Twan Huys en Ken Carson 4

Als achtergrondinformatie over een moordpartij die geschiedenis maakte.


'Op de ochtend van 16 maart 1968 trokken de vier compagnieën Mỹ Lai binnen. De Amerikaanse soldaten, die er in eerste instantie van overtuigd waren dat het dorp vol zat met guerrilla’s, begonnen met schieten en hielden niet meer op totdat vrijwel alle dorpelingen dood waren. De meesten van hen – waaronder baby's en kinderen die nog niet zelfstandig konden lopen – werden in een greppel gegooid en vervolgens met M60 automatische vuurwapens vermoord. Het bloedbad kwam tenslotte tot een einde toen een helikopter van het Amerikaanse leger tussen hun eigen troepen en de overgebleven Vietnamezen landde. Het exacte aantal slachtoffers is nooit vastgesteld, maar het monument op de plek van het bloedbad draagt 504 namen. Slechts elf bewoners van Mỹ Lai overleefden de moordpartij: tien doordat ze door de helicopterbemanning werden geëvacueerd uit de bunker waarin ze zich schuilhielden en de vierjarige Do Ba die levend tussen de lijken vandaan werd gehaald.


Doofpotoperatie

Het Amerikaanse leger beweerde dat de operatie tegen Mỹ Lai een militair succes was geweest en dat er 128 Vietcong-guerrilla's waren gedood. Een officier van de infanterie, die het incident onderzocht concludeerde dat 22 dorpelingen per ongeluk om het leven waren gekomen. In november 1968 schreef Tom Glen, een soldaat, een brief waarin hij het Amerikaanse leger beschuldigde van wreedheden ten opzichte van Vietnamese burgers. Colin Powell, die later Minister van Buitenlandse Zaken zou worden onder George W. Bush, moest de zaak onderzoeken en weerlegde de klachten van de soldaat met de conclusie dat "de relatie tussen Amerikaanse soldaten en het Vietnamese volk uitstekend is".

Het bloedbad van Mỹ Lai werd niet bekend bij het grote publiek tot soldaat Ron Ridenhour dezelfde aantijgingen als Tom Glen naar voren bracht in een brief die hij stuurde naar president Richard Nixon, het Pentagon, het Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en een groot aantal Congresleden. De meeste geadresseerden negeerden de brief, maar Mo Udall, een senator uit Arizona, ondernam actie. In september 1969 – twee maanden voor de inhoud van de brief openbaar werd gemaakt – werd kapitein William Calley beschuldigd van meervoudige moord en veroordeeld tot levenslange gevangenisstraf. Hij ging in hoger beroep bij zowel de militaire rechtbank als een beroepshof, waarna zijn straf werd omgezet in tien jaar. Na hiervan een derde te hebben uitgezeten in de vorm van huisarrest kwam hij in 1974 vrij. 

Nasleep

Dankzij de journalist Seymour Hersh kwam de massamoord in de openbaarheid. Hij sprak militairen die aan het bloedbad hadden deelgenomen. Voor zijn onderzoeksjournalistiek kreeg Seymour Hersh later de Pulitzer-prijs toegekend.'

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloedbad_van_Mỹ_Lai

Hugh Tompson, een van de mannen die per helicopter 11 dorpsbewoners in veiligheid bracht.

Ik had hier ook graag een portret geplaatst van Tom Glen die als 21-jarige soldaat durfde wat maar zeer weinigen durfden, namelijk zijn mond opendoen over schreeuwend onrecht. Maar helaas kon ik geen foto van hem vinden. Dankzij hem en de al even gewetensvolle journalist Sy Hersh werd de My Lai-oorlogsmisdaad wereldnieuws en werd deze terreur aan de vergetelheid ontrukt. Op die manier toonden Glen en Hersh moed, het tegen de mainstream opnemen toont karakter.


