Apparently, it's immoral or something. Sometimes, it feels as if the bottom has completely fallen out, and they are going to just let us fall into the pit, where we will starve to death, and die homeless and ill on the streets. It's not that far-fetched, when you think about the way that the city of Detroit - Detroit! Motown! The American automobile! - is being completely abandoned to die. Childhood mortality in Detroit is worse than Panama or Botswana - but the attitude seems to be, "So what? They are the kids of poor Democrat voters!"
The fgront page of the New York Times prints what we all know:Inequality hollows out the soul. The richest becomes distant and disdainful of those "beneath" the, and lose any sense of community. They suffer from gross narcissism. The poorer lose self-confidence, and move into severe depression. Everyone withdraws from civic life, and from any shared self of identity.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we become less nice people in more unequal societies. But we are less nice and less happy: Greater inequality redoubles status anxiety, damaging our mental health and distorting our personalities — wherever we are on the social spectrum.
Hope is murdered, whether by despair (It’s too big, and I can’t do anything,”) or cynicism (“Why bother? The system stinks and they are all in on it.”)
Either way, it means that inequality triumphs and the American people have surrendered. Any chance of evading a juggernaut combination of Far-Right Wing Evangelicals and the wealthiest 1% owning our government will be gone. They will own all of America's public assets, finish stealing the Trust Funds of Social Security and Medicare, and kick the social contract back to 1898. We can see if it coming, in the Koch Brothers' plan to buy the 2014 elections, every Senate and House, all 36 Governorships....
Chris Christie would be just the man to be President over that new America in 2017. He would create a political machine like the one in New Jersey, a regime of fear, with his trained assistants running every department and commission, just like they do in New Jersey. He would privatize everything government-run service, from schools to prisons to national parks. He'd sell off those useless public lands. He'd stop Medicaid to all that useless public. He would mock the starving.
Isn't that what we see, and fear? That it can't be stopped?
Last night, I caught a bit of "The Best Years of Our Lives" on TCM. It's about small-town America, 1946. When I first saw it in 1971, I was 15, and still recognized a lot of that America, even if there was a lot more car traffic in small towns then.
In 1971, we still believed the same thing we believed in 1946: that one man was as good as another (leaving aside racism and misogyny, of course), and that his opinions and his vote were equally important. Actually, the civic value of all citizens was seen as equal in importance. It was the same with our economic importance in the greater civic being of our nation: the teacher, the doctor, the factory worker, the farmer, the truck driver and the milkman - everyone had their important job to do in our past panorama of life here. We knew that we were fortunate, too. The greatest concentration of wealth the world had ever seen was the combined wealth of the American middle class during "The Great Compression," between the 1940s and the 1960s. Wages for everyone fell within a common band. Income taxes on the top percentage never went below 80%(usually in the 90s) until 1964...and then they dropped to the 70s!
Nobody called that economic system socialist. It was the way that Americans lived - as equals, so they thought. We all believed in equality then. It was the great dream of the 1960s: equality.
The men who designed and created the system that we are really living under now - the present money-wins system - have never believed in equality. They are Aristocrats and Royalists – they believe that having more money gave you more right to govern all of us the little people. Once, vastly unequal socioeconomic systems were justified by the "divine right of Kings." Now, apparently, it's "the 1% work harder" or the hand of the free market.” But Americans have clung to the belief and hope that “hard work will make you successful” - in spite of all evidence, whether hard sociological and scientific facts, or their owned lived experience.
That is beginning to change: they no longer accept those rationales. They are beginning to see how inequality is destroying our nation. However, they feel depressed and hopeless to change it. If we Americans continue in this powerlessness, we make the Royalists’ future America’s self-fulfilling prophecy.
The country that began as an experiment in rational thought guiding a republic of equals will follow Rome's example's: a descent from a self-governing Republic into an emperor--governed Empire. In one thousand years, we will be a paragraph in the history books that describe how the world became an environmentally-ruined militarized system of monarchies, the Feudal Reich.
We still have time to stop it, We still have the time to win crucial elections in 2014, in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, in the Governorships, and in the Statehouses. if we can organize behind the message of turning around income inequality. We must counter the messages that are flooding over us from the Corporate-owned Media with our own narrative, strongly-articulated:
You, as a citizen of the United States, are worth just as much to this country as any other citizen. Your vote and your well-informed opinion are worth just as much as any other voter’s - whether they are of an opposing party, or whether they are rich.
