By Robert Reich
Leave it to Trump and his Republican
allies to spend more energy fighting non-existent voter fraud than containing a
virus that has killed 244,000 Americans and counting.
By Michael de Adder
The cost of this misplaced attention
is incalculable. While Covid-19 surges to record levels, there’s still no
national strategy for equipment, stay at home orders, mask mandates or disaster
relief.
The other cost is found in the
millions of Trump voters who are being led to believe the election was stolen and who
will be a hostile force for years to come – making it harder to do much of
anything the nation needs, including actions to contain the virus.
Trump is continuing this charade
because it pulls money into his newly formed political action committee and
allows him to assume the mantle of presumed presidential candidate for 2024,
whether he intends to run or merely keep himself the center of attention.
Leading Republicans like Senate
majority leader Mitch McConnell are going along with it because donors are
refilling GOP coffers.
The biggest beneficiaries are the
party’s biggest patrons – the billionaire class, including the heads of the
nation’s largest corporations and financial institutions, private-equity
partnerships and hedge funds – whom a deeply divided nation serves by giving
them unfettered access to the economy’s gains.
Their heist started four decades ago. According to a recent Rand study, if America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the three decades following the second world war, the bottom 90% would now be $47 trillion richer.
A low-income American earning
$35,000 this year would be earning $61,000. A college-educated worker now
earning $72,000 would be earning $120,000. Overall, the grotesque surge in
inequality that began 40 years ago is costing the median American worker
$42,000 per year.
The upward redistribution of $47
trillion wasn’t due to natural forces. It was contrived. As wealth accumulated
at the top, so did political power to siphon off even more wealth and shaft
everyone else.
Monopolies expanded because antitrust
laws were neutered. Labor unions shriveled because corporations were allowed to
bust unions. Wall Street was permitted to gamble with other peoples’ money and
was bailed out when its bets soured even as millions lost their homes and
savings. Taxes on the top were cut, tax loopholes widened.
When Covid-19 hit, Big Tech cornered
the market, the rich traded on inside information, and the Treasury and the Fed
bailed out big corporations but let small businesses go under. Since March,
billionaire wealth has soared while most Americans have become poorer.
How could the oligarchy get away
with this in a democracy where the bottom 90% have the votes? Because the
bottom 90% are bitterly divided.
Long before Trump, the GOP suggested
to white working-class voters that their real enemies were Black people,
Latinos, immigrants, “coastal elites,” bureaucrats and “socialists.” Trump rode
their anger and frustration into the White House with more explicit and
incendiary messages. He’s still at it with his bonkers claim of a stolen
election.
The oligarchy surely appreciates the
Trump-GOP tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks and the most business-friendly Supreme
Court since the early 1930s. But the Trump-GOP’s biggest gift has been an
electorate more fiercely split than ever.
Into this melee comes Joe Biden, who
speaks of being “president of all Americans” and collaborating with the
Republican party. But the GOP doesn’t want to collaborate. When Biden holds out
an olive branch, McConnell and other Republican leaders will respond just as
they did to Barack Obama – with more warfare, because that maintains their
power and keeps the big money rolling in.
The president-elect aspires to find
a moderate middle ground. This will be difficult because there’s no middle. The
real divide is no longer left versus right but the bottom 90% versus the
oligarchy.
Biden and the Democrats will better
serve the nation by becoming the party of the bottom 90% – of the poor and the
working middle class, of black and white and brown, and of all those who would
be $47 trillion richer today had the oligarchy not taken over America.
This would require that Democrats
abandon the fiction of political centrism and establish a countervailing force
to the oligarchy – and, not incidentally, sever their own links to it.
They’d have to show white
working-class voters how badly racism and xenophobia have hurt them as well as
people of color. And change the Democratic narrative from kumbaya to economic
and social justice.
Easy to say, hugely difficult to
accomplish. But if today’s bizarre standoff in Washington is seen for what it
really is, there’s no alternative.
Robert
Reich's latest book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It,"
out March 24.
He is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He
served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time
Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the
twentieth century. He has written 17 other books, including the best sellers
"Aftershock,""The Work of Nations," "Beyond
Outrage," and "The Common Good." He is a founding editor of the
American Prospect magazine, founder of Inequality Media, a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning
documentaries "Inequality For All," and "Saving
Capitalism," both now streaming on Netflix.
