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inequality
Post-Election Beatitudes
Blessed are those of the people, for the people, and by the people.
Nov 24, 2024
Whatever postures our country has projected to the world—shining city on a hill, leader of the free world, model of democracy, the indispensable nation, a rules-based order—all have crumbled like a house of cards. Our country’s failures, however, are deeper and older than the recent election.
The United Nations lowered the U.S. ranking to No. 41 among nations in 2022 due to the extreme gap between the rich and the rest and women’s loss of reproductive freedom. Elsewhere the U.S. ranks as a “flawed democracy” because of its severely fractured society. These ongoing societal failures feed a continuous decline in health, such that we now ranks 48th among 200 countries in life expectancy, while having the largest number by far of billionaires and millionaires compared with other wealthy countries. Corporate lobbies for the weapons industry, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, etc. dictate our federal government’s priorities while 78% of U.S. people live paycheck to paycheck.
Blessed Is the Poor People’s Campaign: This national campaign in more than 45 states is organized around the needs and demands of the 140 million poor and low-income Americans. Its vision to restructure our society from the bottom up, recognizes “we must… deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and the denial of healthcare, militarism, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.” Add sexism to that list of injustices.
Blessed is Fair Share Massachusetts, a coalition of labor unions and dozens of community and faith-based organizations that won passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022. The constitutional amendment has instituted a 4% surcharge on annual income over $1 million. In 2024 the $1.8 billion accrued from the tax on millionaires provides free school meals; free community college; and funds to invest in roads, bridges, and public transit.
In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes adequate housing as one cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living. All 27 European Union member states as well as Australia and South Africa institutionalized housing as a human right for their citizens while the United States has not. In every state except Oregon and Wyoming, it can be illegal to be homeless, essentially casting blame on 650,000 adults and over 2 million children for their poverty-stricken homelessness
Blessed is Rosie’s Place, a model to our country of woman-centered humanism. Much more than a shelter, it is a mecca and “a second chance for 12,000 poor and homeless women each year” in Boston. Rosie’s Place was founded on Easter Sunday 1974 in an abandoned supermarket, as the first shelter for women in the country. From providing meals and sanctuary from the streets, it grew into a multi-service community center that offers women emergency shelter and meals plus support and tools to rebuild their lives. Rosie’s offers a food pantry, ESOL classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support, housing and job search services, and community outreach. Ninety percent of homeless women have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse at some time in their lives.
Blessed are the nearly 3,000 domestic violence shelters and groups organized throughout the U.S. to provide temporary shelter and help women rebuild their lives, offering legal assistance, counseling, educational opportunities, and multi-services for their children.
A recent Gallup Survey found that the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in trust of their government and major institutions, including business leaders, journalists and reporters, the medical system, banks, public education, and organized religion—a plunge from top of the list nearly 20 years ago.
Blessed is Hands Across the Hills, a blue-state red-state seven-year effort formed after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to bring together progressive residents in western Massachusetts and more conservative residents of rural eastern Kentucky, for conversations and sometimes intense dialogues about their political and cultural differences. They disputed the idea “that we are hopelessly divided, as a myth sold to us by politicians and mass media, to hide our nation’s all-too-real inequalities.”
Blessed are the peacemakers across dozens of federal agencies, including the military and in communities throughout the country, who challenge, resist, resign, and refuse orders in our flawed hyper-militaristic government. Since the U.S.-enabled genocide in Gaza, more than 250 veterans and active-duty soldiers have become members, respectively, of About Face: Veterans Against the War, Feds for Peace, Service in Dissent, and A New Policy PAC. All have arisen from current and former federal employees aligned with the majority of Americans who want the Israeli-U.S. war on Gaza (now expanded to Lebanon and the West Bank) to end through diplomacy.
Blessed are those of the people, for the people, and by the people—beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality for women.
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The Democratic Party Is Toast If It Doesn’t Earn Back the Trust of the Working Class
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner by consistently naming and picking visible fights with powerful culprits.
