<font face="arial black" size="6" color="#D90000">
THE FIGHT OF OUR LIVES </font>
<font face="arial" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>
Inequality Matters –The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences</font>
<font face="Trebuchet MS, Arial Unicode MS, Microsoft sans serif, verdana" size="3" color="#000000">
<h2>by Bill Moyers</h2>
from the Foreword of the book</b>
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1565849957.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg">
SOME THINGS ARE WORTH GETTING MAD ABOUT.
These two stories from the same page of the same day's New York Times, for example. Under a six-column headline across the top, the Times of March 10, 2004, tells us that the annual tuition at Manhattan's most elite private schools has reached $26,000—for kindergarten as well as high school. Lower down the page, in a story with a two-column headline, we learn about a school in Mount Vernon, New York, just across the city line from the Bronx. Its student body is 97 percent black. Nine out of ten kids qualify for free lunches. One out of ten lives in a homeless shelter.
During Black History Month, sixth-grader sets out to write a report on Langston Hughes but cannot find a single book about the man in the library. It's no fluke: this is a library with only one book on Frederick Douglass, and none on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, or Leontyne Price. In fact, apart from a few Newbery Medal books bought by the librarian with her own money, the shelves are filled with books from the 1950s and 1960s. A child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. In another book, the dry cleaner, the de-liveryman, and the cleaning lady—in fact, all the characters—are white, as all the students in the school were at the time the book was written. A 1967 book about telephones points out that while most phones have dials, a few of the newer models have buttons. The library has no computer. It doesn't even have a card catalog.
And here's something else to get mad about: Caroline Payne has continually been turned down for jobs because of her appearance. Her Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit, and her face and gums are distorted. Caroline Payne is one of the protagonists of David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America. She was born poor, and though she once owned her own home and earned a two-year college degree, she has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life. She has the will to move up, but not the resources to overcome a succession of unexpected and overlapping problems—a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a sudden layoff that forces her to sell her few assets and give up her home. "In the house of the poor," Shipler writes, "the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another."
Here's something else: the House of Representatives, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate, political, and religious right, has approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, but for families earning as much as $309,000 a year— the very families that have already been showered with tax cuts. The editorial page of the Washington Post calls this "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed," the Post says. "But they're not."
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington these days. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; that millions of workers are making less money in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; that working people are falling behind even as they put in longer and longer hours; or that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, forty-five million Americans—eight out of ten of them in working families—are uninsured and cannot get basic care.
Astonishing as it seems, scarcely anyone in official Washington seems to be troubled by a gap between rich and poor that is greater than it has been in half a century—and greater than that of any other Western nation today. Equality and inequality are words that have been all but expunged from the political vocabulary. Poverty still gets mentioned every now and then, but in an airy, offhand way. Next to nothing is said, for example, about the profound shift in poverty that is under way in America today. For years we were told that those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. The poor themselves were counseled that if they wanted to move up the economic ladder, they had only to go to school, work hard, and get married. But now we see poverty where it was not supposed to be: among people who have followed the program to the letter—families with two parents, a full-time worker, and a head of household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor, whom our political elites expect to climb out of poverty on a downward-moving escalator.
The Stanleys and the Neumanns come to mind. These two Milwaukee families—one black, one white—lost their breadwinners in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and out of the country. In a series of documentaries over the next decade, my public TV colleagues and I chronicled their efforts to cope with wrenching changes and find a place for themselves in the new global economy. The Stanleys and the Neumanns are the kind of people my mother would have called "the salt of the earth." They love their children, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.
To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers had to take full-time jobs. Both fathers became seriously ill; when one father had to spend two months in the hospital, the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn't have adequate health coverage. We were present with our camera when the bank began foreclosure on the modest home of the other family because they couldn't meet the mortgage payments. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder and slipping further behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.
They love America, and their patriotism turns a personal tragedy into a political travesty. When our film opens, both families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television. By the end of the decade, they have tuned out. They no longer believe they matter to those who run the country; they don't think their concerns will ever be addressed by the governing class. They are not cynical—they are too religious to be cynical—but they know the system is rigged against them.
And so do we. For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was thirtyfold. Four decades later it is more than seventy-five-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the case. The pressures of inequality on middle- and working-class Americans have grown more severe despite the general prosperity (which is why we called our documentaries about the Stanleys and Neumanns Surviving the Good Times). In the words of the economist Jeffrey Madrick, "The strain on working people and on family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing, and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. Life has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means."
