Our mass delusion of American prosperity and national well being is killing U.S.

[lindysalsagal]

BOB HENNELLY JULY 29, 2018 12:00PM Salon.com

https://www.salon.com/2018/07/29/our-mass-delusion-of-american-prosperity-and-national-well-being-is-killing-u-s/

The disconnect between the corporate news media’s reporting about the “great American economy” and the actual circumstances of the American people grows by the day. It just underscores what great lengths vulture capitalists will go to keep a status quo in place that further enriches themselves at the expense of the health of the nation and the planet itself.

“Because it was that particular tax cut that gave the boost to GDP growth, that boost is accompanied by a sharp worsening of income and wealth inequality,”Richard Wolff, an economics professor at New School University, said in an email. “And that effect is far more important to everyday people than the GDP growth number (largely an abstraction). He continued, “Here is the key mechanism: corporations have been shown to be using the funds saved from taxes by the Dec 2017 law largely to buy back their companies' shares in the stock market. That boosts the market values which disproportionately benefits (1) the top 10 percent of shareholders who own 84 percent of the shares, and (2) the top corporate executives whose pay and benefits are often tied to stock prices. Nothing comparable has boosted average wages which indeed continue to stagnate as they have over the last 40 years. The rich get richer and the rest get nothing.”

As Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and director of , at Columbia University recently wrote, our country is in the throes of three “interrelated epidemic diseases , notably obesity, substance abuse (especially opioid addiction) and depression.”

“First, the U.S. sociopolitical system produces higher levels of income inequality than in other OCED [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] high income countries,” writes Sachs. “High U.S. inequality, and especially the persistent absolute relative poverty of a significant portion of the U.S. population, are risk factors for all three epidemics.”

BOB HENNELLY
Bob Hennelly has written and reported for the Village Voice, Pacifica Radio, WNYC, CBS MoneyWatch and other outlets. He is now a reporter for the Chief-Leader, covering public unions and the civil service in New York City. Follow him on Twitter: @stucknation

[Hortensis]

1. Planetary wealth QUADRUPLED and more over the past

35 years, and a very large share accrued to America. During this period wages dropped for half of all Americans.

America's enormous wealth is anything but a mass delusion.

The mass delusion is what the right-wing wealthy classes are blanketing the nation with: that America can't afford the large middle class, shrinking poverty, and other widespread prosperity we once had. Pure rubbish.

The fix is wealth redistribution through various means, only starting with a living wage, new job qualifications development, and the increased taxation of the wealthy that Obama started.

As Louis Brandeis said many times, we can have democracy or we can have classes so wealthy that to them democracy is an impediment to be done away with; we can't have both. We must tax and regulate these new predatory classes out of existence. Obama started, Trump delays, but we will do it because we have to. What their agents are doing in government now is showing that it is them or us. And there are 330,000,000 of us.

[lindysalsagal]

2. Well said.

[JayhawkSD]

3. I would disagree almost entirely.

Not entirely, because I do agree that the income tax should be a great deal more progressive than it is and that the wealthy certainly should be paying a greater share of the cost of governing this nation.

However, inequality was not caused primarily by tax rates, and taxing the rich will not solve it, mainly because it will not raise the income of the working class. Nor will it significantly lower the income of the oligarchs.

What caused the shocking gap between the oligarchs and the working class was the destruction of the balance of power between them created by collective bargaining, and to regain any measure of wealth equality that balance of power must be restored. Taxation will do nothing to achieve that. Only a robust labor union movement will do that.

Right now the working class is sitting on its hands decrying the loss of labor unions and begging Congress to redress that issue, but Congress is what destroyed unions in the first place, and they most certainly are not going to restore them. They destroyed unions because they are in the pay of the oligarchs. They are still in the pay of the oligarchs, and we keep reelecting them, while begging them to serve us rather than the oligarchs.

If Congress is not going to restore unions, and they clearly are not because it is not in their interest to do so, then who must do so?

Clearly, it is up to the working class to create the union movement, just as they did the first time. It is time to quit asking someone else to do it for us and to take the power that they, unsurprisingly, will not give us. It is time to stand, as I and my brothers did in the early 1960s, outside the gates of a steel plant with axe handles in our hands and shut them down until they meet our demands. If they threaten to fire on us we must answer them, as my brothers and I did then, "Go ahead. We outnumber you sufficiently that you will get some of us, but we will get all of you."

The oligarchs are not impressed by words typed furiously by keyboard commandos, they are not impressed by "messages." The oligarchs understand, and respond to, the actual utilization of power.