The Republican claim of their support for everyday working Americans isn’t aging well.
If you pay attention, you can’t miss their pro-rich, anti-poor-and-middle-class agenda. More proof came in the form of a New York Times guest essay titled, “Many Americans Believe the Economy is Rigged.”
The piece was written by Katherine J. Cramer, co-chair of the Commission on Reimaging our Economy, and Jonathan D. Cohen, senior program officer, both from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Their conclusions come from more than 30 small-group conversations conducted over a two-year period with Americans from all over the country.
They said that many of their subjects believe greed drives the American economy, writing “They believe the rich and powerful have designed the economy to benefit themselves and have left others with too little or with nothing at all.”
“While national indicators may suggest that the economy is strong,” the column continued,” the Americans we listened to are mostly not thriving. They do not see the economy as nourishing or supporting them. Instead, they tend to see it as an obstacle, a set of external forces out of their control that nonetheless seems to hold sway over their lives.”
No surprise there. Some people are really struggling, plus folks listening to Right-wing media aren’t going to hear about how our economic indicators has improved significantly under President Joe Biden.
Some of the participants’ comments were depressing.
“I just feel like the underdog can’t get ahead, and it’s all about greed and profit,” one of them said.
“I like the feeling of not living on the edge of disaster,” another said. “[I am] at my fullest potential economically” right now, but “I’m still one doctor’s visit away from not being there, and pretty much most people I know are.”
The authors wrote, “It is not necessarily the actual distribution of wealth that troubles people. It is the feeling that the economy is rigged against them.”
You’ll get further insight from Robert Reich, a college professor, political commentator, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor, in his column on the Common Dreams website titled, “Why Are Corporate Profits Soaring? Because You’re Getting Fleeced.”
Corporate profits are at a record high and inflation is dropping, but prices aren’t coming down because corporations have enough monopoly power to keep prices high, Reich claimed. He said another tactic is to shrink the size of products without lowering their prices.
That point about monopoly power is very important. Reich said that in 75 percent of the industries in the United States fewer companies now control more of the markets than they did 20 years ago.
He gave as an example the meat and poultry industry, saying that just four companies now control the processing of 80 percent of beef, 70 percent of pork, and almost 60 percent of poultry. He noted that at the end of last year, Americans more paying at least 30 percent more for beef, pork, and poultry than they were in 2020.
“They can get away with overcharging you because they have monopoly power – or they have so few competitors that they can easily coordinate price increases with them and avoid price decreases,” Reich said.
This brings us to the issue of our antitrust laws.
Weakening our antitrust efforts was one of the accomplishments of the pro-business agenda of former president/GOP saint Ronald Reagan. (If you played a drinking game and took a swig every time Joe Scarborough mentioned Reagan, you’d spend most of your waking hours in a drunken stupor.)
In his book Ours Was the Shining Future, David Leonardt explains how the standards for the government challenging a merger changed under Reagan -- from whether it would produce a company that was too large and powerful, to whether regulators could demonstrate that the company would raise prices for the consumers.
Of course, mergers soared. Regulators can’t read minds, and no way were companies going to admit they were going to raise prices. The fix was in.
Here’s the contrast offered by Reich: The Biden administration is using antitrust laws more aggressively than any administration in the last 40 years.
It’s taken action against alleged price fixing in the meat industry, sued Amazon for using its dominance to artificially jack up prices, and stopped further consolidation of the airline industry by successfully suing to block the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines.
You can read Reich’s article here.
You can read the Times’ piece here.
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This harkens back to a post on this blog in April of last year titled, “A Simple Matter of Fairness,” which called for a system of “fair capitalism,” that includes these features that would to some degree level the playing field for the poor and middle class vs. the rich:
*A tax code where the rich and corporations pay their fair share. The end of the GOP’s war against unions, which are the only real leverage for workers seeking better pay and benefits.
*The updating and enforcing of our antitrust laws to try to keep gigantic corporations from controlling too-high of a percentage of their market, a condition that greatly reduces competition in the areas of consumer prices and workers’ salaries.
*An amply funded educational system so that all children have a chance at a good education, not just the ones in the more affluent districts or whose parents can afford to send them to private schools.
*Paid family leave to keep families solvent and together when a baby enters the picture; help with the cost of child care for those kept from entering the workforce because of its cost; aid to assure that people who are struggling have enough food to eat, a decent place to live, healthcare, and other necessities; ample training and job search help for the unemployed and under-employed who are able and available to work.
*Repairs to a corrupt campaign finance system that -- in large part due to the U.S. Supreme Court -- is nothing more than legalized bribery, a fountain flowing with huge amounts of money the wealthy pay to control lawmakers at the federal and state levels to try to ensure the system always favors them.
You can read the post here.
There’s a difference between being misinformed and stupid. Republicans hope their firehouse of lies and their Right-wing media silo will keep enough people uninformed so that they’ll win enough votes from folks who don’t benefit from their policies.
The hope here is that enough will find out the truth, because when they do it will be clear what the GOP is doing and who it’s trying to help.
It’s up to all of us to see that happens.
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Thank you for reading my post. You can see my other writings on my blog: Musings of a Nobody. Please share and subscribe for free via email on its home page.