This is a stunning turn of events for a nation saturated with paeans to "the American Dream." Ours was not supposed to be a country where the winner takes all. Through a system of checks and balances, America sought to maintain a healthy equilibrium. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, Americans made primary schooling free and universal. Because everyone deserves a second chance, state laws were changed to protect debtors, especially poor ones, against rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most if not all (white) comers, rather than held for the elite. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land and even supported squatters' rights. Equal access, long a promise implicit in our founding documents, gradually became a reality for millions of us in the twentieth century. My parents were knocked down and almost out by the Depression and stayed poor all their lives. Nevertheless, I went to good public schools, and my brother made it to college on the GI Bill. When I bought my first car with a borrowed loan of $450,
I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and rested in state-maintained public parks. I was one more heir to a growing public legacy that shaped America as a shared project and became the central engine of our national experience.
Until now.
America is undergoing a profound transformation. The radical political elite that has gained ascendancy over politics has made inequality the objective of a sustained campaign, described by the (now defunct) Center for the Renewal of American Democracy as "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility from social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water, and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources is moving toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures on ordinary Americans that, says Jeffrey Madrick, "deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
You could have seen it coming by following the Great Divider —money. After a long career covering Washington, the veteran reporter Elizabeth Drew concludes that "the greatest change in Washington over the past twenty-five years—in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here—has been in the preoccupation with money." Campaign money has "flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel," writes Jeffrey Birnbaum, who spent nearly twenty years as a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal "Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that—though we often forget—will deeply affect our daily lives."
Senator John McCain describes elections in the United States today as nothing less than an "influence-peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder." During his brief campaign for president in 2000, McCain was ambushed by dirty tricks from the religious right in South Carolina and drowned in a flood of cash from the wealthy cronies of George W. Bush, who was sworn in for a second term under a canopy of cash—$40 million to $50 million—supplied for his inauguration by the very corporations waiting offstage for the payback.
And what a payback! Here's how it works:
When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.
Im not making this up. And I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. That was Time magazine. From the heart of America's media establishment comes the matter-of-fact judgment that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."
It is easy to understand why Franklin Delano Roosevelt feared a government by money as much as a government by mob. It is easy to understand why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned off by politics. They and millions like them have been the losers in a class war that disarmed them of political influence before defeating them.
The battle strategy was outlined a generation ago in Time for Truth, a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger William E. Simon, who had served as secretary of the treasury under President Richard M. Nixon. If the financial and business classes wanted to reclaim the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Depression and the New Deal, "funds generated by business" would have to "push by the multimillions" into conservative causes, Simon wrote. They got the message and had soon put together a well-orchestrated, lavishly financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less.... It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net erected to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."
Looking backward, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate money, intellectual activism, the rise of a literalistic religious orthodoxy opposed to any civil and human rights that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who have bought the political system right out from under us.
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, these elites funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after study advocating their agenda. To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post is one of the few mainstream journalists who has covered the class story. "During the 1970s," he writes, "business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative area." Big-business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And the wealthy elites built alliances with the religious right—Jerry Falwells Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition—who gleefully contrived a cultural holy war as a smoke screen behind which the economic assault on the middle and working classes would be waged.
And they won. In Daniel Altman's recent book on the "neo-conomy," he describes a place without taxes or a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds. "It's coming to America," he announced. He's a little late; it's here. "If there was a class war," says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all, "my class won."
Look at the spoils of victory:
• $2 trillion in tax cuts—tilted toward the wealthiest people in the country
• Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes
• Cuts in taxes on investment income
• Cuts in taxes on huge inheritances
More than half of these tax cuts are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. In 2003, according to the New York Times "nearly 3,400 of the tax returns of people earning $200,000 or more showed no federal income tax due—a rise of nearly 45 percent" over the previous year. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was the sea of red ink that overwhelmed our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on those who live paycheck to paycheck.
Deficits are part of the plan. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. President Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. The goal, according to Grover Norquist, the leading right-wing political strategist, is to "starve the beast"— with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States government is so anemic and anorexic that it can be drowned in the bathtub.
There's no question about it: the corporate, political, and religious right are remaking American life according to a blueprint that only they fully understand, because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready to retire; and they are systematically stripping government of its capacity to do much more than reward the rich and wage war. Every morning's news brings a litany of evidence: Tennessee is withholding Medicaid from three hundred thousand people, the poorest of the poor, because the state is deeply in debt. Florida is laying similar plans. Hearing this, the social reactionaries convened at Grover Norquist's Wednesday Group in Washington will likely break into cheers. But long after George W Bush has retired back to Texas, Americans will be struggling with shrunken resources to reverse the unraveling of our social contract which his radical and reckless policies deliberately hastened.
