"Their income is our cost" is NOT a very powerful meme
I dare anybody to try it out, on a selection of their friends, family, and acquaintances. If might be a big deal for lefties, but I doubt most people will get excited about it.
What most people can relate to, much more easily, is the impossibility of competing against a foreigner who makes 5 cents on the dollar that you do, other factors being equal.
Before addressing what metamars said here, I want to hasten to add that I know metamars is not being intentionally racist. But intentional racism is not the issue, and hasn't been for quite some time now. And yet, the racist implications to thinking like this are clear. As I explained to fladem, when he echoed metmars:
Chinese Workers Didn't Steal Our Jobs
American CEOs STOLE them, and gave them to Chinese workers at a fraction of the pay.
One narrative is FALSE, and pits workers of different nationalities against one another.
The other narrative is TRUE, and pits workers of all nationalities against the CEOs who exploit them.
I'm not uncomfortable with populism. I'm uncomfortable with RACISM and LIES.
So, with that out of the way, let's return to what metamars wrote. First off, of course, what I'm suggesting here is not a popular meme. We have centuries of elite brainwashing to thank for that. But as times get worse, if work hard enough it could well become a popular meme--because, of course, it's true.
But in one sense, it is surely is not a powerful meme right now, because people are just too beaten down, and it's so much easier to blame someone else who's powerless and preferrably far away, so we can blame some faceless "other", and then feel better in our continuing misery. There's a struggle necessary to get people in touch with their own power before a meme like this can be powerful rather than debilitating.
There's a parallel here to the dynamic discussed in the first diary spin-off from that diary, "Conservatives stoke resentment between worse off & better off workers to prevent solidarity". Like it or not, as Oaktown Girl pointed out, the meme of blaming better-paid workers is a powerful one, because people lack the confidence as well as the imagination to instead think, "That's what we all should have" instead of "Why do they have that? Let's take it away from them!"
Well, blaming worse-paid workers in the Third World isn't a whole lot better, either. They're not the ones in charge. They're not the ones who are doing it to you.
The message of that diary was that it wasn't just the working class that was getting screwed, or even the working class and the middle class. Even the affluent top 10% and top 5% excluding the top 1% were not experiencing the kind of income growth that had commonplace prior to 1973:
Oh, sure, those in the top 5 or 10 percent excluding the top 1 percent have done okay... but not by historical standards. Those in 95th to 99th percentile have seen their incomes (including capital gains) rise by just over 50% since 1973, a period of 34 years (the last data is 2007). But this compares to a 100% gain from 1945 to 1973--a period of just 28 years. That's roughly half the gain in 20% more years. And those in the 90th to 95th percentile have done substantially worse--just over a 30% gain since 1973 compared to 120% from 1945 to 1973, one quarter the growth over a period 20% longer.
What's more, when you combine their incomes with everyone else below them, to get an average income for the bottom 99%, that average has only gained 10% over the past 34 years. Of course people in the 90th to the bottom of the 99th percentile don't like to think of themselves mixed in with the rabble below. But the folks in the top 1%--particularly those in the top 0.1% must surely find this amusing, since the post-1973 economy really doesn't work for anyone else but them. And the folks in the 90th through 99th percentile aren't fooling anyone else but themselves if they think otherwise. Heck, even the bottom half of the top 1% only doubled their incomes from 1973 to 2007, the bottom 90% did almost that well from 1945 to 1973. This is the picture of an economy that's stagnant for almost everyone--and has been for 34 years now,up until the biggest downturn since the Great Depression kicked into high gear one year ago.
All this means that there's a tremendous amount of confusion to be cut through. Which is why Dean Baker's original article was so powerful, including the key passage that I'll repeat here once again:
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.
