{"id":1111,"date":"2020-02-16T23:22:24","date_gmt":"2020-02-16T23:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2020-02-16T23:22:24","modified_gmt":"2020-02-16T23:22:24","slug":"inequality-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/2020\/02\/16\/inequality-media\/","title":{"rendered":"INEQUALITY MEDIA"},"content":{"rendered":"

RE-PRINT of Robert Reich @\u00a0 Inequality Media<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

An impeached president who is up for re-election delivered a State of the Union address to the most divided union in living memory.<\/p>\n

But why are we so divided? We\u2019re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We\u2019re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression.\u00a0Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but we\u2019ve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Part of the answer is Trump himself.\u00a0<\/strong>The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists, keeping almost everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.<\/p>\n

But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.<\/p>\n

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many said they\u2019d been working hard and were frustrated they weren\u2019t doing better. Now they were angry \u2013 angry at their employers, the government, Wall Street.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. Most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before, in terms of purchasing power.<\/p>\n

I heard the term \u201crigged system\u201d so often I began asking people what they meant.\u00a0They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and \u201ccrony capitalism.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats and independents.\u00a0A few had joined the Tea Party. A few had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement.<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, the leaders of the Democratic party favored Hillary Clinton and Republican leaders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.<\/p>\n

They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would \u201cshake things up\u201d or \u201cmake the system work again\u201d or \u201cstop the corruption\u201d or \u201cend the rigging.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Something very big had happened, and it wasn\u2019t due to Sanders\u2019 magnetism or Trump\u2019s likeability.\u00a0It was a rebellion against the establishment.<\/strong>\u00a0That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They prefer to attribute Trump\u2019s rise solely to racism.<\/p>\n

Racism did play a part. But to understand why racism had such a strong impact in 2016, especially on the voting of whites without college degrees, it\u2019s important to see what drove it. After all, racism in America dates back long before the founding of the Republic, and even modern American politicians have had few compunctions about using racism to boost their standing.<\/p>\n

What gave Trump\u2019s racism \u2013 as well as his hateful xenophobia, misogyny and jingoism \u2013 particular virulence was his capacity to channel the intensifying anger of the white working class into it.\u00a0<\/strong>It is hardly the first time in history that a demagogue has used scapegoats to deflect public attention from the real causes of distress.<\/p>\n

Democrats did nothing to change a rigged system<\/strong><\/p>\n

Aided by Fox News and an army of rightwing outlets, Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by Washington that he was their champion. Speaking at a factory in Pennsylvania in June 2016,\u00a0he decried politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by \u201ctaking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 of the 24 years before Trump\u2019s election, and in that time scored some important victories for working families: the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. I take pride in being part of a Democratic administration during that time.<\/p>\n

But Democrats did nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that had rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top and undermined the working class.<\/strong>\u00a0As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, \u201cDemocrats don\u2019t have a \u2018white working-class\u2019 problem. They have a \u2018working class problem\u2019 which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly.”<\/p>\n

Clinton and Obama chose not to wrest power back from the oligarchy. Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Yet\u00a0both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.<\/strong>\u00a0Clinton pushed for Nafta and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the \u201cconfidence\u201d of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.<\/p>\n

Both stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class.\u00a0<\/strong>They failed to reform labor laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labor protections.\u00a0Clinton deregulated Wall Street before the crash; Obama allowed the Street to water down attempts to re-regulate it after the crash.<\/strong>\u00a0Obama protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but allowed millions of underwater homeowners to drown.<\/p>\n

Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform.<\/strong>\u00a0In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 supreme court opinion opening wider the floodgates to big money in politics.<\/p>\n

Although Clinton and Obama faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses, they could have rallied the working class and built a coalition to grab back power from the emerging oligarchy.<\/strong>\u00a0Yet they chose not to. Why?<\/p>\n

There is no longer a left or right. There is no longer a moderate \u2018center\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

My answer is not just hypothetical, because I directly witnessed much of it: it was because\u00a0Clinton, Obama and many congressional Democrats sought the votes of the \u201csuburban swing voter\u201d \u2013 so-called \u201csoccer moms\u201d in the 1990s and affluent politically independent professionals in the 2000s<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 who supposedly determine electoral outcomes, and turned their backs on the working class. They also drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans \u2013 big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.<\/p>\n

A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016.\u00a0As Eduardo Porter of the New York Times notes, since 2000 Republican presidential candidates have steadily gained strength in America\u2019s poorer counties while Democrats have lost ground.<\/strong>\u00a0In 2016, Trump won 58% of the vote in the counties with the poorest 10% of the population. His share was 31% in the richest.<\/p>\n

By 2016, Americans understood full well that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders\u2019s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump\u2019s appeal \u2013 \u201cI\u2019m so rich I can\u2019t be bought off\u201d \u2013 although once elected he delivered everything big money wanted.<\/p>\n

The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system.\u00a0<\/strong>There is no longer a left or right. There\u2019s no longer a moderate \u201ccenter\u201d. There\u2019s either Trump\u2019s authoritarian populism or democratic \u2013 small \u201cd\u201d \u2013 populism.<\/p>\n

Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement.<\/strong>\u00a0Trump has harnessed the frustrations of at least 40% of America. Although he\u2019s been a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich, giving them all they\u2019ve wanted in tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, the working class continues to believe he\u2019s on their side.<\/p>\n

Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy.\u00a0They must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities and classes, and band together to unrig the system.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trump is not the cause of our divided nation. He is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It\u2019s not enough to defeat him.\u00a0We must reform the system that got us here in the first place, to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump\u2019s authoritarian demagoguery.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks for reading,<\/p>\n

Robert Reich
\nInequality Media<\/p>\n

P.S.\u00a0If you can, support our work to ensure that the American people know the truth about our political system.<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0Kudos to our monthly donors for your continued support as we continue getting the truth out during these perilous times for democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RE-PRINT of Robert Reich @\u00a0 Inequality Media An impeached president who is up for re-election delivered a State of the Union address to the most divided union in living memory. But why are we so divided? We\u2019re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We\u2019re not in a deep economic crisis…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,33],"class_list":["entry","author-larrynorton","post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-democracy","tag-politics","no-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8bppg-hV","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1111"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1113,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions\/1113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nortonspeaks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}