In a typically excellent piece last week, "When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules", economist Dean Baker made the point that so-called "free trade" rules are made in highly selective manner--to put downward pressure on the vast majority of Americans, while letting a small minority continue to reap monopolistic rents. This was not, perhaps the main point of his post--or maybe it was. In any event, it was an integral part of his argument, a very useful entry point, and something that's far too often ignored:
The upward redistribution of the last three decades has nothing to do with the market and a belief in "market fundamentalism." This is about a process where the rich and powerful have rewritten the rules to make themselves richer and more powerful.
For example, they wrote trade rules that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of the bulk of the U.S. workforce by placing manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in China and other developing countries. This had nothing to do with a belief in "free trade." They did not try to subject lawyers, doctors or other highly paid workers to the same sort of international competition. They only wanted international competition to put downward pressure on the wages of workers in the middle and bottom, not those at the top.
This elite has instituted a system of corporate governance that allows top executives to pilfer companies at the expense of their shareholders and its workers. Top executives are overseen only by a board of directors who owe their hugely overpaid sinecures to the executives they supervise. And of course the Wall Street barons themselves are given a license to gamble with the implicit promise that government picks up their tab when they lose.
Given that reality, Baker argues, the strategic imperative for action is clear:
No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting. Our income is a cost to the rich. They will look to cut it wherever they can, whether this is wages for private sector workers, pensions for public employees, or Social Security for retirees. That is their target.
We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- the multimillion dollar bonuses for the Wall Street wizards is a direct drain on the economy. So are the bloated paychecks of top executives and their lackey boards. Progressives must be prepared to use all the same tactics to bring down the income of the rich and powerful that they have used to reduce the income of everyone else.
The bolded section above is crucial. It's the most focused explanation I think I've seen to explain the common thread of all the conservative economic attacks that are being mobilized against us--as well as the neoliberal "compromises" that are being implemented or readied to sell us out. Keep that passage in front of you at all times, and you'll save yourself enormous amounts of grief.
Not least of all, it will help you recognize when someone's trying to distract you by pitting you against some other poor soul who's in exactly the same sort lose/lose negative sum situation that you are. Pitting one generation against another? Workers and/or taxpayers from one state against another? Employed against unemployed? Insured against uninsured? Oil rig workers against fishermen? (Especially when both are one and the same workers!) All these and more just different forms of the same class war game, the oldest one in the book: Let's you and him fight.
What they're after right now on the global scale is a massive roll-back of social insurance, wages, and middle-class wealth. In short: They want to wipe out the middle class that has taken several centuries to create, and return us to the pre-modern world that is divided almost entirely between rich and poor, with a small middle class that consists almost entirely of hangers on servicing the rich as glorified servants.
Is that a world you want your children and grandchildren to live in? And that's if global warming and other large-scale systemic failures don't make it catastrophically worse.
That is the future they have in mind for us. That is what we're fighting against.
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