The Class War Launched by America's Wealthiest Is Getting More Savage

 

Letter to an acquaintance

Good Saturday morning Gigi,

Your experiences are my experiences.  I, like you, am exposed to the decline and ruination of our once beautiful middle class, and all that it brought to strengthen our great nation.  What you experienced is happening all over the country.  During my 17 years working in the same building, in the same neighborhood, walking the same streets each morning and evening, I watched a working class neighborhood fall into rubble.  Homes, once family owned, became the property of slum lords.  The streets I once walked at night, unafraid, became filled with wandering bands of thugs and vandals and drug dealers and prostitutes.  Long time citizens put triple locks on their doors and bars on their windows and never went out at night, held prisoner in their homes while the thugs had free reign.  This once proud Italian community we called Garlic Gulch, Rainier Valley in South Seattle, is now a blighted abandoned ghetto .  A mixture of poor Black, poor Asian, poor Latinos and poor White. 

Is this the natural course of events?  Did we need to allow this crumbling to take place?  Is it enough to just weep and say that it is the way of things and it is their own fault?  What caused us to lose control over our middle class?  Over our unions?  Over our beautiful American Dream of a job, a home and a family?  Why is it only good enough for a small percentage of our people and not for everyone? 

My simple minded answer is that it is because the people in charge do not care about *All of our people.  Indeed, they will cut their own throats if it brings profit to them.  They are what I call the Ruling Class, the Empire Builders.  And their bottom line, their only line is profit.  Greed is their Master.  Sure, they walk upright and enter their houses of worship and call on God to be on their side, but they serve a different Master.  Greed has other names.  He looks like our friend and says he cares for us right up until we look about and see the ruin that his people have made of our towns, our factories, our dignity, our schools, the list is endless. 

 

Gigi, my hope for a brighter future is not with those powerful, wealthy people now in control.  What you and I see about us is their legacy.  My hope is in those very people who roam the streets, lost, abandoned, attacking one another, grabbing your purse if you dare to go out unprotected.  If we cannot figure out how to empower these people, to teach them to have dignity and self respect and to build the power to change their communities rather than to continue the destruction, if we can't figure out how to turn that tide, then we had better sign up for that one way trip to Mars. 

 

Curious Carl

 

From: Gigi

Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2011 4:52 AM

Subject: Re: The Class War Launched by America's Wealthiest Is Getting More Savage

I can't dispute the stats illustrating income changes through the years, however, there's more in play than economics as regards why, here, in Pittsburgh, our, once thriving neighborhoods, have and continue their descent to ghettos.  Of course those children have little chance, but, several of them, despite their parents' choices, will work to succeed!!

 

Carl, I mean no disrespect, but, unless you've been exposed to living this nightmare...watching your beautiful neighborhood become one huge crime scene, in which your family and friends are the victims, you really, really can't speak to it!  Every one in my family, including myself, and most of our neighbors, fell victim to some crime, once the 'element' began moving in, and the police abandoned us, because, they, too, became targets!

 

And, unions 'were' formed to help the working man, but grew into a colossal greed and power machine!!  My Dad worked in Pittsburgh steel mills and on the railroad.  My husband was in unions. My sister is in AFSCME, as a county employee,  I'd worked for the Commonwealth of PA, also, under AFSCME, so, I know about that which I can state to a certainty.  I could send you my own novella on the lies behind the paragraph I'd c/p from what you'd sent: 

 

"Working people can organize and form unions. Unions do more than raise
wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection
against abuse, intimidation and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers have
to compete, partly to keep out unions, so the existence of unions helps
everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize
their members to vote."

 

I do appreciate your sending this.  I know it's grim.  But, economics in but a mere piece of the puzzle in what creates a criminal!

 

Best, always,

Gigi 


----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@gmail.com>
To: "Gigi" <cjm0806@comcast.net>
Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2011 1:05:34 AM
Subject: The Class War Launched by America's Wealthiest Is Getting More Savage

Hi Gigi,

Whether you agree or disagree with this article, it underscores a serious problem with our American culture.  We are no longer putting the protection of *All Americans first.  We are putting *Profit first...and second...and...

Actually, this struggle has gone on between a government of the people, by the people and for the people versus a government of, by and for greed and plunder.  Right now Greed is on the inside rail ahead at least two lengths. 

Carl Jarvis
The Class War Launched by America's Wealthiest Is Getting More Savage
By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on January 13, 2011, Printed on January 14, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149531/

We're in a class war.

It's the corporations and the very wealthiest against all the rest of us.
We're losing.

In 1962 the wealthiest 1 percent of American households had 125 times the
wealth of the median household. Now it's 190 times as much. Is that a case
of a rising tide lifting all boats, just a few of them a little bit higher?
No.

From 1950 to 1965, median family income rose from $24,000 a year to $38,000
a year. That's close to 4 percent a year, close to 60 percent over 15 years.
That's a rising tide.

