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ACCORDING TO LIZ - More and more Americans are working longer hours for less pay. More and more despair about keeping up with inflation let alone getting ahead.
This is clearly manifested in the anger that continues to grow among the have-nots which, as a self-identified group, now encompasses most Americans. A sad state of affairs in a country that used to be the world’s leader in prosperity and individual innovation.
Statistics repeatedly show that after decades of economic expansion for all, most members of the younger generations can’t hope to achieve the heights of their parents’ peers.
What can be done?
The obvious is to work on narrowing the wealth gap.
No-one should have the assets of an Elon Musk or Harlon Crow nor the power that such confer to meddle in the country’s political and economic destiny. And yet that is precisely what is happening today.
To address this, America needs strong legislators and an impartial Supreme Court and people at all levels of government willing to fight for real democracy, one that embodies social equality.
Which starts with reworking the system from the ground up, electing passionate advocates for the return to a real democracy in every election. Starting yesterday.
Legislation must be enacted to eviscerate the hidden costs of subsidizing of the fossil fuel, Big Ag, and other exploitive industries as well as the corporate takeovers and monopolizations that are decimating local businesses entrenching the current system of a few extraordinarily powerful people.
And their policies of using the highly subsidized shipping industry to chase their cheapest costs of doing business at the expense of workers, the environment, and quality of life everywhere through offshoring jobs and importing shoddy, often dangerous, goods from countries with even fewer worker protections, often through installing or buying off political regimes.
Putting an immediate stop to those plutocrats making fortunes off these subsidized sectors from pushing programs on our politicians to further expand their ability to make money hand-over-fist at the expense of the American taxpayer.
In return, many more of those taxpayers must make a real effort to resist the lure of cheap disposable goods and demand quality, transparency and accountability.
Those cheap disposable goods driving today’s unsustainable consumer society pushed by manipulative advertising and aided by squirrely social media and AI-generated lies, are just another version of bread and circuses two millennia after the fall of the Roman Empire.
It’s the curtain of the great Wizard of Oz drawn across the truth that the all-powerful fear: free speech which is, and must continue to be, the bastion of American life.
Our governments and businesses must be compelled to adopt accountability to the people and full transparency in all their actions. All of them must start focusing on quality – in their operations, in their products, in their responsibility to their communities and the country.
Quality – of goods and of their responsibility to their employees, their suppliers, and their customers.
People’s lives, from CEOs to assembly line workers, from business professionals to artists and stay-a-home parents, are all interconnected. What hurts one sector will eventually spread like cancer, destroying and disfiguring the rest.
Oh, a few may spread their cancer to more naïve and greedy companies where the executives are dazzled by short-term glitter and choose to ignore the long-term prognosis of such unsustainable approaches.
Others may think they can escape with golden parachutes into retirement… But for how long can their descendants thrive in a world left so degraded?
As to the American economy, the exponentially wealthy who avoid taxes, who build their wealth on refusing to pay a living wage to their employees, are too often those calling for austerity further cutting services for the vast majority of Americans who suffer from the tribulations of basic survival.
By pushing the government to decimate unions, consumer costs weren’t cut. The money just moved from the pockets of the workers who tend to spend locally on goods and services and into the offshore accounts of the terminally wealthy to spend on mega yachts, monstrous mansions… and manipulating the government to give them more, more, more.
Further machinations helped concentrate whole sectors of industry under fewer and more powerful companies that could collude or, after cornering specific markets, even set prices as high as possible. As happened both during the pandemic and since – the actual cause of the inflation Americans have suffered in recent years.
Forcing employees to do more work for less pay, reducing staffing, and transferring jobs overseas to line corporate pockets allowing for stock buybacks and other market manipulation, always in favor of the corporate autocracy is, in long run, not effective fiscally, morally or morale-wise.
A couple of generations ago, a majority of companies were model citizens, supporting their employees, helping the communities in which they were based, and investing in the infrastructure on which they depended.
Now too many are using that money to buy off the politicians to avoid any responsibility to the people and the country that allowed them to grow, artificially push up stock prices, avoid taxes and move assets out of the reach of the American government.
Too often the so-vaunted invisible hand of the market has hidden behind-the-scenes abuses.
There are no such things as hard-headed business decisions, only those made based on greed and selfishness.
Wonder why multi-billionaire owners Patrick Soon-Shiong ($7.1B) of the LA Times and Jeff Bezos ($200B and counting) of the Washington Post both refused to let their editorial boards endorse the Kamala Harris?
And even the best of politicians tends to hear the views of those who have the resources and clout to access their offices regularly.
If people want to change the system, they are going to have to gird their loins and fight for themselves.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
