Happy Days Are Here Again?
In 2024, How About More Money for Workers?
Happy New Year to readers of Bracing Views!
Maybe 2024 will see some positive changes. I get emails from Marianne Williamson, Democratic candidate for president, and though I'm not a huge fan, she's right about this:
It took me a while to realize how fundamentally America had changed. In the 1970’s the average worker could afford a house, a car, and a yearly vacation; one parent’s salary could support a family of four; a couple could afford to send their kids to college. All those things meant a thriving middle class - and all of that has collapsed now. Over the last fifty years there has been a $50 Trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 per cent to the top 1 per cent of Americans. Trickle down economics, a soulless economic theory if there ever was one, emerged with the effect of an economic coup. Stockholder values soared while other stakeholders paid the price - from people denied health care and low cost education, to even the dignity of being able to survive on just one job. It has led to the majority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. It has led to one in four Americans living with medical debt, and half of our seniors living in poverty. It has led to gains for the very, very rich, and chronic struggle for the majority of Americans. And let’s not forget the $6 Trillion twin debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan! Yet the corporations behind all those things continue to leech on American citizens with impunity.
This has simply got to stop.
My wife and I are lucky that we're not living paycheck to paycheck, consumed by medical and other forms of debt. My wife’s father was a construction supervisor; my dad was a firefighter. Both earned enough in the 1960s and 1970s for a home, a car, a vacation, and a decent quality of life while supporting five kids. I very much doubt that would be possible today.
As a nation, we should make a collective New Year’s Resolution to share more wealth with the working classes. We need a system that works for everyone, not just the richest few. Yet money still seems to be gushing upwards with very little trickling down.
Along with ending wars and their destructiveness, whether in Gaza or Ukraine and elsewhere, we need a society that works well for everyone.
Maybe then we can sing, “Happy days are here again.”
Hope all is well for you and yours in 2024.
P.S. Warning! If you play the video, you’ll see a smiling Obama near the end. To think of the promise and the movement that Obama threw away after he won in 2008. All so that he could become one of the richest few. Sigh.
Marianne Williamson is 100% on target with her analysis of the hollowing out of the American middle class over the last 50 years. The USA is now an oligarchy, a plutocracy, but the myth that the USA is a thriving democracy lives on. The only way most people survive now is using credit cards, which charge usurious interest rates. The entire economic system is a corrupt scam, set up to enrich the top 1%, allow the next 24% a more or less comfortable lifestyle, and keep the other 75% scrambling to make ends meet. The vulture private equity firms, like Blackstone and Pretium Partners, are buying up all the single family homes while the super rich hide their trillions of wealth in off-shore tax havens. And yet the appetite of the oligarchs is not yet satiated. Their sadistic dream is to eradicate the last vestiges of the New Deal, in particular Medicare and Social Security. They are heartless vultures. What will it take the finally break the myth that this country is still a democracy? What will it take to make everyone realize this country is now a corrupt oligarchy that has only one goal-- to transfer wealth to the super-rich?
Reading Marianne Williamson's email to you reminded me of that odious term: trickle-down economics. As Carlin noted - language always gives it away. The owners get to keep most of the wealth and what little trickles down is all what we get. And even that is now too much for them.
On Obama, I thought he was going to be different after listening to a number of his campaign speeches; then I read a transcript of one of them, and realized he basically had said nothing. He was a packaged empty suit; that he was awarded Marketer of the Year in 2008 by Advertising Age should have told us what and who he really was.