Volume 71, Issue #2 | Summer 2011

The United States is in the grip of an increasingly right wing economic and political agenda. It didn?t start yesterday. For decades, groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have pushed an agenda that today threatens working families.

Jobs keep going overseas, states keep looking to cut critical services, opportunity seems just about gone. Real wages were higher 35 years ago despite huge gains in productivity.

Once we were a middle class country, with core values of hard work,opportunity, and fairness. Now we're losing our middle class, because big corporations and CEOs have been calling the shots.

This didn?t happen overnight. Corporations have had a strategy to consolidate their hold on the U.S. economy for more than three decades. By every economic measure, they?ve been successful.

Look at what they?ve accomplished: reduced levels of unionization, reduced wages and benefits, reduced or eliminated corporate taxes for many companies, reduced or eliminated regulations, increased trade deals with low-wage countries.

U.S. Companies are Investing in New Jobs, Just Not in the United States (graph) Source: U.S. Commerce Department

Over the past 30 years, the incomes of the top 1% of Americans have skyrocketed, while 60% of American families saw no increase. (graph) Source: Congressional Budget Office

Here are the top 10 corporate freeloaders, as compiled by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).