(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
This really is an amazing graphic but it’s a little too big for our Front Page and it can’t be shrunk or you won’t see the 400 at all. So I’m moving it below the fold. – ek hornbeck
Michael Moore joined the demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin on March 6, and mentioned that the 400 richest Americans have more money than all of their 155,000,000 fellow citizens at the bottom of the pyramid combined, and since it isn’t easy to visualize a very large number like 155,000,000, much less compare it to a much smaller number like 400…
I made an illustration in which each pixel represents 100 people, with 1,550,000 black pixels, 500 x 3100, representing the 155,000,000 people at the bottom of the pyramid…
…and 4 white pixels representing those 400 Americans who have most of the money, and just to make those 4 white pixels a little easier to find, I put them right at the top.
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WOW!
which brought about this idea of mine…
The mean wealth of the average member of the “400 Club” is equivalent to the combined wealth of a representative sampling of 387,500 people from the lower 155,000,000.
Let’s see, one person controlling the same amount of wealth as people in the bottom half of the socioeconomic spectrum comprising a couple thousand more than the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, or alternatively, slightly less than the combined populations of Madison, Wisconsin and Salem, Oregon.
Keep in mind that Minneapolis is larger than quite a few NFL, NBA and MLB cities, including St. Louis (356,587), New Orleans (354,850), Tampa (343,890), Anaheim (337,896), Cincinnati (333,012), Pittsburgh (311,647), Buffalo (270,240), Orlando (235,860), and Green Bay (101,412).
And finally, one of the exalted 400 would hold wealth equivalent to the bottom 155,000,000 filling the cities of Syracuse, New York; Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia.
Such an egregious disparity challenges the conceptual ability of even the most vivid of imaginations.