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Among political scientists here in England, there is a saying "all politics is class politics". When that saying was first uttered, class was about who your ancestors were. That system collapsed eventually because of Thatcher (probably the only thing she should be thanked for) and when I was a child, I was told that America is a classless society.
Like hell. The boundaries are drawn differently but it's still about class. "Class war" may be an unfashionable battlecry now but it still goes on and guess what? We're losing. Over the last four decades, we've seen a gradual accumulation of wealth and power toward the upper class. W is, in many respects, simply the culmination of that process. The elimination of the estate tax, of capital gains tax, all those things ensure the concentration of power in the very wealthy, the upper class. Thing is, that couldn't have been done without a certain amount of support. Not enough to win an election perhaps but support all the same so the R's have fed the working classes distraction after distraction to keep them on-side. In any reasonable debate, same-sex marriage would be a done and dusted issue by now. In quite a lot of the industrialised world, same-sex marriage is either legal or well on the way to becoming so but in the US, it's still a divisive issue and the R's are very careful to keep it there. Despite his talk about a constitutional amendment, not much has actually been done on W's watch. Why? Because if anything serious were done, that wedge issue would no longer exist, it would no longer be useful for keeping the plebs riled up and therefore, distracted from their economic plight. Abortion is the same. There are good arguements on both sides of the abortion issue, arguements that reasonable people can evaluate and decide between but we're not seeing them because a climate of vitriol and venom keeps the people distracted from the real issue: Who's screwing who?
The current culture war isn't about abortion or same-sex marriage or even religion. Keep your eye on the cup with the ball under it. It's about money, it's about class. Henry Ford once said that the main objective of the industrialist should be "to make the highest quality of goods possible, at the lowest price possible, paying the highest wages possible". Ford might have been wildly anti-semitic but he was also a clever observer of the class system and, by keeping wages high enough and the prices of his cars low enough, he ensured that much of the wages he paid went back into the company via his cars. Under that philosophy, trickle-down economics might have worked but Ford, while a clever man, has been bypassed by modern industrial philosophy. The modern industrial philosophy is: Make the goods as cheap as possible, employing as few workers as possible, paying the lowest wages you can get away with. Over the law forty years, the productivity of the average American worker has shot up by between 25 and 40 percent because corporations have thought nothing of firing workers without replacing them. Contrary to what your elderly relatives might say, you work far harder than most of them did. Does that mean you should puff your chest out with pride? No. Because they were working hard back then. The people you work for now are pushing you to work not hard but like slaves. In the same forty years, the real value of the wages you get paid has dropped by about 14 percent. In some sectors (auto manufacture for example), it's dropped by even more. More productivity usually means higher profits but that money isn't filtering down to you and me so where's it going?
No, it's not going on taxes. A significant portion of US corporations pay no taxes at all. Quite a few have played the tax code like a harp and arranged matters so the government owes them money. No, it's not going on frivolous lawsuits either. Although there are quite a few pointless suits filed, not many of them make it to open court and fewer still are won, certainly not enough to make that kind of difference. Nope, sorry, government regulation doesn't account for it either. Sure, any businessman could write a book about pointless or irritating regulations but fact is, most of them cost very little taken from the bottom line. Keep your eye on the bouncing ball. No, the money is going into the pockets of the upper class. Since Reagan (may he rot in heaven), the effective tax rate paid by the wealthy has plummeted while their share of the GDP has soared. Around sixty percent of the wealth in the USA is owned by two percent of the population. The worst example is probably Big Pharma. On the annual 500 listing, there are ten pharmaceutical companies. Those ten companies make a profit that exceeds the other 490 companies combined and yet, your health care costs are one of the highest in the world and constantly going up. Here (England), we have socialised healthcare. All of us pay for health care through our taxes (since I smoke, I actually pay vastly more than average). Anytime I get sick, I can go see a doctor, paid for by my taxes. If I need a prescription, I pay £6.50 ($12.80 by today's exchange rate) as a contribution to the drug cost. The young, the old and the poor are exempt from that charge. Is it a perfect system? Far from it (there's a looming crisis over NHS dentists for example). Is it better than the US system? Hell, yes. Yet, your president (the only one you have, sadly) barred importation of generic drugs from Canada. No, don't get in a tizzy over whether you should be allowed to import drugs from Canada, that's another distraction. Follow the bouncing ball. The importation of drugs is a distraction from the very concept of having to pay for health care the way you do.
This essay isn't really about the health system. It's about the movement of money. In the words of the late (and much lamented) Molly Ivins, "capitalism is a wonderful tool for creating wealth but people cheat", that's why we have regulation. As the mania for deregulation has continued, the USA has seen a disparity of wealth last seen just prior to the Great Depression and the man at the top of it doesn't believe in regulation, he believes the free market should be responsible for everything and everything, literally everything he's done has been based around either enriching his own class or cementing his power so he can continue enriching them. Pick an issue: Social security. Social security wasn't in crisis to begin with but even if it was, two or three reasonable people could sit down and come up with a decent solution in an hour or so. What solution did W propose? Privatising social security. Now, don't get distracted by whether you'd be better off for privatisation. Concentrate instead on the movement of the money. It moves from the government to the private sector. How about Iraq? The botched invasion and occupation of Iraq has pushed oil prices to record highs because the price you pay at the pump is based on how much MidEast oil costs. Interestingly, that means that Big Oil can get away with charging the same price for the oil coming from Texas and South America (between half and two-thirds of US supply) as it does for oil from the MidEast. If one is feeling especially cynical (as I usually am), one might feel that since all the given reasons for invading have turned out to be horsecrap, that escalation of price might be why the invasion happened. One might go further and visualise an administration champing at the bit to pull the same trick on Iran, pushing the price of oil up even further but that could never happen, right? How about banking? I'm told you pay a dollar every time you withdraw money from an ATM. How much does that add up to over your lifetime? Here, we don't have ATM fees and there was a public outrage when the banks tried to introduce them a few years back. Perhaps some could claim that UK banks are being subsidised by their US customers except that due to differences in banking laws, we don't share the same banks. One could claim that ATM fees simply offset the cost of maintaining the network except that we don't have them here and Barclays (the largest UK bank) still makes billions in profit.
Follow the money. Where does all that money go? It goes into the pockets of CEOs, it goes to shareholders. Mainly it goes to the upper-class and the upper-class are mainly Republican. Some of them are actually in government but mostly, they just send a little money back to the R's every election to keep the wheel greased. Don't get fixated on individual scandals, focus on the bigger picture. The R's tilt the system in favour of the rich, the rich take the profits and send some back to the R's to keep the system tilted that way. This is how the mafia did business. This is beyond the corruption of individual members, this is corruption of the whole system. Cash and carry government and because the D's tend (as a generalisation, not a rule) to try and even the system a little, it is in big businesses best interests not to have a Democratic president. The mega-corps tend not to pay US taxes anyway but they make a lot of money out of the USA, both in their own right and by having more tentacles in more pies than some sex-crazed hentai monster (hentai is pornographic anime which for some reason, often involves tentacles).
What am I asking for here? I'm asking for focus. As the primaries swing around and the the election, don't get distracted. Issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, even the war, are there to distract you from the eternal question: Who's screwing whom? Vote your wallet.
Me? I'm waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad.
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