Ik meld dit omdat iemand als  de televisiejournalist Twan Huys in zijn programma NOVA College Tour Madeleine Albright niet durfde te vragen waarom zij de moord op een half miljoen Irakese kinderen onder de vijf jaar had gerechtvaardigd op de Amerikaanse televisie. Zie: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084/ En: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4  In tegenstelling tot Tom Glen en Sy Hersh zweeg Twan Huys over deze oorlogsmisdaad die eveneens de wereldpers haalde. Huys bleef muisstil hierover, terwijl toch het programma-onderdeel waarin Albright deze uitspraak deed daarvoor een 'Emmy Award' ontving.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_Albright


Welnu, de lafheid en hypocrisie van Huys werden misschien wel het best geïllustreerd toen hij door de EO het volgende werd gevraagd:


'Wie respecteer of bewonder je?' 


en Twan Huys zonder blikken of blozen het volgende antwoordde:

'De Amerikaanse journalist Seymour Hersh; hij kwam twee jaar geleden als eerste naar buiten met de misstanden in de Abu Ghraib gevangenis. De man is ontzettend goed geïnformeerd.'


De volgende vraag was: 'Wat vind je belangrijke normen en waarden?' Huys antwoordde:

'Moed, momenten waarop je tegen de stroom durft in te gaan om iets duidelijk te maken en geloofwaardigheid, eerlijk en betrouwbaar zijn.'


En dit is nu buitengewoon interessant. Hij zegt 'moed... tegen de stroom' durven 'in te gaan... geloofwaardigheid, eerlijk en betrouwbaar zijn,'  kortom, juist alles dat hem ontbreekt, moed, geloofwaardigheid, eerlijkheid, betrouwbaarheid. Wat betekent dit? 
Daarover later.


Zie ook: http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/search?q=twan+huys 

The Empire 805

'America Must Declare War on America

Friday, 29 June 2012 00:00By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

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(Photo: Robert Stolarik / The New York Times)Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

- Oscar Wilde

I was polishing the local bartop with my elbows the other day next to a naturalized Irishman who works as an electrician. He asked what I did for a living, and I winced a little before telling him, "I write politics," because I knew what was coming. As ever, when I let people know what I do while in the confines of a drinking establishment, I was immediately subjected to a sustained violation of The First Law Of The Bar: "Thou shalt not talk of religion or politics here."

Such moments are normally excruciating for me, pretty much entirely because the absolute last thing I want to do while nursing a whiskey and watching a ballgame is talk shop. This time, however, was different. My new friend regaled me with a succinct, accurate and scathing assessment of his adopted country - "Millions of people need work, the infrastructure of the country is falling down around our ears, but no one in power seems able or willing to put one and one together and solve two problems with one stroke," he railed at one point - before summing it all up with a single, perfect, devastating brick.

"America," he said, "has a war on drugs that doesn't work. It has a war on poverty that doesn't work. It has a war on crime that has only managed to fill its prisons. It has wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that didn't work. You want to fix everything that has gone wrong? There's only one answer: America must declare war on America."

My new friend did not pay for another drink the rest of the night.

Absolutely God damned right.

America must declare war on America, against the fusillade of divisive nonsense that passes for political discourse these days, provided with full corporate sponsorship by a small cabal of rich people via the "mainstream" news media they own from top to bottom. Americans must declare war on America, on the America this fortunate few would create with zeroes to the left of the decimal on their secret donation checks, on the America these reavers and traitors seek to make in their own corrupted, bloated image.

I have made this point time and time and time again, but it bears repeating once more: the single greatest strength the far right and their paymasters enjoy is their utter and complete lack of shame. They will say anything - literally anything - to gain an advantage in any debate, and be damned to whoever takes a screwing in the process.  

A perfect example: on Wednesday, Rand Paul (R-KY), darling of teabagger nation and son of that walking farce of a fake Libertarian Ron Paul, blocked a vote on extending FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program until the Senate votes on legislation declaring that human life begins at conception. Forget all those people in Iowa and Florida who are swamping out their homes after being inundated with record rainfall. We need legislation on fetuses...but God help them if they're born, because these God-fearing Republicans don't give a fig for them once they've passed through the birth canal. Welcome to the planet, brat. You're on your own.

