One of the major themes in the news lately has been the sex life of Republican candidates for President.  Will Newt Gingrich’s standing with “values” voters suffer because he was “dating” his current wife while his then-wife was recovering from an illness in the hospital, or will his current wife be an asset to him?   And what will the voters think about Mitch Daniels, whose wife left him with the kids for two years to shack up with another man?

I for one never cared about Clinton’s peccadilloes and I don’t care about what Gingrich, Daniels, Nikki Haley (who has been accused of getting around a bit), Donald Trump, or any other Republican candidate does in his or her private life.  And I don’t care what Democratic candidates do, either.

There are, however, two exceptions:

1. When candidates condemn what they themselves are doing, as Senator Larry “Wide Stance” Craig did by condemning homosexuality while trolling airport men’s rooms for quickie gay sex.  As most of us know, Newty dallied while condemning President Clinton for his liaison with Monica Lewinsky.
2. When the private actions suggest a pattern of wrong-doing that goes beyond adultery, such as sexual harassment, nonconsensual sex, pedophilia or, as in the case of Senator John Ensign, bribery.

As an adjunct to this “live and let live” philosophy, I am also not ready to condemn the adulterer who lies about his or her adultery, as long as there is no proof that he or she lied about anything else.  Just as you can’t score a home run without touching home plate, most adultery involves lying.  The “act” of lying is part of the “sin” of adultery, and not a separate sin. 

It would be great if all our politicians and public figures were saints, but they’re not.  Who is any of us to define sainthood for other people anyway?  And no one can get inside a couple’s marriage and really know what it’s like in there.

I would rather see the news media focus our attention on these factors:

• The candidates’ past actions in elected office and past record of accomplishments and stands on issues.
• What the candidate is currently advocating.
• How often the candidate follows the line of his or her party and if that party line conforms to what you want.

The news media does a disservice to the voters by wasting time on speculation about the private lives of any candidate, again, unless that candidate’s private life involves illegal activity or demonstrates hypocrisy. 

First, my reaction to the breaking news:  I’m delighted that we caught Osama bin Laden, but dismayed that our troops killed him.  He should have lived to stand trial and after conviction, been sentenced to rot away his years in solitary confinement.  The images of people celebrating his death were quite disturbing to me.  No man’s death should please anyone.  In a humanitarian world, one without war, the world we hope to build—in this future world, the true enemy is death against which all men and women will fight together as brothers and sisters.  Didn’t bin Laden gleefully celebrate the destruction of 9/11?  Let’s despise Osama bin Laden and celebrate his capture, but let’s not stoop one nanometer to his level by applauding his death.  

Now we return you to your regular programming:

We’re used to hearing and reading lies from the right wing, such as the lie that gutting job-creating programs to cut taxes on the wealthy creates jobs.  Or the lie that providing unemployment benefits for too many weeks will lead to people staying at home instead of looking for work.  Or how about the lie that government never does anything as well as the private sector can do it, or that charter schools lead to better educational outcomes.

We’re also used to stupid statements from the right, such as the many factual errors of Sarah Palin or the absurd exaggerations of Michelle Bachman.  Or how about the Florida Tea-partite politico who said that 90% of Planned Parenthood’s work involves abortions.  

But Tom Corbett, newly elected governor of Pennsylvania, concocted an especially unheady brew of lying and ignorance late last week with his solution to the budget problems facing Pennsylvania’s public universities.  His idea is for the state schools to earn money by allowing companies to drill for natural gas below campus.

Let’s start with the lying part that underlies the idea:  The primary reason that Pennsylvania institutions of higher education face a critical funding shortfall is because Corbett’s new budget hacks $2.0 billion in state support to education and cuts aid to colleges and universities by 50%.  Corbett tells us that cutting aid to education is the best way to solve the budget crisis and free businesses to forge Pennsylvania’s economic future in an increasingly globalized and knowledge-thirsty world.   These cuts make little sense to anyone who has one or more child in college.

Corbett’s other lie that lurks behind his advice to public universities is his insistence that gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale becomes deregulated and remains relatively untaxed.  The lie of course is that the current price of oil and the impending shortage of the stuff isn’t enough to interest gas drillers in the Marcellus Shale.  We also have to let them sully the environment and not pay their fair share in taxes.

