Well, as a once mediocre orator and former (thank god!) Vice President of these United States of America once said: “[Go] F**k yourself”. That remark was aimed at Senator Patrick Leahy, but today’s GOP, more extreme and ambitious than even the Bush administration, seems to have implicitly adopted it as their slogan when it comes to what they plan to do to people like you and me.
The Republicans in Congress, and in states across the country are making no bones about their agenda: they desire to kill unions and worker’s rights. They desire to kill the EPA, and kill any regulation regarding worker safety, drug safety, food safety, environmental safety — you name it. They want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare reform with a thousand cuts until nothing is left but private accounts managed by by their buddies at Wall Street to which you are forced to contribute. They want to privatize prisons and schools.
They want an end to financial assistance to college students and their families (except football and basketball players, of course). They want to kill any investment in alternative fuels and public transportation. They desire the awarding of no-bid contracts to their “friends,” i.e., the people who contributed the most to their political campaigns. Oh, and they want to make it ever more difficult, if not impossible, for innovative small businesses to compete with the corporate behemoths that dominate our political landscape. Indeed, without a middle class how can small businesses not dedicated to serving the desires of the rich survive?
In short, the goal of the New and Improved Tea Party Republican Governors and Legislators is to drive a stake through the heart of anyone who still believes he or she is a member of the middle class. As one of their own recently remarked those of us “slobs” in the middle class are a “different breed” the implication being that we are parasites on the body of corporate wealth and power rather than the collective engine of human labor and productivity that made that wealth and power possible.
Let us stop for a moment, now that the Republican “game plan” to dismantle the government and protect their wealthy benefactors at all costs has been exposed in all its naked infamy, and consider what type of country the realization of their goals would create. Imagine a world where there is no safety net. Imagine a country where wages and salaries are steadily decreased. Imagine a country where financial panics and “great recessions” are a regular occurrence every few years. Imagine a country where the water and the food are not fit to drink and eat, and the air isn’t fit to breath. To take the lyrics from a popular John Lennon song lyrics out of context, “It isn’t hard to do.”
(cont.)
The last time in our history in which government primarily served the interests of the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the “rest of us” was roughly the period between 1880 and 1932. While comparisons between different historical eras are always fraught with the risk that the past and future are too different, that too much has changed, to make those comparisons valid and useful, I think in this case, it behooves us to examine the striking similarities between these two eras, because I believe that that particular past is truly prologue to the future the Republicans and their Puppet-masters (The Koch Brothers, yes, and Wall Street, but also many, many more industries and multinational corporations who have a stake in forging a new America) wish to bring about with their heavy handed attack on the American middle class.
Unions and Income Levels:
Let’s start with unions and income, since the point of the spear for the GOP attack on the middle class is aimed squarely at eliminating unions and the right to collectively bargain.
In 2010, Union membership was in decline. According to the Bureau of Labor StatisticsOnly 6.9% of private sector employees, and 36% of public sector employees belonged to unions. However, those who did belong to unions were doing better economically than their non-union brethren:
In 2010, among full-time wage and salary workers, union members had median usual weekly earnings of $917, while those who were not represented by unions had median weekly earnings of $717.
Over a year’s time, that means the annual median salary for those who belonged to unions (or who benefited from union contracts even if they were not union members themselves) was $10,400 greater than non-union workers. That’s a significant difference. In percentage terms, non-union workers earned only 78% of the annual income of union employees. Even in an era where over the last 28 years overall union membership in the private sector has declined from 20.1% in 1983 to today’s level of only 11.9%, unions still have a significant effect on wages and salaries. Unions still provide many people with a path to the middle class, including better health benefits and pensions that have almost disappeared from non-union jobs.
So you can see why Republicans want to eradicate unions from our nation. And you can also realize why the decline in union jobs has led to stagnation in the overall median income of Americans. Indeed, over the ten year period 1998-2008, median incomes declined after adjusting for inflation:
Median household fell to $50,303 last year [2008], from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.
Now let’s look at 1900, a year I picked arbitrarily as falling roughly in the middle of the period encompassing the Gilded Age and the years that led to the Great Depression. The year 1900, also preceded America’s initial progressive reform movement and the laws regarding workers, antitrust legislation, child labor, etc. that were passed between 1900 and the New Deal, as well as the growth in labor union membership which rose.
