‘Over the past three decades, we have become two Americas. We are no longer one large American family with shared prosperity and shared political and economic power, as we were in the decades following World War II.”……..
“The Powell memo [1971] was a business manifesto, a call to arms to Corporate America, and it triggered a powerful response. The seismic shift of power that it set in motion marked a fault line in our history. Political revolt had been brewing on the right..but it was the Powell memo that lit the spark of change..a long period of sweeping transformation both in Washington’s policies and in the mind-set and practices of American business leaders..that reversed the politics and policies of the postwar era and the “virtuous circle” philosophy that had created the broad prosperity of America’s middle class.”
“Today, the gravest challenge and most corrosive fault line in our society is the gross inequality of income and wealth in America…the past three decades have produced the third wave of great private wealth..a new Gilded Age comparable to ..the robber barons in the 1890s, which led to the financial Panic of 1893 and the trust-busting presidency of Theodore Roosevelt; and to the ..great fortunes in the Roaring Twenties, which ended in the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. [note: a thinking person just might see a trend here!!!]
”In our New Economy, America’s super-rich have accumulated trillions in new wealth, far beyond anything in other nations, while the American middle class has stagnated. What separates the Two Americas is far more than a wealth gap. It is a wealth chasm…Wealth has flowed so massively to the top that during the nation’s growth spurt from 2002 to 2007, America’s super-rich, the top 1% [3 million people], reaped two-thirds of the nation’s entire economic gains. The other 99% were left with only one-third of the gains to divide among 310 million people. In 2010, the first full year of the economic recovery, the top 1% captured 93% of the nation’s gains.” [TIME OUT – re-read this last paragraph – how does this achieve the Constitution’s “promote the general welfare”??? How does this work in a “democracy”???]
…..”contrary to political arguments put forward for not taxing the rich, an economy of large personal fortunes does not deliver the best economic performance for the country..concentrated wealth works against economic growth..A recent International Monetary Fund study..conclusion – that a high level of income inequality can be “destructive” to sustained growth and that the best condition for long-term growth is “more equality in the income distribution.”
“The opposite has happened in America since the late 1970s. The soaring wealth of the super-rich has brought the unraveling of the American Dream for the middle class…As a country, we have declined from an era of middle class prosperity and middle class power from the 1940s to the 1970s to an era of vast fortunes and mass economic insecurity..
“Our once healthy clash of interests has become precariously one-sided. In the past decade, business has deployed thirty times as many Washington lobbyists as trade unions and sixteen times as many lobbyists labor, consumer, and public interest lobbyists combined. Spending has been even more lopsided in favor of Corporate America. From 1998 through 2010, business interests and trade groups spent $28.6 billion on lobbying compared with $492 million for labor, nearly a 60 – to – 1. business advantage.”…
“The standard explanation offered by business leaders and political and economic conservatives is that these harsh realities of the New Economy are the unavoidable product of impersonal and irresistible market forces….the unavoidable
cost of progress..the price of the inexorable march of technology and free trade. But the seductive half-truth doesn’t fully square with the facts. It ignores..the impact of public policy and corporate strategy on how we became Two Americas. It fails to explain why such an overwhelming share of the fruits of technological change and globalization went to a privileged few while the majority of ordinary Americans got left out.’
“Germany took a different fork in the road in the 1980s and it has fared better than America in the global marketplace.
While the United States piled up multitrillion-dollar trade deficits in the 2000s, Germany had large export surpluses..
Its economy grew faster than the U.S. economy from 1995 to 2010, with the gains more widely shared. Since 1985, the hourly pay of middle-class workers in Germany has risen five times as fast as in the United states….
”German leaders worked hard to keep their high-wage, high-skilled jobs at home. While U.S. multinational corporations aggressively moved production offshore…Today, 21% of Germans work in production; n the United States,
it’s 9 percent.
“America chose a different path, driven by the pro-business power shift in politics and a new corporate mind-set, both of which lie at the root of the economic rift in America today. The New Economy laissez-faire philosophy of the past three decades promised that deregulation, lower taxes, and free trade would lift all boats….
