Winner Take All or Justice for All?

In Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob S. Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of Berkeley argue that America's money-addicted and change-resistant political system is at the heart of the enormous and rapidly growing income inequality that they say is undermining America's economic and political stability.

Nearly 40 percent of all the economic growth in the United States in the last 40 years has been captured by the top one percent of the population by income. The top one-tenth of one percent has 7.5 percent of the total after tax income in the United States. The United States is drifting from being one of the more egalitarian countries in the world with opportunity for all towards being a country like Mexico, Argentina or Russia with a small minority at the top monopolizing a great deal of the wealth and income of the nation.

Hacker and Pierson argue that government policies have been responsible for (much of) this change. They point to the failure of the federal government to update key policies that should have been modified to deal with changes in the real world. They emphasize:

• Tax reductions for the top income earners (which encouraged them to take more money out of their firms)
• Failure to regulate, especially the failure to regulate the financial industry and the new derivatives that it introduced during the last several decades
• Failure to support unions against the strengthened anti-union efforts of the corporations.

They specifically do not believe that the move towards a more knowledge based economy is the explanation for the drift.

Why then does the Congress pass this legislation? Hacker and Pierson say the reason is money. They suggest that the money needed for campaign financing is important, but far more so is the huge expenditure on lobbying over the last few decades. Money leads to some legislation that is favorable to the very rich, but perhaps more important, block legislation that would be unfavorable to them.

At still a deeper level of causality, Hacker and Pierson point to 

• A major efforts of corporations to organize politically to counter the regulatory successes in the late 1960s and early1970 around issues such as the environment and occupational health and safety
• The diminishing role of organizations representing the economic interests of "the rest of us" in the political sphere, including of the unions.
• The inadequate ability of the media to inform "the rest of us" of the economic issues before the Congress and their meaning in our everyday lives.

Incidentally, I came across this book in the new Bill Moyers program on public television, a program which is a refreshing return to a medium providing the kind of information we need.

Hacker and Pierson do not really have a program to restore the balance, but clearly we need for "the rest of us" to organize to project our economic interests on the Congress and the political process. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the importance of the Internet in doing so should be obvious. So too, the media have to do more.

Today is Martin Luther King Day, a day in which we remember the organization that lead in the drive for civil rights and the courage shown by the freedom riders and others in that campaign. That drive was for the civil rights of minorities. It was a movement that meant to achieve more nearly that promised in the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Perhaps the civil rights issue of our time is how to get our government in America to fulfill its responsibility of helping all of our citizens to secure their rights to life and the pursuit of happiness -- not just the rights of the one percent to prosper economically.