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The War against the Poor (and Middle Class)
PROMINENT BRITISH EPIDEMIOLOGISTS RICHARD WILKINSON AND KATE PICKett mined a mountain of data showing that gross inequality of opportunity and income boosts rates of homicide, narcotics use, playground bullying, mental illness, anxiety, teen pregnancies, academic failure, physical ailments such as obesity and heart disease, and many other disorders, many of them life threatening. In their book The Spirit Leveclass="underline" Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, they wrote that humans are acutely social animals, vividly conscious of the society around them. Consequently, suffering hardships in relation to others can be far more injurious than individual suffering that’s not experienced within a societal context. Wilkinson and Pickett compared a list of countries with the greatest income inequality and a list of countries with the greatest per capita drug use. They found that the lists contained the same countries. Widespread drug use, a strong indicator of societal ills, is more likely to occur in a disparate, harsh, and more punitive culture.1
Paradoxically, countries that have relaxed narcotics laws, such as the Netherlands, have lower rates of drug use. These places are less vindictive and more egalitarian and forgiving. The same correlation holds true among America’s fifty states. Mississippi and Louisiana have higher crime, disease, and disability rates than do Minnesota and New Hampshire, which have a more forgiving legal structure and a more equitable income distribution.2
This trend has been lost on tycoons such as David H. and Charles G. Koch, brothers who inherited vast riches and spend millions funding foundations and political campaigns to shape national politics and economics so that they can have even more wealth and privilege (and, correspondingly, so that everyone else can have less).3
In fact, genuine social justice benefits, not just those toward the bottom, but all society. A person who has amassed $10 billion can afford whatever he or she wants. A more grandiose estate in Tuscany or another billion or two in paper assets are unlikely to affect a billionaire’s general happiness. But a billionaire’s life can be enriched when other citizens are given equal opportunity to live up to their potential, to become symphony conductors or epidemiologists, not crack whores or auto thieves. Everyone benefits when a billionaire can exit his or her limo unaccompanied by armed guards.
Paul Pierson, a political scientist at the University of California–Berkeley, found that in Mexico a “small group of wealthy people are protected by guns mostly from the rest of the population and dart from one protected location to another protected location completely separate from the rest of society.”4 Economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, has noted that as wealth increasingly flows to the top, the security sector takes on a bigger share of the economy. He concluded that for “every three workers in America that’s producing something, there is one worker who’s just keeping the lid on. These are the private security personnel. These are the police officers. These are the prison guards. These are the armed forces. These are the people whose job it is just basically to maintain the society’s property rights and its social organization.”5
Putting more people behind bars than is absolutely necessary promotes a basic unfairness. Demoting small-time offenders to the status of ex-convict stamps them as lesser beings, particularly in more retaliatory societies. Consequently, sending more and more people to prison generates even greater disparities and socioeconomic chasms.
Although laissez-faire hard-liners argue that it’s natural for big fish to eat smaller fish, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) argued that these self-described rugged individualists see the world through a distorted lens. While speaking with supporters during her 2012 campaign, she said:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.6
The widening gap between the richest 1 percent of Americans and everyone else is no longer disputable. Even Forbes, one of the great bastions of hard capitalism, doesn’t deny it. The real estate–banking collapse of 2008 exacerbated the trend. The incomes of the bottom 99 percent grew by only 6.8 percent between 2002 and 2007, compared to a 20 percent gain between 1993 and 2000. In the early 1980s the top 1 percent received an 8 percent share of all earnings. By 2012 that share was up to 20 percent—and still accelerating.7 University of California economist Emmanuel Saez found that “1 percent captured 93 percent of the income gains in the first year of recovery (2010).” This, he said, “can help explain the recent public demonstrations against inequality.”8 Pierson and his coauthor, Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker, in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, point out that when the surge of economic catastrophes enveloped much of the world beginning around 2008, other developed countries experienced nothing like the increase in inequality that occurred in the United States.9
Left-leaning lawyer and political scientist Joseph Dillon Davey said it’s no coincidence that America’s prison population exploded at the same time its distribution of wealth shifted sharply in favor of the richest Americans. Davey saw mass incarceration as the ruling class’s principal method of insuring against resistance and insurrection.10 Epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett agreed that if you accept high inequality, “you will need more prisons and more police. You will have to deal with higher rates of mental illness, drug abuse and every other kind of problem.”11
Davey cited a 1971 speech, barely noticed at the time, by family patriarch David Rockefeller in which he declared that “the social contract” was “up for revision.” Davey and his disciples believe that Rockefeller’s words predicted the establishment of a new globalized economy that would crush American workers and jail resistors.12 Although they give Rockefeller more soothsaying credit than he deserves, America’s union workforce was in fact cut in half, the prison population tripled, and the rich became much, much richer while everyone else treaded water or sank to the bottom. When Occupy Wall Street directed attention to this growing income disparity, the group was monitored, investigated, and suppressed by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and various police departments around the country.13
When in November 2011 the Census Bureau released a new, more accurate measurement of poverty, it showed that 100 million people—one in three Americans—were either in poverty or very close to it. The bureau included 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. These are people living paycheck to paycheck, one illness or one set of tires from falling off the edge. The numbers, which most economists agreed constitute a measure of poverty more accurate than previously possible, came as a surprise to those who gathered them, said Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show,” she said.14