My friend at the bar was on fire over the massive infrastructure problems facing America right now, noting that more than 2,000 bridges are trembling on the edge of collapse in Massachusetts alone. Why has this incredibly important problem not been addressed?Adam Peck of ThinkProgress provided an answer last week:

With as many as 2.9 million new and existing jobs on the line, House Republicans are refusing to pass a transportation reauthorization bill, even after the Senate's version of the bill overwhelmingly passed through the upper chamber in a 74-22 bipartisan vote.

The deadline for new transportation funding is June 30, and if the calendar flips to July without a compromise, as many as 1.9 million workers could lose their jobs, at least temporarily. The Senate version of the bill, if adopted, would create an additional one million new jobs as well, according to Department of Transportation projections.

So why are House Republicans holding nearly three million jobs hostage? Because they want approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to be included in the bill. The State Department estimates that roughly 6,000 jobs would be created if the Keystone XL is approved, but as few as 20 of them will be permanent.

These are but two examples; there are dozens upon dozens more. Were I to list them all, I would singlehandedly cause a worldwide electron and ink shortage. Sufficed to say, where we are can best be explained by how we got here. On the eve of the Supreme Court's ruling on President Obama's Affordable Care Act, James Fallows of The Atlantic laid out how exactly we came to this sad and disgraceful state of affairs:

When you look at the sequence from Bush v. Gore, through Citizens United, to what seems to be coming on the health-care front; and you combine it with ongoing efforts in Florida and elsewhere to prevent voting from presumably Democratic blocs; and add that to the simply unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the years since the Democrats won control of the Senate and then took the White House, you have what we'd identify as a kind of long-term coup if we saw it happening anywhere else.

You can try this at home. Pick a country and describe a sequence in which:

First, the (2000) presidential election is decided by five people, who don't even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms. Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology. Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess and re-do existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them. Meanwhile their party's representatives in the Senate abuse procedural rules to an extent never previously seen to block legislation - and appointments, especially to the courts. And, when a major piece of legislation gets through, the party's majority on the Supreme Court prepares to negate it - even though the details of the plan were originally Republican proposals and even though the party's presidential nominee endorsed these concepts only a few years ago.

How would you describe a democracy where power was being shifted that way?

As if all this were not enough already, that small cabal who helped deliver us to this diseased and deranged estate has the perfect answer to all the problems before us: a plastic-fantastic fraud of a multi-millionaire, named after a kitchen utensil, who was against everything he stands for before he was for it before he was against it, who made his money killing American jobs, whose wife tries to connect with the common people by wearing $900 t-shirts on national television, and whose family claimed a $70,000 tax deduction for owning a doped-up horse.

America must declare war on America. You, me, and everyone we know with brain one in our heads and the best interests of the country at heart need to charge the ramparts, stand our post, and refuse to take even one step back.

The Supreme Court is rewriting the Constitution on the back of a corporate pay stub, Congress has made itself more useless than nipples on an ice cream cone, the President of the United States has decided he can kill where and who he wishes with a video game, and Colorado is on fire even as the "mainstream" news media gives respectful ear to a Republican presidential candidate who argues that firing firefighters is a bully idea and the answer to all that ails us.'

Further Reading:  http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10033-america-must-declare-war-on-america 

Twan Huys en Ken Carson 3

De Nederlandse Ken Carson. Nihilisme met 'zo'n duidelijke kaaklijn.'


In de Angelsaksische wereld heet het conspiracy of silence en daar is alles mee gezegd. Een concreet voorbeeld daarvan is 'het feit dat onze tijd moeiteloos aanneemt dat moord te rechtvaardigen is,' wat 'te maken heeft met die onverschilligheid voor het leven waardoor het nihilisme wordt gekenmerkt.' (Albert Camus)


Staatsterreur, het vermoorden in georganiseerd verband van burgers, inclusief vrouwen en zelfs kinderen die door de media geportretteerd worden als onze tegenstanders, is dan in het openbaar geen onderwerp van gesprek meer. Terreur wordt zo verzwegen en ook het verzwijgen wordt verzwegen, evenals de kritiek op dat verzwijgen. 


