De Neoliberale Ideologie

De Verenigde Staten is sinds de tweede wereldoorlog ons voorland. Het neoliberale model heeft nu wereldwijd gewonnen. Waartoe deze ideologie leidt, daarover schrijft de Amerikaanse auteur Bob Burnett in Common Dreams. De rijken worden rijker en de armen armer, het geld moet immers ergens vandaan komen. Hetzelfde zien we in Nederland, waar het aantal mensen dat onder de armoedegrens leeft ondanks het feit dat men een baan heeft, blijft groeien. 'Hustling Backwards - How the Economy Fails the Working Poor. We all remember that, after Katrina, folks were abandoned in New Orleans because the system failed. That's what the documentary Waging a Living is about, Americans who work for a minimum wage and still are left behind by our economy. No matter how hard they struggle, they are "hustling backwards." Whenever the growing gap between America's rich and poor is brought up, conservatives respond that the rich do more work than the poor. Therefore, they should be compensated more. In the abstract, no one disagrees that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, should be paid more than the janitors that clean up after other Apple employees go home. The question is how much more? Twenty years ago the ratio between America's highest paid and lowest paid employees was around 40 to one. Now it's 431 to one. According to a recent report, the average CEO pay is $11.8 million, while the average work pay is $27,460. "If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour." Roger Weisberg's Waging a Living describes what it's like to be at the bottom of our economy. For three years, Weisberg followed four low-wage workers as they struggled to hold onto the American dream. Mary Venittelli is a waitress in New Jersey. Jerry Longoria is a security guard in San Francisco. Barbara Brooks is a recreational counselor at a home for troubled girls in New York. Jean Reynolds is a nursing assistant in a convalescent hospital in New Jersey. They're not slackers. All four of Weisberg's subjects work fulltime, and take as much overtime as they can get. Three things make their lives particularly difficult: they are on their own - they have no adult partner or family to help them, they have children, and they are relatively uneducated. Mary Venittelli is a recently divorced, middle-age woman with no previous work experience. She works as a waitress for $2.13 an hour plus tips. In her struggle to maintain her three children in the same life style they had before the divorce, she is forced to feed her kids from a food pantry. She covers the huge monthly difference between her income and her expenses by maxing out her credit cards. In the one of the documentary's most poignant scenes, Mary applies for yet another credit card. When her friend asks her if she isn't worried about identity theft, Mary quips, "What do I have to worry about, someone stealing my identity? Please! Take it."' Lees verder:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0120-23.htm Of http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012106G.shtml