If instead of practicing journalism I were writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't make up some of the things said by "All This President's Men." His chief economic adviser assures us that shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. His Council of Economic Advisers classifies hamburger chefs in fast-food restaurants as manufacturing workers. His labor secretary tells us not to worry about stalled job growth because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter." His Federal Reserve chairman expects the tax cuts to cause Social Security benefit reductions—but wants the cuts made permanent anyway. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.
But what is being done to middle-class and working Americans and the poor—and to the workings of American democracy —is deadly serious. Go online and read the transcripts of Enron traders during the energy crisis four years ago, manipulating the California power market and gloating over their ability to rip off "those poor grandmothers." Read how they talked about making political contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's good friend, George W. Bush. You'll find more of these shenanigans from one end of the World Wide Web to the other: Citigroup, the nation's largest financial institution, being fined $70 million for deceptive home-mortgage practices; a subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC being fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries; millions of dollars missing among contractors in Iraq; untraceable funds disappearing behind the facade of faith-based initiatives.
The unmitigated plunder of the public trust has spread a spectacle of corruption across America. For its equivalent one has to go back to the first Gilded Age, when the powerful and the privileged controlled politics, votes were bought and sold, legislatures corrupted, and laws flagrantly disregarded, threatening the very foundations of democracy. It was a time—now is another— when the great captains of industry and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it."
And they will, unless, reading this book, you get mad—mad enough to get organized.
</font>
THE FIGHT OF OUR LIVES </font>
<font face="arial" size="4" color="#0000FF"><b>
Inequality Matters –The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences</font>
<font face="Trebuchet MS, Arial Unicode MS, Microsoft sans serif, verdana" size="3" color="#000000">
<h2>by Bill Moyers</h2>
from the Foreword of the book</b>
<img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1565849957.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg">
SOME THINGS ARE WORTH GETTING MAD ABOUT.
These two stories from the same page of the same day's New York Times, for example. Under a six-column headline across the top, the Times of March 10, 2004, tells us that the annual tuition at Manhattan's most elite private schools has reached $26,000—for kindergarten as well as high school. Lower down the page, in a story with a two-column headline, we learn about a school in Mount Vernon, New York, just across the city line from the Bronx. Its student body is 97 percent black. Nine out of ten kids qualify for free lunches. One out of ten lives in a homeless shelter.
During Black History Month, sixth-grader sets out to write a report on Langston Hughes but cannot find a single book about the man in the library. It's no fluke: this is a library with only one book on Frederick Douglass, and none on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, or Leontyne Price. In fact, apart from a few Newbery Medal books bought by the librarian with her own money, the shelves are filled with books from the 1950s and 1960s. A child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. In another book, the dry cleaner, the de-liveryman, and the cleaning lady—in fact, all the characters—are white, as all the students in the school were at the time the book was written. A 1967 book about telephones points out that while most phones have dials, a few of the newer models have buttons. The library has no computer. It doesn't even have a card catalog.
And here's something else to get mad about: Caroline Payne has continually been turned down for jobs because of her appearance. Her Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit, and her face and gums are distorted. Caroline Payne is one of the protagonists of David Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America. She was born poor, and though she once owned her own home and earned a two-year college degree, she has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life. She has the will to move up, but not the resources to overcome a succession of unexpected and overlapping problems—a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a sudden layoff that forces her to sell her few assets and give up her home. "In the house of the poor," Shipler writes, "the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another."
Here's something else: the House of Representatives, now a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate, political, and religious right, has approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, but for families earning as much as $309,000 a year— the very families that have already been showered with tax cuts. The editorial page of the Washington Post calls this "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed," the Post says. "But they're not."
Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington these days. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; that millions of workers are making less money in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; that working people are falling behind even as they put in longer and longer hours; or that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, forty-five million Americans—eight out of ten of them in working families—are uninsured and cannot get basic care.
Astonishing as it seems, scarcely anyone in official Washington seems to be troubled by a gap between rich and poor that is greater than it has been in half a century—and greater than that of any other Western nation today. Equality and inequality are words that have been all but expunged from the political vocabulary. Poverty still gets mentioned every now and then, but in an airy, offhand way. Next to nothing is said, for example, about the profound shift in poverty that is under way in America today. For years we were told that those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. The poor themselves were counseled that if they wanted to move up the economic ladder, they had only to go to school, work hard, and get married. But now we see poverty where it was not supposed to be: among people who have followed the program to the letter—families with two parents, a full-time worker, and a head of household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor, whom our political elites expect to climb out of poverty on a downward-moving escalator.