Die nihilistische mentaliteit is kenmerkend voor de 'vrije pers,' de commerciele massamedia. Vandaar mijn kritiek op televisiejournalisten als Twan Huys die een illustrerend voorbeeld gaf van de conspiracy of silence toen hij Madeleine Albright aan het woord liet in zijn programma De NOVA College Tour. Let op de naam 'College Tour.' Klinkt hip, een roadshow, met de sterren op pad. En voor wie is het allemaal bedoeld? College impliceert dat de NOVA Tour zich richt jonge mensen die geschoold moeten worden. Albright kon dan ook haar boek verkopen aan een geselecteerd publiek van Amsterdamse studenten. En wat leerden de studenten? Wel, in elk geval dat een televisiejournalist een autoriteit zeker niet kritisch ondervraagd, maar gewoon haar of zijn propaganda laat spuien. Twan Huys had voor de camera eerder zijn schoen opgegeten dan dat hij Albright had gevraagd waarom zijn de moord op een half miljoen Irakese kinderen onder de vijf jaar had gerechtvaardigd op de Amerikaanse televisie. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084/ En http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbIX1CP9qr4


Die vraag had natuurlijk het einde ingeluid van Twan's televisiecarriere en dat zou voor hem gelijkstaan aan zelfmoord, want Huys is niet meer dan zijn imago van 'mooie man met zo'n duidelijke kaaklijn' waaraan hij al die jaren zorgvuldig heeft gewerkt. En dus is voor hem de moord op een half miljoen Arabische kinderen geen relevant feit, niet relevant genoeg om Albright daarover lastig te vallen. Waren de slachtoffer daarentegen een half miljoen joodse kinderen geweest of een half miljoen blanke christelijke kinderen dan had Huys natuurlijk alleen maar daarover gesproken en talloze kritische vragen gesteld aan de autoriteit die mede verantwoordelijk was voor deze genocide. Die respectloze mentaliteit toont hoe het nihilisme werkt bij barbiepoppen als Twan Huys. 


Meer: http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.nl/search?q=twan+huys

The Neoliberal Religion 41

The American People Are Angry

By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

28 June 12

he American people are angry. They are angry that they are being forced to live through the worst recession in our lifetimes -- with sky-high unemployment, with millions of people losing their homes and their life savings. They are angry that they will not have a decent retirement, that they can't afford to send their children to college, that they can't afford health insurance and that, in some cases, they can't even buy the food they need to adequately feed their families.

They are angry because they know that this recession was not caused by the middle class and working families of this country. It was not caused by the teachers, firefighters and police officers and their unions who are under attack all over the country. It was not caused by construction workers, factory workers, nurses or childcare workers.

This recession was caused by the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street. And, what makes people furious is that Wall Street still has not learned its lessons. Instead of investing in the job-creating productive economy providing affordable loans to small and medium-size businesses, the CEOs of the largest financial institutions in this country have created the largest gambling casino in the history of the world.

Four years ago, after spending billions of dollars to successfully fight for the deregulation of Wall Street, the CEOs of the big banks -- JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and the others -- went on a losing streak. The enormous bets they made on worthless, complex, and exotic financial instruments went bad, and they stuck the American people with the bill.

Wall Street received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world. But it was not just the $700 billion that Congress approved through the TARP program. As a result of an independent audit that I requested in the Dodd-Frank bill by the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided a jaw-dropping $16 trillion in virtually zero-interest loans to every major financial institution in this country, large corporations, foreign central banks throughout the world, and some of the wealthiest people in this country.

And, instead of using this money to provide affordable loans to small businesses, instead of putting this money back into the job-creating productive economy, what have they done? They have gone back to their days of running the largest gambling casino in the world. In other words, they have learned nothing.

The American people are angry because they see the great middle class of this country collapsing, poverty increasing and the gap between the very rich and everyone else grow wider. They are angry because they see this great country, which so many of our veterans fought for and died for, becoming an oligarchy -- a nation where our economic and political life are controlled by a handful of billionaire families.

In the United States today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income since the 1920s. Today, the wealthiest 400 individuals own more wealth than the bottom half of America -- 150 million people.

Today, the six heirs to the Walmart fortune own as much wealth as the bottom 30 percent.

Today, the top 1 percent own 40 percent of all wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owns 2 percent.

