The
liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private
power to a point where it comes stronger than their democratic state itself.
That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by
a group.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
Introduction:
We failed to stop them
Back
in the 1980s a lot of us worked like hell to try to stop the Reagan Revolution.
We failed. Which is why the next few years may be our last chance to save
American democracy, our environment, and what’s left of the American Dream.
When
my Boomer generation was the same average age as the Millennial generation is
today, back in 1990, our generation held 21.3% of the nation’s
wealth.[i] Louise and I shared in that wealth; although we
were still in our 30s, in 1990 we owned a profitable small business (our
fourth) and a nice home in suburban Atlanta.
Our
own locally owned business, a home of our own, and the knowledge that our kids
would have more opportunities than we did: that was, in fact, one common way of
defining the “American dream.” It was normal then.
My
dad (born 1928), who worked in a tool-and-die shop, was able to buy a house, a
new car every two years, and take a two-week vacation every year because the
middle class in America before Reagan had a pretty damn good life. He retired
in the 1990s with a full pension that let him and my mom travel the world. He
was living the American Dream.
Millennials
today, by contrast, are roughly the same number of people as Boomers were in
1990 but hold only 4.6% of the nation’s wealth and, if they’re
the same age I was in 1990, they’re most likely struggling to own a home, are
deeply in debt, and find it nearly impossible to start a small business.[ii]
Yes,
you read that right. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3 of the nation’s wealth;
Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the nation’s wealth.
And
the story for Zoomers — those born in the late ‘90s and early oughts — is
pretty much the same. As a Bank of America research report noted:
“Like
the financial crisis in 2008 to 2009 for millennials, Covid will challenge and
impede Gen Z's career and earning potential.”[iii]
Similarly,
a Stanford University study that looked at Zoomers shows the
consequence of Trump’s disastrous handling of the pandemic:
“[C]ollege
graduates who start their working lives during a recession earn less for at
least 10 to 15 years than those who graduate during periods of prosperity.”[iv]
What
happened? In a word, Republicans.
We
Boomers remember well the Reagan Revolution of 1981, which laid the foundation
for billionaires and giant corporations to impoverish the X, Millennial, and
Zoomer generations.
First,
GOP fat-cats came for our wages.
Those
first two decades of the Reagan Revolution saw the first major attack on
workers’ wages since Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the
National Labor Relations Act, which gave union members legal protection from
physical and economic violence, way back in 1935.
In
1990, the end of the first decade when millennials were coming into the world,
Republicans were still just getting started: 56% of workers who applied for
union representation got their union.[v]
That
wasn’t as good as during my dad’s generation — 80% of workers got a
union when they petitioned for one in the 1940s — but it was still a far
cry from what Millennials and Zoomers are facing today as giant trillion-dollar
corporations employ the billion-dollar union-busting industry (that didn’t
exist in 1980) to keep them from having democracy in the workplace.[vi]
In
large part this is because “right to work for less” laws — that allow employers
to gut their unions — began spreading in a big way in the 1980s and 1990s after
several employer-friendly 5-4 decisions by Republicans on the Supreme Court.
The notorious Taft-Hartley law that gave states the legal ability to destroy
union rights was passed with Republican votes over President Harry Truman’s
veto in 1947, but the anti-union National Right To Work Committee wasn’t
formed until 1995.
In
every single case, anti-worker right-to-work-for-less laws have been passed in
states controlled by Republicans at the time of passage; Democrats fought these
anti-worker laws from the beginning and continue to do so.
Nonetheless,
employers have big bucks and can buy a lot of elections, judges, and
politicians: what started as a trickle in the 1950s has turned into a flood
since Reagan’s presidency. Today right-to-work-for-less
states include Arizona, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Georgia,
Indiana, Kansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska,
Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, South
Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.[vii]
Then
they came for your right to an education.
Before
Reagan became governor of California, the entire University of California
system was free. Reagan did away with that as governor, and then, as
president, began the methodical process of eliminating federal and state
support for tuition, saying he didn’t want to “sponsor the intellectual
curiosity” of “brats” who “protest my policies.”[viii]
I
went to college — briefly — in the late 1960s and the only person I knew who
had college debt was a friend working on his graduate degree at MSU. I paid my
tuition working part-time jobs as a dishwasher at Bob’s Big Boy on Trowbridge
Road in East Lansing and changing tires and pumping gas at the Esso station
across the street.
My
mom paid her own way through 4 years of MSU in the 1940s with the money she
made as a summer lifeguard up in her hometown of Charlevoix, Michigan. My dad,
like most men of his generation, was paid a monthly stipend to go to
college by the GI Bill.[ix]
Now,
Republicans have not only changed the bankruptcy laws so that you are no longer
“cleared“ after seven years like it was when I was coming up, but you can’t
even discharge student loans in bankruptcy. This was arguably one of the
largest gifts the GOP ever gave the banking industry’s billionaires.