In 1900, the total union membership in the private sector was 6.5 %, not much different than it is today. However, there were no public sector unions. None. The first public sector employees that were granted the right to collectively bargain were New York City employees in the late fifties. Federal employees were granted collective bargaining rights by President Kennedy in 1962. So in 1900, total union membership was roughly 5.4% less than it is today.
Of course, labor union had little power in 1900 compared to today, nor did the National Labor Relations Board exist.
The median annual income (i.e., the point dividing the income of the upper 50% of earners from the lower 50% of earners) in 1900 was $438 (source: US Diplomatic Mission to Germany).
I’ve been unable to find a figure for that adjusts that 1900 median income figure or inflation into 2010 dollars, but Professor of Economics Timothy Taylor, Managing Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives has stated that the per capita income (i.e. average income, a figure higher than the median income) of US workers in the United Sates in 1900 was roughly $5000 per year, a figure below the current national poverty line and equivalent to the average annual income of the citizens of Mexico.
[M]ost Americans in 1900 were living in what we today would consider poverty. In present-day dollars, per capita American income in 1900 averaged around $5000, less than a fifth the current level. In other words, the typical American in 1900 had about the same income that a typical Mexican has today.
It should be noted that for much of the past 100 years, Mexico has been governed as a corrupt one party state that operated to benefit the wealthy and political elites of the country at the expense of the lower classes.
The party operated much like an urban political machine in the United States. It weakened attempts to form horizontal class- or interest-based political alliances within the lower class by dispensing services to individuals in exchange for their votes. The PRI emphasized personal relationships between individuals of the lower class and party and government officials. It distributed political patronage from the top down to members of organized labor, the agrarian movement, and the popular sector in accordance with each group’s relative strength in a given area. Finally, it used electoral fraud, corruption, bribery, and repression when necessary to maintain control over individuals and groups. […]
Official corruption reached unprecedented levels during the 1970s when petroleum revenues surged as a result of higher oil prices and when newly discovered oil fields in Chiapas and the Bahía de Campeche began producing. Much of the wealth that flowed into the country through the state oil monopoly, Mexican Petroleum (Petróleos Mexicanos–Pemex), was squandered in wasteful and unnecessary projects and the inflation of payrolls. The main beneficiaries of high-level graft during this period were the senior executives of the national oil workers union and high-level PRI functionaries. […]
During the de la Madrid sexenio (1982-88), the PRI began to downplay its traditional populist and nationalist agenda and adopted a probusiness, free-market platform. […]
Sound familiar? The poor were marginalized and the politicians and their cronies benefited. It was a populist, leftist reform party in name only. The tactics the PRI used to become “the world’s most perfect dictatorship” are not much different from the current tactics of the Republican Party. Like the GOP, the PRI divided and marginalize the lower classes while making sure their cronies received the main benefit of government largesse.
The PRI touted itself as a “populist” movement, much like the current “Tea Party” Republicans, but in effect they corrupted the political process through propaganda, election fraud and corruption, all while doing little to benefit the vast numbers of poor people. Once NAFTA was passed, they became “neoliberals” who pursued the transfer of multinational manufacturers with the promise of cheap labor and lax regulation.
In effect, this is the goal of the Republicans in the US today. Destroy the middle class, lower real wages and eliminate regulations American corporations find limit their profits. To do that they need to eliminate the political and economic power of the unions, control the media and keep the ever increasing numbers of the poor divided and blaming each other for the country’s decline into third world economic status.
What would be the consequences of Tea Party Republican’s success? Using history as a guide, the picture is not pretty.
Income Inequality
Republican policies have already created the largest income inequality in our society since the Great Depression. That inequality is only likely to widen if the GOP succeeds in destroying Unions and eliminating vital funding for education and health care. Indeed the effect of our nation’s current income inequality is already well documented (Source: Unequal America, by Elizabeth Gudrais
Harvard Magazine, July-August 2008).
