Once an animal knows what it’s like to run free, it’s never happy to be tied up again.
That pretty much sums up the problem America faces when it comes to the growing wealth of the wealthy and the shrinking middle-class.
Former
president Ronald Reagan began lengthening the leash of corporate America more
than 3 decades ago. The most notable event is perhaps the breaking of the air
traffic controllers union. The message sent was clear. Workers’ rights matter
less than corporate profits.
So
it began and so it continued with the presidents that followed.
Bill
Clinton got rid of the Glass-Steagall
Act of 1933, a law that kept commercial banks from using depositors’ funds
for risky investments.
George
W. Bush came in behind Clinton and cut even
more of corporate America’s leash. Bush added a cookie on top, with two massive
tax cuts that made the rich even richer, and ultimately exploded the US
federal deficit.
In
the years following multiple levels of deregulation on corporate America,
income inequality has spread like a disease. Low
wages and lack of opportunity are now trapping more than 50 million Americans
in poverty.
When
Barack Obama took office in 2009, he did little to repair what the previous
administration had done to damage the middle-class. Although he was successful
in lifting the Bush tax cuts on higher income Americans in 2013, it hasn’t
changed the fundamentals of the economic disparity.
The Daily
Beast notes, “Our national conversation now is dominated by the voices of
the small, thriving minority…Perhaps the economy has been bad enough for long
enough that its expiration date for news has expired, one more sign this
terrible reality is the New Normal.”
To
say that the rich have the American economic
system rigged may be an understatement. In
the 2009 documentary, “Capitalism,
A Love Story,” award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore explains how to
the collapse of the U.S. economy, brought on by
deregulated Wall Street greed, was a “financial coup d’état.”
Looking
back at the taxpayer bailouts of America’s banking industry, it’s hard to
refute Moore’s claims. The big winners in the years following the
TARP bailouts have been the banks. JPMorgan
and Wells
Fargo, along with the rest America’s biggest banks, continue to post record
profits.
The New
York Times points out just how bad income inequality has gotten in the U.S.
“NEW statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else…..
In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year…went to the top 1 percent.”
Yet for American workers, opportunities for upward mobility continue to sink. According
to a Bureau of Labor
Statistics report issued on March 28, 2013, there are more jobs available
in the U.S., but “average weekly wages declined.”
