Wealth Gap: Keeping The Poor Poor

Though this program focuses on the income disparity in America and its return to the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century the reality is this. Income inequality isn't endemic to the United States. China, South Korea, Japan and Thailand are just a sample of countries that face the growing problem of income inequality. China which has sustained almost double digit economic growth for almost ten years has failed to come to grips with the problem as millions are left behind to scrape the bottom of the economic ladder just to survive. Without mentioning the word in the program what those interviewed didn't say is that a new oligarchy has emerged. One not founded on manufacturing as happened 100 years ago but one based on control of the financial markets thereby giving them control of governments and the political power that comes with it.

Some clarification: In 2005 the last full year of Junichiro Koizumi's Premiership the Japanese Diet at the behest of their corporate masters passed the Temporary Workers Dispatch Law creating an employment underclass. A group of workers hired on short term contracts completely beholden to the corporations that employed them. When the 2008 financial crisis struck Japan almost 1 million people found themselves with concealed contracts and no means of financial stability. This all happened in less than 8 weeks.

In the China this underclass was created by internal migration with millions of Chinese living in the rural eastern parts of that country uprooting themselves seeking employment in the Pearl River Special Economic Zone. Because the Chinese government requires its citizens to register with local governments to prove they actually lived in the city in which they were employed to receive any form of benefits the local and provincial governments would refuse all permanent resident requests which continue to this day leaving these workers on he margins of society.

With so much despair and seeing no way out governments and the wealthy had better heed the warning signs or there will be a an uprising and it will be televised.