The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world’s longest life expectancy. It doesn’t even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati’s finding is unsettling on its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged. […]
… Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation. Tax policy and social-welfare programs, then, take on importance far beyond determining how much income people hold onto. The level of inequality we allow represents our answer to “a very important question,” says Nancy Krieger, professor of society, human development, and health at HSPH: “What kind of society do we want to live in?” […]
Americans at the 95th income percentile or higher can expect to live nine years longer than those at the 10th percentile or lower. The poor are more likely to develop illnesses such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer, and there is evidence that relative deprivation and the stress it engenders are involved. […]
… Americans work longer hours than their European counterparts—about 200 more hours per year, on average, than the British, and 400 more hours per year than the Swedes. Again, there are counter-examples (the Japanese work almost as much as Americans do, just 50 hours less a year). […]
Kawachi and Kennedy cited a wealth of evidence that increasing income inequality goes hand in hand with a decrease in “social capital,” a concept akin to community involvement that incorporates, among other things, social relationships, trust, reciprocity among friends and neighbors, and civic engagement. (Malkin professor of public policy Robert Putnam made a similar argument in his seminal 2000 book Bowling Alone.) Letting social capital atrophy means a less cohesive populace that, at the extreme, leaves entire classes of people disadvantaged and excluded. “The big worry,” says Lawrence Katz, “is creating something like a caste society.” […]
Stress can also make people behave in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. David Williams believes that the “hierarchy of needs” framework helps explain why, the poorer people are, the less likely they are to take care of their health. The framework, developed in 1943 by psychologist Abraham Maslow, defines the needs that motivate human behavior and the priority people assign to those needs. Physiological needs (eating, sleeping, breathing) form the foundation; not until those needs are met can people pursue needs in the higher categories (in succession: safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization). “If people are worried about their basic needs of survival and security and food and shelter,” says Williams, “they cannot worry about the fact that a cigarette, which is providing relief from stress now, is going to cause lung cancer 20 years from now. If you can address the basic needs so people are no longer worried about them, you free them to consider those larger, higher-level needs that have long-term consequences for their well-being.”
In effect, cutting social services, weakening unions, lowering wages, shrinking the middle class, and cutting the social safety net has profound consequences for society. It is no surprise that many revolutions occur when people feel powerless to improve their lives. We only have to look to Egypt as the most recent example. The more the Republicans succeed with their “austerity for thee but not for me” plan, the more they risk social instability on a vast scale. The demonstrations we are witnessing in Madison Wisconsin are just the tip of the iceberg.
Education:
Between 1900 and 1919, only half of all school age children attended public or private school, with most never receiving any education beyond the 8th grade. The figures for high school and college graduation were equally grim, as detailed in The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels, by James J. Heckman and Paul A. LaFontaine.
Heckman and Fontaine reported that of the cohort of children born between 1900 and 1910:
Males born 1900-1910: Between 45%-50% attended HS; approx. 25% graduated HS and about 7% graduated college.
Females born 1900-1910: Roughly 40% attended HS; approx. 30% graduated HS and about 5% graduated college.
Consider the effects on families of rising unemployment, lower wages and non-existent or limited, expensive and inadequate health care benefits. It isn’t hard to see the above pattern repeating itself, especially if Republicans succeed in significantly decreasing funding for public education at all levels, both K-12 and colleges. Many of the postwar boom in education was directly related to government aid. Many veterans and baby boomers only attended college because of government programs such as the GI Bill, Pell grants and cheap student loans. Unfortunately, the cutbacks to educational funding that have already been made are already adversely affecting college student graduation rates in the US:
The United States used to lead the world in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Now it ranks 12th among 36 developed nations.
“The growing education deficit is no less a threat to our nation’s long-term well-being than the current fiscal crisis,” Gaston Caperton, the president of the College Board, warned at a meeting on Capitol Hill of education leaders and policy makers, where he released a report detailing the problem and recommending how to fix it. “To improve our college completion rates, we must think ‘P-16’ and improve education from preschool through higher education.”
Under the current Republican agenda even more cuts to education would be on the chopping block. Combined with lower income levels and high unemployment and it’s not difficult to see College and High School graduation rates plummeting to levels we haven’t seen since the early 20th Century. Higher education will once again become reserved for the progeny of wealthy Americans and the occasional scholarship recipient. And more kids would drop out of high school at ever earlier ages to help their families make ends meet by taking whatever low paying jobs might be available.