After
that, they went after entrepreneurs and local businesses.
I
dropped out of college in part because the small business Louise and I had
started in 1969 — an electronics repair shop across the street from MSU — had
grown to five employees and I was making as much money as my dad.
Back
then pretty much every business in East Lansing was locally owned, from the
restaurants and hotels to the furniture and clothing stores and appliance
shops. The only chain store I remember was the Sears that anchored the local
mall; almost all of the rest of the stores in that mall were locally owned.
But
then, in 1983, President Reagan ordered the federal government to stop
enforcing the anti-trust laws that had been on the books for almost 100 years;
the resulting “merger mania” consumed the American economy, with “M&A
Artists” (Mergers & Acquisitions) and speculative banksters, like the one
Michael Douglas played in Wall Street, were ascendant.
Buying
up small businesses and crushing them together into giant conglomerates,
shedding “excess employees” and employing “economies of scale” were the main
ways to make money, instead of serving customers and local communities. The
bean counters took over.
Now
their absolute market dominance and greed are driving inflation, as the normal
competitive pressures that keep such behavior in check are dead. Which is why
they can enthusiastically squash new, upstart businesses — from tech to retail
to consumer goods — like bugs.
Thus,
the chances of people today being able to successfully start a business like we
did are tiny compared to what they were before the Reagan Revolution, when tens
of millions of Americans owned small enterprises that they would often hand
down from generation to generation.
Then
they started squeezing American workers for cash when they got sick or injured.
Medical
debt is another burden that came out of the Reagan Revolution that destroys
millions of American families a year: for half-a-million families every year
it’s so severe they have to give up their homes and possessions to declare
bankruptcy.
America
is the only country in the world that experiences medical bankruptcies like
this.
When
Louise and I started that electronics shop (as teenagers!), we were able to
provide all of our employees with full medical insurance because, at that time,
both insurance companies and hospitals were required by law (in
Michigan and most other states) to be non-profits.
Drug
companies weren’t monopolistic monoliths — it was an incredibly competitive
industry — and pharmaceutical prices were reasonable, too. The country wouldn’t
have tolerated asses like “Pharma Bro” back in the 1960s and 1970s and insulin,
which only costs pennies to make, was dirt cheap.
But
the neoliberal Reagan Revolution did away with all that, encouraging states to
change their laws to bring “free market principles” to healthcare, ending
nonprofit requirements for hospitals and insurance companies. There was, after
all, big money to be made, and when somebody is sick and you hold the cure, you
have the ultimate power to extract every last penny they have.
As The
New York Times noted in an article titled Medical Mystery:
Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980:
“America
was in the realm of other countries in per-capita health spending through about
1980. Then it diverged.[x]
“It’s
the same story with health spending as a fraction of gross domestic
product. Likewise, life expectancy. In 1980, the U.S. was right in the middle
of the pack of peer nations in life expectancy at birth. But by the mid-2000s,
we were at the bottom of the pack.”
Not
only did the parasites get rich, but our nation’s life expectancy actually
went down, relative to other wealthy nations.
Now,
as the Kaiser Family Foundation reports:
“We
find that 23 million people (nearly 1 in 10 adults) owe significant medical
debt. The SIPP survey suggests people in the United States owe at least $195
billion in medical debt.”[xi]
And
if the GOP didn’t nail millennials and Zoomers on any of the above, they
figured out how to go after their need for a roof over their heads.
In
the 1990s, as part of Newt Gingrich’s notorious “Contract With America,”
Congress “deregulated” the financial industry to the point that it’s become a
giant blood-sucking leech attached to your backs.
Thus,
Millennials and Zoomers are struggling with housing costs today, and for good
reason. Trillion-dollar hedge funds and investment groups are purchasing as
many as half (in some towns more) of the available-for-sale housing, so they
can turn them into rentals and then, when they’ve cornered the market, jack up
the prices.
When
my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house
was around 2.2 times the median American family income.[xii] Today, the Fed says, the median house
sells for $374,900 while the median American income is $35,805 — a
ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.[xiii] [xiv]
Louise
and I bought our first home in our mid-twenties, as did many of our
friends. Banks were locally owned and worked with you; finding
fixer-uppers was easy.
No
more.
As
the Bank of International Settlements summarized in a
2014 retrospective study of the years since the Reagan/Gingrich changes in
banking and finance:
“We
describe a Pareto frontier along which different levels of risk-taking map into
different levels of welfare for the two parties, pitting Main Street against
Wall Street. … We also show that financial innovation, asymmetric compensation
schemes, concentration in the banking system, and bailout expectations enable
or encourage greater risk-taking and allocate greater surplus to Wall Street at
the expense of Main Street.”[xv]
It’s
a fancy way of saying that big banks and hedge funds are now worth trillions
while you and your community are destitute.
