Inequality In U.S. Today Is Worse than in Apartheid South Africa or 1774 Slaveholding Colonial America … and TWICE As Bad As In Ancient Slaveholding Rome

Posted on December 17, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog

 

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/12/inequality-u-s-today-worse-apartheid-south-africa-1774-slaveholding-colonial-america-twice-bad-ancient-slaveholding-rome.html 

Even Slaves Had It Better

Inequality in America today is twice as bad as in ancient Rome, worse than it was in Tsarist Russia, Gilded Age America, modern Egypt, Tunisia or Yemen, many banana republics in Latin America, and worse than experienced by slaves in 1774 colonial America.
Nicholas Kristof notes at the New York Times that inequality in the U.S. is worse than it was in apartheid South Africa:

The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)

Indeed, economist and inequality expert Thomas Piketty notes that – according to an important measure – inequality in America today is the worst in world history:

For those who work for a living, the level of inequality in the U.S. – writes Piketty – is “… probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world …”

In other words, there might have been some squalid country in the distant past where the disparity between people without any job and the king was higher than between a jobless American and the top fatcat in the U.S.  But the spread between the American worker and the American oligarch is the greatest in world history.
Indeed, inequality in America has become so extreme that the “99% versus the 1%” meme is grossly inaccurate … because it’s really the .01% versus the 99.99%.
The cause of America’s runaway inequality?
The Wall Street Journal notes:

Many aspects of the recovery, and the Federal Reserve’s stimulus policies, have benefited the rich over others.

Indeed, bad government policy is primarily responsible.

“Bloodiest Thing the World Has Seen”: David Cay Johnston on Inequality’s Looming Disaster

May 22, 2014  |  

 

 http://www.alternet.org/economy/bloodiest-thing-world-has-seen-david-cay-johnston-inequalitys-looming-disaster?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

 

 

Long before anyone knew the name Thomas Piketty, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston was plumbing the hidden depths of the American tax code, revealing the myriad ways it privileges the interests of corporations and the wealthy ahead of those of the 99 percent. Indeed, while it may sometimes feel as if economic inequality is the new trend, Johnston’s career reminds us that the great gulf that separates the rich from the rest in the contemporary United States didn’t happen overnight, but over a course of decades.
Despite coming out during the same year as “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” and “The Divide,” Johnston’s newest release, “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality,” is a different kind of inequality book. Rather than a sweeping overview of centuries of economic history, or an on-the-ground examination of how our justice system ignores the powerful while brutalizing the rest, Johnston’s book is a collection of essays, speeches and excerpts — a kind of inequality reader. Featuring insights from philosophers, economists, journalists, researchers and even politicians, “Divided” reminds us how inequality is one of those rare problems that truly matters to all of us, no matter what our interests or chosen field.
Earlier this week, Salon reached Johnston via telephone to discuss “Divided,” whether American democracy can survive such great economic disparities, and how returning to a more equal society is literally a matter of life and death. Our conversation follows, and has been slightly edited for clarity and length. In addition, Johnston followed up with further thoughts via email.
What inspired you to create this book?
I had done a trilogy on hidden aspects of the American economy, “Perfectly Legal,” which was about how the rich benefit from taxes, “Free Lunch,” about all the subsidies people didn’t know about that go to rich people and corporations, and “The Fine Print,” which was about restraint of trade and monopolies. And in speaking for the last 10 years around the country, one of the things I learned is that people didn’t understand that this isn’t just a function of numbers and whatnot; they didn’t understand there’s a whole structure that affects families, health, healthcare — which are different things — incarceration, opportunity, exposure to environmental hazards, wage theft and so, there was really a need here to give people a broad understanding of, well, “How did this come about, this incredible inequality that we didn’t have in this country until recent years?”
[After the interview, Johnston emailed to add: "My trilogy on the American economy explained many of the little-known, and often deceptive, laws, regulations and official practices. But inequality involves much more than what I had written about in the trilogy. I wanted to provide people with a broad understanding of the issues, ranging from limited opportunity and obstacles to achieving a modicum of prosperity, to the remarkably cruel and thoughtless policies of the Reagan era."]
In your introductory essay, you make a point of arguing that inequality is not natural, that it’s something we created and, by extensions, we can undo. But what would you say to those who, say, have read their Piketty and are thinking this kind of inequality is endemic to capitalism?

