A vitally important piece from @ThePlumLineGS: \”The massive triumph of the rich, illustrated by stunning new data.\” And while the data is stunning, the crucial questions are \”Why and how did this happen?\”
The rich have not just done dramatically better since the 1970s while the rest of society has basically been treading water. They rigged the system to ensure that their advantages and rewards grew. The GOP led this charge with the \”Reagan revolution.\”
Then Democratic \”centrists\” in the Clinton Era (with a Wall Street led and driven strategy) kept it going. Bush and Obama did too. And of course, that has been the centerpiece of all Trump has done. The government emphasized top line \”growth\” without focusing on impact across society.
The very rich, Wall Street, and corporations have flourished as never before in history while everyone else made very modest, incremental progress…if that. Laws not only made it easier to get rich, they gave more political clout to people with money (Citizens United).
The effect was that the while the national economic pie got much bigger, the pieces the 90% got did not. They were kept just large enough to avoid social unrest while the rich feasted and grew fat. It\’s no exaggeration. Look at the data.
But treading water was not enough. It was not only wrong, but with rising costs and inadequate social programs, disruptions due to trade and technological change, etc., the 90% grew more and more economically insecure. Today something like two-thirds of 65 year olds have $1000 in the bank. Most Americans would be bankrupted by a major car repair or dental bill. So while inequality has grown, so has economic anxiety. This has led to frustration and anger that populists have tapped into. Ironically, of course, as in the case of Trump, they have tapped into it to maintain the power they need to continuing siphoning off the economy\’s profits to the 1%. And when political leaders come along seeking to redress the problem, the rich and their political allies slam them as \”socialist\” or leading leftward \”lurch.\”
Progressive candidates who seek a more just society are swarmed and attacked by the political immune system engineered to preserve America\’s emerging oligarchy. (That language is not too strong. That is who we are. That is what we have become).
So-called \”centrists\” are celebrated as bridge-builders when in fact what they really are is enablers, placaters, hired hands who serve the empowered few in the hopes of joining their numbers (if they are not among them already.) That\’s where we are. And, truth be told it looks like that is where we will remain if our democracy continues to be rigged to serve a tiny, tiny hyper-privileged fraction of us. Again, this is not political rhetoric. These are the facts. This is the history of the past 40 years. This is the reality of today.
Impeachment is important because it seeks to hold to account the most corrupt errand boy the super-empowered have ever put into high office. But neither it nor an election pitting that corrupt serial criminal against moderates seeking to more or less maintain the status quo will address the underlying social, economic and political crisis in America in which the government is no longer operated by or for all the people. Unchecked, we become a nation of drones whose lives are offered up in service to a rapacious, unrepentant, greedy & corrupt elite.
Ultimately, such a betrayal of the principles on which we were (at least in theory) founded and such a perversion of the ideas of equal opportunity to which we have aspired will either lead to institutionalize oppression in service of an aristocratic class or massive upheaval.
A better choice would be enlightened systematic change engineered in ways that utilize and strengthen what remains of our democracy. But do we have the insight or the will to make that happen? The Democratic primaries of the next few months will be the next big test.
