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UNDERSTANDING THE STATE OF SOCIETY – SPRING 2011
WAR ANNIVERSARY SPEECH
March 18, 2011
Jeoffry Gordon, MD, MPH [email protected]
OUR country is at the edge of a precarious cliff that presents the
biggest danger to the survival of our democracy than anything since the
Civil War…….Or like Wiley Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - we
may have run off the precipice already – but it just has not yet sunk in.
The problem is one of domestic social justice and economics. THE
PROBLEM IS THE STRANGULATION AND DEATH OF MIDDLE CLASS
AMERICA. You need to understand that this revolution –this silent coup
d’etat, this CLASS WARFARE – happened before your very eyes over the
past decades.
As Robert Reich recently wrote, “It is a not a complicated
story…Today’s typical 30 year old male (if he has a job) is earning the
same as a 30 year old man did three decades ago…The bottom 90 per
cent of Americans now earn, on average, only about $280 more per
year than they did thirty years ago…. But wait, the American economy
is more than twice as large as it was thirty years ago. So where did the
money go? TO THE TOP. The richest 1 percent’s share of national
wealth has doubled – from around 9 percent in 1977 to over 20 percent
now. The (wealth of the) richest one-tenth of one percent has tripled.
The 150,000 households that comprise the top one-tenth of one
percent now earn as much as the bottom 120 million (households) put
together.”
Let me make this very concrete: In one generation from 1979 to
2009 – 30 years – family income for the bottom fifth of Americans FELL
by 7.4%, while income for the top fifth rose 49% - and that of the top 5
percent (those earning over $200,000 per year) rose 73%! In 2008 the
average family in the bottom 90 percent of the population got by with
$31,244 a year while the average family in the top one-tenth of 1
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percent made over $5.5 million dollars. It has not always been this way!
As a matter of fact between 1960 and 1979 Our political system worked
so that income for the bottom 90 percent of US families rose
significantly faster than that of the top 1 percent.
Let us look at the specific causes of this disastrous change: First,
it is the result of our domestic politics. The dynamic started in 1980
with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as President. He began what
the political scientist Jacob Hacker has called the era of WINNER TAKE
ALL POLITICS. The end of the rainbow for these political operatives was
the evisceration of government by marked lowering of income taxes,
estate taxes, and capital gains taxes for the wealthy and larger loop
holes for corporate taxpayers. This was achieved by George W. Bush.
Relative to the size of the economy, federal revenues are currently at
their lowest level in 60 years. In both 2009 and 2010, revenues
equaled 14.9 percent of GDP. By comparison, they averaged about 18
percent of GDP between 1971 and 2010. We don't have a spending
problem; we have a revenue problem! The lies and fables of
Republican public policy and economics, that is, the overwhelming so
called “debt crisis” and the so called damage done by government
wherever it impacts our country, which are now accepted as
conventional wisdom. The hatred of taxes and government has put the
fire in the belly of Tea Party Republicans at both the national and state
level. They have a destructive conception of how to build and maintain
a successful society and are well financed by the corporate plutocracy
to further destroy our country. BUT WAIT! The Democrats clearly are
no better. The deregulatory fervor and pandering to financial
institutions was completed under President Clinton (and his buddies
Robert Rubin and Larry Summers) These policies were the direct cause
of the 2008 depression, resulting in the on-going loss of family homes
by foreclosure and continued unemployment of millions of Americans.
This economic turmoil put the stake in the heart of the middle class and
the torture continues. Democrats put forward only a meek and failed
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oppositional fight to the policies of George W. Bush, both domestic and
foreign. Under Barack Obama they have continued the Bush wars,
continued the Bush tax cuts and bailed out Wall Street and left Main
Street out in the cold. The major banks are now consolidated and
clearly even more too big to fail. In fact, our six largest bank holding
companies currently have assets valued at just over 63 percent of
GDP as of end of 2010. This is up from around 55% of GDP in
2006 before the crisis and no more than 17% of GDP in 1995.
With assets ranging from around $800 billion to nearly $2.5
trillion, these bank holding companies are clearly even more than
ever too big to fail. Their profits are privatized and their losses will
continue to be socialized and the middle class taxpayers will
continue to be enslaved by them. No major players in the financial
sector responsible for mortgage or financial fraud have gone to jail.
Clearly the President has not provided the leadership necessary to
thwart the capture of our government by the right wing, corporatist
libertarians. On the contrary his policies show he is controlled by them.
He was elected because he was a maverick who opposed the Iraq war,
now he is the leader of the mercenary incursion into a hopelessly
corrupt Afghanistan. We haven’t seen President Obama call out the
failed employment or international diplomacy policies of George W.
Bush nor has he articulated the abject failure of the Milton Friedman
mirage economics of deregulating finance capital. Our democratic
President has abandoned the quest for a national job creation program.
There are still over 13 million unemployed Americans and many
millions more who are under-employed or stopped looking for work.
Obama has failed to rein in the wildly illegal home foreclosure process.