The Stanleys and the Neumanns come to mind. These two Milwaukee families—one black, one white—lost their breadwinners in the first wave of downsizing in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and out of the country. In a series of documentaries over the next decade, my public TV colleagues and I chronicled their efforts to cope with wrenching changes and find a place for themselves in the new global economy. The Stanleys and the Neumanns are the kind of people my mother would have called "the salt of the earth." They love their children, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week.
To make ends meet after the layoffs, both mothers had to take full-time jobs. Both fathers became seriously ill; when one father had to spend two months in the hospital, the family went $30,000 in debt because they didn't have adequate health coverage. We were present with our camera when the bank began foreclosure on the modest home of the other family because they couldn't meet the mortgage payments. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder and slipping further behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.
They love America, and their patriotism turns a personal tragedy into a political travesty. When our film opens, both families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television. By the end of the decade, they have tuned out. They no longer believe they matter to those who run the country; they don't think their concerns will ever be addressed by the governing class. They are not cynical—they are too religious to be cynical—but they know the system is rigged against them.
And so do we. For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was thirtyfold. Four decades later it is more than seventy-five-fold. Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the case. The pressures of inequality on middle- and working-class Americans have grown more severe despite the general prosperity (which is why we called our documentaries about the Stanleys and Neumanns Surviving the Good Times). In the words of the economist Jeffrey Madrick, "The strain on working people and on family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing, and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. Life has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means."
This is a stunning turn of events for a nation saturated with paeans to "the American Dream." Ours was not supposed to be a country where the winner takes all. Through a system of checks and balances, America sought to maintain a healthy equilibrium. Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, Americans made primary schooling free and universal. Because everyone deserves a second chance, state laws were changed to protect debtors, especially poor ones, against rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most if not all (white) comers, rather than held for the elite. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land and even supported squatters' rights. Equal access, long a promise implicit in our founding documents, gradually became a reality for millions of us in the twentieth century. My parents were knocked down and almost out by the Depression and stayed poor all their lives. Nevertheless, I went to good public schools, and my brother made it to college on the GI Bill. When I bought my first car with a borrowed loan of $450,
I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and rested in state-maintained public parks. I was one more heir to a growing public legacy that shaped America as a shared project and became the central engine of our national experience.
Until now.
America is undergoing a profound transformation. The radical political elite that has gained ascendancy over politics has made inequality the objective of a sustained campaign, described by the (now defunct) Center for the Renewal of American Democracy as "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility from social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water, and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources is moving toward elite control, contributing substantially to those economic pressures on ordinary Americans that, says Jeffrey Madrick, "deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
You could have seen it coming by following the Great Divider —money. After a long career covering Washington, the veteran reporter Elizabeth Drew concludes that "the greatest change in Washington over the past twenty-five years—in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here—has been in the preoccupation with money." Campaign money has "flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel," writes Jeffrey Birnbaum, who spent nearly twenty years as a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal "Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that—though we often forget—will deeply affect our daily lives."
Senator John McCain describes elections in the United States today as nothing less than an "influence-peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder." During his brief campaign for president in 2000, McCain was ambushed by dirty tricks from the religious right in South Carolina and drowned in a flood of cash from the wealthy cronies of George W. Bush, who was sworn in for a second term under a canopy of cash—$40 million to $50 million—supplied for his inauguration by the very corporations waiting offstage for the payback.
And what a payback! Here's how it works:
When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.
Im not making this up. And I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. That was Time magazine. From the heart of America's media establishment comes the matter-of-fact judgment that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many."
It is easy to understand why Franklin Delano Roosevelt feared a government by money as much as a government by mob. It is easy to understand why the Stanleys and the Neumanns were turned off by politics. They and millions like them have been the losers in a class war that disarmed them of political influence before defeating them.
The battle strategy was outlined a generation ago in Time for Truth, a powerful polemic by the wealthy right-winger William E. Simon, who had served as secretary of the treasury under President Richard M. Nixon. If the financial and business classes wanted to reclaim the power and privileges they had lost as a result of the Depression and the New Deal, "funds generated by business" would have to "push by the multimillions" into conservative causes, Simon wrote. They got the message and had soon put together a well-orchestrated, lavishly financed movement. Business Week put it bluntly: "Some people will obviously have to do with less.... It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more." The long-range strategy was to cut workforces and their wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor, trash the social contract and the safety net erected to protect people from hardships beyond their control, deny ordinary citizens the power to sue rich corporations for malfeasance and malpractice, and eliminate the ability of government to restrain what editorialists for the Wall Street Journal admiringly call "the animal spirits of business."
