“The ongoing upward wealth transfer is a crime against Americans deserving of a little good old fashioned demagoguery — a term [that] I increasingly only use positively because the passions of ordinary people *should* be appealed to and inflamed.” – Pedro Gonzalez, Associate Editorof Chronicles Magazine
Tablet Magazine columnist Alex Gutentag has a new piece titled “Revolt of the Essential Workers” and it is truly something to behold. As Gutentag sees it, the resurgent labor movement may be the greatest challenge yet to the top-down class warfare of the pandemic era. Why? Well, because the economic discontent that propelled both Donald Trump (on the Populist Right) and Bernie Sanders (on the Populist Left) to popularity in 2016, discontent that had been building for many years, has gotten magnitudes worse. Gutentag writes:
As a recent article in the journal American Affairs noted, $34 trillion of real equity wealth, in 2017 dollars, was created between 1989 and 2017. Nearly half that sum (44%) consisted of a reallocation of corporate equity to shareholders at the expense of worker compensation, while economic growth accounted for just 25% of that increase in wealth. In other words, despite the advent of seemingly near-miraculous, time- and space-saving digital technologies, the post-Cold War ‘economic boom’ consisted mainly of America’s wealthy shareholders taking money from its increasingly insecure workforce.
In other words, the globalism favored by our ruling class really took off after the collapse of the Soviet Union because Globalist American Empire elites intentionally traded the previous American model of growth and expanding benefits for all in for a zero-sum system in which elites get richer by “impoverishing the less wealthy orders of society”. Still furious over the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the Authoritarian billionaire oligarchs of the Globalist American Empire took their ongoing revenge to the next level with the imposition of lockdowns in March 2020, shifting even more power than ever completely back to them.
Tech-based U.S. monopolies widened their profit margins as workers and their children were confined to their homes and the Fed pumped money into Wall Street. As the Fed provided unlimited purchases of corporate debt and securities, millions of people filed for unemployment, nearly 1 in 4 households experienced food insecurity, and 200,000 small businesses closed. The result was an estimated loss of $1.3 trillion in household wealth for American workers. Meanwhile, U.S. billionaires gained $1 trillion.
The economic hate crimes that continue to get perpetrated onto American citizens by self-loathing Globalist American Empire elites are brutal and the results continue to be less than pretty.
Today, the U.S. is experiencing the fastest rate of inflation since 2008 and consumer prices have increased by 5.4%. The top 1% of the country has more wealth than the entire middle class, the top 10% own 90% of stocks, and BlackRock and other investment firms are buying up houses. It has been 83 weeks since “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Now, the question is not whether workers will accept temporary lockdowns, but rather, whether they will accept a permanent COVID-industrial-complex that continues to erode their quality of life.
Read the piece in its entirety right here.