Well, Piketty — whose work I relied on for years and who substantiates a lot of things that I’ve written with his research — argues that the concentration of wealth will just continue and continue and continue. As Herbert Stein, Richard Nixon’s chief economic adviser, famously said, a trend will only continue as long as it can. We will either, through peaceful, rational means, go back to a system that does not take from the many to give to the few in all these subtle ways, or we will end up like 18th century France. And if we end up in that awful condition, it will be the bloodiest thing the world has even seen. So I think it’s really important to get a handle on this inequality. After all, since the end of the Great Recession, one-third of all income increases in this country went to just 16,000 households, 95 percent of it went to the top 1 percent, and the bottom 90 percent’s incomes fell, and they fell by 15 percent. So we need to recognize that there is a very, very serious problem here that has to get addressed. But it won’t just go on forever because if you follow that to its logical absurdity, one person ends up with 90 percent of the wealth in the world. And that’s not going to happen.

[In the aforementioned email, Johnston also followed up on this point, writing: "While I certainly am worried that we could end up in a violent revolution somewhere in the future, sparked by extreme inequality,  I’m [an] indictable optimist and believe that [if] the American people have access to explanations and information they will, over the long run, make smart choices.”]
So when you say it will be very bloody, I know you’re speaking of a wild hypothetical to some degree, but do you really think we’re on track for violent social upheaval?
Oh, yes. I’ve written about people on the far right and the far left since the ’60s. Back in the ’60s, I was in the homes of people who built bombs, both left and right. And we live in a country now where we have members of Congress who have either questioned, or ignored questions about, killing the president of the United States. We are seeing all these laws passed allowing people to carry guns openly. We are coming apart as a society, and inequality is right at the core of that. When the 90 percent are getting worse off and they’re trying to figure out what happened, they’re not people like me who get to spend four or five hours a day studying these things and then writing about them — they’re people who have to make a living and get through life. And they’re going to be swayed by demagogues and filled with fear about the other, rather than bringing us together.
When you mention demagogues, are there people currently on the scene that give you a shiver up your spine in that regard, or are you speaking hypothetically?
I think it would be easy for someone to arrive in the near future and really create forces that would lead to trouble in this country. And you see people who, they’re not the leaders to pull it off, but we have suggestions that the president should be killed, that he’s not an American, that Texas can secede, that states can ignore federal law, and these are things that don’t lack for antecedents in America  history but they’re clearly on the rise. In addition to that, we have this large, very well-funded news organization that is premised on misconstruing facts and telling lies, Faux News (formerly Fox News), that is creating, in a large segment of the population — somewhere around one-fifth and one-fourth of it — belief in all sorts of things that are detrimental to our well-being. President Theodore Roosevelt said we shall all rise together or we shall all fall together, and we need to have an appreciation of that.
So, no, I don’t see this happening tomorrow, but I have said for many years that … if we don’t get a handle on this then one of these days our descendants are going to sit down in high-school history class and open a textbook that begins with the words: “The United States of America was …” and then it will dissect how our experiment in self-governance came apart. By the way, the Founders were very worried about this. John Adams said his fear was that instead of having yeoman farmers who owned their own land, and workers who owned their own tools and therefore were independent, that we would become a country in which a business aristocracy would arise, and the mass of people would simply work for wages and the business aristocrats would persuade the wage-earners to support those policies that were actually against their interest and favor the business aristocrats and, when that happened, we would lose our liberties and our democracy.
And he wasn’t exactly the proto-lefty bomb-thrower of the group …
No, but Madison and Monroe and Jefferson — there was a lot of concern about this. They were fearful not just of a hereditary aristocracy but a business aristocracy. And I’ve had my research assistants at Syracuse Law working on this for the last two-and-a-half years and there was an abundance of material written in that era that was concerned about extreme inequality. And that’s what we have in America, is extreme inequality.
