Monthly Archives: September 2015

Keeping them down

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Following up on a previous post about, once again, inequality, it occurred to me that there are groups of people bent on making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Certainly the rich prefer this. But an entire political party may see their fortunes improved by increasing income inequality. That’s one of the takeaways from Thomas Edsall’s piece in today’s New York Times.

Citing recent research, he writes:

If Voorheis, McCarty and Shor are on target, Republicans have a vested political interest in exacerbating inequality because inequality moves voters to the right.

The three researchers opine:

We find that income inequality has a large, positive and statistically significant effect on political polarization. Economic inequality appears to cause state Democratic parties to become more liberal. Inequality, however, moves state legislatures to the right overall. Such findings suggest that the effect of income inequality impacts polarization by replacing moderate Democratic legislators with Republicans.

Once Republicans dominate legislatures, they steadily resist efforts to redistribute incomes via tax schema, thereby intensifying inequality, leading to the election of more conservatives, and so on. Edsall concludes:

Finally, and most important: Republican success at the state level – in contrast with control of the United States House and Senate – has empowered the party to actually make policy without the crippling effects of partisan gridlock.

More law and regulatory policy – much of it conservative and controversial – has been enacted at the state level than at any other level of government in the past five years. In terms of policy initiatives, the 24 states where Republicans are in full control are the most productive of all: the 11 Confederate states, except Virginia, along with Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska (with a nominally non-partisan legislature), Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah.

It is in these states that the retrenchment from social and economic liberalism is moving into high gear, as much of the rest of the country and the federal government remains mired in conflict.

The structural changes in the political system have, then, put the Republican Party in the vanguard of action on a gamut of issues from voting rights to union rights to reproductive rights; from taxation to health care and environmental policy to spending on the poor to education.

Democrats may have the edge in presidential elections, but Republicans now have the advantage where it counts: in the states, where they can set the policies that govern a majority of citizens’ daily lives.

Spreading around

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It seems axiomatic that those who accumulate more wealth than they can spend save more of their income than those whose paychecks barely keep them afloat. Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez’s chart below confirms (source):

Screen Shot 2015-09-29 at 8.46.53 AM

In his book The Darwin Economy, Robert Reich (also teaching at Berkeley) reports that as more riches flow upwards to the top, economic output slows. Moreover, governments at all levels lack the resources to invest in public goods and services. As a result of the latter, bridges collapse, roadways deteriorate, schools struggle.

Meanwhile, and as you’ve no doubt noticed, the Republican presidential candidates propose to further reduce taxes on the wealthy. They say, without evidence, that making rich people richer will spur the economy and thus boost government revenues. Jeb Bush claims that his “new” tax plan will grow the economy by an annual rate of four percent; Donald Trump, of course, does Bush one better by claiming a six-percent growth rate should his proposal be adopted. Both plans recall “voodoo economics” sketched on Arthur Laffer’s napkin.

Back to savings. It’s clear that the wealthy’s surplus has not trickled down to the Rest of Us. But why not contribute to the commonweal? Why not spend a bit of their surplus to help provide necessities for the bottom 90 percent? Why not, to borrow from Trump, make America great again?

Never mind. That would require more taxes.

The slightly-less-crazy John departs

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Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire, captures the moment:

Welcome to the monkeyhouse, America. The prion disease afflicting the Republican party finally has devoured the last vestiges of the Republican party’s higher functions. I had as many problems with Boehner as Speaker as anyone did, but, dammit, he at least believed that the government should keep running. And, as much as the Times wants to believe it, this has nothing to do with the “challenges of divided government,” and everything to do with the fact that the modern Republican party, especially in the House of Representatives, is completely demented.

Saving less

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Source: FRED

Source: FRED

We’ll note that Americans were able to save more money from their paychecks during the 60s and 70s than in recent decades. We should look at these and other economic indicators within the context of income inequality. Also, averages mislead. The Rest of Us spend all that we make, and perhaps then some. The rich, on the other hand, have money left over to “invest” or hoard. For the most part, those surplus dollars are withheld from productive activities that would benefit society.