Nov 22, 2024
A week before the election, my dad was visiting and talked to me about his gut feeling that former U.S. President Donald Trump might win. He was clear about his choice to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “But what are they doing?” he asked me, exasperated.
“They need to level with people about the economy,” he continued. “I know so many people who can’t afford a place to live any more. People do not want to hear, ‘Well, actually the economy is good.’”
Then suddenly he pivoted away from Harris to liberals more generally, and away from the economy into culture.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports.
“You know, another thing: I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”
At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are.
My father would never dehumanize and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites—the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party.
Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for—and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership.
He doesn’t feel like they give a damn about people like him. I’m disinclined to try to persuade him otherwise. Because it’s clear as day that if Democratic Party leaders could swap the party’s historic base of working-class voters for more affluent voters and still win elections, they would.
This is not hyperbole. This is what they have shown us and told us over and over again—in their policy priorities, messaging choices, and electoral campaigns. They say it out loud. In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024.
And even when it appeared to work in 2018, 2020, and 2022, when Democrats won over sufficient numbers of suburban defectors, harnessing a momentous backlash against Trump, the risks were apparent.
In a little-noticed April 2018 post on the election analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, analyst Nathaniel Rakich showed how, at that time, “on average (and relative to partisan lean), Democrats [were] doing better in working-class areas than in suburban ones.”
Rakich showed that Democrats had roughly similar odds of winning over working-class voters as they did affluent voters and that they would likely see some positive results no matter which set of voters they invested resources into reaching.
But Rakich warned that such positive results could be self-reinforcing: If Democrats invested only in winning affluent suburban voters, those efforts would produce some results, and this would bolster Democrats’ resolve that they had chosen wisely. Schumer’s strategy would seem to be validated. But what about the working-class voters who weren’t prioritised?
Three years later, in March 2021, Republican Representative Jim Banks sent a strategy memo to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, arguing that the Republican Party had become “the party supported by most working-class voters.” Banks advocated that the GOP should explicitly embrace this realignment to “permanently become the Party of the Working Class.”
Banks wasn’t using “working class” as a euphemism for white working class. The memo pointed to movement of lower-income Black and Latino voters to Trump from 2016 to 2020 at numbers that should have seriously alarmed Democrats.
A striking feature of the memo is the thinness of its proposed policy solutions to attract working-class voters. While it suggests calling out “economic elitism,” it identifies the villains supposedly responsible for working-class grievances as immigrants, China, and “woke college professors.” Big Tech is called out only because of its “egregious suppression of conservative speech.”
The GOP’s actual policy agenda—from weakening unions to deregulation to lowering taxes on the wealthy to further gutting of public education and more—is a disaster for working-class people.
But a head-to-head comparison of policy agendas is not how most voters make up their minds about which candidate to back. Most Americans are struggling, with a large majority living paycheck to paycheck. In such a context, Trump’s core competency is his intuitive read of popular discontent. His central message boils down to: “I will wreak havoc on the elites who have wreaked havoc on our country.”
While Trump and Republicans are diametrically opposed to progressive economic policies, Trump excels at naming culprits. He’s adept at consistently tapping into generalized “anti-elite” anger and resentment, typically weaving it together with racial prejudice, xenophobia, misogyny, and—especially in 2024—transphobia.
Ambiguous anti-elitism—again, focused primarily on cultural elites—is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians.
It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.
And let’s be honest, affluent liberals can be incredibly condescending. Vulnerable groups are targeted in part to tell a story that “Kamala Harris cares more about catering to this special group (that you harbour prejudice against) than she cares about hard-working people like you.”
Before you go throwing trans people or immigrants or anyone else under the bus (because MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said we should), consider the possibility that these attacks are weak sauce when compared with the popular appeal Democrats could have if they decided to consistently name more compelling villains.
Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports. Trump’s manoeuvre to misdirect resentment only works when Democrats refuse to tell a compelling story that makes sense of working-class voters’ real grievances.