So after having had a major hand in creating the problem—immediate and critical budget shortfall—the Governor proposes his unshackled Marcellus behemoth as the savior.

Only one problem, and here’s where Tommy Boy’s ignorance comes into play: Under current law, none of the royalties from drilling on campus property would go to the universities.  The royalties would all go directly to Pennsylvania’s Oil and Gas Lease Fund.  In other words, Tommy Boy’s plan would provide no help to the colleges and universities now scrambling to pay for teachers, equipment, staff and building maintenance.

I imagine, though, that Corbett’s idea delights his true constituency, the oil and gas companies that see the Marcellus Shale as a potential goldmine, especially if they can drill everywhere (like on the many campuses of college-rich western Pennsylvania), with little regulation and a light tax burden.

No wonder that surveys show that Corbett’s popularity has plummeted since he took office. He was elected to create jobs, but instead cares more about ramming through the right-wing soak-everyone-but-the-rich-and-poison-the-environment agenda. Like Tea-partites and their fellow travelers everywhere, his brand of lies and ignorance plays well until people actually see it in action.

It all seems so trivial, the growing focus of our mass culture on the upcoming wedding of a young man of fairly middling accomplishments who represents one of the most odious ideas ever invented by humans-that some people are inherently better than others.  Yet so far, it’s been relatively easy to ignore the royal hubbub.   

Yes, there are a large number of TV new programs and entertainments dedicated to the royal wedding.  Yes, even the New York Times is increasing its coverage of the upcoming nuptials.  But we easily can skip over those articles, flip away when the nightly news starts to gush over Kate’s dress and bridesmaids, and completely ignore the specials.

But what is increasingly impossible to do is ignore celebrity culture, which seeps into every crack and corner of mass communications nowadays. 

My on-the-fly definition of celebrity culture is the preoccupation with the lives and activities of actors, popular singers, other entertainers, very rich people and those who happen to gain notoriety on TV or the Internet.  Reporting on celebrity culture drives out other news.  Charitable causes and social trends are advanced or retarded based on their relationship to celebrities; e.g., when Angelina Jolie gets involved in a cause, that cause suddenly becomes news.   And when a wide range of publications, including Parade, Cosmopolitan, AARP, People and even The Times and The Wall Street Journal cover a trend, cause or nonprofit organization, they often do so through the eyes of the celebrities who have become involved.

Key to understanding the pernicious influence of celebrity culture is to examine that part of celebrity lives that mass culture covers: the stories primarily show these people living the “jet set” life of what Thorsten Veblen once called conspicuous consumption.  We are not only are told to value the celebrity over the person who has actually accomplished something of worth, we are directed to what is most admirable about the celebrity-the fact that he or she is able and ready to spend so much more than we can on goods and services.

Perhaps one of the worst effects of celebrity culture is that it establishes celebrities—again, primarily entertainers, rich folk and lucky do-nothings such as characters on “Jersey Shore”—as the aspirational heroes and heroines of the culture, the people that we are teaching both our children and our adults to admire most, respect most and most want to emulate.  I don’t think I have to spend any time demonstrating that it’s bad for society when everyone wants to grow up to be Kim Kardashian or Charlie Sheen instead of the paleontologist Tim Flannery or Hikaru Nakamura, a 23-year-old who is currently the best U.S. chess player.

Today I want to explore one little cog in the celebrity culture machine—the list of birthdays that appear in the daily newspapers and elsewhere, and which a number of other periodicals use as filler at the front or back of publications or as regular features on websites.

Let’s start with AARP, the slick bi-monthly publication of the AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), which gives financial, relationship, legal and other advice to those who belong to the organization, all 40 million or so of whom are 50 years of age or older.

AARP has a feature on its last page called “The Big 5-Oh,” which displays a large photo of a famous person turning 50 in the next two months and some short comments that take up the top two-thirds of the page.  In the bottom third are 6 more photos with short blurbs or people turning 50, 60, 70, 80 and sometimes even 90.