Incredibly, the bottom 40 percent of all Americans own just 0.3 percent of the wealth of the country.

According to a new study from the Federal Reserve, median net worth for middle class familiesdropped by nearly 40 percent from 2007 to 2010. That's the equivalent of wiping out 18 years of savings for the average middle class family.

The distribution of income is even worse. If you can believe it, the last study on this subjectshowed that in 2010, 93 percent of all new income created from the previous year went to the top one percent, while the bottom 99 percent of people had the privilege of enjoying the remaining 7 percent. In other words, the rich are getting much richer while almost everyone else is falling behind.

Not only is this inequality of wealth and income morally grotesque, it is bad economic policy. If working families are deeply in debt, and have little or no income to spend on goods and services, how can we expand the economy and create the millions of jobs we desperately need? There is a limit as to how many yachts, mansions, limos and fancy jewelry the super-rich can buy. We need to put income into the hands of working families.

A lot of my friends in the Senate talk a whole lot about our $15.8 trillion national debt and our $1.3 trillion deficit. In fact, deficit reduction is a very serious issue and will be one of the major issues of this campaign. Unfortunately, many of my colleagues forget to discuss how we got into this deficit situation in the first place, and how we went from a healthy surplus under President Clinton to record-breaking deficits under Bush.

When we talk about the national debt and the deficit, let us never forget that the current deficit was primarily caused by Bush's unpaid-for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine that! President Bush and his deficit hawks forgot to pay for two wars which will end up costing us trillions of dollars. It just plain slipped their minds. On top of that, for the first time in American history Bush and his Republican friends decided, during a war, to give out huge tax breaks -- including massive benefits for millionaires and billionaires. Even more importantly, the deficit is the result of a major decline in federal tax revenue because of the high unemployment and business losses that we are experiencing as a result of this recession -- caused by the greed and recklessness of Wall Street. Revenue as a percentage of GDP, at 15.2 percent, is the lowest in more than 60 years.

Despite the causes of the deficit, our Republican (and some Democratic) friends have decided that the best way forward toward deficit reduction is to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, food stamps and virtually every other programs of importance to low and moderate income families. We must not allow that to happen.

If we are serious about dealing with the deficit and creating jobs in America, the wealthy are going to have to start paying their fair share of taxes. We also have to end the massive tax loopholes and subsidies that exist for major corporations. (In that regard, Rep. Keith Ellison from Minnesota and I recently introduced legislation that would end all tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry). At a time when the United States now spends more money on defense than the rest of the world combined, we also have to cut back on military spending.

Yes, we should deal with the deficit. But not on the backs of the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor!

Most importantly, when we talk about what's happening in America, we have to address the unemployment crisis in this country which now finds 23 million Americans without jobs or who are under-employed. And we know how to do that.

We know that the fastest way to create decent-paying jobs is rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure (roads, bridges, rail, airports, water systems, wastewater plants, deteriorating schools, etc.) We also know that we can create a great deal of employment by transforming our energy system away from foreign oil and coal and into energy efficiency and such sustainable energies as wind, solar, geo-thermal, bio-mass and other clean technologies. We also know that, as our country fights fierce global competition, it is absurd to be laying-off educators and making college unaffordable.

While we continue to do everything we can during the next six months to defeat Republican right-wing extremism, it is also important that we never lose sight of the progressive vision that we are fighting for. If we don't know where we want to go, it will be impossible to get there. Some of the issues that I intend to raise are the following:

Not only must we resist cuts in Social Security, we must lift the cap on taxing higher incomes so that Social Security will be strong for the next 75 years.

Not only must we oppose cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, we must see health care as a right of all and continue the fight for a Medicare for All Single Payer health care system.

Not only must we oppose placing the burden of deficit reduction on the backs of working families, we must demand a progressive tax system in which the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.

Not only must we oppose cuts in unemployment compensation, we must fight for a jobs program that creates the many millions of jobs our country desperately needs.

Not only must we fight to end disastrous unfettered free trade agreements with China, Mexico, and other low wage countries, we must fight to fundamentally rewrite our trade agreements so that American products, not jobs, are our number one export.

