PROMINENT BRITISH EPIDEMIOLOGISTS RICHARD WILKINSON AND KATE PICKett mined a mountain of data showing that gross inequality of opportunity and income boosts rates of homicide, narcotics use, playground bullying, mental illness, anxiety, teen pregnancies, academic failure, physical ailments such as obesity and heart disease, and many other disorders, many of them life threatening. In their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, they wrote that humans are acutely social animals, vividly conscious of the society around them. Consequently, suffering hardships in relation to others can be far more injurious than individual suffering that’s not experienced within a societal context. Wilkinson and Pickett compared a list of countries with the greatest income inequality and a list of countries with the greatest per capita drug use. They found that the lists contained the same countries. Widespread drug use, a strong indicator of societal ills, is more likely to occur in a disparate, harsh, and more punitive culture.1
Paradoxically, countries that have relaxed narcotics laws, such as the Netherlands, have lower rates of drug use. These places are less vindictive and more egalitarian and forgiving. The same correlation holds true among America’s fifty states. Mississippi and Louisiana have higher crime, disease, and disability rates than do Minnesota and New Hampshire, which have a more forgiving legal structure and a more equitable income distribution.2
This trend has been lost on tycoons such as David H. and Charles G. Koch, brothers who inherited vast riches and spend millions funding foundations and political campaigns to shape national politics and economics so that they can have even more wealth and privilege (and, correspondingly, so that everyone else can have less).3
In fact, genuine social justice benefits, not just those toward the bottom, but all society. A person who has amassed $10 billion can afford whatever he or she wants. A more grandiose estate in Tuscany or another billion or two in paper assets are unlikely to affect a billionaire’s general happiness. But a billionaire’s life can be enriched when other citizens are given equal opportunity to live up to their potential, to become symphony conductors or epidemiologists, not crack whores or auto thieves. Everyone benefits when a billionaire can exit his or her limo unaccompanied by armed guards.
Paul Pierson, a political scientist at the University of California–Berkeley, found that in Mexico a “small group of wealthy people are protected by guns mostly from the rest of the population and dart from one protected location to another protected location completely separate from the rest of society.”4 Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, has noted that as wealth increasingly flows to the top, the security sector takes on a bigger share of the economy. He concluded that for “every three workers in America that’s producing something, there is one worker who’s just keeping the lid on. These are the private security personnel. These are the police officers. These are the prison guards. These are the armed forces. These are the people whose job it is just basically to maintain the society’s property rights and its social organization.”5
Putting more people behind bars than is absolutely necessary promotes a basic unfairness. Demoting small-time offenders to the status of ex-convict stamps them as lesser beings, particularly in more retaliatory societies. Consequently, sending more and more people to prison generates even greater disparities and socioeconomic chasms.
Although laissez-faire hard-liners argue that it’s natural for big fish to eat smaller fish, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) argued that these self-described rugged individualists see the world through a distorted lens. While speaking with supporters during her 2012 campaign, she said:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.6
The widening gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and everyone else is no longer disputable. Even Forbes, one of the great bastions of hard capitalism, doesn’t deny it. The real estate–banking collapse of 2008 exacerbated the trend. The incomes of the bottom 99 percent grew by only 6.8 percent between 2002 and 2007, compared to a 20 percent gain between 1993 and 2000. In the early 1980s the top 1 percent received an 8 percent share of all earnings. By 2012 that share was up to 20 percent—and still accelerating.7 University of California economist Emmanuel Saez found that “1 percent captured 93 percent of the income gains in the first year of recovery (2010).” This, he said, “can help explain the recent public demonstrations against inequality.”8 Pierson and his coauthor, Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, point out that when the surge of economic catastrophes enveloped much of the world beginning around 2008, other developed countries experienced nothing like the increase in inequality that occurred in the United States.9
Left-leaning lawyer and political scientist Joseph Dillon Davey said it’s no coincidence that America’s prison population exploded at the same time its distribution of wealth shifted sharply in favor of the richest Americans. Davey saw mass incarceration as the ruling class’s principal method of insuring against resistance and insurrection.10 Epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett agreed that if you accept high inequality, “you will need more prisons and more police. You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problem.”11
Davey cited a 1971 speech, barely noticed at the time, by family patriarch David Rockefeller in which he declared that “the social contract” was “up for revision.” Davey and his disciples believe that Rockefeller’s words predicted the establishment of a new globalized economy that would crush American workers and jail resistors.12 Although they give Rockefeller more soothsaying credit than he deserves, America’s union workforce was in fact cut in half, the prison population tripled, and the rich became much, much richer while everyone else treaded water or sank to the bottom. When Occupy Wall Street directed attention to this growing income disparity, the group was monitored, investigated, and suppressed by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and various police departments around the country.13
When in November 2011 the Census Bureau released a new, more accurate measurement of poverty, it showed that 100 million people—one in three Americans—were either in poverty or very close to it. The bureau included 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. These are people living paycheck to paycheck, one illness or one set of tires from falling off the edge. The numbers, which most economists agreed constitute a measure of poverty more accurate than previously possible, came as a surprise to those who gathered them, said Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show,” she said.14
By 2009, as the real estate–banking collapse widened the chasm, nearly half of American families had a debt load that exceeded their assets, leaving them with zero net worth. That same year Goldman Sachs, one of the principal malefactors in the collapse, realized profits of $13.4 billion after paying enormous sums for salaries, bonuses, and the creature-comfort expenses of its top-tier executives. Total compensation for an average employee in the firm neared $500,000.15 Presumably none of them fell into foreclosure.
