Earlier I wrote, “The elite top one percent in this country possess more non-home wealth, that which is available for discretional spending, savings or investment, than 95% of their fellow citizens, and the middle class earns less in today’s dollar, 2008, than they did in 1973, 35 years ago.”
Following more than three decades of national economic gain, the bottom 90% of Americans’ annual income has been on a slow, steady decline. Chris Hedges, speaking at Furman University, said the bottom ninety percent’s income peaked at $33,000 in 1973. By 2005, according to New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in his book, Free Lunch, it had fallen to a bit more than $29,000. He pointed out that, “For each dollar earned in 2005, the top 10 percent got 48.5 cents. That was the top tenth's greatest share of the income pie,” Johnston writes, “since 1929, just before the Roaring '20s collapsed in the Great Depression.”
The rising tide of the nation’s economic growth has not raised all boats. The rising tide only created more depth for the already big yachts to get even bigger.
According to the Economic Snapshot of August 1, 2007 from the Economic Policy Institute, www.epi.org, for example, “All of the income growth from 2001 to 2005 (the latest available data) accrued to the upper 5% and, in particular, the upper 1% of households. In fact, the bottom 90% of households experienced a 4.2% decline in their market-based incomes.
The top 1% of households gained $268 billion of total income and the bottom 90% lost $272 billion since 2001.”
How could this happen? Simply put, the top five percent in general and the top one percent in particular have wrestled near complete control of our government and, in turn, our economy, from the rest of us. Bill Moyers has said their “rhetoric turns truth to lies and lies to truth. -- Now it means corporate domination and the shifting of risk from government and business to struggling families and workers -- and patriotism means blind support to failed leaders.”
The current philosophy that gave rise to such a policy shift can be traced to at least as far back as September 13, 1970 ,when Milton Friedman’s article, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits,” was published in The New York Times magazine. Quoted in part, Dr. Friedman said, “When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system, I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned merely with profit but also with promoting desirable social ends; that business has a social conscience and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are -- or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously -- preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.”
The past decades of which Milton Friedman spoke would, of course, include the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s, the last three plus decades during which middle class income was rising, rather than being squeezed as it has been during the last three decades of the twentieth and first decade of the twenty- first centuries.
Capitalism can be managed or unmanaged, regulated or unregulated. Free market capitalism means unmanaged-unregulated capitalism. From encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia, “Ronald Reagan presided over the most far-reaching changes in U.S. government economic and social policy in half a century. His administration succeeded in eliminating or reducing many social programs begun by the federal government under presidents FDR and LBJ and in lifting many restrictions on business activities.”
Actually, both political parties, both Republican and Democrat are to blame. From the website “Liberalism Resurgent,” Steve Kangas points out: “As for deregulation, that actually began under Carter, not Reagan. Carter deregulated airlines, trucking, railroads, oil and interest rates, and set up much of the deregulation machinery that Reagan would later use.”
More from Chris Hedges: “I single out no party. The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the Republicans. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted, would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It was better, he argued, to take corporate money. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party, under Clinton's leadership, had virtual fundraising parity with the Republicans. Today the Democrats get more. In political terms, it was a success. In moral terms deregulation -- the systematic dismantling of the managed capitalism that was the hallmark of the American democratic state -- was a betrayal.”
And more: “It was an incompetent, corporatized Democratic Party, along with the orchestrated fraud by the Republican Party. They let Bush, in violation of the Constitution, pump hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into faith-based organizations that discriminate based on belief and sexual orientation and openly proselytize. They stood by as American children got fleeced by No Child Left Behind. Democrats did not protest when federal agencies began to propagate “Christian” pseudo-science about creationism, reproductive rights and homosexuality. And the Democrats let Bush further dismantle regulatory agencies, strip American citizens of constitutional rights under the Patriot Act and other draconian legislation, and thrust impoverished Americans aside through the corporate-sponsored bankruptcy bill. It is a stunning record.
The corporate state has rigged our system, hollowed out our political process and steadily stripped citizens of constitutional rights, federal and state protection and assistance. The Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. It has passively accepted defeat in elections it won. It has run candidates with platforms so tepid the best that can be said is that they are not as terrible as Republican candidates. This cycle of lowered expectations, Nader said, "produces a dying dynamic for our dismantled democracy that has no end point because every four years both parties get worse.”
Peter Camejo has written, “What confuses so many progressively inclined people is they do not really understand that our society is controlled by the corporate power of concentrated money. The corporations and the super rich – through their domination of the government, the media, and educational institutions and of course the two parties – run our society.
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