During his campaign for president and since taking office, Donald Trump has told Americans that he is a friend of workers. That is not true. His disrespect for workers goes far beyond the 800,000 federal employees who are not receiving paychecks because of the government shutdown he initiated. Many of these workers are now worried about how they will meet their mortgages, put food on the table, and pay to see the doctor. Does Trump even care? When you try, as Trump did, to throw more than 30 million Americans off the health care they have, you are not a friend of workers. When you propose a budget, as Trump did last year, that makes a $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, a $500 billion cut to Medicare, and a $72 billion cut to Social Security, you are not a friend of workers. When you take away overtime pay to millions of workers, as Trump did by rescinding a federal labor rule put in place by Barack Obama, you are not a friend of workers.
Trump likes to claim that there are union workers who support him. Maybe some of them do. But they should understand that all his appointees to the National Labor Relations Board do not favor workers. Day after day, Trump tells us the economy is “absolutely booming,” the “strongest we ever had” and the “greatest in the history” of our nation. That might be true for the millionaire who pay $200,000 to be members of Mar-A-Lago. But it is just not true for millions of middle class and working families. So here is what is really happening in our economy. Since Trump was elected, the five richest Americans have increased their wealth by more than $100 billion. Companies have announced over $1 trillion in stock buybacks last year alone. In 2017, the top 10 corporate executives saw their combined compensation skyrocket by more than 60 percent from the year before, reaching almost $1.9 billion. On average, they each received $185 million in compensation. In 2017, the top 25 Wall Street hedge fund managers made more than $15.3 billion, their highest compensation in years. Incredibly, that amount is nearly double what all 140,000 kindergarten teachers in the United States earned last year.
Yes, the economy is doing great for the top 1 percent. While the very rich get richer, real wages for average workers over the past year are up by all of 1.2 percent at around $9 a week and millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages. Today, the United States has more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s. Since the 2008 Wall Street crash, 46 percent of all new income has gone to the top 1 percent. Chief executive officer incomes have gone up 937 percent over the past 40 years and they now make 361 times more than the average worker. The most important economic reality of our time is that, over the past four decades, there has been an enormous transfer of income and wealth from the middle class to the richest people. Since 1979, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their very share of national income decline from 58 percent to 46 percent, costing them nearly $11,000 per household.
As bad as income inequality is, wealth inequality is even worse. The top tenth of 1 percent in our nation today own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The three richest people own more wealth than the 160 million people in the bottom half. Meanwhile, the median household in the United States has less wealth than it did 35 years ago after adjusting for inflation, and the average wealth of the bottom 40 percent is virtually zero. Shockingly, the wealth gap between white Americans and black Americans has more than tripled over the past 50 years. This is wrong.
Do you know why Americans are outraged, frustrated, and depressed? Do you know why they are falling to diseases of despair like opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide? It has to do with a strong sense of hopelessness because the average worker makes less today than he or she made more than 40 years ago after adjusting for inflation. The economy is clearly not “absolutely booming” when nearly 80 percent of workers live paycheck to paycheck. The economy is certainly not the “strongest we ever had” when 43 percent of households cannot afford basic necessities without going into debt. The economy is of course not the “greatest in the history” of our nation when workers are retiring in even worse financial shape than their parents and when half of older Americans have no retirement savings. The economy is no good when hundreds of thousands of young people are unable to afford to go to college, more than 30 million Americans have no health insurance, one in five cannot afford the medicine prescribed by their doctors, and 40 million live in poverty. The time is long overdue to change our priorities. Instead of an agenda for the wealthy few, we need to create an economy that works for all. It is time to get to work and do it.
Most big companies gave back their windfall in the form (as predicted) of share buy backs. A share buy back is what a CEO does when he/she doesn’t have the imagination to invest it. Generally it did not go to employees. Major shareholders win as the shares increase in value but nobody else does. Remember 90% of Americans are not shareholders, so only the rich should have got richer – except, of course, the market is almost down from 12 months ago despite the sugar high of the cuts. The other major shareholders are foreign investors. A lot of the money was handed out headed outside the US. So Trump and the top 1% did quite OK (especially as they got the biggest income cuts) and foreign holders and CEOs did OK too – China, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Bahrain must be happy. The rest of us will carry the debt/deficit legacy for decades.