There was a great movement for equality in this county in the 1950s and 1960s: the Civil Rights Movement. That movement succeeded because it had long-term strategies and persistence in the face of what appeared to be completely insurmountable obstacles. The leaders and the everyday people who marched and rode buses and walked looked past their tactical differences and temporary setbacks by keeping their
Eyes on the Prize. If we are going to ever turn back the monstrous future that rolling like a tsunami towards us, then we, too, must follow that movement's example.
There is one thing that the 1% do not have have. They may have the money, but we have the people. 68% of Americans think that income inequality is too high, and that government should do something to end it. What we must do is organize a national movement for 2014, based on diminishing income inequality This issue creates a new consensus in our nation. Our principles? Changes in the tax codes. Enforcement of laws against fradud. If a company receives subsidies from the American taxpayers, then its corporate officers must be held accountable to American taxpayers. There must be an end to damaging public assets - our air, our water, our land itself - for private profit. There must be an end to the taxpayers' subsidy of private wealth while the vast majority of the people suffer from want, illness, and fear.
The issue of economic and civic equality cuts across all those dichotomies that the Corporations encourage us to focus on, “red states” vs “blue states”, Social Conservatives v Liberal Democrats, Fox vs MSNBC, all the divisions that are designed to make us thinks that we can’t win. We can win if we if work to organize every voter who is depressed, crushed or angered by income inequality, to rise up to defeat it. We can develop concise explanations of what happened: "Inequality isn’t because you aren’t working hard: it’s because the owners are robbing you legally." The wealthiest bought our tax system to pay themselves out of your pocket," "We’ve given the “job creators” 30 years of tax breaks – so where are all the jobs?" "It’s only class warfare when we fight back.” "If you use your wealth to harm Americans, you don’t deserve tax breaks."
It's a message of the most basic of American values, one that babies are even born with: a sense of fairness, the knowledge of good and evil. This is a message that can win - if we begin to take it out into the electorate. We need to recruit candidates (even sacrificial ones) for every office, if only to demonstrate that this is a message that conveys huge public support.
This approach can and will work. We know it, because it is the system that tehe Koch Brothers used to take over the Governorships, the state houses, and the House of Representatives in 2010.
Can we in the Porgressive community organize to do this? Can we band together all of our disparate interests, our varying tactical approaches, overlooking the bright shiny divisive objects that the Corporate Media will toss at us? Can we keep our eyes on the prize?
Can we see this moment in world history, and work together to seize equality for the people of the United States? We are operating against a vast connection of think tanks, paid-off politicians, interlocking machinations of corporate grifters, immoral laws, and evil men of wealth beyond imagining. But the only way to prevent the world that they are forcing upon us is by recognizing what they are doing to us, and organizing to reveal and destroy it.
Janice Reitman described the challenge in her excellent examination of "The Stealth War on Abortion" in the Jan. 15 issue of Rolling Stonemagazine:
Connecting the fiscal and social agendas into a single, conservative "worldview" has been the goal of conservatives since the Reagan era. To outsiders, the Tea Party, with its focus on cutting taxes and spending, might seem to rule the party. But looks can be deceiving. Evangelicals, long outsiders in the GOP power structure, now hold large sway in the party through organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council. "I'd say it's kind of baked into the cake," Ralph Reed, the head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said recently on MSNBC.
"This is what progressives don't understand," says Tabachnick. "The public is so obsessed with the big battle between Democrats and Republicans that they miss the larger philosophical and legal underpinnings developed by this permanent think-tank structure that has been working behind the scenes for years. And now they're in a place where regardless of what's happening with the Supreme Court, they are ready to maximize every opportunity because of the extremely well-funded partnership between the free-marketeers and the religious right that's helping to overhaul the country from the bottom up."
These forces are coordinated in every area, from our private lives, to our nation's empire-building in far-away lands, to the destruction of the weather, water and land in the future. We have to chose between creating and enacting blueprints for change, vs scrambling to adapt. The wealthiest 1% have been following a plan for over 40 years. It’s time for the rest of Americans to do so, as well.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, is there any organization that is in a position to enact such a movement? Is Organizing for America open to such a sweeping project?