Inequality

I listened to Senator Slotkin’s response to Trump’s diarrhea of lies before Congress last night. Fortunately, it was only a bit over ten minutes long. She spent the first nine minutes on the three shared beliefs all Americans hold: the middle class is the engine, strong national defense is primary, and democracy is wonderful, American exceptionalism. She touched on the need to bring prices down, make more things in America through union jobs, provide certainty —>> read more –>>

This is part of the series on the insecurities produced by American capitalism for most Americans. The Insecurities of Jobs Employment insecurity1 is the first insecurity that comes to mind. It is historically one of the original products of the capitalist revolution. Harvard political science professor Kathleen Thelen gave an address as the American Political Science Association President in 2019 titled, “The American Precariat: U.S. Capitalism in Comparative Perspective.”2  She describes the increasing forms and —>> read more –>>

We have written at some length about the flatlining of income growth for the bottom 90% of the population since 1980 and the transfer (heist) of that income to the top 10%, really almost all to the top 1%. This is the $47 Trillion Heist. Insecurity – a central feature of American life One of the chief outcomes for the bottom 90% is the tremendous increase in the number and intensity of their insecurities. The —>> read more –>>

The phenomenon of Trump is so disturbing that it requires our entire mental attention. He creates so much noise that, for many, the only strategy is to turn off the news.  His election, despite his obvious pathological narcissism,10 requires a profound explanation that may even draw on the concept of evolutionary maladaptation. This is certainly my state of mind. But, another view is that Trump is simply the next phase in the fifty-year social movement —>> read more –>>

Changes in Economic Policy and Regulation In two earlier posts, “What is financialization and why does it matter? – part 1” and “What is financialization and why does it matter? – Part 2” we defined financialization and discussed the changes in the financial sector of the economy as well as the changes in the behavior of corporations under financialization. These could not have occurred without changes in the regime of laws and regulations that control —>> read more –>>

Financialization is one of the most important drivers of changes in the last 50 years in American capitalism, and consequently in our society. As noted in other posts, and recently by Bernie Sanders, almost all of the income growth in the past 50 years has ended up in the bank accounts of the top 10% of the US population. Really, almost all of it actually ended up in the hands of the top 1%. I —>> read more –>>

A reader of my recent post, “Bernie Sanders got much right about our current situation….” commented: “Thank you Mark for validating what we know to be true with real data. Now what do we do about it?” My perspective on our situation has shifted because I have come to recognize that American life has been transformed over the past 50 years. The Trump era, following 2016, marks the culmination of a long campaign by the —>> read more –>>

Bernie Sanders, Senator from VT, sent out an email yesterday. The subject line contained one word, “Oligarchy”. So, I read it. There is much truth here: Dear Mark, For years and years in the corporate media, you’d only heard the word ‘oligarch’ preceded by the word ‘Russian.’ But oligarchs aren’t uniquely a Russian phenomenon or a foreign concept. No. The United States has its own oligarchy. When I first started talking about this, many people —>> read more –>>

Now that the billionaire class has installed their President and seized many posts in the Trump cabal, they are fighting over a limited supply of mansions close to the throne. “In this 1831 lithograph, Honoré Daumier depicted King Louis Philippe as Gargantua, sitting on his throne, consuming a continuous diet of tribute fed to him by various bureaucrats, dignitaries, and bourgeoisie, while defecating a steady stream of titles, awards, and medals in return. Daumier was —>> read more –>>

Ben Casselman wrote this piece in the 1.10.2025 NYTimes: “Economists Are in the Wilderness. Can They Find a Way Back to Influence?” The article cites the following as evidence of the decline of economists’ influence: Trump’s tariff plans, immigration, free trade, failure to foresee the global financial meltdown of 2008, deindustrialization, and a long-term slowdown in economic growth despite tax cuts. I won’t indulge myself in reciting the many false assumptions underlying neo-classical economics.33 No mention —>> read more –>>

The 12.26.2024 issue of The London Review of Books includes Eliot Weinberger’s stunning piece on the Trump presidency, “Incoming!”. It begins: “They came from Florida, from Fox News and Fox Business, square-jawed men and women with big hair and collagen lips. They came from professional football and World Wrestling Entertainment. They came from daytime talk shows and reality television. They were ‘straight out of central casting’, as the future president said. Some of the women —>> read more –>>

In the wake of Trump’s victory over Harris there has been much hand-wringing over how to explain the obvious trend among Americans to favor Republicans. Is the Democratic Party too focused on social issues? Is this alienating white males in particular? Did the party underestimate the general misogyny of voters? Somehow, and perhaps because billionaires and corporations are such a source of money for the party, the Democratic Party, in general, has not discussed the —>> read more –>>