Here is a list of the 21 people featured in the first three issues of AARP in 2011 in alphabetical order.  I have put in bold, italics and underlining to indicate all the non-celebrities.  In the non-celebrity group I include athletes (not because I think we should focus more on them, but because very few of them ever become part of “celebrity culture,” that is, followed not for their accomplishments but because of their celebrity):

Alley, Kirstie (60)

Ann-Margret (70)

Boyle, Susan (50)

Channing, Carol (90)

Clooney, George (50)

Etheridge, Melissa (50)

Gretsky, Wayne (50)

Jones, James Earl (80)

Lopez, George (50)

Louis-Dreyfus, Julia (50)

Mays, Willie (80)

Murphy, Eddie (50)

Nimoy, Leonard (80)

Nolte, Nick (70)

O’Neal, Ryan (70)

Reed, Ralph (50)

Ride, Sally (60)

Russell, Kurt (60)

Sullenberger, Chelsey (6)

Thomas, Richard (60)

Will, George (70)

Only 6 out of 21 (or about 29%) are not actors or entertainers, and of those 6, two are athletes.  Of the remaining four, two are modern heroes: a former astronaut and the pilot who belly-landed a plane on the Hudson River.  BTW, the two political figures,  Ralph Reed and George Will, are of the extreme right, which may suggest that AARP, long a proponent of a humanitarian social net for senior and others and a big backer of health care reform, may be tacking rightward.

Note that there are no scientists, no historians, no chess players, no film directors (who after all create the films in which actors merely play a role), no Directors of the Centers for Disease Control or the National Labor Relations Board, no governors, no literary authors.

The daily newspaper is no better.  For decades, most dailies have had lists of birthdays of the day, which is typically supplied by the Associated Press wire service. 

Here’s who is on the AP birthday list today: “Movie director-writer Paul Mazursky is 81. Songwriter Jerry Leiber (LEE’-buhr) is 78. Actor Al Pacino is 71. Rock musician Stu Cook (Creedence Clearwater Revival) is 66. Singer Bjorn Ulvaeus (ABBA) is 66. Actress Talia Shire is 65. Actor Jeffrey DeMunn is 64. Rock musician Michael Brown (The Left Banke) is 62. Rock musician Steve Ferrone (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) is 61. Country singer-songwriter Rob Crosby is 57. Actor Hank Azaria is 47. Rock singer Andy Bell (Erasure) is 47. Rock musician Eric Avery (Jane’s Addiction) is 46. Country musician Rory Feek (Joey + Rory) is 46. TV personality Jane Clayson is 44. Actress Renee Zellweger is 42. Actress Gina Torres is 42. Actor Jason Lee is 41. Actor Jason Wiles is 41. Actress Emily Bergl is 36. Actress Marguerite Moreau is 34. Singer Jacob Underwood is 31. Actress Sara Paxton is 23. Actress Allisyn Ashley Arm is 15.”

(I do admit that I got a little nostalgic twinge reading that it was the birthday of someone involved with the making of the 1966 pop hit, “Walk Away, Renee.”  After all, it is one of the dozen 45 RPM vinyl records that I still own.)

Of the 25 people on the list, the only non-actor, non-entertainer is the film director Paul Mazursky.  Among those left off AP’s list of April 25 birthdays were two other film directors, the former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl , the horribly right-wing yet significant propagandist Dinesh D’Souza and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn. 

This active crowding out of those who have real accomplishments is a small part of the larger imperatives of mass culture, which tell us to organize our emotional lives around commercial transactions, and not around achievement and service to others, and establishes as our role models those who are famous because they either represent or are extreme participants in mindless consumption.

More from the speech I gave two nights ago at the monthly meeting of the Pittsburgh Area Jewish Committee (PAJC):

To belabor what is probably obvious, shrinking the percentage of the workforce covered by unions shifts money up the economic ladder because the non-unionized workers make less for the same or comparable jobs, leaving the difference for executives, owners and shareholders. It’s not a coincidence that the period in which the United States had the most equal distribution of wealth was the same age in which the economy was the strongest and that unions were also the strongest: after World War II through most of the 70s.  Unions turn low wage jobs into middle class jobs—they always have and they always will.

