{"id":4083,"date":"2010-11-08T20:45:03","date_gmt":"2010-11-08T19:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4083"},"modified":"2010-11-08T20:47:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-08T19:47:00","slug":"is-the-united-states-a-banana-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=4083","title":{"rendered":"Is the United States a banana republic?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps that seems like an outrageous suggestion &#8211; but consider this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 per cent of  income, up from almost 9 per cent in 1976 &#8230; the United States now arguably has a more unequal  distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua,  Venezuela and Guyana.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is an extract from a recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/11\/07\/opinion\/07kristof.html?_r=1\">op-ed piece<\/a> in the &#8220;New York Times&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Inequality in the USA is outrageous and, in the face of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, it is likely to become even worse. As explained in &#8220;The Spirit Level&#8221; [my review <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/currentaffairs.html#TSL\">here<\/a>], this kind of inequality causes a range of poor social incomes where all citizens in the society suffer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps that seems like an outrageous suggestion &#8211; but consider this: &#8220;The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 per cent of income, up from almost 9 per cent in 1976 &#8230; the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4083"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4089,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083\/revisions\/4089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}