Read The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion Online
Authors: Lois H. Gresh
The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (3 page)
W
hen thinking of The Hunger Games trilogy, core issues immediately pop to mind. The reader can’t help but wonder if our society is heading toward the same problems depicted in the world of The Hunger Games. Perhaps this is a central reason why the series affects readers so much: We identify with the central characters and can actually envision—with great horror—a future reality that is not too different from Katniss’s reality. We’re already heading down the path leading to these aspects of society we see in the novels:
Big Brother
Government control over citizens, harassment of citizens
Lack of privacy and erosion of civil liberties
Legal penalties for invoking freedom of speech
Using people to spy on each other
Dehumanization
Ultimately, rebellion.
In subsequent chapters, we establish that there’s a huge disparity between the people in the Capitol who have too much to eat, who focus on what they look like, and spend money on plastic surgeries and style, versus everyone else—the starving, the hounded, the impoverished, those lacking even basic human comforts. The “haves” versus the “have nots”—we see them clearly in the world of The Hunger Games, but we also see them clearly in our society.
In our real world, in the United States, the top 1 percent of all households controls 43 percent of the wealth, and the next 19 percent controls 50 percent of the wealth; hence, it’s estimated that
20 percent of all households in the United States control 93 percent of the wealth
.
What does this leave for everyone else, the 80 percent of citizens of the United States? Unfortunately,
880 percent of households have only 7 percent of the nation’s financial wealth.
And even worse, as Professor G. William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz tells us, “[T]he bottom forty percent of the population . . . holds just 0.3% of the wealth in the United States.”
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These are enormous disparities in resource distribution between the rich and everyone else.
Business Insider
puts it bluntly: “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it’s also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age. If you’re in that top 1%, life is grand.”
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Statistics show that the disparities are starting to look like what we saw right before the Great Depression. For example, in 1928 the “top one-hundredth of 1 percent of U.S. families averaged 892 times more income than families in the bottom 90 percent,” and in 2006, “the top 0.01 percent averaged 976 times more income than America’s bottom 90 percent.”
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People have lost their homes at a shocking pace, and some reports suggest that the “housing crisis could peak in 2011, as the number of homeowners receiving foreclosure notices climbs to about 20%.”
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Indeed, as of February 2011, CNN tells us that foreclosures are responsible for a whopping 26 percent of current house sales. Further, “nearly thirty percent of mortgage borrowers are underwater on their loans, owing more than their homes are worth”
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and estimates place the losses to banks on mortgages at possibly more than $700 billion.
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People are unemployed with no hope of ever finding jobs again. The understated statistics from the government suggest that the nation’s unemployment rate is 9 to 9.5 percent as of January 2011. However, as many analysts are quick to point out, the unemployment numbers do not include those who have given up all hope of finding work. Estimates place the hopelessly unemployed at 6 million of the supposed 15 million jobless Americans. In addition, 1.5 million people have been out of work for more than ninety-nine weeks. Explains Harvey Katz of Value Line, which does investment research:
Worse, the aforementioned unemployment rate of 9.4% is just a fraction—perhaps half—of the overall jobless rate. That is because this so-called official rate includes only those considered to be technically unemployed . . . the cumulative total is probably closer to 18%—or just under one in five Americans who want fulltime, permanent employment, who are unable to secure such work.
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To avoid a major Depression akin to the one the United States suffered in the 1930s, the U.S. government gave $700 billion to the banks. The government also bailed out the auto industry to the tune of some $25 billion.
Branko Milanovi
, lead economist at the World Bank’s research division in Washington D.C., recently told
U.S. News & World Report
that the wealth of the world has never been as unequally distributed between the rich and everyone else as it is now. He says that the countries with the widest disparities are in Latin America and Africa.
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Professor Domhoff cites a 2006 study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research, whose data is pretty old at this point, from the year 2000, to point out that the financial disparities exist worldwide.
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The study concluded that the top 10 percent of all households in Switzerland owned more than 70 percent of the country’s wealth; in Denmark, they owned 65 percent; France, 61 percent; Sweden, 58 percent, England, 56 percent; and so forth. Again, these are older statistics, and also, as Domhoff points out, the data is “spotty” for many countries. Still, no matter how lenient we are in looking at the numbers, hoping to reduce the inequalities, we can’t get around the fact that the disparities are absurdly wide.
As we all know, wealth leads to power. Before the 2008 presidential election, CNN noted that “The herd of candidates vying for the White House in 2008 may have different positions on abortion, gun control, climate change and taxes, but there is one thing most of them have in common—they’re millionaires.”
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Money
magazine wrote that the “seven front-runners, those with the highest standings in the polls and the biggest campaign troves, all have assets that would place them in the nation’s top 10% of households, and most of them in the top 0.5%.”
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In 2002,
Forbes
magazine listed the ten richest politicians in America, and among them were Michael R. Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, with close to $5 billion; Winthrop Rockefeller, lieutenant governor of Arkansas, $1.2 billion; B. Thomas Golisano, then gubernatorial candidate of New York, $1.1 billion; and John Kerry, then senator of Massachusetts, $550 million.
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