We Built This Country on Inequality

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/179385/we-built-country-inequality


John D. Rockefeller Sr., oil tycoon and paragon of income inequality, seen here during the Great Depression (AP Photo)

I admit to tuning out most conversations surrounding income and/or wealth inequality in the United States. It’s not because I don’t find these conversations important; they are vital. The problem is that I always hear the issue of inequality situated around what has happened in the last thirty or forty years, which ignores the fact this is a nation built on inequality. The wealth gap didn’t spring up from policy gone awry—it is the policy. This country was founded on the idea of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few white men. That that persists today isn’t a flaw in the design. Everything is working as the founders intended.

The source of that inequality has changed, as the past thirty/forty years have been dominated by the financial class and rampant executive corruption, but the American economy has always required inequality to function. Even times of great prosperity, where the wealth gap decreased, inequality was necessary. The post-WWII period is notable for the lowest levels of inequality in the modern era, but the drivers of that prosperity (the GI Bill, construction of the highway system, low-interest home loans) deliberately left black people out, and the moments of robust public investment that have benefited racial minorities and women have always been followed by a resurgence of concern over government spending and “state’s rights.”

Our job, then, if we’re serious about forming a society of true equality, is to interrogate and uproot the ideologies that created the original imbalance. In other words, we can’t deal with income/wealth inequality without also reckoning with white supremacy and patriarchy.

So far, we haven’t done a very good job of that. Bryce Covert writes eloquently about the gender gap, while Matt Bruenig writes about the failure to address economic disparity along racial lines. Over at Salon, he says:

Although the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation which just reached its 50th anniversary, made great strides in desegregating the economy, economic discrimination is still widespread, and anti-discrimination legislation alone can never rectify the economic damage inflicted upon blacks by slavery and our Jim Crow apartheid regime.

[Demeter]

1. what do you mean WE, Yankee? It was built by SLAVERY

This country wouldn't exist if it weren't for the 300 years of involuntary slave labor (and some indentured servitude) that built the White House and most everything else up to 1870, and the quasi-slavery of sharecropping, company store coal mining, and guest workers following...

Since my family, the Slavs (root word for slavery, as we were frequently enslaved for 1000 years or so) didn't even get here until the 20th century...

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

2. But we built this city on rock n roll. nt