🚀 go-pugleaf

Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in
America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced,
in the Washington Times, as a "Marxist." If only. I've never been able
to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in
English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem.

But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America
is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone
else. In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers,
the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now
obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax
income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by
7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of
income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage
points.

As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80
percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the
top 1 percent." Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for
the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."

But the moderate-to-conservative economic thinkers who long refused to
think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out
by Roger Lowenstein in an essay in the same issue of the New York
Times magazine that features Larry Summers' sobered mood.

Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and
the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it
matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the
national income?

In Lowenstein's view: "...whether Roger Clemens, who will get
something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or
200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant. My kids still have health
care, and they go to decent schools. It's not the rich people who are
pulling away at the top who are the problem..."

Well, there is a problem with the super-rich, several of them in fact.
A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling
underclass.

First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great
deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the
poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere
exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on
Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname
Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of
Wal-Mart's founder.

You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail
empire happens to have generated a $200 billion family fortune?

Second, though a lot of today's wealth is being made in the financial
industry, by means that are occult to the average citizen and do not
seem to involve much labor of any kind, we all pay a price, somewhere
down the line. All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and
exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as
I can determine, go to soup kitchens.

Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people
also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the
urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires'
horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the
rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college
education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the huge concentration of
wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in
favor of the wealthy. Yes, we should acknowledge the philanthropic
efforts of exceptional billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates.

But if we don't end up with universal health insurance in the next few
years, it won't be because the average American isn't pining for
relief from escalating medical costs. It may well turn out to be
because Hillary Clinton is, as The Nation reports, "the number-one
Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry."
And who do you think demanded those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy --
the AFLCIO.

Lowenstein notes, that "if the very upper crust were banished to a
Caribbean island, the America that remained would be a lot more
egalitarian."

Well, duh. The point is that it would also be more prosperous, at the
individual level, and democratic. In fact, why give the upper crust an
island in the Caribbean? After all they've done for us recently, I
think the Aleutians should be more than adequate.

 Barbara Ehrenreich