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| Teamsters rally in Madison in February. |
Unfortunately, "income inequality" doesn't resonate quite like "violent union thugs." Anti-worker plutocrats and their lackeys know this. In the War on Workers, they employ the time-tested strategy of sowing the fear that working people will violently attack the populace. That's why they're so desperate to find a union thug to beat up an innocent bystander, like the Fox reporter who lied that he'd been struck by a protester. And that's why the Tea Party uses provocateurs to incite violence. But despite the Tea Party's money, organization and media megaphone (Fox News), they've only come up with one video of one guy who shoved a Tea Partier who provoked him in Sacramento.
Far more dangerous to the general health of the citizenry is income inequality. The upward redistribution of wealth is exponentially more harmful to exponentially more people than one well-deserved shove. The City of Richmond recognized this. In its resolution, Richmond cites a study by University of California at Berkeley Economics Professor Emmanuel Saez. He reviewed U. S. income tax data dating back to World War I and found, according to Alternet,
...the U.S. is now more unequal than at any time in the last one hundred years. This unprecedented shift of wealth to those at the very top of the income pyramid has occurred over the last generation...The resolution cites the work of two U.K. researchers researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, who found rising income inequality leads to
...lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, more drug use, less trust, more homicides, more teen pregnancies, lower scholastic achievement, more prisoners per capita, more obesity and even less recycling...In case you want to consider moving to Richmond, it's a residential inner suburb of San Francisco. The resolution will be sent to leaders of Wisconsin’s unions as well as to the city councils of neighboring cities.You can read the resolution here.
