What Does The Destruction Of Our Middle Class Do To Democracy?

Has wealthy greed brought us the dysfunctional government we now suffer?

By Donald A. Collins | 22 September 2023
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

Who pushed through the 2010 Citizens United law that allows unlimited corporate funding of political candidates?

The result is not a mystery any more than the corporate tax cut from 35% to 21% signed by Trump in 2016 that didn’t “trickle down” as promised.

Big business now controls our government.

Now a government debt default is almost certain, another legacy from felon Trump who could well be our next President.

An alleged billionaire Trump posed as the little voters’ best hope after he and our wealthiest citizens imposed their financial burden on our poor and middle classes, already angry and feeling betrayed.

The greed of the wealthy has brought the anger of the poor and middle class but ironically pushes us toward a possible Trump presidency and the future of neo-fascism!

On Netflix is a program called “Working: What We Do All Day” which explores what a ‘good’ job actually is which is described as “a new limited series, in which host Barack Obama visits 3 American workplaces.” Obama gracefully and with total concern and modesty circulates among workers at all levels, sometimes carrying them food to their working places.

These stories of various entering and even upper-level jobs offer a gripping and sometimes poignant glimpse at the workplace for a major number of Americans.

As we learn from these several installments Netflix TV programs,

In an ideal world, every job would offer every worker good pay, purpose and a chance to grow. However, the ways in which we earn money and seek out a livelihood are much more complicated, especially when you consider the spiraling inequities many Americans face in the workplace today. Those nuances are explored in Working: What We Do All Day, a new limited series from Higher Ground Productions and Concordia Studio, hosted by former President Barack Obama and directed by Caroline Suh (Blackpink: Light Up the Sky, Salt Fat Acid Heat).

The Working series was inspired by a classic 1974 nonfiction work called Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Studs Terkel. Told through oral history, it chronicled over 100 everyday Americans of the era, their jobs and how employment impacted their lives. In the nearly 50 years since it was published, Americans have faced explosive changes in the way they work, all in the face of increasing inequality.

“We wanted to show how work looks totally different, depending on what kind of work you do,” Suh tells Tudum.

About 61% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, an issue that impacts both low-wage and high-income families alike, according to new research from LendingClub.

More facts from this source:

Low-wage earners are most likely to live paycheck to paycheck, with almost 8 in 10 consumers earning less than $50,000 a year unable to cover their future bills until their next paycheck arrives. Yet even 4 in 10 high-income Americans, or those earning more than $100,000, say they’re in the same position, the research found.

Such a situation is viewed as financially risky because it means those households don’t have enough savings to tide them over in case of an emergency, indicating that they are unable to cover their upcoming bills until their next payday. The rate of Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck is on the rise, up 2 percentage points from a year earlier, the analysis found.

Inflation is partly to blame, with consumers still grappling with higher prices — although prices have cooled since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022. But a minority of paycheck-to-paycheck consumers point to another issue that’s impacting their financial stability: nonessential spending on items such as travel, eating out and streaming services, the analysis found.

I strongly suggest you listen carefully to a 9/16/23 program on CNN hosted by Smerconish with Scott Galloway, a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business (I got my MBA there in 1962 so my MBA is a bit out of date).

At NYU he teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to second-year MBA students and is the author of the Digital IQ Index ®, a global ranking of prestige brands’ digital competence. In 2012, Professor Galloway was named “One of the World’s 50 Best Business School Professors” (Poets & Quants). Professor Galloway is also the founder of several firms including:

Professor Galloway was elected to the World Economic Forum’s “Global Leaders of Tomorrow,” which recognizes 100 individuals under the age of 40 “whose accomplishments have had impact on a global level.” Professor Galloway has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer (Nasdaq: EBHI), The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), Gateway Computer, and Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He received a BA from UCLA and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

Unions are “noble,” says Galloway, but “just haven’t worked.” Meanwhile, “Minimum wage is stuck at $7.25. There should be one union. The head of that union is Biden. $25 minimum wage.”

Professor and venture capital investor, Galloway offers an imaginative precis on why unions have failed, and the dominant large companies who now bought control of our government and created wealth which has not tickled down.

He does not mention the impetus given this control process by making Citizens United the law in 2010 what allows companies unlimited campaign contributions in our elections.

Capitalism is not adequate to take care of all our citizens in a fair way, since one percent now controls the capital that is not spread out.

As noted above sixty one percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck but in urban areas where more of our poorer citizens live that number is 69% as described here.

This of course exacerbates then the kind of attacks on democracy offered by Donald Trump which offer fear, hate, and lies as Hitler’s harangues influenced the German population in the 1930’s.

We are in a new Gilded Age.

Read about that era here.

This total imbalance, so well analyzed by Galloway in the clip you just listened to, needs ameliorated or we could face another Trump term and the fascist regime he will bring.

We Democrats need to begin to remedy these imbalances as well and at the same time address the out-of-control immigration crisis and the burgeoning national debt issue, created again by the cutting by Trump of corporate taxes for rich companies in 2017 from 35% to 21%.

Again, I strongly suggest you listen carefully to this program on CNN.

Let me repeat the above: “Unions are “noble,” says NYU Professor Scott Galloway, but “just haven’t worked.” Meanwhile, “Minimum wage is stuck at $7.25. There should be one union. The head of that union is Biden. $25 minimum wage.”

Of course, getting anything truly transformative through our present Congress will require defeating the Trump GOP, but also opening the eyes of Democrats to see where we are with too many disaffected Americans.

While a strong believer in capitalism and successful venture capital investor, Galloway offers an imaginative precis on why unions have failed, and the dominant large companies have bought control of our government and wealth has not tickled down.

He does not mention the impetus given this control process by making Citizens United the law in 2010 what allows companies unlimited campaign contributions in our elections.

Capitalism, Galloway argues, is not adequate to take care of all our citizens in a fair way, since one percent now controls the capital that is not spread out.

What Galloway, a seasoned venture capitalist, says in the program on CNN with Smerconish, does not say but one can assume he would say that if the present number of Americans who are unable to get a decent start has reached the level that it has, then the kind of attacks on democracy offered by Donald Trump can appeal to the downtrodden poor and small middle class as Hitler’s comments did to the German population in the 1930’s.

We are in a new Gilded Age where the rich have too much. CEOs of big companies take home millions in annual salaries. Women lib? How about GM CEO’s Mary Barra’s $29 million a year?

This total imbalanced condition, so well analyzed by Galloway in the clip you just listened to, needs ameliorated or we could face another Trump term and the fascist regime he will bring.

Of course, we homo sapiens may well be overtaken by our unwillingness or inability to solve in a timely fashion the rapidly expanding climate crisis with its already evident power to bring us to a 6th Extinction.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us” and “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”.

How the Citizens United Decision Changed U.S. Political Campaigns (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

The Rise of the Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else | ENDEVR Documentary

The Death Of The American Middle Class

Survey finds most Americans are living ‘paycheck to paycheck’

How America is Ruining the Middle Class | JHS Ep. 734

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