So, there is no reason to think that higher tax rates on the rich would be "job-killers," as the Republicans and their media allies say endlessly. Indeed, the Fifties and Sixties were a golden age for American workers, and a more recent experiment with slightly higher tax rates, raised to just below 40 percent under Bill Clinton, was accompanied by the nation's last major expansion of employment (and a balanced budget).
To protect the overall economy, the government also could impose reasonable regulations on corporations to prevent dangerous excesses -- and to ensure that workers (and consumers) get a fair shake. It would make sense, too, to strengthen the ability of unions to negotiate for higher pay, rather than marginalize them.
Through a mix of smart government investments and checks on corporate hegemony, a reinvigorated middle class could afford to buy goods and, in turn, make businesses more profitable. The alternative of a tiny slice of super-rich living in unparalleled luxury while most people see their modest dreams crushed is not only a recipe for political disorder but ultimately won't even be good for the rich.
Thus, the answer for middle-class and working-class people should be obvious: Support a democratized and energized government that intervenes on behalf of the broader society and insists that the spoils of a world market and advanced technology are shared more equitably.
After all, many of those business opportunities -- created by high-tech and free trade -- were made possible by the U.S. government investing in things like the space program, the Internet, an interstate highway system and global security.
Bad News
But the bad news is that Big Money has now run amok. Corporate chieftains are embracing Ayn Randian theories about the morality of inequality.
To back up this extreme ideology, they've also financed a political/media industry that deludes average Americans about the nature of the threat they face. It's an endless process of waving shiny objects before the eyes of the citizenry -- and it works.
This political/media structure also can inflict punishments. Politicians and media figures who step out of line pay a steep price. After all, the system's well-compensated propagandists are very skilled at making their opponents look bad -- and there's always some personal failing or professional mistake that can be highlighted, exaggerated and turned into the defining element of a target's life.
Mainstream journalists, who worry that they too could be targeted by the Right, have adapted to this ugly system by joining in it, focusing on the foibles of the target du jour.
In Campaign 2000, when Al Gore was regarded as a threat (mostly because of his environmentalism but also because he saw benefits in wise governance), the Right and the mainstream media transformed him into "Lyin' Al," the delusional boaster about his imaginary accomplishments.
The fact that the press -- including the New York Times and the Washington Post -- had to make up quotes for Gore to "prove" the point made a certain kind of sense if you understood the deformed political/media structure that now exists in the United States. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Al Gore vs. the Media" or Neck Deep.]
In Campaign 2000, the American Left didn't help things when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader campaigned on the slogan, "not a dime's worth of difference" between Al Gore and George W. Bush. That was arguably the most destructive falsehood in U.S. political history (if one considers the consequences of the Bush presidency and his Supreme Court appointments, think: Citizens United.)
Something similar is underway now with President Barack Obama, whose mild center-left reforms and his rhetorical defense of government as a force for good have infuriated the Right.
A recent Maureen Dowd column in the New York Times summed up the emerging Obama conventional wisdom that seeks to explain his failure to solve the nation's problems by dissecting Obama's difficult childhood as a mixed-raced child abandoned by his father and often separated from his mother. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The "Blame Obama' Syndrome."]
Obviously, the nation's problems are far deeper than Obama's personality flaws. But Dowd's column fits with the broader pattern of blaming anyone who challenges the status quo (even slightly).
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