The tsunami of billionaires that has washed across the planet over the last decade or so is troubling in the extreme. Now, we have the fattest one setting policy in Washington in the most direct way imaginable. Billionaires already own the US political system, and they are on the very shortest of lists in the new White House come January 20th. In 2000, Bloomberg’s list of billionaires included 322. By 2024, Bloomberg had stopped keeping —>> read more –>>

American Compass is a self-described think tank for conservative economics. From its Mission Statement page: “We are developing the conservative economic agenda to supplant blind faith in free markets with a focus on workers, their families and communities, and the national interest.” There is much to admire about the analysis of our situation here. Globalization is accurately described as a failure to develop broader economic growth around the world, with its true face as the —>> read more –>>

For the period between the end of WWII and 1979 there was productivity growth of ~ 55%. That means that for an hour’s work the economic value has grown by 55%. Over that period workers’ wages grew in parallel. As the economy flourished, so did the vast bulk of the population Many times over the past four or five years, we have mentioned the great wage stagnation that began in roughly 1979 and extends to —>> read more –>>

In the fall of 2011, a large group of protestors occupied areas around Wall St. in NYC for six weeks under the banner of “We are the 99%” At the same time, there were protests around the world in financial centers. These followed the financial collapse of 2008, and the $ trillions poured into the financial centers to bailout them out. The socialization of private risk-taking. Not a single Wall Street big wig was brought —>> read more –>>

Neoliberalism is the word most frequently used by commentators and academics when discussing the changes in the US economy over the past 50 years. For most people, this is a completely useless term. Are we talking about some new form of the New Deal? Then, we must yank ourselves back to 19th-century European liberalism to discover what neo is. Then, we are thrust into a very small world of political thinking that emerges chiefly from —>> read more –>>

Last spring, I moved with my wife Karen Davis from Hudson, NY to West Palm Beach, FL. In part, this was to be closer in our aging years to one of our children. We bought a condominium in a vintage 1969 10-story building right on the Intracoastal Waterway, across the way from Palm Beach, where billionaires and Donald Trump have their palaces. We have twice experienced gentrification in our earlier lives. Beginning in the late —>> read more –>>

Much is made here and elsewhere of the extreme concentration of wealth in the top 1% of the world’s population (63 million people) and perhaps most excessively in the top 0.1%. Now, we must also recognize that these very same people, the world’s multi-millionaires and billionaires, contribute in similar excessive proportions to CO2 emissions. Oxfam’s 10.28.2024 report, “Carbon Inequality Kills: Why curbing the excessive emissions of an elite few can create a sustainable planet for —>> read more –>>

October 2024 The US Congressional Budget Office has updated it findings on wealth inequality.   Since 1989 the top 10%’s share of wealth has increased from 56.5% to 60.1% in 2022. As usual the top 1% did even better with its wealth share gaining 4.4% over the same time period. Meanwhile the bottom 50% of the population remain stuck at a 6.4% share of the country’s total wealth. Not shown here is the fact that —>> read more –>>

Milton Friedman 58 asserted in his 9.13.1970 NYTimes opinion piece that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”59 Within a decade this mantra, combined with changes in laws and regulations of corporate behavior, unleashed the —>> read more –>>

A frequent topic here is the staggering success of the rich and corporations in extracting income and wealth from the economy. In my 1.2.2024 post, Three charts that define the last 45 years in the US, I described how the rich and corporations have used a set of policies and strategies to accomplish this. I have called these The Wealth Supremacy Playbook. A recent essay in the New York Times, “It’s Time to Tax the —>> read more –>>

Much is being made of a Delaware court blocking Musk’s $50 billion compensation contract. See the reporting in the NYTimes: Elon Musk’s Tesla Pay Package Is Voided by Judge. The court found that the compensation was set by a Board of Directors of Tesla who are in Musk’s pocket. “The process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed. Musk had extensive ties with the persons tasked with negotiating on Tesla’s behalf. —>> read more –>>

Its the time of year for summations, usually for just the previous year. My selection of charts explains much of the past 45 years for the rich, middle-class, and poor in America. The Great Divide The dark blue line describes the growth in productivity. That is the dollar value of output per hour of labor. It has been rising fairly steadily for the entire post-WWII era. This is the result in improvements in technology and —>> read more –>>

Last year, at about this time,  I tapped away at the list below. In recent days I returned to the question of a new Siege of Angers. I came up with little new and found that last year’s Siege of Angers remained at the top of my mind. The one exception is the continuing siege of fascism spearheaded by Trump. We need to counter-attack vigorously. I don’t believe the Democrats are in a position to —>> read more –>>