October 11, 2015
The
United States is among the richest countries in all of history. But
if you’re not a corporate or political elite, you’d never know
it. In the world working people inhabit, our infrastructure is
collapsing, our schools are laying off teachers, our drinking water
is barely potable, our cities are facing bankruptcy, and our public
and private pension funds are nearing collapse. We – consumers,
students, and homeowners – are loaded with crushing debt, but our
real wages haven’t risen since the 1970s.
How
can we be so rich and still have such poor services, so much debt and
such stagnant incomes?
The
answer: runaway inequality – the ever-increasing gap in income and
wealth between the super-rich and the rest of us.
This
isn’t the first time that a tiny elite has gained extraordinary
control over economic and political life. Ancient Egypt had the
Pharaohs. Medieval Europe had feudal lords and kings. We Americans
had industrial robber barons.
And
today, we’ve got financial and corporate elites.
Runaway
inequality is upending how we see ourselves and how we govern. It is
upending the American Dream (the cherished idea that life gets better
and better with each generation). And it is upending the practice of
democracy and the very idea that each of us has roughly equal
influence in governing our country.
It’s
time to face up to runaway economic inequality – what causes it,
what it’s doing to us, and what we can do about it.
This
book has four aims:
1.
Shine a light on economic inequality: It’s worse than you think
For
all the talk about economic inequality, most of us have no idea how
bad it really is. It’s as if our native sense of justice won’t
let us comprehend how outrageously unequal our economy has become and
how much worse it’s getting day by day. Maybe we’re just too
fair-minded to wrap our minds around the level of systematic greed
that now permeates society’s top echelons.
We’ll
look at just how wide the gap is between the super-rich and the rest
of us, and how rapidly it is accelerating. A very small group of
economic elites is accumulating more and more of the country’s
resources while the rest of us stand still or fall further behind.
But
the problem goes beyond how many dollars we have (or don’t):
Runaway inequality is tearing apart the fabric of our society. The
super-rich live in a world that no longer requires mutual reliance on
common public services. Elites generally don’t use our schools, our
roads, our airports. They don’t really care if our infrastructure
collapses. We are cracking into two separate societies.
At the
same time, the super-rich are able to park trillions of dollars far
from the reach of the tax collector. By avoiding and evading taxes,
with help from an army of lawyers and bankers, the rich are
undermining the government services that the rest of us need. So our
roads and bridges crumble, our environment becomes contaminated, our
children crowd into our rundown schools. We pay a fortune out of
pocket for higher education and poor quality health care. And some of
us with darker pigmentation are targeted for arrest and fines in
order to help fund local government, while also facing poverty and
police violence.
Runaway
inequality undermines the practice of democracy. As the rich get
richer and richer, it gets easier and easier for them to buy
political favors. They can twist the media, elected officials, and
government agencies to do their bidding. They vote with their money,
which makes a mockery of our democratic “one vote, one person”
creed. We’ll see data showing that elected officials rarely act on
the agenda most Americans support. Instead they represent the wishes
of the affluent.
Using
over 100 easy to read charts and graphs as well as text, we will
demonstrate that as bad as you think it is, it’s worse.
2.
Examine the Fading American Dream
We’ll
take an honest look at how we compare to other developed nations.
Most
of us still view our country through the lens of the American Dream
and American “exceptionalism.” We see ourselves as leading the
world in just about everything that is good and just. As virtually
every politician likes to say, we are the shining light of freedom
and prosperity, blessed by God.
Most
Americans believe that the U.S. has the most upward mobility and
highest standard of living in the world. We think that the U.S. is
the fairest nation on Earth, offering the best prospects for everyday
people. (And for anyone who isn’t moving up, it’s their own
fault.)
But
the facts in this book will undermine that perspective. While America
may have had the most prosperous working class from World War II to
1980, it doesn’t anymore. In fact, today the U.S. is the most
unequal country in the developed world. We have the most child
poverty and homelessness. We have more people in prison than China
and Russia. And Americans are less upwardly mobile than most
Europeans.
We’ll
see that our public services don’t stack up either. Our health care
costs more, covers fewer people and produces worse outcomes. And we
are nearly last among developed nations in energy efficiency and
overall infrastructure.
No
question about it, the top 1 percent never had it so good. But the
rest of us are losing sight of the American Dream as runaway
inequality accelerates.
3.
Empower ourselves with the big picture
From
years of conducting economic workshops for adults, we’ve learned
that having a clear overview of what is going on is remarkably
empowering for people. When you can step back and see how it all fits
together, the world makes more sense.
We’ll
work hard at presenting that big, wide view, because most of us never
have a chance to see it. You just can’t get an accurate picture of
the economy as a whole through the everyday media or the jumble of
internet sources. We hear snippets about stock markets, government
debt, trade, unemployment and inflation. What we don’t hear about
is the context, substantive explanation, or critical questioning
about why any of this is happening and how it relates to our daily
lives.