Trump personally did especially well as the tax advantages for real estate were preserved and enhanced and inheritance tax (which impacts wealthy property owners most) was killed. One estimate is he will benefit by about $1B. This is why, during the recent election, the GOP candidates rarely mentioned the tax cuts as they were a disaster. I used to understand (and partly empathize with) the anti-debt, anti-deficit, pro-business GOP. However, unarguably, Trump has hurt a lot of businesses, massively increased debt and massively increased deficit and given the money to the rich like himself. Trickle down, as usual, is not working as spare money the rich have tends to go into further share investments (which do not benefit the companies they but, just the person selling the share – another wealthy person or foreign entity). If by now you do not agree this administration is simply a kleptocracy I suggest you but a dictionary and learn to add up.
“The investment boom that wasn’t.” That’s how Bank of America Merrill Lynch economists categorized what’s happened in the US economy since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed a little over a year ago. What was theoretically supposed to be a boon for US companies — and by extension, the broader economy — has not had its intended effect. The analysis comes against a backdrop of fresh calls for an economic slowdown, an unprecedented government shutdown, anduncertainty surrounding US-China trade relations.
Indeed, the current economic picture stands somewhat in contrast to what Trump said upon the release of House Republicans’ tax reform bill in late 2017 — that tax cuts would be the “rocket fuel our economy needs to soar higher than ever before.” On the heels of the tax package that gave a boost to the country’s wealthiest, corporations retur
ned much of their tax-cut-fueled earnings back to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks and juicier dividends. Goldman Sachs said $1 trillion in buybacks, a record, were authorized in 2018. More granularly, S&P Dow Jones Indices estimated in May that corporations spent $564 billion on buybacks and $428 billion on dividends in one year through that month. The “tax cut story” has always seemed overdone, Bank of America said, as expectations of future growth are a bigger driver of capital expenditures than the actual cost of capital — which corporate tax cuts theoretically lowered. And investors have indeed soured on growth expectations, the firm has found. “Leading indicators of capex have been weakening for a year now, and in the fall US indicators started to turn down as well,” global economists Ethan Harris and Aditya Bhave told clients Friday. “Falling growth expectations are undercutting capital spending growth, with more weakness ahead.”
According to Oxfam, the number of billionaires has doubled since the global financial crisis of 2008, even as average families have struggled mightily to recover. In contrast to the soaring fortunes of the global financial elite, the wealth of the world’s poorest fell by $500 million each day in 2018—an overall decline of 11 percent. “The economy we have today is fundamentally inhuman,” Paul O’Brien, vice president for policy and campaigns at Oxfam America, said in an interview with the Huffington Post. Singling out U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the rich as the kind of upward redistribution that has worsened inequality at the expense of the world’s poor and working class, O’Brien said that only transformative political and economic changes across the globe will be sufficient to close the gap between the rich and everyone else.
“The recent U.S. tax law is a master class on how to favor massive corporations and the richest citizens,” O’Brien said in a statement. “The law rewards U.S. companies that have trillions stashed offshore, encourages U.S. companies to dodge foreign taxes on their foreign profits, and fuels a global race to the bottom that benefits big business and wealthy individuals.” “The only winners in the race to the bottom on corporate tax are the wealthiest among us. Now is the time to work towards a new set of tax rules that work for the many, not the few,” he continued, echoing the popular slogans of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “We need economic, political, and tax reform to level the playing field if we want to restore prosperity and opportunity for all, including women, girls whose needs are so often overlooked.”
Citing United Nations figures, Oxfam points out that crucial public services throughout the world—including in wealthy nations like the U.S. and the U.K.—are suffering from crippling austerity as the global financial elite and massive corporations hoard economic gains, thanks in large part to regressive government policies that allow them to pay minimal taxes and enrich executives with massive pay packages. Meanwhile, workers are forced to scrape by on starvation wages. “People generally are beginning to realize that they have been sold a bad bill of goods,” O’Brien said. “Today, 262 million kids are going to stay home because there is no funding for their education, 10,000 people today will die because they don’t have access to basic healthcare that could easily be funded through proper fiscal systems.”
Oxfam’s analysis concludes that only a “human economy” that guarantees essential services like healthcare, education, and housing to all—funded by higher taxes on the ultra-rich—can begin to resolve the inequities that are producing mass suffering and threatening the existence of the planet. According to Oxfam, “if the richest one percent paid an additional 0.5 percent tax on their wealth, an estimated $418 billion would be raised a year. This alone would ensure an education for the 262 million children currently not in school and provide healthcare that could save the lives of more than three million people.” “Inequality is not inevitable,” Oxfam’s report concludes, “it’s a political choice.”
Four years on, thinking I should settle down, I returned to the United States. It felt quite a lot like stepping back into that other violent, impoverished world, where anxiety runs high and people are quarrelsome. I had, in fact, come back to the flip side of Afghanistan and Iraq: to what America’s wars have done to America. Where I live now, in the Homeland, there are not enough shelters for the homeless. Most people are either overworked or hurting for jobs; housing is overpriced; hospitals, crowded and understaffed; schools, largely segregated and not so good. Opioid or heroin overdose is a popular form of death; and men in the street threaten women wearing hijab. Did the American soldiers I covered in Afghanistan know they were fighting for this?
One night I tuned in to the Democrats’ presidential debate to see if they had any plans to restore the America I used to know. To my amazement, I heard the name of my peaceful mountain hideaway: Norway. Bernie Sanders was denouncing America’s crooked version of “casino capitalism” that floats the already rich ever higher and flushes the working class. He said that we ought to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.” He believes, he added, in “a society where all people do well. Not just a handful of billionaires.” That certainly sounds like Norway. For ages they’ve worked at producing things for the use of everyone — not the profit of a few.
The truth is that almost a quarter of American startups are not founded on brilliant new ideas, but on the desperation of men or women who can’t get a decent job. The majority of all American enterprises are solo ventures having zero payrolls, employing no one but the entrepreneur, and often quickly wasting away. Sanders said that he was all for small business, too, but that meant nothing “if all of the new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent.” (As George Carlin said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”)
Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a system that works much better than ours, yet even the Democratic presidential candidates, who say they love or want to learn from those countries, don’t seem to know how they actually work. Proof that they do work is delivered every year in data-rich evaluations by the U.N. and other international bodies. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual report on international well-being, for example, measures 11 factors, ranging from material conditions like affordable housing and employment to quality of life matters like education, health, life expectancy, voter participation, and overall citizen satisfaction. Year after year, all the Nordic countries cluster at the top, while the United States lags far behind. In addition, Norway ranked first on the U.N. Development Program’s Human Development Index for 12 of the last 15 years, and it consistently tops international comparisons of such matters as democracy, civil and political rights, and freedom of expression and the press.
What is it, though, that makes the Scandinavians so different? Since the Democrats can’t tell you and the Republicans wouldn’t want you to know, let me offer you a quick introduction. What Scandinavians call the Nordic Model is a smart and simple system that starts with a deep commitment to equality and democracy. That’s two concepts combined in a single goal because, as far as they are concerned, you can’t have one without the other. Right there they part company with capitalist America, now the most unequal of all the developed nations, and consequently a democracy no more. Political scientists say it has become an oligarchy — a country run at the expense of its citizenry by and for the super rich. Perhaps you noticed that.
In the last century, Scandinavians, aiming for their egalitarian goal, refused to settle solely for any of the ideologies competing for power — not capitalism or fascism, not Marxist socialism or communism. Geographically stuck between powerful nations waging hot and cold wars for such doctrines, Scandinavians set out to find a path in between. That path was contested — by socialist-inspired workers on the one hand and capitalist owners and their elite cronies on the other — but it led in the end to a mixed economy. Thanks largely to the solidarity and savvy of organized labor and the political parties it backed, the long struggle produced a system that makes capitalism more or less cooperative, and then redistributes equitably the wealth it helps to produce. Struggles like this took place around the world in the twentieth century, but the Scandinavians alone managed to combine the best ideas of both camps, while chucking out the worst.