Like polishing a duck

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Vox‘s David Roberts tries to parse or otherwise make sense of Donald Trump’s statements to Hugh Hewitt on climate change. He ultimately gives up, and you can see why from this transcript:

Well, first of all, I’m not a believer in global warming. And I’m not a believer in man-made global warming. It could be warming, and it’s going to start to cool at some point. And you know, in the early, in the 1920s, people talked about global cooling. I don’t know if you know that or not. They thought the Earth was cooling. Now, it’s global warming. And actually, we’ve had times where the weather wasn’t working out, so they changed it to extreme weather, and they have all different names, you know, so that it fits the bill. But the problem we have, and if you look at our energy costs, and all of the things that we’re doing to solve a problem that I don’t think in any major fashion exists. I mean, Obama thinks it’s the number one problem of the world today. And I think it’s very low on the list. So I am not a believer, and I will, unless somebody can prove something to me, I believe there’s weather. I believe there’s change, and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again. And it changes depending on years and centuries, but I am not a believer, and we have much bigger problems.

Does this shit actually appeal to voters? I know the answer, and it frightens me.

Here’s Roberts’s gem:

And I realized that factchecking Donald Trump is a category error. It’s like polishing a duck.

Homeless vs. refugees

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Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the U.S. would accommodate as many as 100,000 refugees per year from the war-torn Middle East. So, how many people have been displaced in Syria alone? According to the United Nations, the number reached 6.5 million by the end of last year. Our effort, then, will be small indeed, a bit more than a gesture.

Another question: How many Americans are homeless? According to HUD (pdf), there are over half a million in the U.S. on any given night.

The system (as the pope would put it) delivers both the homeless and the refugee. Can’t we do better?

Betting the future

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The pope will soon arrive in the U.S. He has spoken forcefully about climate change and its causes, placing much of the blame on rapacious capitalism. It’s therefore unsurprising that many, if not most, Republicans are at least uncomfortable with the visit and at least one member of the House announced his decision to “boycott” the pope’s address before Congress. The GOP’s constituency, for the most part, rejects the science and fact of climate change, all the while averring that they are “not scientists.”

But for saner inhabitants of the planet, global warming presents profound, though uncertain, risks to current and future generations of animal species, including Homo Sapiens. For decades, now, the scientists have warned in increasingly strident tones that unless action is taken sooner rather than later, there may be no way to mitigate climate change. (See the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.) Each warning is met with hollow words.

There is much at stake, for both the planet and fossil-fuel companies. The carbon embedded in oil reserves will exacerbate climate change should it be burned. But it’s black gold for the likes of Chevron, Shell, and Exxon. It has no value to them unless extracted and combusted.

And speaking of Exxon, Bill McKibben writes in today’s New Yorker that the massive corporation knew that its product would warm the planet. One of its principal scientists, James Black, told Exxon’s management committee that the “greenhouse effect” was real. That was in 1977. A year later, according to McKibben, Black reported that a doubling of carbon emissions would raise global temperatures by two to three degrees Celsius. Those numbers reflect today’s current estimates. However, rather than seek alternatives to oil and gas, Exxon management chose to disparage the scientific community, bribe legislators, and expand its operations.

As I see it, the reason we don’t act to keep carbon buried is that (a) our current lifestyle, heavily reliant on the automobile, gets in the way, and (b) the effects of climate change are gradual and their increments barely noticed from month to month. We are like the frog in the warming pot of water, failing to act until it’s too late.

We can only imagine what future generations, suffering the ravages of a warming planet, might say about their predecessors. I’m guessing that they will not be kind. Nor should they be.

Sprawling toward Gomorrah

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Most of the American West was built after the advent of the automobile. And most of the building was unplanned. Aided and abetted by the nexus of real estate, oil, and vehicle interests, sprawl ensued, becoming the norm that blights vast stretches of once-rural landscapes.

Let’s say you’re concerned about climate change. You know that to limit its effects, carbon emissions must be contained. Ah, but what about all those vehicles now made necessary to transport people and goods between and among low-density cities and towns? Now there’s a challenge.

If legislatures make gasoline more expensive, already strapped households will be further burdened in pursuing ordinary lives. There will be political pushback from both citizens and the aforementioned nexus.

That is what happened in California, as the state’s Assembly balked at imposing more taxes on gasoline and diesel, even after the governor and the Senate had endorsed such measures.

