It should come as no surprise to Americans that the pro-business agenda pushed in the American party system has produced strikingly unequal results.  We live in a society where teachers, pundits, politicians and business executives push the virtues of an “American dream,” whereby anyone can go from rags to riches with enough hard work.  This story represents more of a fiction than a reality today, and has only been sustained for as long as it has because of the continued propagandizing of the public. 

 

Simply put, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to move up the socio-economic ladder in light of increasing economic inequality throughout the United States.  Inequality has grown dramatically in the last three decades, and this is no accident; it is the direct product of a campaign on the part of corporate America to redistribute resources (incrementally) from America’s working and middle classes to the affluent. 

 

The campaign has proceeded through a multi-pronged approach.  The robin-hood-in reverse phenomenon includes the following tactics on the part of business: union busting in the form of the illegal firings of workers seeking to unionize, increased success on the part of political leaders in preventing regular increases in the minimum wage so that it is indexed to inflation, longstanding efforts to privatize public social-welfare goods, such as Social Security and public education (the latter through charter schools and vouchers), the never-ending campaign to gut other welfare programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (which was successfully ended in the mid 1990s), mass layoffs in the private sector as a result of outsourcing manufacturing jobs to third-world sweatshops, increased obsession with downsizing the state through mass budget cuts in areas such as public education, public transit, and other social services, efforts to bust-up private sector unions through relocation of manufacturing abroad and non-stop demands for contract concessions from unions that remain in the country, and successful efforts to get workers in the private sector to work more efficiently and for longer hours for declining pay.  These are merely some examples of the corporate class war that’s been declared against the American people.  Other initiatives could easily be added.

 

The many attacks on the middle and working classes predictably result in an increasingly desperate state for the mass public.  This is precisely the finding of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which concludes that the “income gaps between [the] very rich and everyone else more than tripled in [the] last three decades.”  The richest one percent of Americans, the CBPP finds, captured from 1979 to 2007 a greater percentage of total national income “than at any time since 1928.” 

 

The rise of depression level inequality should not be taken as an indication that the American public is as desperate as it was during the 1930s.  After all, unemployment was closer to 25 percent at that time, compared to just under 10 percent today.  It is not the case that the mass public is as poor as it once was 80 years ago; rather, the reality is that the richest Americans are far richer than they were during the Great Depression. 

 

To put this growing inequality into perspective, a review of the data is in order.  By 2007, the richest one percent of Americans captured 17.1 percent of the national income, compared to the poorest 20 percent, who shared just 14 percent of national income.  The richest one percent also own about 35 percent of all national wealth, while the next 19 percent of richest Americans control more than 50 percent.  Combined, then, the richest 20 percent of Americans control about 85 percent of the national wealth, leaving just 15 percent for the other 80 percent of the population.  These striking inequality levels are what political scientist Larry Bartels warns about when he discusses the rise of the “new gilded age” and the decline of American democracy. 

 

As discussed above, inequality levels have grown much worse in the last three decades.  From 1979 to 2007, the richest one percent of Americans’ incomes rose by 281 percent.  In contrast, the incomes of the middle fifth (middle 20 percent) of Americans rose by just 25 percent, while the incomes of the poorest 20 percent increased by just 16 percent.  In hard dollars, this means that the richest one percent of Americans earned on average an income of $1.3 million, compared to the national median household income of just over $55,000. 

 

The Bush administration’s tax cuts also contributed greatly to rising inequality.  This should be no surprise, considering that they went overwhelmingly to the richest Americans.  The cuts, while in place from 2001 through 2010, were at first frontloaded to concentrate benefits among the middle and working class.  They were deceitfully structured, however, to concentrate the overwhelming majority of the benefits for the very rich, albeit in the later years of the 2000-2010 period.  By 2009 to 2010, for example, nearly 60 percent of the Bush tax cuts went to the richest one percent, as compared to less than 40 percent being shared by the bottom 80 percent.  In hard dollars, the Bush tax cuts provided the bottom 20 percent of Americans with an average tax cut of just $29.  The middle 20 percent of Americans averaged $760, while the top one percent averaged cuts of $41,077.  Of those in the top one percent with incomes of more than $1 million per year, average tax cuts stood at $114,000.

 

Defenders of growing inequality will no doubt defend the “right” of business men and women to make as much money as they please.  This is seen as fundamental to the American dream.  What this argument misses is that there is only a finite amount of wealth that must be shared by the entire public.  An increasing share taken by the richest of Americans inevitably leaves less for those who are poorer or middle-working class.  When wealthy Americans seize larger portions of the national income, this forces everyone else to work harder for less.  This trend means that they will have less time for their families and for leisure, and will be less able to make ends meet when it comes to providing for basic necessities (let alone luxuries). 

 

Another toxic after effect of growing inequality is that it depresses political participation among most Americans, especially the poor.  This is to be entirely expected, as those who are forced to work longer hours for less money (often working multiple jobs) have less time left over to educate themselves about political issues, advocate and lobby on various policy proposals, and knowledgably participate in future elections.  In short, increasing economic inequality translates into increasing political inequality.  This last point should be seen as a major problem for those with any serious commitment to democracy.  Those with contempt for democratic representation will no doubt ignore the link between economic and political inequality.  This much is clear in their discounting of the consequences of the growing monopolization of American wealth by the upper class business elite. 

 

The general public can take a stand against the threat to American democracy by fighting the many efforts on the part of the business class to encroach upon their incomes and wealth (see the various tactics discussed above to see what we’re up against).  It is only when the masses become active in resisting the corporate assault on America that we will make serious progress toward minimizing social and economic inequality.

 

 

Anthony DiMaggio is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com), a daily online magazine devoted to the study of media, public opinion, and current events.  He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He can be reached at: [email protected]

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