'President Obama Speaks on Economic Mobility'

Transcript here.

The top 10 percent no longer takes in one-third of our income -- it now takes half.  Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20 to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273 times more.  And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288 times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.

So the basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed.  In fact, this trend towards growing inequality is not unique to America’s market economy.  Across the developed world, inequality has increased.  Some of you may have seen just last week, the Pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length.  “How can it be,” he wrote, “that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

But this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.

Yesterday we saw The Smartest Guys in the Room and Inside Job. I sat there with my mouth open for so long my tongue dried out. One more documentary and I'll be wandering down to Kshama Sawant's office and begging to be allowed to lick envelopes in support of her plan to retool Boeing war machine plants into bus factories, or whatever the hell it is she's doing now.