And
forget about getting a loan to start a small business in this big-bank
environment of today.
When
Louise and I started our first business, we did it with a $3000 loan from a
small local Michigan bank. Back then bankers were part of the local
community and eager to do what they could to help the community grow and
prosper, including lending a 19-year-old money to start a business.
Nowadays
they just want to extract every penny they can from you so their CEO can buy
another megayacht.
And
then Republicans came for our wealth, in a huge way.
Finally,
perhaps the most important of the reasons Millennials and Zoomers are so badly
screwed these days are the various changes in our tax code that began in the
1980s.
Reagan
dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% down to 27%, and
cut corporate tax rates from 52% to functionally nothing.
America’s
richest millennial, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, now owns fully 2
percent or 1/50th of ALL the wealth of ALL millennials in the country.[xvi]
The
average billionaire pays an income tax rate of under 3%, and the majority of
our nation’s largest corporations not only pay nothing in annual income taxes,
but most have so gamed the system that they get money back.
And
where does that money come from? It’s taken out of the taxes the
government collected from you and me.
This
42-year-long process, with Reagan’s original massive tax cuts amplified by
trillions more in tax cuts for the morbidly rich from the Republican George W.
Bush and Donald Trump administrations, has produced a $50 trillion transfer of
real wealth from the middle class to the top 1 percent.
You
read that right: they’ve taken $50 friggin trillion dollars out
of our pockets over the past 42 years and stashed it in their money bins.[xvii]
When
Reagan was elected there were only eight billionaires in America; now they’re
appearing like popcorn, while all around us homelessness continues to spread,
as Reaganomics destroys the lives of millions of Americans — particularly
Millennials and Zoomers.[xviii]
That
is why Americans, and particularly Millennials and Zoomers, have been had by
the GOP.
And
now that Republicans have handed all that money over to the top 1% — and five
corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled in their 2010 Citizens
United decision that billionaires and corporations owning politicians
isn’t corruption or bribery but “free speech” — it’s getting harder and harder
to do anything about it.
Every
time any sort of reform — even modest, reasonable reforms — come before
Congress, a united block of Republicans in the Senate haul in another billion
dollars in campaign contributions and Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
and his friends kill it with the filibuster.
And
don’t get me started on climate change, which Republicans, right
across-the-board, continue to deny, in deference to the fossil fuel industry
and its billionaires who fund their elections. The GOP has put money and power
above the fate and future of our and our children’s planet.
They
even tried to end our 240-year experiment in democratic self-governance, and
are now actively embracing neofascist autocracy, openly trying to emulate the
rightwing strongman governments that have taken over Russia and Hungary.
Like
the far-right did in Russia and Hungary, Republicans have succeeded in
overturning the right to abortion in the states they control and are openly
embracing homophobia and misogyny.
And
did I mention over 400 million guns drenching our country in blood, and
Republican Senator John Cornyn recently saying that Republicans are unified
across-the-board to prevent any further action to stop gun violence in America?
And
now, Republicans are trying to indoctrinate our children in their white
supremacy and racism by forcing teachers to push a false narrative about
American history — all while they try to rig our elections by purging millions
of minority, Millennial, and Zoomer voters from the rolls with the 2018
blessing of five Republicans on a corrupted Supreme Court.
The
good news, however, is that, increasingly, older and younger generations are
working together to throw Republicans out of office and elect progressive
Democrats who understand these issues and know how to do something about
it.
From
80-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders to 25-year-old progressive Democrat Maxwell
Frost of Florida who won a House seat in 2022, progressives are growing in
political power at the same time America is waking up from the fog of BS
Republicans have been crop-dusting over us since 1981.
All
is not lost; change is in the air. And Millennials and Zoomers are leading the
way.
[i] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/08/11/millennials-are-the-largest-workforce-and-the-least-wealthy-why-politics/
[ii] ibid
[iii] https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-class-2020-graduates-future-career-recession-2020-5
[iv] https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/recession-graduates-long-lasting-effects-unlucky-draw
[v] https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/private-sector-unions-corporate-legal-erosion/
[vi] ibid
[vii] https://www.nrtw.org/right-to-work-states/
[viii] https://hartmannreport.com/p/forgiving-student-debt-isnt-giving
[ix] ibid
[x] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/upshot/medical-mystery-health-spending-1980.html
[xi] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/the-burden-of-medical-debt-in-the-united-states/
[xii] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/why-housing-appreciation-is-killing-housing/
[xiii] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
[xiv]
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
[xv] https://www.bis.org/publ/work468.pdf
[xvi] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/08/11/millennials-are-the-largest-workforce-and-the-least-wealthy-why-politics/
[xvii] https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
[xviii] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/video-the-other-millennials