In 1936, the popular U.S. journalist Marquis Childs first described the result to Americans in the book Sweden: The Middle Way. Since then, all the Scandinavian countries and their Nordic neighbors Finland and Iceland have been improving upon that hybrid system. Today in Norway, negotiations between the Confederation of Trade Unions and the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise determine the wages and working conditions of most capitalist enterprises, public and private, that create wealth, while high but fair progressive income taxes fund the state’s universal welfare system, benefitting everyone. In addition, those confederations work together to minimize the disparity between high-wage and lower-wage jobs. As a result, Norway ranks with Sweden, Denmark, and Finland among the most income-equal countries in the world, and its standard of living tops the charts.
So here’s the big difference: in Norway, capitalism serves the people. The government, elected by the people, sees to that. All eight of the parties that won parliamentary seats in the last national election, including the conservative Høyre party now leading the government, are committed to maintaining the welfare state. In the U.S., however, neoliberal politics put the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and capitalists have used the wealth generated by their enterprises (as well as financial and political manipulations) to capture the state and pluck the chickens. They’ve done a masterful job of chewing up organized labor. Today, only 11% of American workers belong to a union. In Norway, that number is 52%; in Denmark, 67%; in Sweden, 70%.
In the U.S., oligarchs maximize their wealth and keep it, using the “democratically elected” government to shape policies and laws favorable to the interests of their foxy class. They bamboozle the people by insisting that all of us have the “freedom” to create a business in the “free” marketplace, which implies that being hard up is our own fault. In the Nordic countries, on the other hand, democratically elected governments give their populations freedom from the market by using capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone. That liberates their people from the tyranny of the mighty profit motive that warps so many American lives, leaving them freer to follow their own dreams — to become poets or philosophers, bartenders or business owners, as they please. Maybe our politicians don’t want to talk about the Nordic Model because it shows so clearly that capitalism can be put to work for the many, not just the few.
The issue of income inequality is front and center in the American conversation. A recent poll showed 66 percent of Americans agree that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed in the United States. Instead, the rich are getting richer and wealth gap is increasing. As the run-up to the 2020 election begins, there is one notable policy proposal to reduce income inequality — and it would not cost the taxpayers a dime. That proposal is codetermination: a system that allows employees at large corporations to elect members of the boards of directors. With workers serving as directors, it is argued they would be in a much better position to obtain higher wages for themselves and block excessive management compensation packages. Codetermination has been in effect in Germany, Scandinavia, and other northern European countries. And, if Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has anything to say on the matter, it will be implemented in the US as well.
Warren is the first major Democratic candidate to announce her plans to run for president, having set up an exploratory committee on New Year’s Eve. Her rhetoric foreshadows a campaign centered on anti-corporate populism and income inequality. “How did we get here? Billionaires and big corporations decided they wanted more of the pie. And they enlisted politicians to cut them a fatter slice,” Warren announced in a video sent to supporters. The main selling point for Warren’s federal chartering proposal has been a challenge for income inequality. Proponents view the requirement that employee-elected board members make up 40 percent of corporate directors as a needed check on the power of capital. “My bill will help the American economy return to the era when American companies and American workers did well together,” Warren declared when the legislative proposal was rolled out last summer.
Advocates note that for the bulk of the post–World War II years, labor shared in the growing productivity, with workers’ living standards rising during the postwar boom. That began to change in the 1970s. Despite continued economic growth and productivity, wage rates flattened out. Advocates point out that over the last decade, big American companies have dedicated 93 percent of earnings to shareholders — redirecting trillions of dollars that could have gone to workers or long-term investments in these corporations. Eighty percent of the value of stock is owned by only 10 percent of the population, and half of Americans own no stock at all. This has accelerated the trend towards greater inequality. And, according to progressive economists, this tunnel-vision dedication to short-term shareholder profits has had other consequences.
“Too much money, chasing too few assets had led to asset inflation and financial volatility. And too little capital invested in productive investments,” Robert Hockett, a co-author of the Warren bill, told WhoWhatWhy. Supporters of the bill view the German codetermination system as a model. They point to the strong German economy, where income differentials between CEOs and rank-and-file workers are much smaller than in the US. Less inequality translates into a stronger middle class and more consumer purchasing power, according to the bill’s proponents.
