In honor of Bastille Day, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the situation in which we find ourselves in this country today.
Speaking at the protests of the G20 summit in Toronto, Canadian activist Maude Barlow reminded the gathered crowd that the three richest men in the world have more money than the 48 poorest COUNTRIES in the world. Just let that sink into your brain for a second. Overall, the richest 2% of the world’s population controls over half of the wealth, and the bottom 50% control less than 1% of the wealth.
Sucks to be them, right? Well, you’re most likely one of them, too. If you’ve got some time, this rant by Hofstra University political science professor David Michael Green brings home the reality of how the redistribution of wealth away from the middle class is on the brink of turning this country into another Argentina or Brazil, where a tiny percentage of elites control the wealth and the vast majority of people live in the worst slums imaginable. If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing (and it is quite a stemwinder), at least read this paragraph:
The product of these efforts has been precisely what one would expect. Corporations and economic elites have grown fantastically more wealthy than they already were thirty years ago. Their tax liabilities are now negligible and sometimes less than zero. Massive national debt, the product in part of those tax gifts to the rich, plus huge bills for interest on that debt (this alone is one of the largest items in the federal budget each year), is now owned by the mass public, who got nickels and dimes worth of tax cuts, in exchange for which they will now have to literally work years of their lives to pay down the taxes the rich escaped. Working people across the country get less and pay more for everything today. College is becoming increasingly out of the financial reach of average Americans. The minimum wage, which actually often isn’t the minimum, is far from a sustainable salary for one person, let alone a family. As of 2004, the richest one percent of Americans possessed sixty percent of all wealth in the country, while the bottom forty percent accounted for a whopping two-tenths of a percent. Between 1979 and 2004, after-tax income for the top one percent of Americans rose by 176 percent, while for those in the bottom 20 percent that figure rose only six percent. And those figures are for six years ago, during what by current standards was flush times for working people. Now jobs are disappearing, with the inevitable effect of driving wages down further, not to mention all the obvious effects on prosperity, security, health, mental health and sheer longevity.
Here’s a graph to help you visualize that:
Writing in The Nation, Harvard economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich says that this widening gap is at the very heart of the Great Recession, just as it was in 1929. In 1928, the richest 1% of Americans received 23.8% of income earned in the U.S., and in 2007 that figure was 23.5%, aided by tax cuts and shifting tax burdens that consistently favored the rich while gutting the middle-class. Again, Reich’s article isn’t a quick read, so here’s a good pullquote:
If nothing more is done, America’s three-decade-long lurch toward widening inequality is an open invitation to a future demagogue who misconnects the dots, blaming immigrants, the poor, government, foreign nations, “socialists” or “intellectual elites” for the growing frustrations of the middle class. The major fault line in American politics will no longer be between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. It will be between the “establishment” and an increasingly mad-as-hell populace determined to “take back America” from them. When they understand where this is heading, powerful interests that have so far resisted reform may come to see that the alternative is far worse.
Need some quant porn to flesh it out? Look at this post at Calculated Risk that compares the current unemployment situation to previous economic downturns. The graph below is too small to read here, so be sure to look at the original, but I think even at the reduced size you get the point:
Boston College law professor Ray D. Madoff (apparently no relation) calls the end of the estate tax and the continuation of other elite-friendly tax laws nothing less than the enabling conditions to create an American aristocracy, even as some super-rich individuals like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates themselves have called for their class to give away their fortunes to the betterment of society.
While Reich is quick (and correct) to point out that the Democrats are just as equally to blame for the situation as the Republicans, it never ceases to amaze me that the current crop of Republicans has stopped even pretending that they have any other agenda, and that President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress will compliantly go right along with it, without so much as a peep from anyone other than “Give ‘Em Hell” Bernie Sanders (the only ACTUAL socialist in Washington, I hasten to add).
It is more than painfully clear that there is little that can be done within the existing political structure to reverse the situation, and that the only agent of change will be class warfare on the size and scope of the three major proletarian revolutions. The real remaining question is how much worse will things have to get for the middle-class populations of the U.S. and Europe — will nothing happen until every major city resembles Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro? I think the answer lies in how quickly things transpire; if things level off for a decade or two, the complacent population of America and Europe are not likely to rise up, even as our way of life is inexorably assaulted. A few sharper shocks, and maybe we’ll get some sense kicked into us.
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