Pickety -- Democratic Primary Makes Clear: A Populist Revolution is Coming [View all]

[RiverLover]

Democratic Primary Makes Clear: A Populist Revolution is Coming
by
Lauren McCauley, Common Dreams
2/16/16

Regardless of Sanders win, Thomas Piketty predicts 'the end of the politico-ideological cycle' brought on by Ronald Reagan at the behest of financial elites



...snip......

Putting Sanders' rise within historical context, Piketty revisits the period between 1930 and 1980 when the U.S. "pursued an ambitious policy of reduction in social inequalities," with economic policies that included progressive income and estate taxes, as well as the implementation of a federal minimum wage (which reached above 10 dollars per hour, in 2016 dollars, by the end of the 1960s).

"Half a century of steady fiscal progressivity" came to an abrupt end in 1980, when Ronald Reagan "surfed" into the presidency "on a program designed to reinstate a mythical capitalism said to have existed in the past," propelled largely by the frustrations of "the financial elites."

Piketty said this culminated with the 1986 fiscal reform, which lowered the top tax rates to 28 percent (compared to an average rate of 82 percent for the richest Americans during the previous era), as well as the freezing of the federal minimum wage.

Neither effort, he notes, was "genuinely challenged by the Democrats of the Clinton years and the Obama era" leading to an "explosion of inequalities and huge salaries...and stagnation of the incomes of the majority."

Indeed, the French economist rose to global prominence in 2014 when he argued in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that the world had entered another Gilded Age.


Piketty concedes, "Faced with the Clinton electoral machine and the conservatism of the major media, Bernie will perhaps not win the primary." But he adds, "it has been demonstrated that another Sanders, possibly younger and less white, could one day soon win the American presidential elections and change the face of the country."

"Today, Sanders’ success demonstrates that a substantial proportion of America is tired of the rise in inequality and these pseudo-alternatives and intends to return to a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism," he concludes.......

Read in full~
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/16/democratic-primary-makes-clear-populist-revolution-coming

From 2 years ago, a great speech from a man who could make the impossible possible if ENOUGH people wake up to the purchase of our govt by Moneyed Interests & say ENOUGH & vote for BERNIE.

This isn't some manufactured campaign schtick. This is his life's work.

He needs our help to help him help US.

He isn't being purchased by Super PACs because he wants to work for US, The People.

Its great he may be paving the way for a populist in the future. But I say, why not NOW? Why wait? Contribute $25 to Bernie, and ask your friends to as well.