Most
of all, the media turns a blind eye to the fact that we live in a
capitalist system. We’re never allowed to get outside that box so
we can look at it and see how it ticks. So we never hear about the
fundamental conflict that capitalism creates between the needs and
wishes of privately owned corporations and our health and well-being
– or the well-being of the planet that sustains us. We don’t hear
about how the corporate owners’ and financiers’ insatiable drive
for profits is eroding our standard of living. Yet these conflicts
are key to understanding our new era of runaway inequality.
The
picture of the economy that nearly all of us share turns out to be
wrong. We are told in many different ways that the economy is like a
complex machine that functions beyond the reach of human control.
This machine metaphor frames our view of the economic world: It makes
us think that everyone is just doing their thing in the machine, and
that we each get what we deserve, more or less. It obscures the
reality that there is, in fact, a fundamental conflict between
employees and owners, between the rich and the rest of us.
The
big picture we’ll present makes a lot more sense than the chopped
up version that bombards us each day. Yes, the economic system is
complex and yes, it is very hard to control. But its fundamental
direction is set by humans who serve particular interests. We will
see how powerful people chose to dramatically change the economy’s
direction a generation ago, and how working people have been paying
the price ever since. Runaway inequality is not an act of God. It is
the result of a system designed by and for wealthy elites.
4.
Come to a common understanding so we can build a common movement
We
offer this, our most ambitious goal, with the utmost humility: We aim
to help build a broad-based movement for economic and environmental
justice.
Right
now, we lack a robust mass movement with the power to reclaim our
economy and our democracy to make it work for the 99 percent.
Instead,
we have thousands of individual groups working on every issue from
fracking to a living wage. We have unions fighting for their members
and worker centers fighting for immigrant rights. We have protests
ranging from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to climate
justice. We have hundreds of progressive websites and journals to
cover all this activity. But we do not have a coherent national
movement with a clear and bold agenda that links us together.
We
will show that runaway inequality is at the root of many of the
problems we face, including the meteoric and disastrous rise of the
financial sector, defunding of the public sector, environmental
destruction, increased racial discrimination, the gender gap in wages
and the rise of our mammoth prison population. And we will posit that
if we share a clear understanding of runaway inequality – and the
basic economic situation we face – we can begin to build a common,
broad-based movement for fundamental economic justice that will take
on America’s economic elites.
The
political system will not move unless we organize on a mass level
like the Populists did over a hundred years ago, like the trade union
movement did in the 1930s and like the Civil Rights movement did in
the 1950s and 1960s.
Some
liberal economists and politicians appeal to the self-interest of the
super-rich. They argue that the rich would be (even) better off if
they would just allow a fairer distribution of income and wealth. We
disagree. Expecting the wealthy to help us secure basic fairness is a
losing proposition.
Economic
elites will only give up power and wealth when they’re forced to do
so by a powerful social movement.
So
this book has far-reaching but difficult to achieve goals. It
outlines an economic analysis and economic solutions that can connect
us and enable us to build a broad, common movement. Such a common
economic analysis does not by itself bring us together. But it will
be very hard to create a powerful mass movement without one.
To
achieve these goals the book is divided into four parts:
Part
1: Causes of Runaway Inequality analyzes how wealth is extracted from
all of us by Wall Street.
Part
2: The Decline of American Exceptionalism examines America’s
ranking on key economic and social issues in comparison to other
developed nations.
Part
3: Separate Issues, Common Cause shows the major impact of runaway
inequality on a series of issues that often are viewed independently.
Part
4: Solutions reviews a range of policies and actions that will be
needed to bring more economic and social justice to America.
In the
end this book makes one essential point again and again. Runaway
inequality comes at a steep price. The money that enriches the few is
extracted from all that we hold dear – our public life, our
incomes, our health and the education of our children. It is making
poor the richest country on Earth. . . . Until we do something about
it.
Les
Leopold, the director of the Labor Institute in New York, design
educational programs on economics, health, safety and the environment
for unions, worker centers and community organizations. He also is
the author of three previous books on labor and financialization.
This book, which to date has more than 20,000 copies in circulation
with worker and community organizations, is available at
runawayinequality.org
[3]
(free shipping). For bulk orders contact him at LesLeopold@aol.com
[4]
[6]
Source URL:
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Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/les-leopold
[2] http://www.chelseagreen.com/
[3] https://www.runawayinequality.org/product/runawayinequality
[4] mailto:LesLeopold@aol.com
[5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on How Could Such a Rich Country as Ours Produce So Many Poor People?
[6] http://www.alternet.org/
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/les-leopold
[2] http://www.chelseagreen.com/
[3] https://www.runawayinequality.org/product/runawayinequality
[4] mailto:LesLeopold@aol.com
[5] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on How Could Such a Rich Country as Ours Produce So Many Poor People?
[6] http://www.alternet.org/
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has
always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and
nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs