← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Bardamu
Thread ID: 9783 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2003-09-14
2003-09-14 19:22 | User Profile
The Collapse of the Middle Class
A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY by Rep. Bernie Sanders
[url=http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/09/04_sanders.html]http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/0...04_sanders.html[/url]
The corporate media doesn't talk about it much, but the United States is rapidly on its way to becoming three separate nations.
First, there are a small number of incredibly wealthy people who own and control more and more of our country. Second, there is a shrinking middle class in which ordinary people are, in most instances, working longer hours for lower wages and benefits. Third, an increasing number of Americans are living in abject poverty -- going hungry and sleeping out on the streets.
There has always been a wealthy elite in this country, and there has always been a gap between the rich and the poor. But the disparities in wealth and income that currently exist in this country have not been seen in over a hundred years. Today, the richest 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent, and the CEOs of large corporations earn more than 500 times what their average employees make. The nation's 13,000 wealthiest families, 1/100th of one percent of the population, receive almost as much income as the poorest 20 million families in America.
While the rich get richer and receive huge tax breaks from the White House, the middle class is struggling to keep its head above water. The unemployment rate rose to a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June, 2003. There are now 9.4 million unemployed, up more than 3 million since just before Bush became President. Since March, 2001, we have lost over 2.7 million jobs in the private sector, including two million decent-paying manufacturing jobs -- ten percent of our manufacturing sector. Frighteningly, the hemorrhaging of decent paying jobs is now moving into the white-collar sector. Forrester Research Inc. predicts that at least 3.3 million information technology jobs will be lost to low-wage countries by 2015 with the expansion of digitization, the internet and high-speed data networks.
But understanding the pain and anxiety of the middle class requires going beyond the unemployment numbers. There are tens of millions of fully employed Americans who today earn, in inflation adjusted-dollars, less money than they received 30 years ago. In 1973, private-sector workers in the United States were paid on average $9.08 an hour. Today, in real wages, they are paid $8.33 per hour -- more than 8 percent lower. Manufacturing jobs that once paid a living wage are now being done in China, Mexico and other low-wage countries as corporate America ships its plants abroad.
With Wal-Mart replacing General Motors as our largest employer, many workers in the service economy not only earn low wages but also receive minimal benefits. Further, as the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs soar, more and more employers are forcing workers to assume a greater percentage of their health care costs. It is not uncommon now that increases in health care costs surpass the wage increases that workers receive -- leaving them even further behind. With the support of the Bush Administration many companies are also reducing the pensions they promised to their older workers -- threatening the retirement security of millions of Americans.
One of the manifestations of the collapse of the middle class is the increased number of hours that Americans are now forced to work in order to pay the bills. Today, the average American employee works, by far, the longest hours of any worker in the industrialized world. And the situation is getting worse. According to statistics from the International Labor Organization the average American last year worked 1,978 hours, up from 1,942 hours in 1990 -- an increase of almost a week of work. We are now putting more hours into our work than at any time since the 1920s. Sixty-five years after the formal establishment of the 40-hour work week under the Fair Labor Standards Act, almost 40 percent of Americans now work more than 50 hours a week.
And if the middle class is having it tough, what about the 33 million people in our society who are living in poverty, up 1.3 million in the past two years? What about the 11 million trying to make it on a pathetic minimum wage of $5.15 an hour? What about the 42 million who lack any health insurance? What about the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness in this year, 1.3 million of them children? What about the elderly who can't afford the outrageously high cost of the prescription drugs they need? What about the veterans who are on VA waiting lists for their health care?
This country needs to radically rethink our national priorities. The middle class is the backbone of America and it cannot be allowed to disintegrate. We need to revitalize American democracy, and create a political climate where government makes decisions which reflect the needs of all the people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors. We need to see the middle class expand, not collapse.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the only Independent in the U.S. House.
2003-09-15 19:22 | User Profile
Incredible: shove masses of the nation's wealth down the rat holes of public education, Medicare, and Social Securtity, while also letting in million of 3rd world immigrants, and wages for the middle class decline!
Who would have guessed?
What 'Bernie' doesn't get is that it doesn't matter if there are more rich people getting richer. That is all fine and well. What matters is 1) the way these people manipulate the government spending-troughs 2) the lack of middle class people getting richer.
2003-09-15 22:55 | User Profile
Anybody who talks about the growing gap between rich and poor and the stagnation or decline of real wages without also at least mentioning immigration doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
2003-09-16 02:46 | User Profile
I think people who work hard, get educated, take huge financial risk, etc should be paid more.
