It’s time for working-class people to take back the reins

Wages have finally started rising slightly faster than inflation, but not enough to make up for the lost ground since the pandemic began. Unemployment is at a record low, but that is because more and more people have to work additional jobs to pay the exorbitant rents and home prices charged by the giant corporations that are gobbling up housing across the country. And the child tax credit that was keeping millions of children out of poverty has been killed by short-sighted right-wing politicians in Washington, D.C.

Obviously, mainstream Americans have to take back the reins in the next election so we can reset the national budget and achieve economic and social justice. We the people can and will balance the budget by legislating a number of hefty taxes on corporations and the wealthy that are long overdue, as President Biden emphasized in his State of the Union speech.

But, to win in 2024, prosperous Democrats and Independents will have to open their hearts to a lot more coverage of the opinions and the growing challenges of working people today. Unfortunately, the corporate media has other priorities for your viewing pleasure, based on their own agendas. And the folks who are being hit the hardest usually don’t contribute to the op-ed pages because they are too busy working. But they do vote.

I do not doubt the expertise and wisdom of the academics, ambassadors, congress members, etc. appearing in the daily news. But, listening to NPR, I sometimes wonder: If there are so many smart, highly-educated people out there, why haven’t they been able to lead this country out of the wilderness of fake news and dark-money propaganda?

The reason is simple: They do not have the attention of everyday people. The well-meaning liberal intelligentsia and influencers are impressing each other, but they are not reaching the hearts and minds of ordinary voters, who have the untapped potential to call the billionaires and monopolistic corporations to account. Regular people have the ability, if we choose to exercise it, to bring the giant corporations and the plutocrats to heel in this country — to use justified, punitive legislation to break them up or tax them into submission for generations to come.

Working people have learned what we know the hard way, and we don’t forget. But most of the selfappointed experts in Washington and the blogosphere have put themselves, by hook or crook, into an economic class where they have lost contact with authentic, everyday concerns.

For example, many politicians and pundits, including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, routinely point to rising wages as a cause of inflation, instead of the result. But working people are well aware that we have lost several percentage points of real income because inflation has risen faster than wages for almost two years now. We need even higher wages because prices are still going up, and everyone from essential workers to middle-class families is more hard-pressed with every paycheck. The truth is, long-suffering average, patriotic Americans can no longer carry the burden of the billionaires’ rigged economy, and the longstanding need for fundamental tax reforms has become an existential crisis.

These days, people are looking for leaders they can count on not to let their educations and accomplishments distract them for one minute from the battle at the front lines of America’s class war, where people’s lives are at stake every day. If that is populism, count me in.

The self-serving pundit class is still mostly turning a blind eye to the growing plight of the vast majority of Americans, which is caused by rampant, unchecked corporate greed enabled by a tsunami of dark money in politics. But we can change the status quo in the next election by becoming more discerning consumers of and even makers of the news, and by putting people first when we vote.

It is high time for “just folks” in both parties to rise up and defeat the billionaires’ non-stop disinformation campaign by personally and publicly supporting the common sense solutions that people at kitchen tables know this country needs — like stiff taxes on rich families and corporations. We have to turn our opposition to the bloated special interests and their cronies in Congress up to 11, and keep it there.

Believe me, we have not yet begun to fight.