King’s civil rights story has a clear beginning — the Montgomery bus boycott — and an apparently triumphant ending — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King’s dream of economic equality has been harder to achieve. Why? For one, he demanded that Americans restructure capitalism, both at home and abroad. But he also challenged a core part of the American Dream: the false assumption that those who work hard can move upward. King rejected the bootstrap myth, because he understood that many people, notably those of color, didn’t even have boots. At the end of his life, King had embraced a full-throated condemnation of the American economic system that favored wealth and demeaned those caught in poverty. But there were glimpses of this critique in earlier moments. His “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in 1963 laid out a broad economic struggle that black Americans had and would continue to face without adequate redress of civil and economic rights.
Delivering his famous speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King told audiences, “One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. . . . In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check . . . that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” Justice in this sense was both protection from segregationists and access to that “vast ocean of material prosperity.” But only the “dream” part of the speech persists in our national story. White Americans clung to King’s emphasis on the “content of character,” because the phrase appeared to argue for a colorblind society, deflecting attention from the racial injustice built into the American economic system. By not truly remembering the whole speech, we fail to comprehend the condemnation of the very system King was challenging. Without economic justice, walking in the front door of a store or eating at the counter was meaningless, because the poor couldn’t afford the goods.
Even at the great moments of triumph of the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, King reiterated this economic message. During his 1965 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, he boldly stated, “I still dream that one day all of God’s children will have food and clothing and material well-being for their bodies, culture and education for their minds, and freedom for their spirits.” His dream, he said, had turned into a nightmare, because capitalism continued to deprive Americans of spiritual wealth and genuine justice. But he still held out hope for the nation. King believed that American capitalism would and should collapse on itself, so that a better economic system could arise in its place. He was not a Marxist, though, because he believed that the materialism in communism undermined that system, too. His “world house” would be built on something different from consumption. “Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets life is social,” he said in a 1967 speech. An alternative system would have to tackle root issues, by first understanding that “the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”
For King, economic justice was at the core of his religion and his political activism. While his detractors, including members of the Johnson administration, thought his pursuit of economic justice was beyond his level of competence as a preacher, it was actually at the core of his being. King’s public ministry had begun to challenge American democracy and capitalism in ways that went beyond access to the ballot box and consumer goods. He also noted that the nation’s assertion of global dominance was an extension of business interests that benefited from military spending. This is the radical King that many had come to know by the end of his career. He was in Memphis to launch the Poor People’s Campaign, working in a concrete way with sanitation workers striking for better wages and working conditions.
An economy that’s rigged to benefit the richest 1% has left most of America behind. While wages for workers have remained flat for decades, expenses for healthcare, housing, and most basic needs have risen. Alongside record concentrations of income and wealth at the top, America’s racial wealth divide has persisted – or worsened. As people of color make up a larger share of the diversifying US population, that persistent racial wealth divide is bringing down America’s median wealth. But while wealth at the middle falters, it’s soaring at the top. In other words, the 1% are profiting off ongoing racial economic inequality. All this is happening against a backdrop of seemingly good economic news. Black and Latino unemployment rates reached historic lows in 2018, and median income has slowly inched up for all households in the last few years.
But measures of wealth – what you own minus what you owe – tell a very different story. Those were our findings in Dreams Deferred, a new study on the racial wealth divide for the Institute for Policy Studies. Since the early 1980s, median wealth among black and Latino families has been stuck at less than $10,000. The median black family today owns $3,600 – just 2% of the $147,000 of wealth the median white family owns. The median Latino family has assets worth $6,600 – just 4% of the median white family. In other words, the median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family. “Median wealth” refers to the household at the exact middle of wealth distribution – with half of households above and half below. That’s different from “average wealth”, which skews the numbers by including the wealth of the richest 1%. (Average white wealth, for example, was $930,000 in 2016. But the ordinary white person isn’t close to being a millionaire.)
Changes in median wealth give us a multi-decade understanding of economic security and wellbeing. Since 1983, median wealth for all US households declined by 3%, adjusting for inflation. Over this same period, the median Black family saw their wealth drop by more than half. Meanwhile, the number of households with $10m or more soared by 856%. If the trajectory of the past three decades continues, by 2050 the median white family will have $174,000 of wealth, while Latino median wealth will be just $8,600 – and black median wealth will head downward to $600. In fact, the median black family is on track to reach zero wealth by 2082. While the middle stagnates and the very top soars away, there’s also surging growth at the bottom end of the spectrum. A growing number of households are “underwater” when it comes to wealth. The proportion of all US households – of any race – with zero or “negative” wealth (meaning their debts exceed the value of their assets) has grown from one in six in 1983 to one in five households today.
