You’ve got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right.
—Bernie Sanders
Fight the growing gap between the super rich and everyone else.
An America that works for everybody.
Technically we live in the richest country in the world, but most of that money is in the hands of just a few super-rich people. The gap between the rich and the poor hasn’t been this bad in almost one hundred years. The top one-tenth of 1 percent has more money than the bottom 90 percent of America. Let that sink in for a minute.
Imagine you are on a boat, or a long bus trip, there are a hundred people, but one guy hogs as much of everything—the food, the snacks, the space, air conditioning, etc.—as ninety other people get. That would be pretty obviously unfair. The actual situation is much worse than that. The numbers are a bit stupefying at first. You have to give them time to sink in.
Most (58 percent) of all income gains since the Wall Street Crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent wealthiest Americans! No wonder there is more money for a few, but less money for everybody else. This injustice is at the root of all the other problems the country faces.
While Trump campaigned with the promise to help the American worker, the actions of his administration once in office have been an all-out attack on blue collar and middle class workers. The Trump administration worked to take away workers’ right to bring class action lawsuits against their employers in case of wrongdoing. Trump’s picks to his cabinet have been anti-union capitalists, like billionaire Betsy DeVos the secretary of education, and Alexander Acosta the secretary of labor, whose first policy move was to weaken a rule requiring companies to pay employees for overtime.
Labor experts agree one of the most important things for a healthy US job market is innovation and training, but the Trump administration made deep cuts to the labor department, cutting it by 40 percent, as well as cutting funding for job training programs. Trump’s labor board, now stocked with people who look out for big business rather than their employees, is currently working to make it harder for employees to form unions.
Trump’s labor department has scrapped an Obama-era rule saying that restaurant and bar workers cannot have their tips taken away by the restaurant or bar they work at.
The Senate passed a measure to repeal an Obama-era rule that required companies seeking federal contracts to disclose violations of labor standards like safety and fair pay rules. The Trump labor department has been targeting the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and hamstringing the agency’s ability to look after the safety and health of workers in a variety of ways. For example, they have drastically reduced the time in which companies are required to report accidents happening on the job, effectively making the reporting of safety violations voluntary. The labor department also is no longer making records public when companies violate health and safety standards. This sends a signal to CEOs and business owners that they can treat their employers however they like because nobody in this administration is really looking out for the workers.
Trump’s labor department is seeking to eliminate the Federal Employees Retirement System for all new government hires. These same White House officials are planning a wage freeze for federal employees in 2019 and taking away paid holidays for federal employees, according to leaked documents. While the administration smiles and pretends to embrace the worker, really it is so they can stick a knife in the worker’s back.
There are very practical tactics and policies that can combat this.
When the wealth gap has gotten as crazy out of control as it is, all of this should just be seen as common sense. The reason it isn’t has a lot to do with the super rich using their money to control and manage public opinion, and to paint these common-sense ideas as radical, when they are really anything but!
The truth of the matter is that the American dream has been withering on the vine for some time. More and more you hear about kids these days who can’t afford to move out of their parents’ house. I assure you it is not because this generation is lazier than previous generations. When I hang out with my buddies and we talk politics, we always laugh when the news says the economy is doing well, because it sure isn’t going up for most of us, who are working menial jobs to get by. Opportunity in the land of opportunity has been drying up. People are so sick of not getting their fair shot at the American dream that a lot of them were bitter enough to be willing to be swindled by a huckster. We can find a better way.
The world is the way it is because people have made it so. There is no reason we can’t fix the widening wealth gap if we choose to do so. We can fix this, not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is a winning strategy politically.