Here are some other trends that have helped to concentrate more of our income and wealth in relatively fewer hands:

• Tax policy:  We can describe our tax policy since Ronald Reagan took office as “Reverse Robin Hood.”  In Reagan’s first year, Congress cut income taxes to historically low levels, that are nevertheless still higher than today.  A year later, Congress raised taxes, but the new increases fell heavy on the middle class and the poor. And for more than 30 years, that’s the way it’s gone:  tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy alternating with tax increases that primarily take more form the middle class. The Bush II cuts that have recently been extended have the highest incomes paying the lowest rates and the lowest percentage of total government revenues in the history of the modernized West.  But even as we have lowered taxes, we have borrowed more money, creating safe havens and investment opportunities in which the rich can stash the money they have saved in taxes.
• The movement to privatize what have been traditional government services such as running prisons and educating our youth:  Whether for schools, prisons, or cooking and delivering meals to soldiers, when a private company does it, it intends to make profit for its key executives and shareholders.  As many studies have shown, low level government workers, many of whom are unionized, typically make more money than their peers in the private sector, most of whom aren’t unionized, whereas private sector presidents, officers and senior management make far more than department heads and other civil service executives.   Some government contracting makes sense, for example, to manufacture tents for soldiers or provide a special social service to an “at-risk” population; these functions have historically been outsourced.  But the new outsourcing of the recent past has usually not worked well for our citizens. Virtually all studies on charter school performance demonstrate that charter schools almost always fail to improve student performance and often worsen it. It is also well documented that the privatization of our prisons over the past 25 years has been a festering scandal of prisoner abuse and fraud. When the government loans money to students for college and career training, the terms have been significantly better than when the private sector was allowed to do so between the early 90’s and this year. And let me ask you this—did you prefer how our wars went when we used relatively few contractors as in World War I and II, or now that we’re making massive use of military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan?   Again, keep in mind that when the government gives a contract out instead of doing it with its own workforce, it is taking money from lower paid employees, who tend to be middle class, and giving it to executives and investors, who tend to be wealthy.
• Shrinking of social welfare programs: We don’t have to spend much time here.  It’s clear that a social welfare program, whether it’s food stamps, healthcare for poor children or support of state universities, represents a transfer payment down the economic ladder.  When we used to provide more money for these programs, we had a more equitable distribution of wealth than we do now.
• The attack on social security: The first step in the 30-year attack on Social Security came when the administration of Ronald Reagan changed the government accounting system and rolled the Social Security Trust Fund into the general budget and then claimed that the Trust Fund was near bankruptcy when all it needed to remain strong was to get back the money that it had lent the federal government.  Since then, almost every “fix” that has been made to the system has taken benefits away, for example, by raising the age or retirement, or to collect more Social Security revenues by increasing the percentage of what people pay.  In the same time, the cap on wages to be assessed Social Security taxes has crept up very little when inflation is considered.  Because of the graying of the baby boom generation, we do face a minor shortfall in the Trust Fund in about 30 or so years, not a grave one, but our elected officials seem to avoid the obvious solution—to take the cap off the income which is assessed the Social Security tax.
• For example, President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility & Reform proposes eventually raising the retirement age to 69 and raising the cap on income assessed by the Social Security tax only to $170,000.  The lawyers, accountants and writers in this room could work well into our 70’s or 80’s, but the age of 69 seems pretty old for retirement from most jobs: think of janitors, warehouse workers, retail clerks, factory workers, truck drivers, and most hospital staff.  Why couldn’t the National Commission have knocked a few years off that proposed retirement number and taken the cap off the income to be taxed for Social Security?
• Its treatment of Social Security is one of just many ways that President Obama’s National Commission wants to accelerate the movement of income and wealth up the ladder.  Although not asked to mess with the tax system, the Commission gave a detailed recommendation for changing it.  Paul Krugman is just one of many economists who, upon analyzing the series of tax increases and decreases proposed by the commission, recognized that if the commission’s plan passed, the wealthy would be paying even fewer taxes.  Meanwhile, the National Commission proposed draconian cuts to social welfare and education programs, again taking money from the poor and middle class who benefit from these programs and giving it to the wealthy, who will get the benefit of the proposed tax breaks.
• Right-wingers, primarily Republicans, are on the move in many states to take more away from the working and middle classes.  Republicans in Missouri, Michigan, Arkansas and Florida have all taken steps to cut the time that the unemployed can receive unemployment benefits. And nationally, the right-wing has begun a legislative assault on Medicare and Medicaid’s funding and fundamental structure.