To turn from how bad things are getting to how we can make them better, I’d like to ask you what solutions you’d like to see people organize around in terms of reducing inequality?
Number one, we’ve got to change the makeup of Congress. The Democrats got 1.4 million more votes than the Republicans [in 2010] but they have a minority [in Congress] because of gerrymandering. So we need to have state legislatures — and we may need a constitutional amendment to make districts evenly divided between the parties — that will get us more centrist candidates rather than extremists on both left and right.
Secondly, we’ve got to restore unions. If you believe in market economics, you’ve gotta believe in unions. Now, unions aren’t perfect, but neither are corporations, or the government or, for god’s sake, the clergy. Unions allow people as a group to negotiate for reasonable pay, and without unions you have big corporations, and individuals who have no bargaining power, such as a lot of unemployed workers. Our competitors all have unions. The Germans even have unions for executives. So we need to get back to unions if we’re going to improve people’s economics.
We need to get people to vote. If the bottom 90 percent voted at the same rate that the top 1 percent do, you would have a different Congress. That’s why you’re seeing efforts to take away the franchise, because the serious professionals in the Republican Party recognize that the demographic trends are going against them, and to stave that off they’ve got to try and deny the franchise to people, which is an extraordinary move, something we haven’t seen since Jim Crow.
We need to have a big enough government to enforce the law. We have not prosecuted any of the “too big to fail” banks and we have a president who has said, Well, these things look awful, but they may not be crimes. I’m sorry — the banks falsely certified documents … there are plenty of witnesses who have emails and memos they wrote and can testify that they said that this is illegal and wrong and they were told to shut up or were gotten rid of. We have money transferred through the mail and through the wires. That’s all you need to prosecute fraud. And yet, Bill Black, the guy who got us all those convictions in the savings and loan crisis, no one will speak to him. That’s just one example. I have written about all sorts of lawless behavior that’s going on, involving cheating in the real-estate industry, the failure to pay out benefits in the insurance industry, and when you “deregulate” and cut the staffs whose job is to look out for the public, the most cunning and conniving are the beneficiaries.
And this is also true in tax; the wage-earners will be taxed very effectively because it’s all automated. But those people who have very complicated individual or investment or corporate tax portfolios, Congress has cut away the ability to — and put in place rules that make it really impossible to — enforce the laws. So America today has two income taxes separate and unequal, one for wage earners who are thoroughly and efficiently taxed, and one for investors, business owners and corporations, who the government does not have the capacity to properly tax, and therefore are undertaxed, shifting the burden onto the wage earners.
To that point, it’s died down now that the elections are coming up, but there was previously a lot of talk of “tax reform” —
Well, I’ve said repeatedly, there is no discussion in Washington of tax “reform,” a word journalists should use in quotes. There is a lot of talk of shifting the burden of taxes off of corporations and wealthy Americans. But reform means making the system better, and there’s nothing being proposed that’s reform. When Ronald Reagan’s (too big) tax policy changes were made, there were giant studies by the Treasury where they tried to figure out everything about the effects of this. There’s no serious intellectual work going on about how do we design a tax system for the 21st century.
Let me give you one of my lines on it: America has a tax system that is well-designed and effective for the middle of the 20th century. We now live in the 21st century. We are not a national industrial wage economy — we are a global services/asset economy. Mostly intangible assets. And the tax system does not recognize this. Therefore, it is damaging the economy rather than strengthening and providing for the commonwealth goods and services that are needed for private wealth creation.
Barack Obama has made a point to be seen as sort of like the president who put inequality on the front burner. And you include his speech from 2011 in Osawatomie, Kansas (where Teddy Roosevelt gave his famous “New Nationalism” address), in the book. But at the same time, as you’ve noted, 95 percent of the gains, post-Great Recession, have gone to the tippy-top of the economic pyramid. How do you judge him on this issue?