”But that is not what has happened. the middle class was left behind..Even the 60 million upper-middle-class Americans and the nation’s wealthiest 5 % have been falling steadily firther behind America’s financial elite, the super-rich 1 percent….
“Since the 1970s, business leaders have largely abandoned [the[ share-the-wealth ethic. With some exceptions, CEOs have practiced “wedge economics” – splitting apart the pay of the rank-and-file employees from company revenues and profits..according to the Census Bureau, the pay of a typical male worker was lower in 2010 than in 1978, adjusted for inflation….
“..in our New Economy, the dynamic thrust of the “virtuous circle” has been disrupted by job losses and the lid on average pay scales. Flat pay is not bad only for individuals, but for the whole economy. Weak pay leads to weak consumer demand. Companies don’t expand and hire, ans as a country, we bog down in long painful “jobless recoveries.” That has happened several times in the past two decades..
“..downsizing, offshoring and wedge economics have backfired.”
“There is growing, and disturbing, evidence that America has evolved into a caste society, increasingly stratified in terms of wealth and income, with people at the bottom almost frozen there, generation after generation..
”One major reason..a caste society is emerging in the United States is that education is no longer the great social leveler that it once was. Just the opposite.”
“It didn’t have to be this way..Sharing the gains from America’s growth from 1979 to 2006 in the same way they were shared from 1945 to 1979 would have given the typical middle-class family $12,000 more per year. Overall, 80% of Americans, from the bottom through the entire middle class, would have earned $743 billion more a year; the richest 1% would have made $673 billion less; and the next 4% down from the top would have made $140 billion less.
”So it was the changes in our laws and in the way American business decided to divide its revenues that cost average Americans roughly three-quarters of a trillion dollars since the late 1970s. All that money went to the richest 5%..”
“Overall, more than 59,000 factories and production facilities were shut down all across America over the last decade, and employment in the core manufacturing sector fell from 17.1 million to 11.8 million..a punishing toll for what historically had been the best sector for steady, good-paying middle-class jobs. By pursuing a deliberate strategy of continual layoffs and by holding down wages..which yielded higher profits for investors, business leaders were not only squeezing their employees, they were slowly strangling the middle-class customer demand that the nation needed for the next economic expansion.
“Two trends are primarily responsible for today’s hyperconcentration of wealth in America – the collective decisions over time by America’s corporate power elite to take a far bigger share of business earnings for themselves, and the increasingly pro-rich, pro-business policy tilt in Washington since the late 1970s
”The long-term trend of tax cutting since the 1970s has dramatically widened America’s wealth divide. As the tax code has been written, rewritten, and rewritten again since 1978, it has been tilted so heavily in favor of the super-rich that many millionaires and billionaires today actually pay lower tax rates than many people in the middle class. The key driver of this lopsided outcome is the sharp cut in capital gains tax – from 48% in 1978 to 15% today.”..
”To make matters worse, ordinary employees typically pay a higher payroll tax rate – 7.65% to finance Social Security and Medicare – than corporate CEOS and super-rich investors. their investment gains are not subject to the payroll tax, and their pay over $106,800 is also exempt. As a result, the super-rich pay as little as 1 to 2% of their earned income in payroll taxes, far below the 7.65% rate of middle-class Americans.”
So – is there ANY. doubt about. ”Who Stole The American Dream?” Why do. YOU. think this series was titled. “The Far Right Threat to Democracy – the Rich and Corporations” ???????? WHY do. YOU. think Pulitzer Prize winners and Nobel Prize winners are writing books, studies, papers on the. THEFT OF THE AMERICAN DREAM by the rich and corporations????????????????????? It’s all there for. YOU – unspun Census Bureau, IRS, GAO, CBO. statistics, confessions by the perps themselves, statistical comparisons between the middle class golden prosperity of 1947-1973 and the middle class hell of 1980-2023. WHY are billionaires paying taxes [IF they pay !] at a lower tax rate than YOU?
With Justice For All 
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