But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that [Bernie Sanders’] reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate.
The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket.
Even as President Joe Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust.
The reality is that the Biden-Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish—and what more they attempted to do—primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way.
Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal.
Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.
Banks’ strategy memo told Democrats exactly how Trump and the GOP would win in 2024, and then they proceeded to do it.
So when can we read the strategy memo for how Democrats intend to stop the bleed of working-class voters and win them back?
We’ve had the framework in our hands for as long as we’ve had Trump. It’s easy to find. Google: “Bernie Sanders.”
By circling the wagons to defeat Sanders (twice), the Democratic Party establishment imagined it was making itself more palatable to highly prized affluent swing voters. But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that this reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate. Even The New York Times’ “moderate” columnist David Brooks finally gets it now.
It should now be abundantly clear that if Democrats do not learn to speak to and earn the trust of working-class people like my father—and people who are far more alienated than him—the party is toast. That means standing up visibly and vocally for working people and picking open fights with powerful culprits. Ultimately, it means confronting and reversing the central crisis underlying the “populist moment” we live in—runaway inequality—by delivering big for America’s working class.
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Tax Dodging by Super-Rich, Big Corporations Costs Nations Half a Trillion Per Year: Study
"The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system," said the chief executive of the Tax Justice Network.
Nov 19, 2024
A study published Tuesday estimates that tax dodging enabled by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other wealthy nations is costing countries around the world nearly half a trillion dollars in revenue each year, underscoring the urgent need for global reforms to prevent rich individuals and large corporations from shirking their obligations.
The new study, conducted by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), finds that "the combined costs of cross-border tax abuse by multinational companies and by individuals with undeclared assets offshore stands at an estimated $492 billion." Of that total in lost revenue, corporate tax dodging is responsible for more than $347 billion, according to TJN's calculations.
"For people everywhere, the losses translate into foregone public services, and weakened states at greater risk of falling prey to political extremism," the study reads. "And in the same way, there is scope for all to benefit from moving tax rule-setting out of the OECD and into a globally inclusive and fully transparent process at the United Nations."
The analysis estimates that just eight countries—the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Japan, Israel, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—are enabling large-scale tax avoidance by opposing popular global reform efforts. Late last year, those same eight countries were the lonely opponents of the United Nations General Assembly's vote to set in motion the process of establishing a U.N. tax convention.
According to the new TJN study, those eight countries are responsible for roughly half of the $492 billion lost per year globally to tax avoidance by the rich and large multinational corporations, despite being home to just 8% of the world's population.
"The hurtful eight voted for a world where we all keep losing half a trillion a year to tax-cheating multinational corporations and the super-rich," Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, said in a statement Tuesday. "The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system, and their people consistently demand an end to tax abuse, so it's absurd that the U.S. and U.K. are seeking to preserve it."
"It's perhaps harder to understand why the other handful of blockers, like Australia, Canada, and Japan, who don't play anything like such a damaging role, would be willing to go along with this," Cobham added.
TJN released its study as G20 nations—a group that includes most of the "hurtful eight"—issued a communiqué pledging to "engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed." Brazil, which hosted the G20 summit, led the push for language calling for taxation of the global super-rich.
The document drew praise from advocacy groups including the Fight Inequality Alliance, which stressed the need to "transform the rhetoric on taxing the rich into global reality."
The communiqué was released amid concerns that the election of far-right billionaire Donald Trump in the U.S. could derail progress toward a global solution to pervasive and costly tax avoidance.
The new TJN study cites Trump's pledge to cut the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% and warns such a move would accelerate the global "race to the bottom" on corporate taxation.
"People in countries around the world are calling in large majorities on their governments to tax multinational corporations properly," Liz Nelson, TJN's director of advocacy and research, said Tuesday. "But governments continue to exercise a policy of appeasement on corporate tax."
"We now have data from these governments showing that when they asked multinational corporations to pay less tax, the corporations cheated even more," Nelson added. "It's time governments found the spines their people deserve from their leaders."
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