A dozen cookies arrive on a plate. Big Business takes 11 of them and says to the Tea Partier, “Pssst! That union guy is trying to steal your cookie!”. There’s a joke making the rounds and it goes like this: Big Business, a Tea Partier and Organized Labor are sitting around a table.
once and for all.” And in an interview with the effervescent Megyn Kelly of Fox News, Fitzgerald said, “If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.”. So none of this is truly about slashing deficits and balancing budgets. We know it’s really about smashing labor and its protections, undermining the Democratic Party further and trying to torpedo Obama’s reelection. In a fundraising letter, Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald bragged that their goal had been not budget repairs but “to break the power of unions .
It’s also about ignoring the advances labor has brought the middle class and using charges of union corruption and financial excess to divert attention from the real culprits. According to Friday’s edition of USA Today, “The heads of the nation’s top companies got the biggest raises in recent memory last year after taking a hiatus during the recession” — a catastrophe many of them helped create.
That wasn’t just a riot. Hence the need, Randolph said, for a national government with laws acting on all the people throughout the states. It showed how far ordinary people might go in rejecting regressive taxes and policies giving investors huge paydays with public money. The United States, Randolph said, must be empowered to put down insurrections anywhere in the country. A debtor uprising in western Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion had marched on the state armory. It’s no coincidence that he also charged the delegates with repairing the federal government’s military weakness.
If that contention remains startling, we can thank an immense effort, carried out over generations, to throw out not only Beard’s particular economic interpretation of the convention, but along with it any suggestion that struggles between elites and ordinary Americans over public and private finance played a role in framing our Constitution. But entire careers in academic history — major ones, like Edmund Morgan’s — have been largely dedicated to depicting a founding generation acting with perfect intellectual consistency almost entirely on principle. Wherever self-interest did arise, Morgan suggests (in his popular book “The Birth of the Republic” and elsewhere), the nature of the founding mission was such that it enabled even greed to inspire the founders to good. It’s not surprising that many of the popular founding father biographers routinely avoid the issue. In that kind of history, everyday political struggles over money between ordinary Americans and American elites just don’t play.
The estate tax (which only hits the top 2 percent) has also been slashed. Capital gains – comprising most of the income of the super-rich – were taxed at 35 percent in the late 1980s. In 2000 it was 55 percent and kicked in after $1 million. Today it’s 35 percent and kicks in at $5 million. They’re now taxed at 15 percent.
The other big growth area, before the 2008 crash, was in the largely unproductive FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, where high salaries enticed smart young Americans who might have manufactured useful goods and services into manufacturing the toxic financial products that brought down the world economy. The homeland of Margaret Thatcher became even more dependent on a bloated financial sector than the over-financialized U.S. In the last decade, as the economist Michael Mandel has pointed out, almost all of the new jobs have been created in health, education and government, which share one characteristic in common: low productivity and rapidly escalating costs. Most Americans work in the nontraded service sector.
Take out the increased benefits, which tend to be eaten up by cancerous health insurance costs, and the real average hourly wage has not increased in 35 years. But according to the economist Alan Blinder in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed titled “Our Dickensian Economy” last year, since 1978 productivity in the nonfarm business sector has grown by 86 percent, while real compensation — wages plus benefits — has grown only 37 percent. Still not convinced that the Anglo-American model of the last generation is a failure? Orthodox economists recite the dogma that if productivity goes up worker compensation will follow.
Only in the English-speaking world, with its tradition of radical libertarian ideology, could a head of state like Margaret Thatcher declare: “There is no such thing as society.” According to a 2007 article in the Journal of Business Ethics, 31 of 34 corporate directors, each of whom served on an average of six boards of Fortune 200 corporations, agreed that their duty to shareholders would require them to cut down a mature forest or allow a dangerous, unregulated toxin into the environment, if that increased shareholder value. .
spends twice as much on healthcare as other developed nations, with no better results, and the runaway cost of medicine in the U.S. America’s most dysfunctional industries have the best-paid CEOs. And yet a Wall Street Journal CEO compensation study in 2010 found that healthcare CEOs did much better than their equivalents in more productive industries like energy, telecom and consumer goods. is the biggest threat to the economy in the long run. The U.S.
Related Stories
