David Korten: War Against the Middle Class

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:




War Against the Middle Class
Why is the middle class is shrinking?

by David Korten
posted Mar 01, 2011


As did most Americans of my generation, I grew up in the post-World War II years believing that America was defined by a strong middle class supported by a durable bipartisan political consensus.

In fact, the American middle class was created in the space of just a few years by New Deal legislation that established Social Security and other safety-net programs, implemented a highly progressive taxation of income and estates, supported unions, and raised the floor on wages to narrow the wealth and income gap between the upper and lower economic classes.

Perhaps because I was living abroad during most of the 1970s and 80s, even into the 1990s, I believed until the mid-1990s that the middle class is a universal American ideal. It was quite a shock when I eventually came to realize that America is governed by an owning class that considers government intervention to maintain an equitable distribution of wealth anti-American, socialist, and a threat to individual liberty and national prosperity.

In the 1970s, an alliance of elite interests began preparing to roll back the measures that created the American middle class and launched a full-scale class war during the 1980s under the banner of the Reagan revolution. Corporate interests provided the money and controlled the real agenda. Religious fundamentalists provided votes in return for lip service to a conservative social agenda opposing abortion, family planning, and gay marriage. Libertarians provided an ideological framework removing constraints to the unlimited concentration of wealth in the name of market freedom. Neo-conservatives provided justification for wars and outsized military expenditures to swell the profits of the defense industry and secure corporate access to the world’s resources and markets. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/david-korten/war-against-the-middle-class

[OneGrassRoot]

1. Love Korten and Yes Magazine. K&R :) n/t