Dean Baker: "The Rich & Powerful Have Re-Written the Rules to Make Themselves More Powerful"

[amborin]

What the Elites Are Trying to Steal from Us, and Why

by Paul Rosenberg

In a typically excellent piece last week, "When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules", economist Dean Baker made the point that so-called "free trade" rules are made in highly selective manner--to put downward pressure on the vast majority of Americans, while letting a small minority continue to reap monopolistic rents. This was not, perhaps the main point of his post--or maybe it was.

In any event, it was an integral part of his argument, a very useful entry point, and something that's far too often ignored:

The upward redistribution of the last three decades has nothing to do with the market and a belief in "market fundamentalism."
This is about a process where the rich and powerful have rewritten the rules to make themselves richer and more powerful.
For example, they wrote trade rules that were designed to put downward pressure on the wages of the bulk of the U.S. workforce by placing manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in China and other developing countries. This had nothing to do with a belief in "free trade." They did not try to subject lawyers, doctors or other highly paid workers to the same sort of international competition. They only wanted international competition to put downward pressure on the wages of workers in the middle and bottom, not those at the top.

This elite has instituted a system of corporate governance that allows top executives to pilfer companies at the expense of their shareholders and its workers. Top executives are overseen only by a board of directors who owe their hugely overpaid sinecures to the executives they supervise. And of course the Wall Street barons themselves are given a license to gamble with the implicit promise that government picks up their tab when they lose.

Given that reality, Baker argues, the strategic imperative for action is clear:

No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting. Our income is a cost to the rich. They will look to cut it wherever they can, whether this is wages for private sector workers, pensions for public employees,
or Social Security for retirees. That is their target.
We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- the multimillion dollar bonuses for the Wall Street wizards is a direct drain on the economy. So are the bloated paychecks of top executives and their lackey boards. Progressives must be prepared to use all the same tactics to bring down the income of the rich and powerful that they have used to reduce the income of everyone else.

snip

http://www.openleft.com/

[BrklynLiberal]

1. and they are being aided and abetted by some who should be fighting them.

at the highest levels and at the lowest

http://markmaynard.com/?p=7501&cpage=1

<snip>
The best part of the article is the contribution by Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Here’s a highlight:

….Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining… It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

As Mr Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.

And here, according to the author of the article, is the big takeaway message from all of this… “If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them. They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best. There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots. As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.”
<snip>

[glitch]

3. The elite shouldn't count on their brainwashed stooges. Once they get that they've been used

they will be even uglier than they are now.

[BrklynLiberal]

5. IF they ever get they have been used...and it happens before it is way too late.

[glitch]

7. That is a big IF.

That's ok, if they don't we can bring the ugly.

[Peace Patriot]

9. How do we know who anybody votes for in this country?

It's all run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, in all the shiny new electronic voting systems, with virtually no audit/recount controls. These 'TRADE SECRET' machines are largely (80%) owned and controlled by one, private corporation--ES&S, which just bought out Diebold--with rightwing connections that would make your hair stand on end.

Any political analysis which doesn't acknowledge this obviously critically important fact is just not valid. It may contain sentiments that we agree with. But it is omitting THE most important key to change--transparent vote counting. The system is SET UP for fraud. There is no other reason to have such a system. And so, political commentary takes place in a sort of La-La Land based on false assumptions about our power as a people. We have no power to change anything--neither to start rightful taxation of the rich, nor to elect representatives who will do so. We obviously have no power over the political dialogue, but, worse than this, we have lost the power to count our own votes. Until we recognize this, and until we change it--which it is still theoretically possible to do--we don't really have a democracy. It's fine and good to talk about what our representatives should be doing in our interest and for the common good--such discussions are very important--but if we lack the right to know who actually won our elections, if the very basis of our power as a people has been hijacked, has been rendered non-transparent, has been privatized--let alone by a rightwing corporate monopoly--such discussions are merely diverting. We have no power to implement our will, as a people. And the corpo-fascist media can go apeshit with false portrayals of who we are and what we want--which is exactly what they have done. Our system is not only filthy with the power of "organized money" (as FDR put it), it is directly manipulable by one, private, rightwing corporation. And if we don't START with taking back our right and power over the counting of our votes, our discussions of who and what to vote for, and our discussions of who and what we think other Americans are voting for, lack reality.

[BrklynLiberal]

11. True.. It is not the voters that count..It is who counts the votes that matters.

[ixion]

2. Dean Baker speaks the truth

it is class warefare, pure and simple.

[AzDar]

4. K & R

:kick:

[ArcticFox]

6. I disagree in part

The article says: "We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- the multimillion dollar bonuses for the Wall Street wizards is a direct drain on the economy. So are the bloated paychecks of top executives and their lackey boards. Progressives must be prepared to use all the same tactics to bring down the income of the rich and powerful that they have used to reduce the income of everyone else."

Yet, there is absolutely no way for us to fight using the same tactics. I have NO power to cut the salary of any CEO. I cannot buy many of the things sold by large corporations because there is no alternative, non-corporate, supplier. Those that have, have virtually everything. They own the government.

The more the rich get richer and the rest of us poorer and more helpless, the more it seems our intervention will have to be by extraordinary means. Means that are not technically legal, even if morally right. I don't want to say the "v" word, but I think it will have to come to that. If we don't stop driving the path we're on soon, the rich will destroy the world and everyone on it.

[Blue_Tires]

8. major kick

[jimshoes]

10. Well, we outnumber them

about 10,000 to 1. Perhaps we can use that to our advantage. Somehow.

[BrklynLiberal]

12. Perhaps..if votes were accurately counted.

[guitar man]

13. Yes

Somehow.



Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

John F. Kennedy

[ProSense]

14. "No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting."

Interesting. Wonder how long that will take?