There are political and economic pundits who declare the necessity of statistics, or who, conversely, decry and try to discredit them when they find it convenient to do so. By the same token they either enthusiastically extoll or antagonistically excoriate history in similar fashion.
That being said — for all the years that this writer has lived and worked in the United States — he has heard the propaganda that the country is open to unlimited economic possibilities for every citizen, to those who take advantage of opportunities in that vein and who are willing to apply themselves accordingly. And yet, the economic indicators with respect to the ownership of vast amounts of wealth, for many years, seem to be stuck on the dial to one per cent of the population. Any well-thinking individual — having juxtaposed that statistic with what has so often been asserted to be true — has to wonder what is the reason for this discrepancy. Why hasn’t the needle moved?
The following quotations from famous and infamous Americans reveal how the materialistic propaganda is not only ubiquitous, but how it has seeped, way down deep, into the very fabric of the psyche of society:
“This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.” — Al Capone
“The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the cold war, is that the engine of capitalism, the individual, is mightier than any collective.” — Rand Paul
“Capitalism — for the record — has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the world.” — Trish Regan
“America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men (and women) who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance — and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.” — Ayn Rand
Now, there is some truth to all of those sayings, but is that not often the case with anything which is regarded as propaganda or heresy? It is a fact that there are those in society who have arisen out of the dust of poverty to join the ranks of the much-vaunted billionaires. Among such individuals one would find African Americans like Tyler Perry; Shawn Corey Carter, AKA “Jay Z”; Oprah Winfrey; Michael Jordon; and Sean “Diddy” Combs. And, ever so often, we see some people being suddenly propelled out of the shadows of obscurity into the glorious sunlight of economic and material wealth, having possessed the winning ticket for a local or national “Lotto” type competition. And yet the needle on the scale with respect to the ownership of wealth continues to show that the smallest percentage of those in society controls a humongous share of the nation’s resources.
The question of population growth was also considered by this writer as far as any impact that that might have on the movement of the needle. Assuming that such changes occur progressively, over time, or in spurts, the needle seems to have held its position relative to such changes. Again, why is that? The Population Growth Bureau reported that:
“During the 1990s, the nation’s population increased by an average of 1.3% per year. By 2020, the population was still growing, but at a snail’s pace. The 0.7% annual increase between 2010 and 2020 was the second-slowest growth rate between the censuses in U.S. history. The growth rate slowed even more in the wake of COVID-related business shutdowns and travel restrictions, to just 0.1% between 2020 and 2021. Higher immigration levels bumped up population growth in 2022 (0.4%), but the rate is still well below the 90s average.”
In an article published by USA Facts on November 13, 2023 the following was so stated:
“The top 20% of Americans by income have seen their share of wealth increase the most between 1990 and 2022. In the final quarter of 2022, this group held 71% of the nation’s wealth — up from 61% in 1990. The highest-earning 1% of Americans drove this growth: at the end of 2022, their share of the country’s wealth grew to 26% from 17% in 1990 — nine percentage points. Across those 32 years, the rest of the top quintile saw their share of wealth grow to 45% from 44% — a one percentage point gain.”
In addition to the above data with respect to trends in the growth of wealth in the U.S.A. there has often been much talk, on the reverse side of the spectrum, about the ever-increasing gulf between the rich and poor.
Now, is it because the rich have ambition and the poor have none? Is it because the rich are disciplined, and the poor are not? The latter are often blamed by conservative politicians for their own sorry lot in life. It is true that some among the poor are dishonest and shiftless as is the case with all human beings, but, is that always the fact of the matter?
The following article, which was posted online on April 25, 2024, titled: “Nine Charts about Wealth Inequality in America”, is a reflection of such discussions. In that piece its writers stated that: “Wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country and has risen for much of the past 60 years. Racial wealth inequities have persisted for generations, reflecting the long-standing effects of racist policies, not individual intentions or deficits. In a nation that professes that those who work hard and play by the rules should be rewarded with social and economic upward mobility, these persistent disparities are a stark reminder that, as a society, we have not achieved this goal.”
