Elites Are Unanimous: Lower Everyone's Wages and Standard of Living - But They Don't Say it Out Loud

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AlterNet / By Jeff Faux

The Elites Are Unanimous: Lower Everyone's Wages and Standard of Living -- Except They Don't Say it Out Loud
America's 1% are in harmony on the matter that concerns them most -- who gets the biggest slice of the pie.



Calls for a bipartisan “Grand Bargain” on taxes and spending for the next decade ring out daily, if not hourly, from the politicians and pundits who dominate our political media. But the national discourse is silent on the tacit agreement both parties have already made on the future that lies ahead for the majority of working Americans: a dramatic drop in their living standards.

The United States can no longer satisfy the three great dreams that have driven most of its domestic politics since the end of World War II: the multinational corporate class's dream of limitless profits; the military-industrial complex's dream of global hegemony; and the dream of the people for rising incomes and expanding opportunities. One out of three? Certainly. Two out of three? Maybe. All three? No.

So far, Corporate America gets priority boarding in the economic lifeboat – with the safest seats reserved for Wall Street. Four years after the crash, the financial sector remains heavily subsidized with cheap federal loans that it uses to buy higher yielding bonds, speculate in exotic IOUs and pay outrageous salaries to those at the top. Larger than ever, they are more than ever “too big to fail.” As a result, Wall Street continues to divert the nation’s capital away from investment in sustainable high-quality jobs in America.

Next in line is the Pentagon and its vast network of corporate contractors, members of Congress with military facilities in their districts and media propagandists for the empire. The administration, along with some libertarian Republicans, insists that military spending will not be spared in the coming era of austerity, and has proposed modest cuts over the next decade. At the same time, virtually all of Washington supports the policies that require huge defense budgets, i.e., remaining in the Middle East, expanding in Latin America and containing China in its own neighborhood. The threatened across-the-board cuts in federal spending that become automatic if a long- term budget deal is not made by December will almost certainly be finessed in order to protect the military budget. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/156219/the_elites_are_unanimous%3A_lower_everyone%27s_wages_and_standard_of_living_--_except_they_don%27t_say_it_out_loud/

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1. A good read on the current situation but not as much predictive

I wouldn't presume to give economic predictions myself, but I can offer up some ruminations on how we lower middle class "boos" already know and feel what the author presumes the power elites do.

That "two earner" family has been struggling for decades, not only recently, buying "McMansions" with family rooms that no one has ever used because they're never home and work themselves to the bone doing overtime and/or several jobs to maintain, and even less reason to use them after all these new electronics have taken away any family time left. The new "toys" are wonderful distractions, but perpetuate that "keep up with the Jones" consumerism.

Those "summer jobs" we used to work as teenagers no longer exist, and young people of college age have been unable to find any meaningful work before, during, and even in some cases after graduation. The bulk of "burbs" and rural area jobs have been paying minimum wages for decades as well, and not everyone can work at Walmart, drive a truck, or get one of those temp jobs as an admin assistant. Not to mention that the temporary agencies exploit their employees like developing country remitters.

The financialization of the "Wall Street" that has been preying on "Main Street" for many, many years has led to now a complete lack of ethics in trading and banking, promoted CEO worship and promulgated such ruthless corporate raiders as Willard "Mittens" Romney (he sounds so much "sexier" as a gangster) as the new role models for the one percenters. One percenters, that even sounds like a gang !

The author and others complain about a credit crunch, but consumer saving has been on the upswing for awhile now, business debt as well as inventories held down, and credit has eased. The hoarding of cash is now the problem that the Wall Steet crowd AND the financiers have created to further obfuscate matters. It's true that the financiers and I'm sure some others are overjoyed to just sit on their own respective piles of currency collecting the interest on those high yield bonds, but that's nothing compared to what they could be reaping from normal capitalistic spending.

What both disappoints and surprises me is the manufacturers' timidity and alledged hesitation to invest in our future. "Uncertainty" is no excuse for supposed risk taking capitalists, so of more concern is the perceived lack of consumer demand, which is true in most economists' eyes that I've read, and perhaps industry is examining the very same reading.

We now resemble a developing country in many ways. One reason to say this is because along with our current extremes of inequality, the complexity of the tax code and all it's pecularities favoring corporatism at the expense of public works and policy facilitates tax evasion and avoidance. The refusal to tax fairly the wealthiest sections of our society supplemented by voter repression and the lack of a reasonable immigration policy come together to suppress the growing ethnic minorities in favor of the power elites that constitute the controlling political minority. These lax tax policies are simply a cost-effective way to control populist challenges to the then dominant minority's power base.

All in all, our incomes and standard of living are not what worry me, it's the de facto decline of our society, and just as trying to predict the stock market, we can't be sure of when it's actually going to be disintergrating. I relate our societal fissures to the actual decline of the West in general, since these are clearly global trends, especially in Europe and other developed countries. North American political polarization has now come full measure into various large electorates becoming dissassociated with our original U.S. Constitutional intentions of procedure. The Republican base that has become so radicalized and so ignorant of the actual Bill of Rights that it now makes up the largest portion of those who unwittingly point towards parlimentarisnism, although once they realize what they're asking for, it might be a unicameral one.

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2. We from Congress down

Must stop pretending to lead the world. Our values are not the best ones. The decline of the west is real, we have to stop living in some dream world where God tells us we are exceptional and can lead. We must accept the equality of all humans on earth. Crony capitalism must no longer be tolerated anywhere. The elite must fade away.