Bill Moyers: We Are Living in the United States of Inequality!

The unprecedented level of economic inequality in America is undeniable. In an extended essay, Bill Moyers shares examples of the striking extremes of wealth and poverty across the country, including a video report on California's Silicon Valley. There, Facebook, Google, and Apple are minting millionaires, while the area's homeless, who have grown 20 percent in the last two years, are living in tent cities at their virtual doorsteps. A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government, says Moyers, while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole, that has turned us into the United States of Inequality. Inequality matters. You will hear people say it doesn't, but they are usually so high up the ladder, they can't even see those at the bottom. The distance between the first and the least in America is vast, and growing. The Washington Post recently took a look at two counties in Florida, and found that people who live in the more affluent St. Johns County, live longer than those who live next door in less rich Putnam County. The Post concluded: The widening gap in life expectancy between these two adjacent Florida counties reflects perhaps the starkest outcome of the nation's growing economic inequality. Even as the nation's life expectancy has marched steadily upward, a growing body of research shows, that those gains are going mostly to those at the upper end of the income ladder. That is true across America. In California's Silicon Valley, Apple, Facebook and Google, among others, have reinvented the Gold Rush. But down the road in San Jose, it's not so a pretty picture. Co the math: In an area where one fourth of the population earn an average of about $19,000 dollars a year, rent alone can average more than $20,000 dollars a year, and that difference adds up to homelessness. We talked to Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza,who brought this story to our attention. Martha Mendoza: I've been a journalist in this area for 25 years, and during that time, it has gone from having a pretty robust middle-class, to being an area, where you see this great divide of wealthy and poor, and nowhere do you see, that more than in the Silicon Valley, where 25 years ago, this was a place of orchards and farms, and ranching, and small businesses, and it has completely changed now, so that you have incredibly wealthy people, and incredibly poor people, and a growing gap. Homelessness has increased dramatically.