Social Security, Medicare, etc.:
The Extremists in the GOP have made it quite clear they want to cut what they call “entitlements” but what I call common decency and good policy. In effect they want to start eliminating, piece by piece, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and the recent health care reform law. What effect would that have on our society. I think it is instructive to consider how our society dealt with these issues prior to the New Deal.
While records from the period are scarce, I did find one official survey by the New York Commission on Old Age Security 1930 (p. 39), (found ironically in Support of the Elderly before the Depression: Individual and Collective Arrangements, Carolyn Weaver, Cato Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, (Fall 1987)),which provides some statistics from what was probably at that time the richest state in the nation regarding how New Yorkers addressed care for their elderly citizens. The results should not surprise you, but nonetheless I found them shocking to contemplate in light of the vigorous attack on our nation’s social safety net by GOP Tea Party extremists. Here are the facts as the Commission reported them in 1930.
Percentage of New Yorkers 65 years or older:
With public or private pensions:
10.1%
Who worked to support themselves: 28.5%
Dependent on friends/family: 50.4%
Dependent on organized charity: 3.5%
As you can see, few people had any sort of pension. More than half either relied on family and friends for their financial and other support or on charity. And almost 30% were forced to continue to work past the age of 65 in order to support themselves. And this was in New York! Imagine what the situation was like in poorer states.
Weakening or eliminating our social safety net would have far reaching and substantial negative effects on American society. Yet this is the goal of the Tea Jihadists who now control the GOP. They don’t want even the modest health care reforms that the Democrats passed last Congress which limit insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and other abuses, and provide for insurance exchanges. They want deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. They aren’t too fond of unemployment insurance either, worker safety laws, food safety laws, and nutritional programs for the poor. My guess is they would like to scrap or downsize workers compensation laws too. What do you think that would do to the fabric of our nation?
One thing about which I can speculate is the effect such repugnant and ill-considered policies would have on life expectancy in the United States. Here’s some figures for you to consider from the website Life Expectancy by Age, 1850–2004:
US Life expectancy at birth:
White Males<br
1900 – 48.23
1940 – 62.81
2004 – 75.7White Females
1900 – 51.08
1940 – 67.29
2004 – 80.8All Other Males
1900 – 32.54
1940 – 52.33
2004 – 69.8All Other Females
1900 – 35.04
1940 – 55.51
2004 – 76.5
Now obviously advances in medical science and technology had a great deal to do with these improvements in life expectancy, but it is important to remember that we gave disabled and older Americans the ability to afford the cost of paying for new drugs and treatments. In countries where the poor or disabled or the elderly have no access to adequate health care, life expectancy rates are still lower than ours despite the availability of high quality medical facilities for the rich. And that will be our outcome as well should we decide to stop making health care available, and if we backtrack on the modest health care reforms the democrats and president Obama passed in 2010.
The US already ranks in 36th place for life expectancy among other nations despite our wealth and power. Thirty-sixth? Isn’t that incredible? Now imagine how far that ranking will fall if the Republicans have their way with slashing your “entitlements.” Or if they can also eliminate laws and regulations that protect the environment (i.e., the air we breathe air and the water we drink) from toxic pollutants that cause cancer and other diseases. Laws the people like Koch Brothers and corporations like Monsanto and Dow Chemical like are anxious to repeal.
I hope this diary gave you some idea of what our our nation might devolve into should the GOP succeed with their poisonous agenda: a poorer, sicker, more crime ridden, less economically mobile society and a nastier place to live for us and for future generations. A nation that people who lived though the Great Depression would see emerging all over again. A nation without hope for young or for old.
Elections have consequences. Last election the GOP won because the base for the Democrats (and I did not like may of those Democratic candidates) was not as motivated as the base for the Tea Party Crazies. I don;t know how much more damage the Republicans can do should they retain power in many states and in Congress in 2012. And God help us if Obama is defeated and a Republican bound to follow the whims of his or her craziest members assumes control of the Oval Office with majorities in the House and Senate. Because if you thought Bush, Rove and Cheney were bad, the next republican President with that kind of power would be ten times worse.