Since 2008 a total of 4,731,000 American families have lost their home
security to foreclosure. We haven’t seen President Obama standing in
front of a home to prevent a bank foreclosure like our Congressman
Bob Filner did. We haven’t seen President Obama marching on the
streets of Madison Wisconsin defending union workers – the only
vestiges of an organized middle class - as he promised he would during
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his campaign. Mainstream politics - both Republicans and Democrats has fully accepted Reagan’s folly that government is the problem and
any taxation is an inappropriate taking.
The second contribution to the end of the American dream comes
from the business sector: Before the year 2000 generally wages of both
high school and college graduates rose along with productivity. Since
the year 2000 productivity in the US has risen about 15 percent, but
with the decline of unions and traditional manufacturing the median
wages of all workers has been flat. The difference has filled the coffers
of corporations and Wall Street. The Koch brothers’ political conspiracy
is both a cause and a self-serving result of this transformation. The
United States needs both unions and a forward looking industrial
policy.
Thus in 2011 we have a hugely distorted income distribution in
the United States, a tilt which has not been seen since 1929 on the very
eve of the Great Depression. Organizations such as the United Nations,
the CIA, and the CDC use an index called the GINI coefficient to
measure income inequality. (If everyone in a population had the same
income the coefficient would be zero, if one person had it all, it would
be 1.) Currently the most admirable country is Sweden with a
coefficient of .25. The United States has a GINI of .45, nowhere near
that of Canada - .32 or Great Britain - .34, but close to that of Russia at
.42, and much worse than Egypt even before its revolution - .34, and
approximating that of Argentina at .46, Costa Rica - .48, Equador - .48
and Mexico - .48. In fact, the CIA considers a Gini above .40 as a
predictor of civic unrest. Folks, while you have been watching, our
country has become a Banana Republic. We are totally in thrall to the
caudillos. Beware: we are on the cusp of the rise of fascism, that is, a
subjectivist, nationalistic, authoritarian form of government based on
violence powered by and for the benefit of a ruling business class. I
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hope the turmoil in Wisconsin politics and the turn out on the streets
there represents the start of the reawakening of the American public to
the false premises of the destructive Mid-west and Southern
Republicans.
So what are the implications of all this? First a tidal wave of
money has been flowing in the direction of the oligarchy that rules our
country. THIS IS THE COALITION OF THE KILLING, THE DRILLING AND
THE BILLING! With it they have bought our Congress and a succession
of Presidents; “Citizens United” represents their purchase of the
Supreme Court; in health care reform they bought a federal subsidy and
resurrection of for profit insurance companies - leaving 53 million
Americans uninsured now and 23 million uninsured after all the
reforms are done; in Iraq and Afghanistan they are reaping profits from
unnecessary privatized mercenary war; and they have buried climate
change as an important issue. They throw us drunken and stoned
Hollywood celebrities, the Super Bowl and March Madness in the
media as diversionary substitutes for attention to meaningful issues.
Reality and responsibility are no longer important to the Republican
oligarchy – grabbing power and money is all that counts. Unfortunately
these days the forces of progressive, liberal, humanitarian politics in
America are disorganized and have no fire in their belly.
Secondly, (and this will blow your mind) recent studies by English
public health epidemiologists, and now confirmed by the CDC, have
shown that among wealthy countries and among the our individual
states many parameters of social and civic morbidity such as life
expectancy, literacy, math skills, infant mortality, homicides,
imprisonment, teenage births, obesity, mental illness, and trust
INCREASE with increasing income inequality. (BUT NOT with
increasing average income!) As a country we are now 50th in the world
in life expectancy and 50th in the world in maternal mortality as well,
yet we spend twice as much on health care per capita as the next
closest country. In 2011 in the United States SOCIAL JUSTICE is no
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longer a public policy for the poor and ethnic minorities, it must be a
banner for us all because we are witnessing the destruction of the
middle class and the dissolution of the public programs that support a
healthy civic society – the courts, clean air and water, health care, and
educational system and dependable police and firemen. In 2011 we will
spend $171 billion on our Iraq and Afghan wars while we are choosing
not to maintain our domestic education systems. Obama’s so called
health reform legislation is premised on moving about 20 million
uninsured Americans into the state based Medicaid system which is
falling apart and accepting as a given that everyone who can afford to
buy health insurance will continue to devote a minimum of 20 percent
of their family income to that purpose.
Finally I want to close with the parable of the Girl Scout cookies:
Five people are sitting around a table: the CEO of a large bank, a
Republican Senator, a Democratic Congressman, a school teacher from
Wisconsin, and a Tea Party Republican. God comes into the room with
12 boxes of chocolate mint Girl Scout cookies which she places on the
table. Everybody smiles and recognizes that they are truly blessed. The
CEO leans over and whispers something into the ear of the Senator. The
Senator stands up and spouts forth a loud and rambling pro-life, antihomosexual speech. The Congressman, seemingly bored, puts his head
down on the table and goes to sleep. The CEO quietly leans over,
scoops up 11 boxes and hides them under the table. He then turns to
the Tea Party Republican and says “Hey that union gal wants to take all
your cookies!” This is the state of our democracy today. We need to
start now, starting today to understand the tragic circumstances of
American politics and fire up a movement to restore social justice and
civic pride in our country and with the pledge that we will take all our
cookies back.