The Disaster Known as the Fyre Festival Turned Into a Conversation About Income Inequality
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By now, it's clear that Fyre Festival was a bit of a disaster, but the controversy over the event started an important conversation about income inequality.
A luxury vacation festival in the Bahamas reportedly organized by rapper Ja Rule and promoted by Kendall Jenner and model Bella Hadid received huge backlash on Twitter Friday for not fully delivering on promised accommodations like food, transportation and music.
The cost of the festival? Roughly $12,780 a person, according to CNN.
People who attended wrote tweets about their disappointment.
The tweets about #FyreFestival quickly turned into a discussion of income inequality.
Twitter user @popespeed pointed out that a person at the festival had previously tweeted insensitive comments about people losing power. The user then shifted gears to making distressed tweets about a lack of cell phone battery at the festival.
Struggles with food, shelter, and transportation are something many Americans deal with on a regular basis. Here's what it's like to live every day in the U.S. for millions of people:
- Last year, not a single state in the U.S. offered enough affordable housing for America's poorest families.
- The number of Americans living in high-poverty areas, where 40 percent of families live below the poverty line, nearly doubled between 2000 and 2013.
- About 55 percent of Americans did not fly in a commercial airliner last year, and less than 4 percent of Americans have passports.
- More than 48 million Americans struggled to put food on the table in 2014.
Income inequality is getting worse.
The Economic Policy Institute states that the gap between the rich and the poor has risen in every state since the 1970s. In a report last year, the Economic Policy Institute's Estelle Sommeiller, Mark Price, and Ellis Wazeter wrote that the gap started to widen after American values about worker's rights started to erode.
"This earlier era was characterized by a rising minimum wage, low levels of unemployment after the 1930s, widespread collective bargaining in private industries (manufacturing, transportation [trucking, airlines, and railroads], telecommunications, and construction), and a cultural and political environment in which it was outrageous for executives to receive outsized bonuses while laying off workers," they wrote.
"We need policies that return the economy to full employment, return bargaining power to U.S. workers, and reinstate the cultural taboo on allowing CEOs and financial-sector executives at the commanding heights of the private economy to appropriate more than their fair share of the nation’s expanding economic pie."