California came close to passing really ambitious climate change legislation last week, only to step back at the last minute. The original version of the Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act, passed by the state Senate and backed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D), set three goals to be achieved by the year 2030: cut the state’s gasoline consumption by 50 percent, require electric utilities to generate 50 percent of their power from renewables, and make buildings 50 percent more energy efficient. Unfortunately, lawmakers had to drop the gasoline provision, the most aggressive of the trio, to get the bill through the state Assembly, even though the Assembly is heavily controlled by Democrats.

Once built, sprawl may very well be forever. Meanwhile, carbon emissions continue to increase, assuring a rise in global temperatures, perhaps to levels that destroy habitats for most species, including our own.

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UPDATE Sept. 19, 2015:

Okay, there is a potential solution to the transportation-based emissions problem. Since sprawl cannot be undone, at least in the next few decades, and, therefore, we will continue to rely on the automobile to get us from one place to another, the obvious remedy is electric vehicles, a proven technology. Of course, there is still the problem of Big Oil, which has demonstrated time and again its ability to affect political outcomes. Here’s another excerpt from the linked Grist article:

A 2014 report by the ACCE Institute and Common Cause, entitled “Big Oil Floods the Capitol: How California’s Oil Companies Funnel Funds into the Legislature,” spelled out just how much:

Key members of Big Oil are some of the largest corporations in all of California, including Chevron, Exxon, Aera Energy and Occidental Petroleum. And these big corporations spend big time. Over the past 15 years, Big Oil spent a whopping $143.3 million on political candidates and campaigns. That’s nearly $10 million per year. …

Big Oil employs high profile, high powered lobbyists to ensure their interests are represented. In the past 15 years, the price tag for these lobbyists has totaled $123.6 million. In 2013-2014 alone, the top lobbyist employer, Western States Petroleum Association, spent $4.7 million.

Say it ain’t so, Joe

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I admit to being moved by Stephen Colbert’s interview with Joe Biden. Both men have suffered tragedy in their lives and both entered the world as Irish-American Catholics. Colbert displayed empathy. Biden exhibited emotional pain along with unabashed humility. Joe Biden. Common man.

I quickly recovered, however. Joe Biden is a politician, after all, and no one gets to be a senator or vice president without compromising or jettisoning moral principles, if they existed in the first place. As it happens, Joe Biden, for all his Catholic sensibilities, chose repeatedly to represent the interests of Big Money over those of working-class college students.

Before Biden was rebranded as the kindly, well-liked Vice President, he was a long-serving senator from Delaware, the “senator from MBNA” as he was often called for a number of very good reasons. Delaware is the state that attracted a great many credit card company headquarters by offering little in the way of usury laws — limits to interest rates that banks could charge their customers. As a result, one of Delaware’s most important industries is those who profit from debt-creation [via Hullabaloo].

Student debt weighs heavily on thousands of young people answering the politicians’ call to get a college education, or else. At the end of 2014 such debt stood at $1.2 trillion.

20150310_Student_loans-400x310

The whole system is a racket, which accounts for what’s shown in the chart at the top. Because of the highly profitable nature of the student loan program in general (loans earn interest until they are paid regardless of graduation or post-grad jobs), and because of the government guarantees and the number of loans issued, college tuition is encouraged to rise, which further encourages loan amounts to rise, which further increases profit from interest payments, in a near-endless cycle.

And Joe helped make it so.

Schauen Sie nach Deutschland

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Here is an interesting, informative, and sober piece in Vox. The author, in describing Germany’s high-speed rail, suggests that we Americans could learn a thing or two about how best to transport people by train.

Riding the high-speed train between Berlin and Hamburg, Germany’s two largest cities, is a radically different experience from riding its American counterpart, Amtrak’s Acela, which connects major East Coast cities. Germany’s InterCity Express (ICE) ride is as smooth as a Mercedes on the Autobahn. The conductor comes around politely offering to bring you coffee. The bathroom doors open electronically with the push of a button for disability access. There’s no perennial stopping and starting of the train, no grumpy barking conductor, no herky-jerky rolling of the bathroom doors, none of Amtrak’s chronically late arrivals. And on German trains, the wifi actually works.

However, there is a problem, and it’s a big one, in trying to follow Germany’s lead. We Americans love sprawl, and sprawl frustrates the task of moving citizens from one burg to another.

