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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Get equity or die tryin’


By Linda Felaco

From time to time, we get commenters who claim that we here at Progressive Charlestown “hate” the rich. This attitude puzzles me. Surely, if there was ever a time when the rich of this country disguised their loathing and contempt for the poor—a big “if” considering the deep Calvinist streak that connects prosperity to divine election—the gloves have come off during this election cycle.

Herman Cain proclaimed “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Newt Gingrich advocates firing school janitors and replacing them with the children of the poor to instill a “work ethic” in them. Though if you’re wondering how putting poor children’s parents out of work and giving the children their jobs—for lower pay—betters the lives of families in poverty, you’re going to have to ask Newt, because I’m baffled.

Multimillionaire Mitt Romney joked that he was “unemployed” while he was “earning” more per day than most Americans earn all year and paying a lower tax rate on those earnings than most Americans do. He also bragged last month that he liked to fire people at a time when nearly 13 million Americans are out of work. And to top it off, last week he declared that he was “not concerned about the very poor”—and managed to come under fire from both the left and the right, the right decrying his belief in the safety net.



Apparently, merely quoting what the rich say about the rest of us in their “quiet rooms” makes you a “hater.” Though Bill Maher’s reaction to Mitt Romney’s now-infamous quiet rooms comment during his January 20 show was similar to mine: “It’s a wealth gap, not anal warts.” When did we start having a caste system in this country? I was always led to believe this was a democracy and that I was the equal of anyone else. Maybe that’s why commenter “Jerry” thinks public education in this state is such a dismal failure. My teachers clearly did not prepare me to assume the role of Dalit. Then again, judging from the difficulty some people are having grasping why the Cranston West school prayer violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, our schools have failed.

Universal public education was supposed to give everyone an equal opportunity to better themselves. Except in this country schools are funded largely through local property taxes, meaning wealthier communities have better schools. But at least everyone has the opportunity to attend some sort of school one way or the other, and even if your teachers are underqualified and overworked, you at least have access to books, assuming you’d managed to learn to read—and assuming Newt Gingrich hadn’t grabbed the books out of your hands and shoved a broom at you instead.

It used to be that if you weren’t a heterosexual white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, you could blame your lack of success on the old inequalities: racism, sexism, homophobia. But progress has been made in removing many of the more visible of these barriers. So why are so many people still struggling to get by? Why is social mobility—i.e., “the American dream,” that your children will be better off than you are—at an all-time low? As Bill Maher said during his show on January 13, “We’re 10th in the world in the American dream. It’s like Mexico being 10th in the Mexican hat dance.”

Except it’s even worse than Bill Maher thinks: A recent study of the 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility than we do. And in social justice, which includes categories such as health care, income inequality, preschool education, and child poverty, we ranked 27th.

You’d think the lower and middle classes would be natural allies against the upper or owning classes, yet somehow in this country they’re bitter enemies. This is the land of opportunity, after all; we never had an aristocracy from which people were automatically excluded by birth, and our constitution granted us all equality (well, all white male landowners, at any rate; equality for everyone else came later). Anyone could get rich just by pulling themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps (which is hard to do if you don’t even have boots). And if you couldn’t get rich in the states, all you had to do was light out for the territories and stake yourself a claim.

Of course, that very land grab was a massive campaign of wealth distribution from Native Americans to white settlers, given that land was the main form of wealth in the 19th century.

No one has the slightest wish to take away any privilege or advantage of the rich because they still believe the old rags-to-riches stories, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and dammit, they want all the perks when they get there. People will shoot the messenger who dares to point out that even if the Horatio Alger myth was true at some point in our history—another big “if”—it sure as hell isn’t true now that the frontier has long since been closed and income inequality is at 1929 levels. Not only are you not going to ever be rich, but under the economic conditions being projected for the foreseeable future, your kids will be lucky to barely hold on to the same standard of living as yours.
There's a reason Jay Gould was
called a robber baron.

Then there’s the fierce competition among the poor and middle classes for the few decent-paying jobs left. Common cause is lost in the struggle to stay above water by standing on others. As robber baron Jay Gould famously stated, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Simply defining who's rich and who's poor is subject to endless debate. The poor have been tricked into believing they’re middle class, and the wealthy have been allowed to hide in the middle class. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in January, nearly a fifth of families making less than $15,000 and nearly two-fifths of those making more than $100,000 called themselves middle class.

And for all that the rich like to claim that they earned their wealth—though it’s not at all clear to me that extracting every last droplet of wealth from a faltering company and then destroying it is “earning”—the fact is that the higher you go up the income scale, the smaller the percentage of your total wealth is earned from work and the larger the percentage is “earned” by that wealth itself, often (cf. Mitt Romney) by gaming the system so that most of your earnings are considered “capital gains” and taxed at a far lower rate than earnings from work.

Oh, but these are the revered “job creators” we’re talking about! We tax them less so they’ll invest that money in businesses that will employ us! Except that’s not how it works out in real life. Because those tax breaks have to be paid for somehow, and the way they’ve been paid for has been through reduced government investment in infrastructure and education (i.e., fewer jobs) and spiraling debt. You don’t make more money by going into debt. That’s just basic arithmetic.

The rich even manage to turn poverty into a profit center for themselves. JP Morgan Chase has been collecting millions of dollars from the federal government to process the transactions of the debit-type cards that food stamp recipients use to access their benefits—and to add insult to injury, JP Morgan Chase offshores those processing jobs to India.

According to the latest income figures, median U.S. income has fallen to $26,000 a year. That means 50% of all Americans are subsisting on less than that. During his show on January 20, Bill Maher pointed out that 

“The success or failure of [Mitt Romney’s] campaign will depend on his ability to convince someone making $26,000 a year that he, Mitt, a rich guy, knows how to make them rich too. And if you elect him, he’ll tell you the secret. It’s not a political platform so much as a wealth seminar. ‎This is the same thing that makes guys like Tony Robbins rich: They have a secret. But the secret turns out to be that they’re rich because they’re robbing you. And somehow Americans are good with this.”

After all, this has always been the country of the snake-oil salesman and the get-rich-quick scheme. Get equity or die tryin’.