As President Donald Trump continues to demand more than $5 billion in taxpayer funding for a border wall, a growing number of voices are calling for such funds to be diverted to a far more pressing issue: water. The rapidly decaying infrastructure of water systems across the country is bringing dangerous levels of lead and other contaminants into homes, and action needs to be taken to upgrade them. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka highlighted the issue in an open letter to Trump this week in which he urged the president to consider “a true emergency that puts millions of our citizens at risk.” Besides Newark, more than 20 other New Jersey cities and towns have elevated lead levels in their tap water, as do many other municipalities, said the letter. And while Flint, Mich., is the poster child for poor water management, it’s not the only place suffering a crisis that demands immediate action. “I join in solidarity with the 11-year-old girl known as Little Miss Flint who told you that spending $5 billion to make water safe is a much better way to protect Americans than building the wall,” said Baraka. U.S. infrastructure is reaching the end of its economically useful and serviceable life cycle, according to a new report from NACE International, a group created in 1943 by 11 corrosion engineers from the pipeline industry. The acronym stands for National Association of Corrosion Engineers. “Today, bridges, pipelines, roads, power generation and transmission, and water treatment facilities [are] all are at risk of corrosion-related failure,” according to the association’s 2019 Spotlight on Corrosion Report.
To the Editor:
I worry about the nation my children will inherit. I worry about the erosion of confidence in our government and its institutions by the working-class community. I worry that more and more people believe that all politicians and public officials are corrupt, partisan and out for themselves. I worry that as this point of view becomes more accepted, the ground for autocrats and strongmen becomes more fertile, and our democracy more imperiled. I worry that our representatives, on both sides of the aisle, are so removed from the reality of working-class life that they fail to see, and fail to understand, the true driving forces of working people’s discontent.
Some Republican leaders have responded to this discontent by making scapegoats out of immigrants and minorities, and some Democratic leaders have falsely characterized working people as ignorant bigots, and then dismissed them as a lost cause. Members of the working-class community have lost confidence in mainstream politicians and our institutions because their needs have been ignored. They vote for fringe candidates out of desperation, because they feel they have no voice in the establishment. For decades, as our nation increased its wealth, working people saw little improvement in their lives. They helped to make our country prosperous, but, increasingly, have been unable to pay their bills or afford health care.
For decades, corporate leaders and their shareholders built their personal wealth by cutting worker benefits, eliminating pensions, dismantling unions and demanding ever higher levels of productivity and efficiency, while eliminating any sense of job security. For decades, our representatives in Washington allowed this degradation to continue unchecked and have often enriched themselves by turning a blind eye or by being openly complicit. Our political leaders allowed workers to be treated as just another disposable commodity. This lack of respect for a group of people absolutely critical to the success of our nation has torn our country apart and threatens everyone’s future. We must find a more equitable balance between wages, productivity and profits. A rise in productivity should trigger a rise in salary, and when profits soar, the working people instrumental in that success should share in its bounty.
Also, our society as a whole must acknowledge the essential contributions of the working-class community, and acknowledge that working people’s lives have value. Someone needs to do the nuts-and-bolts, hands-on work that keeps our country going, and those who do deserve more than hardship for their efforts. And, finally, our political leaders must actually do their jobs and advocate for the needs of all people, and not just their corporate sponsors. If we can start down this road of economic and social justice, then I believe: Confidence in our government and its institutions would begin to strengthen. The immoral scapegoating of immigrants and minorities would find little support. The sense of hopelessness felt by many in the working class would begin to subside, as would, perhaps, the rates of drug abuse and suicide. And political opportunists and autocrats, who are a greater danger to our nation than any external enemy, would have no foothold. Steps must be taken to include everyone in our nation’s prosperity. Only then will we bridge the gulf that divides us.
Daniel Wasik
Fanwood, N.J.
The writer is a precision machinist.
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