Redirect Your Anger

Americans are frustrated at the difficulty of making ends meet. Campaign promises about tackling inflation, lowering prices, mass deporting migrants, and using tariffs to solve our problems likely won one of the closest presidential elections in US history.

Those promises are hollow at best and dangerous at worst. Inflation hasn’t been high for 18 months, and prices aren’t returning to where they were. Mass deportations will worsen the economy, not improve it. And tariffs will cause inflation to skyrocket once again.

This is all misdirection designed to keep people looking the wrong way, intended to distract from the real problem plaguing our country: a group of political, corporate, and wealthy elites has been working for decades to dismantle the middle class and funnel all of the wealth to a select few.

The Downfall of the Middle Class

A comment I’ve seen numerous times is, “I was barely getting by, and then inflation hit, and I can’t make ends meet.” That is important not just because inflation increased prices but also because so many people were struggling or barely making ends meet before the pandemic and subsequent inflation.

38 million Americans relied on federal food assistance to keep from going hungry in 2019; when inflation was low, the pandemic didn’t exist, and people now claim life was good.

That resulted from decades of deliberate actions designed to erode the middle class. In 1968, the middle class peaked, the minimum wage peaked, unions were strongest, corporate taxes were over 50%, and the top individual tax rate was 70%.

The fact that unions are weaker today, the federal minimum wage is minuscule, corporate taxes are at an all-time low, and the middle class has all but been eliminated is all connected.

It began in the 1970s, when a future Supreme Court Justice, Lewis Powell, wrote a memo for the Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise.” In it, Powell wrote about how businesses needed to fight back against the media, colleges, intellectuals, arts, and science. Sound familiar?

The result was that the era of corporate lobbying and courts limiting corporate regulation was upon us. This led to a significant reduction in the enforcement of antitrust laws, allowing the formation of the giant corporations we see today. The idea of corporate money as free speech and “corporations are people” set hold, which led to Citizens United. Special Interest money flowed into politics by the billions.

“In 1971, there were only 176 companies in Washington DC. A decade later, in 1980, there are 2,445 companies, 9,000 lobbyists and 60,000 trade association employees.” -Al Jazeera

Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. He saw the new conservative movement as one focused on corporate power through his concept of supply-side economics, the idea that if you reduced taxes on corporations, the whole nation would prosper. Trickle-down economics had begun.

Republicans couldn’t win with just corporate support, so they targeted working-class white Americans. Here is how Lee Atwater, a political strategist for the Republican Party and advisor to Ronald Reagan, described it. Warning: the language is abhorrent.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n****r, n****r, n*****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r’ - that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N****r, n****r.’”

The strategy was successful, and the Republican party continues to be the party of corporate interests and wealthy tax cuts while drawing the majority of white working-class voters.

Reagan quickly showed how anti-labor he was when 13,000 air traffic controllers went on strike in 1981. Reagan gave them 48 hours to return to work or be fired. In the end, many were fired, and the air traffic controller union organization was disbanded.

We can see how a reduction in unions has affected the middle class.

These decisions funneled America’s wealth to the top, where now fewer than 900 billionaires hold more wealth than half of American families in a country with a population of 330 million people.

Why are we okay with a system where Jeff Bezos is so rich that he bought a yacht so big that it came with another smaller “more practical” yacht while paying Amazon workers so little that they needed to rely on federal aid programs paid for by our tax dollars? Why are we subsidizing the workers of one of the wealthiest corporations on the planet?

Be angry. Get mad! But direct it at the real source of your problems: corporate greed, income inequality, dark money in politics, the abysmal federal minimum wage, and the constant attacks on organized labor.

If we do that, we will retake the power that belongs to the people and rebuild a robust middle class. It is time for a government of the people, by the people, for the people to become America’s reality.

https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/powell-memo.pdf

https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/the-people-vs-america/1970s.html