Occupy North Fort Myers to offer video presentation
Occupy North Fort Myers will present video clips on numerous economic subjects on Saturday, March 3, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., at the Main Lee County Public Library meeting room, 2050 Central Avenue, Fort Myers.
Discussion Will Follow.
Among those to be featured:
– Robert Reich, Former US Secretary Of Labor, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.
– Joseph Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and the John Bates Clark Medal. He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.
– Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics and International Affairs , Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Krugman won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (informally the Nobel Prize in Economics)
– Jacob Stewart Hacker, Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and Professor of Political Science at Yale University. His most recent book is Winner-Take-All Politics.
– Barbara Ehrenreich, award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books and is best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.
– Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics for 35 years. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University.
If the median household income increased by the same percentage as the country’s economic output from an almost doubling of productivity since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000. Or when productivity doubles if all people shared the benefits of these productivity gains, the workweek would be 20 hours instead of 40 for the same standard of living as before the doubling. We are much too far from sharing the benefits of these gains, according to Occupy North Fort Myers officials, who also maintain:
– Banana republics are notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie. You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.
– C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
– Wealth inequality is even more extreme than income inequality: the top 1 percent have 40 percent of the wealth!
Nearly 1 in 2 Americans have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income. The inflation-adjusted average earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have fallen from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000. Between 1973 and 1993, the real wage declined by 14 percent, though it since rose by 7 percent from 1993 to 2000, for a net change of -8 percent. The minimum wage in 2000 was down about a third in real terms, from its peak level in 1968, when the unemployment rate was only 3.6 percent!
– Come view these informative videos of some of the most knowledgeable people in the country speaking on the issues of wealth and income disparity, and join the discussion that follows.
Unlike most regional Occupys, Occupy North Fort Myers is focused exclusively on the production and presentation of educational programs, and the production and distribution of educational printed material on the most important Occupy economic, social or political justice issues.
– Source: Occupy North Fort Myers