Understanding the Fury in America

“Too much wealth divorces most people from their humanity.” – Anonymous

[Note to my regular readers: As a result of feedback, I’ve decided to add a new in first section to my draft book on economic inequality explaining why the issues are relevant and not merely of historical interest. This is the first of the series.]

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” - Adam Smith (1723-1790)

There is a fury in America. A group of the white working class, large enough to determine the results of an election, is angry with the Democratic Party.

It’s not racism. Enough of this group once voted for Obama. The key to understanding this new rage is to see what has changed for them and why.

Once upon a time, an average family could afford a house, a car, a vacation and all on a one eight-hour workday job. This was the result of the Democratic Party’s policies that I will review in detail in the following chapters. The present situation, in which the average person can’t afford mere rent without taking on multiple jobs at once, is also the result of the Democratic Party’s policies that rejected and vilified those earlier policies as leftist or socialism.

This rising economic inequality is a major political issue and has been known for decades. Democrat politicians have promised to end it, and they failed. Although Carter, Clinton and Obama honestly believed that their reforms would reduce economic inequality, as the chart of the Gini coefficient below reveals, their policies failed completely. This was no accident.

I will explain how they were deceived.

• For example, while FDR regulated the banks effectively, Clinton removed that precise restraint and laid the basis for the 2008 Crisis. Why would he do a thing like that?

• While FDR’s reforms after the Great Depression set the basis for a new increasing economic equality, Obama’s did nothing to affect the high level economic inequality. What wrong economic theory influenced him?

While I am being very critical of the Democratic Party, I also see it as the only hope to restore the sharing of prosperity by which America once led the world. However it is the rank-and-file members who need to take control of the party to restore it to the party for the average citizen, not a party benefiting only snobbish, coastal elites.

There are also conservatives who are gravely concerned about the issues that I identify in this book. I quote these conservative sources quite frequently, but it’s highly unlikely they will have any influence on the reinvented Republican party as it is presently governed.

A key term that has deceived many members of the Democratic Party is the claim by its leaders to be ‘centrists’. That word suggests a middle of the road approach. That is quite misleading. Centrists tend to be liberal on social policies but, as I will demonstrate, are Reagan level conservative on financial policies, in particular low taxes on the rich and deregulation of the banks.

There are several factors that have caused the wild swing to the new right wing movement. Many of these have been well explained elsewhere. I will concentrate on the economic factors that are never fully explained. - As Democrat strategist James Carville said it best: "it's the economy, stupid." Unfortunately the elite who control the Democratic Party have not taken that to heart.

What follows is an overview of the fundamental premise of this book. The evidence in support is developed in the sections that follow.

When The Democratic Party Got Mislead

There can be successful reform again. We can unmask the billionaires’ deception by looking back at that time when the prosperity of America was shared more fairly with the salaried classes. We can see this different analysis by the measure of inequality represented by the Gini Coefficient, developed by Corrado Gini in his 1912 paper titled “Variabilità e mutabilità”.

[Note: The Gini Coefficient stayed above 48% through Obama, the first Trump administration and Biden. (Government Census Report, 2022, Fig. 1)

The conclusions of this graph are plain to see.

The Gini Coefficient disproves the trickle-down theory:

• The coefficient remained low through both Republican and Democrat presidencies: FDR/Truman,Eisenhower,Kennedy,Johnson,and the Nixon/Ford administrations. There was increasing prosperity for all. The economic tide raised all boats, as JFK once said.

• It began to rise, surprisingly, under Jimmy Carter — not Ronald Reagan.

• From Carter and afterwards, it rose and stayed high through both Republican and Democrat presidencies. Now that same tide raises only yachts.

This was not an accident but a result of strategy by the predatory billionaires that I will explain.

Follow The Money

It’s straightforward to see who is doing it: ‘follow the money’.

According to Forbes,

•In 1982 there were 13 billionaires in the US.

•In 2023 there were 801.

As that Forbes headline exposed: “The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than The Bottom 50% Of The Country.”