Now that I have shown you how this massive net transfer of money—almost a heist, as it were—occurred, I want to close with two questions: why should we care and what can we do about it?

Why should we care?  I think most of us are fairly well off, and statistically speaking many of us would qualify as wealthy.  Many of us are among the ones who have done quite well over the past three decades.

But we should all care because one of the hard lessons of economic history is that nations in which equality of wealth increases over time always thrive economically whereas those in which the equality of wealth decreases tend to decline.  I first read of this idea from Fernand Braudel, usually considered the great historian of the 20th century after Toynbee, who brilliantly analyzes Spain’s decline during the 16th century because of the growing unequal distribution of wealth fueled by the growth of predatory tax policies that had the poor and middle classes paying more and the wealthy paying less. A positive historical example is Western Europe after the Black Plague, an age of rapid economic growth and the highest average wage compared to total wealth in western history. Closer to home, we can compare our nation’s condition from the end of World War II to the late 70’s to what it has become since, save for the Clinton boom, which also saw a temporary reversal of the trend towards greater wealth inequality. If we don’t reverse the trend, the economy and quality of life in the United States will decline quickly and permanently.

I want to pose and then give my answer to one other question: What to do to reverse the three decade trend of greater wealth inequality in the United States?  The following are some actions that I would submit we should demand from our elected officials and those who want our vote and support in primaries:

• Raise taxes on the wealthiest five percent of incomes and use the funds to provide simple wealth-shifting programs such as lowering the cost of tuition at public universities or increasing food stamp payouts.
• Remove the $106,800 cap on individual and employer payments to the Social Security Trust Fund (known sometimes as SSI or payroll taxes), so that everyone pays on all income but keep the cap on maximum benefits, which would secure the Social Security system well into the future.
• Raise the minimum wage.
• Foster unions by lowering barriers to unionization, ending “right to work” laws and requiring that charter school teachers join unions in areas in which the public school teachers are unionized.
• End government outsourcing for ongoing non-manufacturing, non-research government functions such as operating prisons and public parking and providing military services.  Government pays lower paid workers more and higher paid workers less than the private sector does, so when the government does it, there is a more equitable distribution of wealth.

All of these actions will raise wages and redistribute wealth down the economic ladder.  The experience of Western Europe suggests that these moves would not threaten our competitiveness in global markets.

We won’t be able to fix in one election, or even in one decade the grave harm which three decades of taking from the middle class and poor and giving to the wealthy has inflicted on our society.  But if we don’t get started now we will continue along the same sorry path that in 50 short years turned Spain from the most powerful nation in the world into Europe’s backwater for four long and hard centuries.

 

I gave the following remarks yesterday evening at the monthly meeting of the Pittsburgh Area Jewish Committee (PAJC). My topic was “putting the Attack on Public Unions in Perspective.”  I spoke after Sam Williamson, Associate Manager of the Pennsylvania Joint Board of Workers United, SEIU, spoke on the significance of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

In this speech I pull together a number of ideas that have populated by blog over the past 18 months, so I thought I would publish it on the blog for my readers. It’s pretty long, so I’ll split it up over two days:

Over the next 15 minutes, I’m going to put the current attempt in many states to reduce pensions and curtail the collective bargaining rights of unionized public employees into two broad contexts: one—the 30-year war against labor unions and, two—the role that war has played in the broader movement of income and wealth up the ladder from the middle class and the poor to the wealthy, also a phenomenon of the last 30 years.

My interest in these matters began when I was a television news reporter working for the national news program, “Business Today” and covered the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981.  During that time I was the first mass media journalist to report about the impact of the graying of the baby boom generation on the economy and society, and also the first to report on our development into a nation of rich and poor.  Today, among other things, I write the blog, OpEdge, which has investigated and analyzed the right-wing war against unions as one of its continuing themes.

Let’s get started, because we’re talking about class warfare, which as Betty Davis might have said, is always a bumpy ride.