For every successful businessperson, there are 2 failed ones and 10 who were too afraid to take the risk required for the large return.
-Jay
2003-09-16 06:02 | User Profile
*Originally posted by Lewis Wetzel@Sep 15 2003, 22:55 * ** Anybody who talks about the growing gap between rich and poor and the stagnation or decline of real wages without also at least mentioning immigration doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. **
Right. This whole immigration mess we're in might prove Thomas Chittum right, that it's all a war against the white working class. But the good news is that whites are finally getting wise to it.
2003-09-16 06:45 | User Profile
Originally posted by Ragnar+Sep 16 2003, 06:02 -->
QUOTE* (Ragnar @ Sep 16 2003, 06:02 ) <!--QuoteBegin-Lewis Wetzel@Sep 15 2003, 22:55 * ** Anybody who talks about the growing gap between rich and poor and the stagnation or decline of real wages without also at least mentioning immigration doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. ** Right. This whole immigration mess we're in might prove Thomas Chittum right, that it's all a war against the white working class. But the good news is that whites are finally getting wise to it.**
Let me repeat a post I made at Liberty Forum
[url=http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_business&Number=866903&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1&t=-1#Post866903]Beware of Angry, Jobless Men[/url]
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These middle-aged men are matched by another demographic cadre: Men in their early 20s who don't know where their first years in the workforce are going to take them. In the old days, the script was familiar: They would follow in their fathers' footsteps. They'd get entry-level manufacturing jobs, or, more recently, start out at the bottom in a job that involved computing or technology.
Today, the manufacturing jobs have disappeared and the technology sector is still in recovery. If they're lucky, these young men now can hope for low-level, low-paying jobs in the service sector.
Interesting to see how this dovetails with MacDonald's predictions.
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Given that the continued existence of Judaism (as a politically and culturally powerful group capable of effectively lobbying for their policies) implies that the society will be composed of competing, more or less impermeable groups (as they advocate open immigration and while advocating "National Greatness" tend in practice to be distrustful of any more substantive expression of American cultural unity, such as religious revival), the neoconservative condemnation of multiculturalism must be viewed as lacking in intellectual consistency. The neoconservative prescription for society embraces a particular brand of multiculturalism in which the society as a whole will be culturally fragmented and socially atomistic. These social attributes not only allow Jewish upward mobility, but also are incompatible with the development of highly cohesive, anti-Semitic groups of gentiles; they also are incompatible with group based entitlements and affirmative action programs that would necessarily discriminate against Jews. As Horowitz notes "High levels of cultural fragmentation coupled with the religious option are likely to find relatively benign forms of anti-Semitism coupled with a stable Jewish condition. Presumed Jewish cleverness or brilliance readily emerges under such pluralistic conditions, and such cleverness dissolves with equal suddenness under politically monistic or totalitarian conditions."
Jewish neoconservatives readily accept a radically individualistic society in which Jews would be expected to become economically, politically, and culturally dominant while having minimal allegiance to the lower (disproportionately gentile) social classes. Such a society is likely to result in extreme social pressures as the lower middle classes are placed in an increasingly precarious economic and political situation. As in the case of the intellectual activity of the Frankfurt School, the Jewish neoconservative prescription for the society as a whole is radically opposed to the strategy for the ingroup. Traditional Judaism, and to a considerable extent contemporary Judaism, obtained its strength not only from its intellectual and entrepreneurial elite but also from the unshakable allegiance of responsible, hard-working, lower status Jews of lesser talent whom they patronized.
Kevin MacDonald, Culture of Critique
Otho_Isch
2003-09-16 10:55 | User Profile
What ol' Bernie fails to mention at all is the transfer of a large portion of the American national debt to Israel in various forms. That debt represents lost American material gains and a significant blow to the wellbeing of every working American.
iwannabeanarchy
2003-09-16 21:46 | User Profile
'Deregulation' has often been about failed re-regulation. Have no doubt that actually doing away with regulations on business is good for all of us. The amount of bureaucracy involved in starting and running a business is insane. It doesn't benefit Americans.
Likewise, tax cuts benefit the working class by allowing for increased jobs creation.
The America First Party basically has the right idea: have the government control the border, leave the domestic sphere to the private sector, and watch real Americans amass more wealth than the world has yet seen.
They are probably over the top on free trade, but a lot of views are reasonable here, given the one-two punch of mass immigration and exporting of jobs to 3rd world masses. But immigration is the real nasty: it hits people where they live, by forcing competition in those areas where Americans should have expected to have a lockdown on some rising wages.