A November 2011 report by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project pointed out that most children who grow up along the top or bottom of the American income spectrum keep their respective places all their lives. The practice of “legacy” admissions in our elite universities, for example, is naked affirmative action in favor of the silver-spoon set. America once had the highest proportion of college grads in the world. Now, thanks to deteriorating educational systems and less accessible systems of higher learning, we’ve fallen to twelfth.16
Much of this can be attributed to the waning political power of the nonrich as the rising impact of big money works its will. When the Great Recession struck, state and local governments laid off hundreds of thousands of middle-class teachers. It was a double whammy, devastating teacher families and, by weakening public education, making it harder for children of the nonelite to climb up from the economic basement. Although George Orwell’s 1984 was seen by many as a harbinger of the future, totalitarian government never came to America. What we got instead was closer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which alphas and epsilons stay locked in place.
What’s happening to America’s class structure is well illustrated by passenger airliners. Year after year business and first-class grow more opulent and expensive, whereas passengers in the coach or economy sections are crowded together like lima beans in a can. They pay extra for pillows, blankets, legroom, or a better spot in the security line. Food, if available, costs extra and is a close approximation of prison fare that’s been wrapped for transport.
Around the time Congress was passing the more regressive tax structure put forth by President George W. Bush, it dutifully enacted legislation to stiffen bankruptcy laws and make it much more difficult for citizens burdened by unmanageable debt to get out from under it. A key provision of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 erected barriers to filing a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, under which most debts are forgiven. Instead the law required debt-ridden citizens to file under Chapter 13, which kept much of their debt on the books. Bankruptcy judges were still prevented by law from modifying mortgages, although there’s no logic to this exemption. It exists only because the financial giants that buy and sell mortgages have the clout in Congress to make it exist.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the only avowed socialist in Congress, managed to attach an amendment that established a periodic audit of the Federal Reserve to the scandalously tepid Wall Street Reform Act. “As a result of this audit, we now know that as the crisis raged the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion” in secret loans to financial institutions and other well-placed corporations around the world, Sanders reported. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”17 President Obama, the election-year champion of “change,” waited until the fourth year of his first term to propose a task force to investigate the now-cold trail of shady and downright illegal mortgage-lending practices that led to the housing crisis.
Hard-right fanatics spent many thousands of work hours and millions of dollars to win the right to inject unlimited cash into political campaigns. When the Roberts court approved unlimited, untraceable corporate spending for campaign ads in its Citizens United ruling, those same fanatics quickly began to argue that the additional cash wouldn’t make a difference. But long before the ruling, U.S. politics had moved decidedly to the right, a dynamic that had much to do with expanding the Gulag.
Over the last seventy-five years, the liberal stance on economic issues has drifted slowly to the right. Democratic president Bill Clinton, for example, signed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act and removed barriers between banking, insurance, and Wall Street securities trading. Clinton also signed off on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which allowed all sorts of cowboy speculation in derivatives—including deadly credit default swaps—free of federal oversight. It’s difficult to imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt, or for that matter, Republican trustbuster Teddy Roosevelt, working on behalf of such measures.
In the meantime, the Grand Old Party (GOP) rapidly became a party in which even conservatives like Alan Simpson, Bob Dole, and President George H. W. Bush were considered much too liberal. The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower is now the party of novelist Ayn Rand, whose pompous pulp fictional contempt for the nonrich is combined with relentless preaching that acute selfishness is a moral imperative. Still, as Republicans embrace the concept of downsizing budgets, there are signs that some of them may accept reforms in the criminal justice system. The conservative policy group Right on Crime declares that it’s “possible to cut both crime rates and costly incarceration rates” and that prisons “are not the solution for every type of offender. And in some instances, they have the unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk offenders—making them a greater risk to the public than when they entered.” Among signatories to the group’s statement of principles are conservative chieftains Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, and Grover Norquist.18
Still, in stratified twenty-first-century America, society continues kicking people after they’re knocked to the ground. In May 2011 Florida governor Rick Scott signed a bill that forces welfare recipients to submit urine, blood, or hair samples for drug testing. Positive results carry an immediate six-month removal from the revamped welfare program established by Clinton and then–House Speaker Gingrich. The program in 2009 paid average annual cash assistance of $5,100 to a family of three. The Florida drug penalty is a collective punishment for the entire family. A second positive test results in an additional three-year ban on state assistance.
Backers of measures like these assume the poor are a sociological other, a group that’s roughly approximate to the incarcerated. In 2012 congressional Republicans led by Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) sought to require that the unemployed submit to drug testing in order to receive jobless benefits. The status of unemployment made them, in Barrasso’s mind, criminal suspects. The senator never thought to include among these suspects the financial insiders who plunged the economy into crisis by playing fast and loose with the law. Even as the $16 trillion in federal assistance rained down on them, not one had to pee in a cup.