One difference between German and American train travel is what you see out the window. On Amtrak’s Northeast corridor route, you can spend seven hours traveling from Boston to Washington, DC, without ever passing a farm. Each city’s suburbs bleed into the next. When leaving Berlin, on the other hand, in less than half an hour you’re whisked from the capital’s center to cornfields and cow pastures. This reflects not just the train’s speed but the absence of sprawl in Germany. The suburbs — a handful of detached houses with pitched roofs, many featuring solar panels — whiz by in a few minutes. Despite, or perhaps ironically because of, Europe’s greater density, you are far closer to the countryside when in a major city. There is no equivalent to the US’s unending hellscape of highways, strip malls, fast food drive-thrus, and auto body shops. Europeans’ cities were more built up before the car, and they didn’t then tear their cities apart to accommodate cars and facilitate sprawl, as we did. The US is so vast that we could pave everything within 200 miles of New York City and still have more than enough land for our corn and cows. But if Europeans wanted to preserve rural areas, they would have to use urban space more efficiently, and so they have. A much greater share of the typical European metro area’s population is concentrated in its inner city. So you get dense, transit-rich cities with countryside in between.

Sprawl, as we know, condemns us to the automobile, upon which we rely for the most ordinary daily activities. We drive from our suburban houses to fetch a loaf of bread, deliver children to playgrounds, and transport us to jobs scattered near and far. Those cars compete for limited space on our nation’s streets, roads, and highways, creating diurnal goos, which we curse and bemoan. Yet, we have no choice but to endure and suffer.

Oh, and what about all those carbons spewing forth from millions of tailpipes? We seem to be stuck with those, ultimately to our self-ruination.

Turning all this around would require a collective response, necessarily involving government. The Germans evidently understand the political dynamics, eschewing Americans’ feral faith in the individual and the heretofore unrealized magic of “the invisible hand.”

Money is getting anxious

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Bernie Sanders has pulled ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa. The Guardian suggests a “mirroring” of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party victory earlier today.

“Press 1 for revolution,” urge the hosts of a teleconference call for 17,000 union activists as they seek to sign up more volunteers for a leftwing insurgency.

Pundits scoff at their naivety, but opinion polls show the leader of this revolution – a grouchy socialist with unkempt white hair and a disdain for media niceties – pulling ahead of more-polished establishment rivals in the race to lead his party.

This grizzled veteran is proving a surprise hit on university campuses and social media, blending old-fashioned rallies with an online buzz that compensates for his lack of support from the party machinery.

The monied interests were behind Clinton, as they are behind her husband. But they’re becoming a bit skittish, as Hillary faces increased scrutiny over her emails and she struggles to name her political tune. None of the Republican candidates, Big Money knows, could prevail in a national election. That’s because the country as a whole is not as predisposed to crazy as are the GOP faithful. After all, the electorate went for a black Democrat twice to lead the nation. Yet, if not Hillary, who will do their bidding after Obama leaves the White House?

Joe Biden?

Ok, this makes me a bit giddy today

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Labour leadership: Jeremy Corbyn elected with huge mandate

— The Guardian

Minutes after his victory, Corbyn said the message is that people are “fed up with the injustice and the inequality” of Britain.

“The media and many of us, simply didn’t understand the views of young people in our country. They were turned off by the way politics was being conducted. We have to and must change that. The fightback gathers speed and gathers pace,” he said.

Go, Bernie!

Concession and resolution

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The rich get richer. But why? Joseph Stiglitz denies that wealth accumulation by a few is the necessary outcome of a market economy. Markets, he argues, are imperfect, yielding less-than-desirable outcomes for the Rest of Us. Moreover, markets have been rigged to favor the rich at the expense of everyone else. His views and arguments are under review by the New Yorker‘s James Surowiecki in the current issue of the New York Review of Books (paywall), who begins:

The fundamental truth about American economic growth today is that while the work is done by many, the real rewards largely go to the few. The numbers are, at this point, woefully familiar: the top one percent of earners take home more than 20 percent of the income, and their share has more than doubled in the last thirty-five years. The gains for people in the top 0.1 percent, meanwhile, have been even greater. Yet over that same period, average wages and household incomes in the US have risen only slightly, and a number of demographic groups (like men with only a high school education) have actually seen their average wages decline.

