Arm Yourself for the Class War

Compared to the masters of the new Gilded Age, foreign terrorists are amateurs.

It's been going on for a very long time, and the obscenely rich are winning again, piling up victories that would shock their predecessors in the Gilded Age.

Erik Loomis at TPM:

There is a class war going on in the New Gilded Age. If “war” is the term we want to use for “massacre of the defenseless.”

Time for everyone to update your Class War Calendars with the latest income inequality figures. The Economic Policy Institute this week released the most recent figures on wages, and here is what we learned:

The “annual earnings of the top 1.0 percent of wages earners grew 4.9 percent in 2014, and the top 0.1 percent’s earnings grew 8.9 percent.”

In the past year, wages of the entire bottom 99 percent of earners grew less than 2 percent.

The “earnings of workers between the 99th and 99.9th percentiles have reached their highest level of all time,” and the earnings of the top 0.1 percent were only higher in 2007, just before the global economy crashed.

Since 1979, when the Reagan era ushered in our current age of American inequality, average annual earnings of the bottom 90 percent have increased by 16.7 percent; average annual earnings of the top 1 percent have increased by 149.4 percent; and average annual earnings of the top 0.1 percent have increased by 324.4 percent. It is not just that the rich have more money than the rest of us; their income is also growing much faster than the income of most people.