Shame!

A couple of nights ago on the BBC World Service I heard a middle-class American couple speak about their lives. It appears they live day to day in fear. Fear that they will end in poverty. With two children and living in a country where 47 million people have no health-care coverage, the woman said she didn’t dare leave her job because it provided health insurance for the entire family. She hated her job, but each day she made herself go. To get there, she drove in a car that’s inferior to cars she has previously owned. The same is true of her husband’s car. ‘We’re going down, not up,’ he said in bewilderment. Their underlying fear was the erosion of the middle class.

Is it any wonder when average earnings in the US have actually declined, while CEOs are wallowing in salaries amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s only so much to go round.

Take it from Barack Obama: ‘At a time when average workers are experiencing little or no income growth, many of America’s CEOs have lost any sense of shame about grabbing whatever their plaint, hand-picked corporate boards will allow.’ To America’s first black presidential hopeful, I say amen.