The United States, as I’ve mentioned often, is a grossly unequal society. Income and wealth flow upwards, leaving most boats level if not sinking. I’ve also included charts of the Gini index, the standard measure of inequality. I do so again.

gini index through 2014

On these pages, and out of head-banging frustration, I’ve touted the good old days of union rebellion, which produced many of the benefits we now take for granted, including Social Security, paid weekends, and a minimum wage. But sentimentality can get the best of me. Stiglitz is earnest in his offer of remedies. I should be too.

So, I say that we go ahead and accommodate the forces of innovation, entrepreneurship, and even competition. After all, some very bright men and women create amazing products and services that many of us enjoy, such as the Apple computer I’m using here. Let them thrive and make lots of money.

However, we should keep in mind that wealth is not created in a vacuum. Tax-financed public institutions, especially the legal system, enable and protect wealth accumulation. We should also keep in mind that while a few do exceedingly well, wide swaths of the population suffer misery and hardship. Extremes in wealth and poverty do not a society make.

Stiglitz supports redistribution after-the-fact. And so do I. Surowiecki:

After all, the policies that Stiglitz is calling for are, in their essence, not much different from the policies that shaped the US in the postwar era: high marginal tax rates on the rich and meaningful investment in public infrastructure, education, and technology. Yet there’s a reason people have never stopped pushing for those policies: they worked. And as Stiglitz writes, “Just because you’ve heard it before doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it again.”

Amen.

A view from without

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I didn’t see this coming, as a decade-long inhabitant of Old Mill Town:

To the north is the much underappreciated Everett. Barely mentioned in the family of Puget Sound cities, it’s a virtual secret hiding in plain sight. The neighborhoods around downtown have a pleasant patina, acquired from decades of being a working class city. Its downtown is filled with lots of interesting spots – some new some old. It’s kind of like turning the clock back to the more peaceful, small town days when Seattle was a remote, backwater town. Want a less costly place to live? To paraphrase the Village People, “Go North, to begin anew!”

— Mark Hinshaw, Crosscut

Are we in danger of having to form a Lesser Everett movement? Well, not quite, I’d say. But perhaps I should be more appreciative of where I live.

Movin’ on out

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We white Americans don’t particularly care for people of color. First we resist any efforts to integrate the races. Then, in response to court orders, if black families start moving into our neighborhoods we white Americans move further away. Should black families follow, we move even further. This is the gist of Thomas Edsall’s piece in today’s New York Times.

The animosity of whites toward blacks and browns was on full display in HBO’s mini-series Show Me a Hero. White people of Yonkers, New York, yelled and screamed and spat their venom upon city officials who finally and quite reluctantly capitulated to a federal judge’s order to allow the construction of subsidized low-income housing units in previous all-white neighborhoods. The city’s defiance of the order threatened to bankrupt the municipality, which faced tens of millions of dollars in fines.

The series’s director shows us the ugliness of concentrated poverty. Gangs, drugs, illegitimate  births, defaced and defiled properties. Who wants that? As it happens, no one, regardless of color.

Despite prolonged attempts to ignore the huge and growing problem of race and poverty in America, a looming reality appears just down the chronological road: whites will be in the minority. I suspect that white America is at least vaguely aware of the eventuality, which could partially explain the vehement strands of anti-immigration sentiment, best expressed by The Donald. To what lengths will a white minority go to subjugate people of color? The strategy is already evident. First, concentrate the dark- and brown-skinned residents into multi-family clusters. As crime inevitably takes hold in such areas, arrest and then imprison the perpetrators. Exclusionary zoning also works, preventing lower-income people from affording the nicer homes surrounding the better schools. Should the courts frustrate these efforts, whites can always escape by movin’ on out.

There was a time in America when we were making progress in de-segregating schools and neighborhoods. But since 2000, roughly, those gains are evaporating. We are re-segregating the population by both race and income.

This will not end well.

From Edsall's column in the NY Times

From Edsall’s column in the NY Times

Joe Hill

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Labor Day approaches, a good time to reproach those in power and those who serve at their behest. One apt target: the Seattle Times‘ editors and publisher, who castigated once again the actions of the local teachers union, poised to strike over “demanding too much,” in the eyes of the corporate scriveners. The teachers have the temerity to want more money for their vitally important work. Oh, and they’d also like the school district to provide recess time for the children. Ingrates. The Times:

The teachers are demanding too much — so much that they will have a negative effect on broader efforts to reform the state education system. They’re at risk of becoming a symbol of excess for those who oppose more school spending.

