Can we avoid a ‘2-tiered’ society?
“My friends, we are on the way to becoming a twotiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment are easily manipulated. Once unbottled, mass resentment can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays, and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?” 1994 Speech by Robert Reich, secretary of Labor.
That amazing prediction presciently predicted our current fraught political and societal situation. What Reich described was not inevitable but was the result of the deliberate and considered long-term policy of one political party.
For over 70 years, an anti-union policy has been promoted in red state and conservative national politics. Starting with Taft-Hartley in 1948 to “Right To Work” policies in states to the destruction of the air traffic control union by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Union bargaining power has been eroded until today only 7% of the workforce is unionized resulting in a profound loss of bargaining power and a steady erosion of blue-collar wages.
For over 70 years the considered policy of one political party has been to drastically reduce income taxes on the wealthy, the mega-rich and huge trans-national corporations. The result of this policy has been to reduce revenues that could have been used to further the resiliency of our society such as financing a national universal healthcare system, financing a universal preschool education system, financing free higher education for all or financing a world-class infrastructure.
A further result of these policies has been an explosion of the national debt to a staggering $30 trillion. A consequence of not investing in the future, in world-class higher education is a student debt of over $1.5 trillion, thus financially compromising the future of countless millions of aspiring young people. The consequence of not having a universal free healthcare system has led to millions of people being bankrupted by medical expenses as well as mightily enriching insurance companies and hedge funds invested in hospital chains.
To achieve the enrichment of a tiny percentage of the population and huge corporations, one political party has endeavored to corrupt our political system with money. It has relentlessly endeavored to pack our judicial system with judges friendly to the mega-rich, corporations. The culmination of this policy was the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Citizens United. By ruling that money is speech, the court unleashed a tidal wave of billions of dollars into the political system skewing it inexorably in favor of corporations and the mega-rich and against the interests of the vast majority of the population.
There is a bitter irony in what has resulted, the very same political party that caused the conditions that led to the misery, the anger, the hate and disillusionment is the very same party that is now attempting to capitalize and use these very same corrosive sentiments as political fodder to attain power, to direct vitriol against targeted enemies such as immigrants, people of color, liberal elites and people of minority faiths. It is the same technique that has been used over the ages by authoritarians, by fascists and dictators of all stripes to gain and maintain power. We are well on our way to the future Reich predicted. Can the forces of sanity, fairness, moderation and toleration prevail here, now, today?