And, not only must we vigorously oppose the war against women, we must fight to end all forms of discrimination and prejudice in this country.

The struggle we are engaged in right now is of pivotal importance for this country. Whether we win or lose will determine the future of America. That struggle is not just for our lives but, more importantly, it is for our children and our grandchildren.

Despair is not an option. I know people get angry, I know they get frustrated, I know they get disgusted. But we don't have the right to give up and turn our backs on our children and grandchildren.

Our job is to simply bring to fruition what the overwhelming majority of the American people want. They want an economy that works for the middle class and working families and not just for the rich. They want everybody in this country to have health care as a right. They want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. They want to move away from these gross inequalities in income and wealth. We have the people behind us. They have the money. And at the end of the day, the people will be stronger than the money.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/12138-focus-the-american-people-are-angry

Joseph Stiglitz 2

'AlterNet / By Lynn Parramore

 469 COMMENTS

Exclusive Interview: Joseph Stiglitz Sees Terrifying Future for America If We Don't Reverse Inequality

What will life look like down the road if we don't reverse economic inequality? We must see through the myths of capitalism and build a mass movement if we are to save ourselves.

June 24, 2012  |  

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of America's most prescient voices, wrote an article for Vanity Fair several months before Occupy Wall Street was born. "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" called attention to the widening gap between rich and poor and its deadly impact on our society and its democratic institutions. In his newly released book, The Price of Inequality,Stiglitz returns to this theme of a divided society, delving into the origins and consequences of economic unfairness. I caught up with Professor Stiglitz and talked to him about how the persistent myths and beliefs associated with our capitalist system help to drive this trend, turning America from a land of opportunity to a land of broken dreams.

Lynn Parramore: An argument has been made, particularly since the end of the Cold War, that capitalism is great at producing things that can improve our lives, and so we ought to therefore tolerate some unfairness. What's wrong with that narrative?

Joseph Stiglitz: Well, capitalism does have a lot of strengths, including producing things that are very innovative. But what drives capitalism is the profit motive. You can profit not only by making good things, but also by exploiting people, by exploiting the environment, by doing things that are not so good. The narrative that you describe ignores the extent to which a lot of the inequalities in the United States are not the result of creative activity but of exploitive activity. And if you look at the people at the top, what is so striking is that the people who've made the most important creative contributions are not there.

By that I mean the really foundational things like the computer, the transistor, the laser. And how many people at the top are people who made their money out of monopoly -- exercising monopoly power? Like bankers who exploited through predatory lending practices and abusive credit card practices. Or CEOs who took advantage of deficiencies in corporate governance to get a larger share of the corporate revenues for themselves without any regard to the extent to which they have actually contributed to increasing the the sustainable well-being of the firm. 

LP: How does our current situation compare to other eras in terms of the differences between ordinary Americans and the richest among us?

JS: Doing a precise comparison is difficult because we don't have data sets that go back that far. But we do have data sets that go back more than 30 years and what is clear is that the share of the top 1 percent has almost tripled since 1980. So, this kind of inequality at the top has unambiguously gotten much, much, much worse. We also have data on the extent to which there's been a hollowing out of the middle class. The data that recently came out from the Fed indicated that we've wiped out 20 years of increases and wealth for the middle American.

LP: So for most of us, 20 years of economic progress just went up in smoke. But the super-rich are doing very well. What happened?

JS: It's the peculiar nature of the American economy, which is that's it's a very powerful machine that is working for a very few people, and has not been delivering for most Americans. If you had an economic machine that worked the way it was supposed to, everybody would be getting better. And an economy that's normally growing, say, 3 percent, even over a 20-year period. Steady accumulation would lead to their wealth more than doubling in that period. And it clearly hasn't happened. And adjusted for inflation, it would have even increased even before, unadjusted for inflation, would have increased it even more. And that clearly hasn't happened.

LP: There's a persistent myth that America is still the "land of opportunity." Why is that myth so prevalent, even in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?'

Lees verder: http://www.alternet.org/economy/155918/exclusive_interview%3A_joseph_stiglitz_sees_terrifying_future_for_america_if_we_don't_reverse_inequality/