Poverty for America's poor was a conscious choice by the 1%

Robert Reich
2.22.2017
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The resistance mustn’t be only about Trump, or, for that matter, only about resisting. It must also offer an affirmative, hopeful agenda for the future.

A huge number of people are in pain. They’ve lost jobs, wages, savings, pensions, and much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. Their jobs are less secure than ever in living memory. Inequality is wider than it’s been in 90 years.

It didn’t have to be this way. It was a choice. Over the last four decades political leaders of both parties (but mostly Republican) chose deregulation, privatization, austerity economics, and trickle-down economics.

At the same time, we have witnessed the rise of a global oligarchy extending from Davos, to banking and tech billionaires who have seceded from their societies, and elected leaders who view the world the same way they do and have, wittingly or unwittingly, become their lackeys.

Trump spoke to that pain -- although he mounted one of history’s greatest bait-and-switch con games and has filled his administration with billionaires and Wall Street bankers. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain, although it won’t deal with the underlying structural problems that provoked it. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe that marry economic insecurity with racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.

As Naomi Klein notes below, a good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table – a wealth tax coupled with taxes on the unearned income of the wealthy that would finance a large guaranteed wage subsidy for the bottom 90 percent, single-payer healthcare, and a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of color and poor whites, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

What do you think?

Source
https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED&fref=nf