Slitting Your Own Throat as Ideology

The right in the US is dismantling the middle class society and turning the country into a "banana republic" with a top 0.1% who own everything and the bottom 99.9% effectively peons and serfs available a starvation wages to do the bidding of the ultra-rich.

Here is a bit by Robert Reich demonstrating how the Republican party is busy with the dismantling of America:

The battle has resumed in Wisconsin. The state supreme court has allowed Governor Scott Walker to strip bargaining rights from state workers.

Meanwhile, governors and legislators in New Hampshire and Missouri are attacking private unions, seeking to make the states so-called “open shop” where workers can get all the benefits of being union members without paying union dues. Needless to say this ploy undermines the capacity of unions to do much of anything. Other Republican governors and legislatures are following suit.

Republicans in Congress are taking aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a relatively minor rule change allowing workers to vote on whether to unionize soon after a union has been proposed, rather than allowing employers to delay the vote for years. Many employers have used the delaying tactics to retaliate against workers who try to organize, and intimidate others into rejecting a union.

This war on workers’ rights is an assault on the middle class, and it is undermining the American economy.

The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

For three decades after World War II – I call it the “Great Prosperity” – wages rose in tandem with productivity. Americans shared the gains of growth, and had enough money to buy what they produced.

That’s largely due to the role of labor unions. In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.

There's more. Go read the whole post. He has a lot more to say that is well worth reading. For example:

Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).

What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.

How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.

That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.

Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.

It is good to find voices out there, like Robert Reich's, pointing out that the path of impoverishing the bottom 99.9% is not the way to build a "strong" country. Instead, it creates a society of un-educated, politically volatile, and desperate people. This is the recipe for tearing a country apart. But this is what passes for "wise policy" from the political right in America. Not since the halcyon days of the Gilded Era have the rich been allowed to run this roughshod over Americans. The Gilded Era led to the Great Depression as the bottom 90% literally ran out of money to keep the economy going. The wealth was locked up in the hands of the few and things ground to a halt. Think of a game of Monopoly played on a grand style. The "winner" leaves everybody else destitute and the economy destroyed.