The following is an excerpt from William Greider’s book Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and
redeeming Promise) of Our Country. Greider is a conservative, but he is a
conservative that does not believe in the direction of conservatives have gone
for the past 35 years. He is a journalists writing in the field of economics.
Those who have read my blog know that I am liberal but also affirm many
conservative beliefs but think the Republican party took a radical turn with
the election of Ronald election and the Democrats have not put up much of a
fight against the radical changes in our society. Read the following excerpt
and see what you think. Better yet, buy the book and read it in its entirety. If accepted this would go a long way in getting the country working together again and put the middle class back as a primary focus.
3. The triumph of the
free-market ideology and its destruction of an equitable society. For the
last thirty years, conservative reforms like the deregulation of industries and
finance and regressive tax cuts gradually eviscerated the government's
protective mantle. Families were exposed to the harsh edge of market forces.
Businesses and banks were freed to innovate and maximize returns, but also to
discard their long-standing obligations to workers and society. The federal
government essentially switched sides in the enduring contest between capital
and labor.
The reigning conservative order, one could say, mainly
produced more billionaires and debt while leaving a broad wake of social
dislocation and insecurity. The purchasing power of industrial wages has been
stagnant for thirty years, while profits and productivity have boomed. A
striking consensus has formed among the political elites of both parties and,
until very recently, no one of prominence was willing to question the reign of
the markets.
One million households in the uppermost tier-the top 1
percent-now collectively earn the same amount as the 60 million families who
make up the lower two-thirds of the income ladder. Major corporations
destabilized middle-class security by walking away from the unwritten social
contract they had once embraced. Health care, pensions, job security, and other
elements of worker protection were gutted or revoked by right-wing reformers in
Washington. This is partly why so many families are caught in the debtor's trap
and spiraling downward.
But the conservative order has essentially failed as an
economic system and its advocates are now in political disarray. It failed for
practical reasons as well as its ideological contradictions. The size of
government and of federal subsidies for financial and business interests did
not get smaller. Instead, conservative economics merely withdrew the assurances
business had previously given people, whether they were workers or those in
need. The "market friendly" regime failed because it did not lead to
the widely shared prosperity its sponsors promised would appear once they got
government out of the way.
In another era, this economic deterioration would have led
to a rapid shift in politics and the governing agenda, but it is not clear
whether Democrats are ready to pursue significant changes. For three decades,
most Democrats gradually retreated before the rightward march in economic
policy or collaborated actively in making market forces dominant over government
interventions. The social stresses resulting from the gross and growing
economic inequality were occasionally lamented, but even when they held
Congress or the White House, Democrats were largely silent on the wage
question. The disparities could become politically explosive if a sharp
adjustment in the US economy's debt-supported consumption occurs and families
have no choice but to accept falling living standards. Many already are. The
pain and loss will not be equitably distributed. The least among us will suffer
the most, followed by many millions in the broad middle. Those at the very top
will suffer hardly at all. Social injustice compounds desperation and anger. The
politics of class conflict-supposedly extinguished by the prosperity that
followed World War II-is making a comeback as America's enormous middle class
is gradually being dismantled.
William Greider. Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and
Redeeming Promise) of Our Country (p. 20). Kindle Edition.
One of my favorite books of all time was Grieder's book "Secrets of the Temple". Written back in the 1980's so it's very out of date now but will tell you more about economic and monetary history in this country than almost anything else. Exhaustively researched and detailed.
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