The Last Recession Led to an Unequal Recovery. We Can Choose a Different Path.

[BeckyDem]

By
Ken-Hou Lin &
Megan Neely,
The Conversation

Published
March 22, 2020

As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, it is abundantly clear that the global economy is entering a recession – the first we’ve seen since 2008.

Some officials have compared the last period of economic decline – also know as the Great Recession – to the Depression, which began in 1929.

Yet it is clear that these two downturns differed not only in severity but also in the consequences they had for inequality in the United States.

Though the Depression was bigger and longer than the Great Recession, the decades following the Great Depression substantially reduced the wealth of the rich and improved the economic security of many workers. In contrast, the Great Recession exacerbated both income and wealth inequality.

Some scholars have attributed this phenomenon to a weakened labor movement, fewer worker protections and a radicalized political right wing.

https://truthout.org/articles/the-last-recession-led-to-an-unequal-recovery-we-can-choose-a-different-path/?utm_campaign=Truthout+Share+Buttons

[scarletwoman]

1. Uh, talk about obvious:

...In contrast, the Great Recession exacerbated both income and wealth inequality.

Some scholars have attributed this phenomenon to a weakened labor movement, fewer worker protections and a radicalized political right wing. (my bold)

[BeckyDem]

2. Buying legislation that protects your company interests, and there are many, increased

under Citizens United to the point its a stretch to say we have a functioning democracy. They did not have that kind of stranglehold before. The greed is good crowd keeps growing. I keep hoping we can build a coalition of voters to end it. It polls well across party lines, Americans hate it.

[BeckyDem]

3. The Reagan-Thatcher project of enhancing untrammeled business power, carried forward and extended by

their successors, has been the political reflection of a dedicated and coordinated campaign by the business classes to reverse the “crisis of democracy” of the 1960s that deeply troubled liberal international elites, who devoted the first major publication of the Trilateral Commission to this serious malady. Their prime concern was the increased engagement of popular classes in the political arena to press their demands, all of which imposes too much pressure and the state, threatening (though this remains implicit) the dominance of the business world. As the American rapporteur, Harvard professor of government Samuel Huntington, observed nostalgically, “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” but those happy days were disappearing under the attack of the great majority, whose role in a liberal democracy is to be passive and acquiescent, a doctrine with a rich pedigree, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere.

That was the liberal end of the political spectrum. Toward the conservative end, at the same time, the influential “Powell memorandum,” directed to the Chamber of Commerce by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell (later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon), called for open war by the business world to defend itself from the virtual takeover of the country by radical forces that were destroying “free enterprise” under the leadership of Ralph Nader, Herbert Marcuse and other “dangerous extremists.”

excerpt: Today’s most powerful authoritarian leaders — e.g., Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel and Donald Trump in the US, to name just a few — are enjoying widespread popularity with the masses and happen, in fact, to have risen to power via democratic means. What’s going on? Is something wrong with today’s democracy?

https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/30/07/2018/resurgence-political-authoritarianism-interview-noam-chomsky

Here specific causes intrude.

[BeckyDem]

4. "The folks in the middle and at the bottom haven't seen wage or income growth, not just over the

last three, four years, but over the last 15 years," the president said.

https://money.cnn.com/2013/09/15/news/economy/income-inequality-obama/index.html

[ResistantAmerican17]

5. And we are rewinding the tape and playing it again...

Some “finance expert” on CNN right now pleading for us to prioritize big business and not “politicize” relief by focusing on individuals and small business. She’s using the “mass school shooting” RW talking point—it’s not the time to try to change things.

[BeckyDem]

6. Exactly! Can't do THAT now. Can't do THAT either. We must stay centered on getting a little

done which means don't demand anything. CNN is one of the worst.

[ResistantAmerican17]

7. She even gripes about congress limiting stock buybacks as a condition of aid

Not a quote but a a summary—-“politicians shouldn’t be telling business what to do”. FFS

[BeckyDem]

8. They're always cheering unregulated capitalism. ugh