The attempt of Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislators to end important collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin is the tip of the iceberg of what is an all-out assault on public workers occurring before our very eyes.  Here are some other examples that have not received as much ink nationally:

• In Indiana, Democrats legislators also walked off the job to slow down Republican efforts to ram through laws that weaken Indiana’s prevailing wage and collective bargaining laws.
• In Florida, there are three bills moving through the legislature that weaken the teacher’s union, restrict political activity by public unions and reduce benefits to state workers.
• Republicans in Iowa, New Jersey, Maine and Ohio are all trying to restrict collective bargaining rights of state employees
• Meanwhile, the governor of Ohio wants to exempt universities from a requirement that they pay union-level wages on construction projects.
• Even Democrats are getting into the “attack the unions” game.  Connecticut’s new Democratic Governor is demanding $2 billion in public union concessions over two years.
• Let’s cap this review of anti-union activity across the country with a little Alice in Wonderland thinking that many have been doing, including the New York Times this past January.  It seems as if certain policy makers are considering ways to enable states to enter bankruptcy in a new and as yet illegal way that would allow the states to keep paying municipal bond holders while breaking all union contracts.

If you think all this activity against public unions sprang up overnight as a collective expression of the anger or frustration of a country riddled with economic problems, then you haven’t been paying attention.  Right-wingers, primarily from the Republican Party, have been aggressively trying to curtail unionism and union political activity since the ascension to the presidency of the patron saint of union-busting, Ronald Reagan:

• Symbolically, the 30-year war against unions began when President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers—85% of all air traffic controllers—because they did not return to work as ordered during a strike in August of 1981.  Reagan also banned the fired employees from all future federal work, a move that the Clinton Administration rescinded in 1993.
• Reagan packed the National Labor Relations Board with management representatives. Prior NLRB boards settled only one third of all cases in favor of employers, even under Nixon.  Reagan’s NLRB settled three-quarters of all complaints in favor of employers.  The NLRB under Reagan also took more time to settle union complaints, which made it harder to organize and easier for management to pursue decertification campaigns.
• Both Reagan and Bush II’s Labor Departments were anti-union.  Reagan’s Labor Department, for example, declined to ask union-busting consultants and the companies that hired them for the financial disclosure statements the law demands, but it did ask unions to provide this documentation. Though the Labor Department cut its overall budget by more than 10 percent, it increased the budget for investigating union finances by almost 40 percent.
• Under Bush II, the budget was again eviscerated, with funding stripped from every enforcement operation: workplace health and safety, minimum wage, fair hours, and even child labor.  But no surprise, funding for investigations of labor unions increased.
• Now we come to that odd confection called charter schools.  Although many well-intentioned people now support charter schools, make no bones about it—the inception of the charter school movement and the continued advocacy by the right-wing has from the start derived from anti-union motives. For the most part, charter schools replace unionized teachers with non-unionized ones, who, of course, make less money, a necessity if the charter school is going to make a profit for its organizers.  The list of long-time financial supporters of the charter school movement reads like a who’s who of union haters, including the Walton family and the Koch brothers.  And supporting charter schools is part of the anti-union panoply of policy recommendations by such anti-union think tanks as the Heritage Foundation, the Pacific Research Foundation and the Goldwater Institute. By the way, virtually all studies of the matter show that the charter school movement has yielded disappointing results in the area of student performance both in school and on standardized tests.

The war on unions is just part of a larger trend over the last 30 years to transfer both income and wealth up the economic ladder.  This period has seen incomes and overall wealth of the middle class and poor stagnate while those for the upper 5% and 1% grow steadily.

Before I lay out some of the key events in this transfer of income and wealth up the economic ladder, let me first convince you that it has occurred.  Most of my facts were supplied by Professor William Domhoff, author of Who Rules America Now and The Powers that Be:

• The top 1% now owns 34% of all the wealth in the United States, compared to only 20.5% in 1979, for a gain of almost 70% in the past 30 years!
• Income of the top 1% was only about 13% of total income in 1982 and today  it’s about 21.5%—a gain of two-thirds!
• The chief executive officers and presidents of companies now make many more times the money than their average full-time worker does.  In 1980, CEOs made about 42 times what the average worked was paid; CEOs now make 475 times the income of the average worker in the United States.  By the way, in Europe and Japan, it’s anywhere from only eleven times as much to 22 times as much
• The top 1% of U.S. households owns nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• And only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

I think it’s reasonable to say that all ideology and philosophy aside, the past 30 years have seen the rich taking more of the pie and leaving less for everyone else.