The above article provides a clue to the widening gap between rich and poor, that being systemic racism. But, before the advent of racism in America, which became entrenched during and after the long period of African chattel slavery, the gross imbalance in the ownership of wealth was due, largely, to classism which was a carryover from England into the burgeoning American colonies.
The political and economic powers behind British colonial expansion had put their feet on the scales of economic opportunity thus tilting them in favour of the elite, leaving the poor whites, many of whom were forced or were tricked into going to the colonies, with small, worthless pieces of land or with nothing at all to call their own. The earliest economic readings, with respect to the accumulation of vast wealth, had the needle pointing to a very small landed class from before the colonies obtained independence from the British Empire. The effects of such inequality from colonial times has persisted until today.
In her book, “White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Professor Nancy Isenberg penned the following words in her introduction:
“Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting. We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not any kind of proto-democracy. The generation of 1776 certainly underplayed that fact. And all subsequent generations took their cue from the nation’s founders. A past that relies exclusively on the storied Pilgrims, or the sainted generation of 1776, shortchanges us in more ways than one. We miss a crucial historical competition between northern and southern founding narratives and their distinctive parables minimizing the importance of class.”
When the wheels of American history continued farther up the line from the tall thickets of elitism and the deep bogs of British colonialism and rolled on through the heartland of the American Revolutionary War, and then turned on to the thoroughfare of the 1800s, still pulling classism, now with the caboose of Black racism inextricably hitched behind it, there were some among the gathering on the platform, those who the elite had traditionally marginalized and suppressed for generations, who were there to greet them.
Some of those individuals were concerned about the undue influence of the monied and the landed elites over the rest of society. They had experienced the tension between the concept of property rights under the U.S. Constitution, and that of the equality for all as espoused by The Bill of Rights, which, paradoxically, seemed to be at variance with each other. They sought to effect change so that poor whites could, finally, and incontrovertibly, find their place in the economy which they could then bequeath to their progeny and to their progeny’s progeny.
Those public servants who stood on the smoke-filled platform of the 1800s to meet the unrelenting movement of history later went on to form the Republican Party, and one from among the poor — a man who became a champion for them against the wealthy — was none other than Abraham Lincoln who would become the 16th president of the United States, from March 4, 1861 to April 15, 1865.
The Republican Party was formed to carry out an agenda which was not unlike that of the modern Democratic Party. Unlike the new iteration of the modern Republican Party they were concerned about equality, about the rights of working people, about voting rights, about social justice, about education for all, about child care, about jobs, about women’s rights, about the horrors of child labour, about expanding the middle class, and about seeing to it that the monied and the landed interests paid their fare share of taxes so that the nation would not be beholden to their selfish corporate agendas. Many in the party were viewed as “radicals” pushing a progressive agenda. While they were in the ascendancy the needle did move somewhat.
The oligarchic chamber from which the bullet was fired which felled the president on April 15, 1865 is still in use today, used to counter a progressive agenda which had the blessing of Abraham Lincoln, and then later on by that of Teddy Roosevelt and by that of Dwight Eisenhower — who were all Republicans. Ronald Reagan, also a Republican, became the very antithesis to that progressive agenda, and did much to stymie its movement and to fashion its undoing. His presidency was a revisionist history of the party and of its original goals. The modern Republican conservative agenda is the same old script of classism, a throwback to the old colonial era, one that was championed then by the Democratic Party, when racism and Jim Crow comprised its calling card, but with a brand new cast of characters. If one could remove the face of the dial and examine its inner workings, then one would be able to appreciate why the needle is still frozen — ever pointing at one per cent of society as far as the ownership of the vast wealth in the American economy is concerned.
In closing, this writer is of the opinion that the following words from Peggy McIntosh sum up the point that he has been trying to make in this opinion piece:
“It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.”