President Obama understands the broad nature of the problem and he’s right to say this is the issue of our time. But his policies simply reinforce inequality. His policies show that he very much identifies with Wall Street and with its interests. Remember, he was going to put Lawrence Summers in as head of the Federal Reserve, and a whole bunch of people — and I was among them — [said] that this would be a terrible policy mistake, that Janet Yellen is among the group of people who consistently predicted things correctly and gotten it right (and I would count among them Dean Baker, me, Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz and a few dozen other people who deal with these issues in public).
The president has consistently sided with Wall Street, whether it’s not prosecuting the criminality which brought down the economy in 2008, or supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership — which is not about “free trade,” it’s about protecting existing ownership interests against the future. And so he’s just a really good example of where what he says and what he does don’t align. I don’t know the explanation for that. But having watched him very closely, I think it has to do in part with [that] he wants very much to be … the great uniter. And if you’re going to bring about the kind of change I think we need, there’s going to be a lot of divisiveness about it; and he just doesn’t have a stomach for it, it’s not who he is. He’s the “Can we please get along here together?” guy.
Garry Wills once described his approach as “omnidirectional placation.”
That’s a great line … I mean, he’s like the child from the family where the parents fought and that child was the one who’d get the parents to make peace. And he really does identify very heavily with the folks on Wall Street. Here’s [former Treasury Secretary] Timothy Geithner who flat-out cheated — calculated deliberately — on his taxes and lied to Congress about it. And I can tell you that because I replicated his taxes in TurboTax, which was a hell of a lot of work. And I know somebody who was a deep expert/authority who did the same thing. We could not produce, without overriding the system, what he said. And all he had to do to be honorable about this was pay the penalties as well as the taxes and interest. But look at Geithner, look at everything he’s done. Did Geithner do anything for the homeowners who got taken to the cleaners, here? You didn’t have to take out a mortgage to get taken to the cleaners; property values fell for everybody. People who had nothing to do with taking out these bad mortgages were harmed. Now, every single thing you saw Geithner do was to benefit Wall Street. And Obama spoke well of him right to the moment [Geithner] decided to earn his reward and go to work on Wall Street.
Obama was even, before he moved on to not-better Summers, considering nominating Geithner for the Fed.
Yes. I recognize that Obama has been dealt a terrible hand. Ten days after his inauguration in 2009, top Republicans had a meeting and agreed that making him ineffective was their overriding goal. He’s been dealt a terrible hand, here, and in some ways he’s played it well. But on the fundamental issues of what’s driving our inequality, he has not played this at all well.
He has a very deep knowledge of strategic arms, because that’s what he studied when he was in college; [but] I don’t think he has a deeper understanding of economics than your average college graduate, and your average college graduate doesn’t have a very good understanding of economics. Because we live in a society where there’s a dogma: neoclassical economics, particularly the Chicago set. (By the way, I went to the Chicago school, 40 years ago. I’m not an economist but I did go there for two quarters on a fellowship.) There are lots of other economic theories out there and they get no attention because we have this dogma about economics in America.
Now that we seem to be in a moment when the discussion of inequality has gone mainstream, how optimistic are you that this is a problem we’ll actually start to fix in the near- or medium-term future?
We’re still living in the age of Reaganism; that has not come to an end yet. But we now have 33 years of empirical evidence that what Reagan promised didn’t work. If it did, if what Reagan and George W. Bush promised us worked, we would be swimming in jobs today. And we’re not. So I’m afraid, in the short run, what we’re going to see is an effort to shift the blame for this from failed policies to us. The “it’s the 47 percent who are takers” argument that Romney put forth, rather than looking at the structure and the rules that create and reinforce inequality. But this must come to an end and we have to get some changes and what’s missing are leaders who can articulate a new path. A smarter, growth-oriented path that will make us all better off. So Elizabeth Warren, who I’ve known for 25 years, Elizabeth Warren could be that person, but I don’t think she’s going to do it. She wants to focus on fixing what she knows. But we need someone, multiple people, to arise who understands the structure and nature of the problem and can then put it in terms that ordinary people understand before we get real change.