There is a class war, and as Warren Buffett, a member of the upper class, has observed, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (Business Insider, Aug 25, 2020.)

However, the rich have convinced many of the American people that there is no class war. That rather than being the opposition on an economic battlefield, they are their saviors. The narrative even goes as far as claiming the policies that once brought economic equality were harmful to the working class of the United States. The policies themselves being labeled as socialistic, leftist, or even worse, Marxist notions—one step on the slippery slope to communism.

As saliva rises in the mouth of a conditioned dog at the sound of a bell, an image of three families living in a three-bedroom apartment in 1950s Russia appears in the minds of the financially desperate class at the mention of the word “socialism”.

Yet, FDR’s policies were high taxes on the rich, socialism for the salaried classes, and tight regulation of the banking industry. These policies laid the basis for a fair sharing of prosperity with the middle and working classes—and a stable financial system until 2008. With his high tax and socialist policies, he was the most popular of US presidents, having been elected for four terms. This proves the looming threat of billionaires pulling their wealth out of the United States should they be taxed more, is nothing more than fear mongering. It is transparently a bogus claim with a motive.

Knowledge is Power

Dostoyevsky disclosed the billionaires’ method, "The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison." We can rephrase Dostoyevsky: The best way to keep the salaried classes from winning the class war, is to make sure they never realize there is a class war.

Here the billionaire-controlled media has successfully used the Russian tactic known as the firehose of falsehood. The suffering classes believe such a thorough deception could happen in Russia, but never in America. They don’t see who their prison wardens are.

Their key tactic: the moneyed class keeps knowledge of several systems essential for the stealth upper transfer of wealth secret. There are no courses in the universities or colleges on the causes of economic inequality.

Look at all the influential economists. Prior to the 2008 meltdown, they were united in praising the stability of the financial system. The House of Representatives was so appalled by their favoured economists’ failure to see the fragility of the system that it convened a special committee to investigate their failure.(House Investigation, July 2010).

Financial journalists also do not understand the financial system with any depth. They were completely taken in by bank propaganda that everything had never been better prior to ‘08. Gillian Tett, editor of the Financial Times, wrote a paper for the Central Bank of France explaining why the financial journalists were so wrong. She attributed it to a process called “social secrecy”.

Relying on her anthropological background, she noted that elements of society always keep knowledge of the inner workings of certain systems secret and, she writes, that’s what’s being done in America (across the world) regarding the financial system today. (Bank of France, Review, July, 2010)

We don’t have any university courses discussing the inner workings of the financial systems for the general public because as Tett puts it, what matters most, “is not discussed because those topics are considered boring, irrelevant, taboo, or just unthinkable”.

It’s not just the financial, but also crucial aspects of the tax code and corporate systems that are kept from the average educated voter. While there are a few courses in universities that could give some background, they are designed and offered only to those who are going to become part of the system and benefit from it. Never to those who might be critical of it and wish to reform it.

As Old as History

It’s not new. Throughout history there have been groups of predatory rich people attempting to consolidate wealth and widen economic inequality. The Scottish economist Adam Smith, considered the father of modern economic theory, exposed their motto in his book The Wealth of Nations as the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” (p148)

Charles Koch modernized the billionaire worldview: “I want my fair share—and that's all of it”. (The Real News Network, Oct. 29, 2012)

Too much money divorces most people from their humanity, which creates sociopaths. We have seen the rise of the charismatic billionaire sociopath. Dominating social media, they have triumphed as the saviors of America. They have captured the anti-establishment anti-Democrat frustration.

The Path Forward

Our investigation will start there at the tipping point date of 1970. There will be two parts:

• The first is to look at the actual policies that crept in, especially those that deceived Jimmy Carter and the subsequent Democratic Party presidents.

• In the second part of the book I will open the black box of the financial, corporate and tax systems; show why all of the reforms to reduce economic inequality were designed for failure—and did fail, then provide positive, effective reforms to restore the fair sharing of the wealth of the nation.

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Acknowledgement: Image by Fajrul_Falah on pixabay.