Income inequality is now at its highest level in the United States since the Great Depression as the income gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen.
Until California finds a solution to growing income inequality, growth will remain tepid, leading to continuous budget deficits, budget cuts and debt.
Today, women’s rights issues return to center stage in Washington D.C., with the Senate set to vote on a piece of legislation aiming to prevent wage discrimination on the basis of gender.
Worst of all, concentrated wealth means concentrated political power. In the age of SuperPacs and Citizens United, it is money that speaks the loudest in terms of electing politicians and influencing policy.
Wall Street isn’t the only place where popular unrest has been fomenting. Here on the West Coast, inmates of the California prison system are protesting their conditions in a hunger strike that now has thousands of participants in at least eight California prisons, and has entered its tenth day.
In the midst of a budget crisis last year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger mandated furloughs for state workers. Employees who held positions that were deemed critical, such as state prison guards, were given permission to bank furlough days. This means that workers could cash in on the days they were forced not to work.
A female guard’s search of a male prison inmate’s genitals and buttocks through nearly-transparent underwear was ruled unconstitutional by the San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