This is so wrong, in so many ways... Time to make things right

Billionaires Think We're Jealous of Their Wealth? Gag Me with a Silver Spoon

March 24, 2014  |

Change your tune, plutocrats. Contrary to your fantasies, we are plagued by reality, not envy.

Here on our whimsical island off the coast of the Eastern Seaboard, we have a company called Manhattan Mini Storage that is as famous for the semi-snarky wit of its billboards and subway posters as it is for the spaces it rents to we New Yorkers who live in apartments so small the mice are stoop-shouldered.
The sacrifice we make for living here is that we have no room for all our stuff; this storage facility exists to bridge the gap by renting out the urban equivalent of an attic or cellar where we can stash our junk until our next move, new relationship or death.
Some of its advertising addresses this problem directly — “Your closet’s tinier than a runway model’s lunch,” one read a couple of years ago; “When he’s a keeper but his stuff isn’t,” was another favorite. Yet most of the notoriety the firm’s ads have achieved has little to do with their product and much to do with pride of place and politics.
“NYC: Tolerant of your beliefs, judgmental of your shoes,” is a New York state of mind that even those of us who favor sneakers and loafers over Louboutins can get behind. Others are more candidate-specific. “Rick Perry: The voice in your head is not God,” said what a lot of us were thinking and, “If Mitt had storage, he’d be able to find his tax returns,” actually does manage to deftly combine product placement with a point of view.
But their current ad really catches the eye:
“The French aristocracy never saw it coming either.”
“It,” of course, is a revolt of the 99 percent, the thought of which seems to have elements of the one percent so freaked out they can barely choke down their Salon Blanc de Blanc. But apparently, whenever the American elite contemplate the possibility of open rebellion against income inequality it’s not peasants storming the Bastille at the start of the French Revolution that they see — it’s Nazis jackbooting into mansions and searching the premises for yacht owners.
How else to explain venture capitalist Tom Perkins’s infamous comparison of what he called “progressive war” to Kristallnacht? And now we have Home Depot tycoon Ken Langone telling Politico.com that as far as populist sentiment goes, “I hope it’s not working, because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
Langone subsequently has apologized — sort of. So did Perkins — sort of. But the foul deed is done, the smear is smeared and it won’t be the last time this particular straw dog barks. Because a lot of the time, it works.
Nor will this envy and jealousy meme disappear any time soon because it, too, seems to have captured the imagination of the plutocracy. “It’s safe to conclude that a national shift toward envy would be toxic for American culture,” Arthur C. Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute wrote in the March 2 edition of The New York Times.
Indeed such envy might do just that, but beyond Internet trolls and covetous cranks, where is it? As the headline of Jonathan Chait’s recent story in New York magazine notes, vast public envy is an “imaginary epidemic.” The closest we have come politically, he writes, “was a brief upsurge in populist anger for a short period of 2009, following news reports of bonuses handed out to employees at bailout recipient AIG.

The House of Representatives (by a vote of 328 to 93) passed a 90-percent tax on those bonuses. But the Obama administration opposed the bill, the Senate forgot about it, and the moment passed. It’s notable that even this small, ultimately ineffectual moment did not rise from any generalized spate of envy but specific resentment against the use of tax dollars to reward failure.