In 1964 there was a big tax cut. That's when things started to slow down for
average people. By the mid-'70s the rise of the middle class stalled. From
1975 to 2010 median family income rose $42,936 to $49,777. That's not quite
16 percent over 25 years, less than six-tenths of 1 percent per year.

Briefly, when taxes went up under Clinton, median income rose, peaked at
$52,587 in 1999, and then, after Bush cut taxes, declined. Keep in mind that
this is median family income. In the '50s and '60s, family income was
usually earned by a single person. Today, family income normally comes from
at least two people.

At the same time, income for the richest soared. In 1979 the richest 1
percent of Americans earned 9 percent of all U.S. income. Now they earn 24
percent of all U.S. income. One percent of Americans earn nearly one-fourth
of all the income in the country.

Then came the crashes of 2001 and 2008 and the recessions that followed.

The crash hasn't changed anything. Things have become worse.

From 1990 to 2005, adjusted for inflation -- the minimum wage is down 9
percent, production workers' pay is up only over 15 years 4.3 percent.

At the same time, the rich get richer:

Corporate profits are up 106.7 percent. The S&P 500 is still up 141.4
percent since 1990. CEO compensation is up 282 percent. Call it transfer of
wealth. Or call it class warfare.

What's wrong with the rich getting richer?

Slate's Timothy Noah, in "The United States of Inequality," wrote, "Income
distribution in the United States [has become] more unequal than in Guyana,
Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and
Ecuador."

Take a look at that list.

Countries with wide income inequality don't lead the world in research,
technology, industry, and innovation. They're unstable. They have large
underclasses. They have high rates of crime. They have little opportunity.

In such countries the rich have disproportionate power. They take control of
all aspects of society, especially government, the police, and the
judiciary. They become self perpetuating.

If current trends continue, "The United States by 2043 will have the same
income inequality as Mexico." (Tula Connell, Mar 12, 2010, AFL-CIO Now.)

Countries with high levels of income inequality are third-world countries.

Here's how regular people can deal with cultures of high inequality. The
primary, and best, weapon is a progressive tax structure. As people move up
the income ladder they pay a higher rate at each rung. Unearned income -from
dividends and capital gains - is taxed at least as high as earned income
(money that people actually work for.) Tax cuts for the wealthy mark, with
great precision, the decline in fortunes of ordinary Americans. Tax cuts for
the wealthy mark, with equal precision, the increase in inequality. We had a
chance to slow the process by letting the last round, the Bush tax cuts,
expire. We've lost that round.

People can become educated and move on up.

Back in the '60s, when I was growing up, New York City had free
universities. The burgeoning SUNY system charged $400 tuition a semester.
The minimum Regents scholarship was $400 a semester. If a student didn't get
one, he or she could easily earn enough to pay tuition with a summer job.
The same held true for most state university systems across the country.

Today, students have to borrow. The median student debt for an undergraduate
degree - forget about a doctorate, law school, and med school - is $20,000.
The first, and truest, lesson you learn when you go to college is how to be
in service to the banks.

We've lost that battle.

What does it mean?

"Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching
the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich
who have about a 22 percent chance.

"Children born to the middle quintile of parental family income ($42,000 to
$54,300) had about the same chance of ending up in a lower quintile than
their parents (39.5 percent) as they did of moving to a higher quintile
(36.5 percent). Their chances of attaining the top five percentiles of the
income distribution were just 1.8 percent."

(Understanding Mobility in America, April 26, 2006, Tom Hertz, American
University.)

Working people can organize and form unions. Unions do more than raise
wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection
against abuse, intimidation and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers have
to compete, partly to keep out unions, so the existence of unions helps
everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize
their members to vote.

Businesses have become very good at beating unions. And they're getting
better at it. According to Business Week, ("How Wal-Mart Keeps Unions at
Bay," 10/28/2002),"over the past two decades, Corporate America has
perfected its ability to fend off labor groups."

In the 1940s a third of private sector employees were unionized. Now it's
down to just 7.2 percent. Unions only remain strong in the public sector,
where membership is 37 percent.

If you read the papers or watch the news, you will see an anti-public
service union story almost everyday. These are the people who teach your
kids, pick up the trash, clean the sewers, drive the buses and trains,
they're the police and fireman. The stories will tell you their pension fund
liabilities will bankrupt the states; that it's unionized teachers who have
ruined our schools. Charter schools - without unions - are the new favorite
charity for billionaires.    

When a country is, or becomes, a third-world country, the other thing people
can do is run. To some place richer and freer. Like America.

But when America becomes Mexico, where you gonna run to?


Larry Beinhart is the author of "Wag the Dog," "The Librarian," and "Fog
Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin." His latest book is
Salvation Boulevard. Responses can be sent to beinhart@earthlink.net.

C 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149531/

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