Looking backward, it all seems so clear that we wonder how we could have ignored the warning signs. What has been happening to working people is not the result of Adam Smith's invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate money, intellectual activism, the rise of a literalistic religious orthodoxy opposed to any civil and human rights that threaten its paternalism, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of wealthy elites who have bought the political system right out from under us.
To create the intellectual framework for this revolution in public policy, these elites funded conservative think tanks that churned out study after study advocating their agenda. To put muscle behind these ideas, they created a formidable political machine. Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post is one of the few mainstream journalists who has covered the class story. "During the 1970s," he writes, "business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperative action in the legislative area." Big-business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And the wealthy elites built alliances with the religious right—Jerry Falwells Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition—who gleefully contrived a cultural holy war as a smoke screen behind which the economic assault on the middle and working classes would be waged.
And they won. In Daniel Altman's recent book on the "neo-conomy," he describes a place without taxes or a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds. "It's coming to America," he announced. He's a little late; it's here. "If there was a class war," says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all, "my class won."
Look at the spoils of victory:
• $2 trillion in tax cuts—tilted toward the wealthiest people in the country
• Cuts in taxes on the largest incomes
• Cuts in taxes on investment income
• Cuts in taxes on huge inheritances
More than half of these tax cuts are going to the wealthiest 1 percent. In 2003, according to the New York Times "nearly 3,400 of the tax returns of people earning $200,000 or more showed no federal income tax due—a rise of nearly 45 percent" over the previous year. You could call it trickle-down economics, except that the only thing that trickled down was the sea of red ink that overwhelmed our state and local governments, forcing them to cut services and raise taxes on those who live paycheck to paycheck.
Deficits are part of the plan. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn us, when he predicted that President Reagan's real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions. President Reagan's own budget director, David Stockman, admitted as much. The goal, according to Grover Norquist, the leading right-wing political strategist, is to "starve the beast"— with trillions of dollars in deficits resulting from trillions of dollars in tax cuts, until the United States government is so anemic and anorexic that it can be drowned in the bathtub.
There's no question about it: the corporate, political, and religious right are remaking American life according to a blueprint that only they fully understand, because they are its advocates, its architects, and its beneficiaries. In creating the greatest economic inequality in the advanced world, they have saddled our nation, our states, and our cities and counties with structural deficits that will last until our children's children are ready to retire; and they are systematically stripping government of its capacity to do much more than reward the rich and wage war. Every morning's news brings a litany of evidence: Tennessee is withholding Medicaid from three hundred thousand people, the poorest of the poor, because the state is deeply in debt. Florida is laying similar plans. Hearing this, the social reactionaries convened at Grover Norquist's Wednesday Group in Washington will likely break into cheers. But long after George W Bush has retired back to Texas, Americans will be struggling with shrunken resources to reverse the unraveling of our social contract which his radical and reckless policies deliberately hastened.
If instead of practicing journalism I were writing for Saturday Night Live, I couldn't make up some of the things said by "All This President's Men." His chief economic adviser assures us that shipping technical and professional jobs overseas is good for the economy. His Council of Economic Advisers classifies hamburger chefs in fast-food restaurants as manufacturing workers. His labor secretary tells us not to worry about stalled job growth because "the stock market is the ultimate arbiter." His Federal Reserve chairman expects the tax cuts to cause Social Security benefit reductions—but wants the cuts made permanent anyway. This may be the first class war in history where the victims will die laughing.
But what is being done to middle-class and working Americans and the poor—and to the workings of American democracy —is deadly serious. Go online and read the transcripts of Enron traders during the energy crisis four years ago, manipulating the California power market and gloating over their ability to rip off "those poor grandmothers." Read how they talked about making political contributions to politicians like "Kenny Boy" Lay's good friend, George W. Bush. You'll find more of these shenanigans from one end of the World Wide Web to the other: Citigroup, the nation's largest financial institution, being fined $70 million for deceptive home-mortgage practices; a subsidiary of the corporate computer giant NEC being fined over $20 million after pleading guilty to corruption in a federal plan to bring Internet access to poor schools and libraries; millions of dollars missing among contractors in Iraq; untraceable funds disappearing behind the facade of faith-based initiatives.
The unmitigated plunder of the public trust has spread a spectacle of corruption across America. For its equivalent one has to go back to the first Gilded Age, when the powerful and the privileged controlled politics, votes were bought and sold, legislatures corrupted, and laws flagrantly disregarded, threatening the very foundations of democracy. It was a time—now is another— when the great captains of industry and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it."
And they will, unless, reading this book, you get mad—mad enough to get organized.
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