What’s handy about making accusations of envy or jealously is that it doesn’t have to reflect badly on you, the accuser. Hey, it can’t be helped if people are resentful — your success is your own and why should there be apologies for making something of yourself? Thus, victimhood becomes the whine du jour of the superrich — it goes well with everything.
“The politics of envy are the wrong politics in America,” Wall Street shill and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers proclaimed to Politico. “The better politics are the politics of inclusion where everyone shares in economic growth.”
There it is — the sound of the other shoe dropping. Because the second half of the argument goes that instead of being jealous, we all should be working in harmony together to create jobs and opportunity. Problem is, the deeply rich talk about building the economy but do almost nothing about it. There’s a lot of take and a lot of keep, but not much giving back.
Open the Books, a new nonprofit working for greater transparency in government spending, reports that between 2000 and 2012, Fortune magazine’s top 100 companies received $1.2 trillion from the feds. And, Aaron Cantú writes at Alternet.org, “That doesn’t include all the billions of dollars doled out to housing, auto and banking enterprises in 2008-2009, nor does it include ethanol subsidies to agribusiness or tax breaks for wind turbine makers.”
Investigative journalist David Cay Johnston reports big business hoarding money as if they were hiding cash in a mattress: “Uncle Sam spent $3.5 trillion in fiscal 2013. Corporations hold liquid assets equal to all the money the federal government spent that year plus 2012 and three months of 2011.

The total corporate cash reserve… amounts to almost $25,000 per American, up from $13,000 per American in 1994 (again after adjusting for inflation). And this cash is highly concentrated, most of it held by the 2,800 biggest companies, IRS data shows.
Since 1994, liquid assets have grown at about six times sales, my analysis of the official data shows. When liquid assets grow six times faster than revenues, it tells you that companies are hoarding cash, not investing or spending.

Richard Rubin at Bloomberg News recently found that, “The largest US-based companies added $206 billion to their stockpiles of offshore profits last year, parking earnings in low-tax countries until Congress gives them a reason not to. The multinational companies have accumulated $1.95 trillion outside the US, up 11.8 percent from a year earlier.”
Alan Pyke at the website ThinkProgress adds, “While precise estimates of lost revenue are difficult to make, previous inquiries into profit offshoring found that it cost the US between $30 billion and $90 billion each year during the early and middle 2000s, when the pile of untaxed corporate profits was much smaller.

States and localities also lose out on tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue each year to similar offshoring strategies. A recent study found that by closing just one small loophole in state business tax laws, states could bring in a billion dollars in new revenue almost overnight.

Think of the highways, bridges and housing that money could build or repair, and the jobs that could be created, the teachers and tuitions it could provide, the mouths it could feed. Then throw in corporate malfeasance without punishment, gross mismanagement and exorbitant executive salaries — for example, Henrique de Castro, the failed #2 at Yahoo, who’s getting $109 million for his 15 disastrous months there, or about $244,000 per day (h/t to R.J. Eskow).
Anger about these salient facts is simply common sense. And income inequality is all too real. But we’re not jealous or anti-money. As Mark Twain wrote, “I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”
So try to change your tune, plutocrats. Contrary to your fantasies, we are plagued by reality, not envy. Unless you live here in Manhattan and have a lot of closet space. Then we need to talk.

Moyers & Company senior writer Michael Winship is president of the Writers Guild of Amerca, East, and attended AFL-CIO convention as a delegate.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/billionaires-saying-were-jealous-their-wealth-gag-me-silver-spoon?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Robert Reich: What Will It Take for Us to Get Back to Being a Decent Society?

. . . Now that we're second only to Romania for child poverty.

 Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

December 19, 2013  |

It’s the season to show concern for the less fortunate among us. We should also be concerned about the widening gap between the most fortunate and everyone else.
Although it’s still possible to win the lottery (your chance of winning $636 million in the recent Mega Millions sweepstakes was one in 259 million), the biggest lottery of all is what family we’re born into. Our life chances are now determined to an unprecedented degree by the wealth of our parents.
That’s not always been the case. The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches – with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone – was once at the core of the American Dream.
And equal opportunity was the heart of the American creed. Although imperfectly achieved, that ideal eventually propelled us to overcome legalized segregation by race, and to guarantee civil rights. It fueled efforts to improve all our schools and widen access to higher education. It pushed the nation to help the unemployed, raise the minimum wage, and provide pathways to good jobs. Much of this was financed by taxes on the most fortunate.
But for more than three decades we’ve been going backwards. It’s far more difficult today for a child from a poor family to become a middle-class or wealthy adult. Or even for a middle-class child to become wealthy.
The major reason is widening inequality. The longer the ladder, the harder the climb. America is now more unequal that it’s been for eighty or more years, with the most unequal distribution of income and wealth of all developed nations. Equal opportunity has become a pipe dream.
Rather than respond with policies to reverse the trend and get us back on the road to equal opportunity and widely-shared prosperity, we’ve spent much of the last three decades doing the opposite.
Taxes have been cut on the rich, public schools have deteriorated, higher education has become unaffordable for many, safety nets have been shredded, and the minimum wage has been allowed to drop 30 percent below where it was in 1968, adjusted for inflation.
Congress has just passed a tiny bipartisan budget agreement, and the Federal Reserve has decided to wean the economy off artificially low interest rates. Both decisions reflect Washington’s (and Wall Street’s) assumption that the economy is almost back on track.
But it’s not at all back on the track it was on more than three decades ago.
It’s certainly not on track for the record 4 million Americans now unemployed for more than six months, or for the unprecedented 20 million American children in poverty (we now have the highest rate of child poverty of all developed nations other than Romania), or for the third of all working Americans whose jobs are now part-time or temporary, or for the majority of Americans whose real wages continue to drop.
How can the economy be back on track when 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent?
The underlying issue is a moral one: What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Conservatives answer that question by saying it’s a matter of personal choice – of charitable works, philanthropy, and individual acts of kindness joined in “a thousand points of light.”
But that leaves out what we could and should seek to accomplish together as a society. It neglects the organization of our economy, and its social consequences. It minimizes the potential role of democracy in determining the rules of the game, as well as the corruption of democracy by big money. It overlooks our strivings for social justice.
In short, it ducks the meaning of a decent society.
Last month Pope Francis wondered aloud whether “trickle-down theories, which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness…”. Rush Limbaugh accused the Pope of being a Marxist for merely raising the issue.
But the question of how to bring about greater justice and inclusiveness is as American as apple pie. It has animated our efforts for more than a century – during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, and beyond — to make capitalism work for the betterment of all rather merely than the enrichment of a few.
The supply-side, trickle-down, market-fundamentalist views that took root in America in the early 1980s got us fundamentally off track.
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. His homepage is www.robertreich.org. 
http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-what-will-it-take-us-get-back-being-decent-society

 

Pope Francis Attacks 'Idolatry of Money,' Says Inequality 'Kills'

Pope Francis called on politicians to guarantee “dignified work, education and healthcare” to their citizens.

November 26, 2013  |  

 

Pope Francis launched a broadside against inequality and out-of-control capitalism in a 84-page document released Tuesday.

In what is known as an “apostolic exhortation,” which means communication from the Pope of the Catholic Church, Francis called on politicians to guarantee “dignified work, education and healthcare” to their citizens and also criticized the “idolatry of money,” according to Reuters.  Francis “beg[ged] the Lord” to deliver politicians who were more concerned with the poor and inequality.  

Francis blasted the current economic system as one that is profoundly unequal.

“Just as the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say 'thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills,” the Pope wrote.  “As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”

He also repeated his calls for reform in the Catholic Church, though still said that women could not become priests.  He did say that women should have more influence in the church.

Francis himself has made it a point to practice what he preaches.  He lives in a guest house at the Vatican rathan the usual, lavish Apostolic Palace.  Last month, Reuters notes Pope Francis suspended a bishop who spent millions on his residence. 

http://www.alternet.org/pope-francis-inequality-and-capitalism