The paper’s Education Lab, handsomely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, champions the corporate reform of public education. But that’s too nice. The reform movement seeks nothing less than to destroy the schools, the teachers and their unions. The reformers do so by squeezing education budgets, testing the hell out of kids (all done by corporations, of course), then foisting the results on an ignorant populace, poised to believe the worst, that the schools and their teachers are failing at their task. Why, then, pay the incompetents more money?

I’m reminded often of my grandfather, reportedly a Wobbly at one point in his life, a member of Clarence Darrow’s poker club, and a longtime union member in the newspaper business, a linotype operator he was. Here is a picture of him in the print room of some Midwest publication. He is standing at the far left.

W.H. Aldrich at print shop (1917)

He ended his career working for a San Francisco newspaper. (I can recall the lone visit as a small boy to the noisy floor of machines where he punched keys, producing lead letters for the next edition.) He toiled proudly on the linotypes, paying his union dues, and striking when necessary. It was one such strike while at a Chicago daily that lasted so many weeks that he had no choice but to join his three sons, already situated in the Bay Area.

He brought with him his wife, his books, and a few LPs—one of Paul Robeson. As I sat at the keyboard this morning, typing as my grandfather did, I listened to Robeson’s rendition of Joe Hill, accompanied by Alan Booth at the piano. I confess: tears fell. Yes, it was about my grandfather, who died today 50 years ago. But it was more about the things for which he fought, especially the working man—and woman.

Joe Hill was executed a century ago, framed for murder. An itinerant, really, having emigrated from Sweden. He found work using his hands in many different trades. He also found time to write poems and songs, even the night before he was shot standing against a firing wall. It was his last will, asking that his ashes be spread across the land but never in Utah, which put him to death.

My will is easy to decide,

For there is nothing to divide.

My kin don’t need to fuss and moan,

Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.

My body, ah, if I could choose

I would to ashes it reduce

And let some merry breezes blow them

To where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flower then would take root and bloom again.

This is my last and final will:

Good luck to all of you,

Joe Hill

Yet, the sadness this morning was as much about what has happened in America since Hill was executed. Thousands of men and women paid with their lives to secure eight-hour days, weekends, Social Security, and union protection. Today, a half-century after my grandfather’s death, private sector union membership is in the single digits and newspapers, as always, side with their corporate sponsors over those still trying to improve working lives. Wages have shrunk, benefits slashed, and financial security tossed to the gutter.

Joe Hill and my grandfather imagined a better fate. But my generation collectively forgot history, while willfully ignoring past struggles to secure a better future.

We are all on our own now, expected to kiss capitalism’s big, smelly ass. Sad, indeed.

Sorry, Joe. Sorry, Grandpa.

Feeling strapped lately?

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First the truism: the rich keep getting richer as the poor become poorer. A new study, via the New York Times, gives us the numbers. If you’ve discovered that your paycheck is not keeping pace with your needs, you are not alone. Across all income quintiles average hourly wages have declined, even among professionals like lawyers, corporate managers, teachers, and computer analysts. But for those at or near the bottom, your income has declined the most. Take a look at this chart from the Times.

Screen Shot 2015-09-04 at 9.15.58 AM

Here’s another truism: employers feel no pressure to boost wages. There are plenty of people in the job market looking for work, and their burgeoning supply against modest demand for their labor squeezes paychecks. At the other end, highly skilled workers are in relatively short supply, pushing wage ceilings upwards.

The trend, while good for the individual employer, bodes ill for the economy as a whole. If we all make less money, we spend less (or go ever deeper into debt), retarding growth. (We would prefer that profits be reinvested in the economy, but why do so if the products or services cannot be bought?)

real median household income to 2015

Elites offer a solution. Get an education. Though, it must be added, not just any old education. Securing a graduate degree from Harvard holds far better promise than a certificate from an information technology online training course. Whether or not you can gain entrance to an Ivy League school depends mostly on your choice of parents. That is, your chances of becoming wealthy are greatly improved if you are already rich. Yep. This game is rigged, and not in your favor.

For the Rest of Us, denied a slot at the better schools and therefore lacking the opportunity to climb the economic ladder, the answer may lie elsewhere. It was once suggested that workers of the world should unite. How’s that going?

union membership rate 1983 to 2014

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics