corporate earnings and flatlining personal income and employment prospects.
The percentage of corporate profits going to employees is at its lowest level since 1966. Unemployment remains stuck around eight per cent, and the long-term jobless make up almost forty per cent of the total—historically high figures that continue to baffle economists. “We have an unemployment crisis and only a debt problem,” says Peter Diamond, a Nobel laureate at M.I.T. The concentration of wealth at the top grows ever more pronounced. From 2009 to 2011—the years of the financial crisis and the recovery—the income of the top one per cent rose 11.2 per cent. The income of the bottom ninety-nine per cent actually shrank 0.4 per cent.
Eighty per cent of Americans believe their children will be worse off than they are. Analysts predict that the figure will pass ninety per cent at some point during Season Three of “House of Cards.”
The good news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies saw its profits increase by thirty-five per cent.
The bad news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies hired a net total of zero workers. Last month, four days after the price of its shares passed a record high of ninety dollars, the company announced that it would eliminate three thousand employees, after having let go four thousand in 2012.
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Inequality is the ur-story behind most of the news on any given day. A whole literature is devoted to the subject. Fine books by Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Larry Bartels, Timothy Noah, Edward N. Wolff, and the late Tony Judt have analyzed the same statistics and trend lines going back to the nineteen-seventies, discussed many of the same economic forces and political policies behind them, and proposed many of the same remedies. You are not reading another lament. Apparently, inequality will go on getting worse no matter what anyone says, wearing us all down until our indignation is reduced to the moral equivalent of a muscle tic.
Is it possible to draw a connection between the above and the fact that while Americans are largely unenthusiastic about both the Democratic and Republican parties, the pro-corporate Republicans– with their stand against any increase in the minimum wage and any tax increases for the very wealthy– find themselves with especially abysmal approval ratings compared to the Democrats?