From Campaign for America's Future Archive

While national news outlets hail the conclusion of a historic teacher strike in Chicago, another important story often overlooked by national reporters is the ongoing struggle to defend public education in the months that follow successful strikes. In Oakland, California, where teachers won important concessions from the district as a result of their strike earlier this year, the community is nevertheless still seeing their students’ education undermined by lack of resources and disrupted by school closures and further privatization from charter schools.

Recently, when Oakland teachers, joined by contingencies of parents and students, showed up at a school board meeting to voice their opposition to a decision to close a beloved elementary school, they were met with barricades and a phalanx of police officers who roughed up peaceful protesters.

The ongoing struggle that continues in Oakland after teachers held a successful strike illustrates why advocacy for public education can no longer settle for labor-friendly contracts that make life better for teachers and students, but has to challenge more widespread political and societal conditions that undermine schools, as Chicago teachers just did. Calling for these deeper structural changes means taking on an economic and political agenda and a hierarchy of policy leaders that choose to give public funds and tax breaks to an array of beneficiaries other than public schools.

Advocating for this more ambitious goal can result in real change not only in local communities, as teachers have been proving in Chicago, but also on the national stage where leading presidential candidates in the Democratic Party are finally turning away from the decades-long narrative that public schools are failed institutions and the solution is to withhold funding from them and subject them to competition from a parallel charter school industry.

The weight of the wealth that sits at the top of America’s economic order isn’t just squeezing dollars out of the wallets of average Americans. That concentrated wealth is shearing years off of American lives.

The latest evidence for that squeeze on American wallets comes from the Census Bureau. Researchers there have just released results from their latest annual sampling of U.S. incomes. In 2018, the new Census stats show, incomes for typical American households saw a “marked slowdown.”

In effect, average Americans have spent this entire century on a treadmill getting nowhere fast. The nation’s median — most typical — households pocketed 2.3 percent fewer real dollars in 2018 than they earned in 2000.

The “vast majority” of American households, note Economic Policy Institute analysts Elise Gould and Julia Wolfe, “have still not fully recovered from the deep losses suffered in the Great Recession.”

America’s most affluent households have been having no such problem. Average top 5 percent incomes have increased 13 percent overall since 2000, to $416,520. The new Census Bureau figures, based on a sampling of U.S. households, tell us that top 5 percenters are now collecting 23.1 percent of the nation’s household income.

But these Census Bureau figures significantly understate just how much income America’s richest are annually grabbing, mainly because Census researchers “top code” high incomes to keep the identity of sampled deep pockets confidential. All incomes above fixed top-code levels get recorded at the top code. These levels have changed over the years, but the Census Bureau’s continuing reliance on top coding leaves us with figures that fudge the real extent of our inequality.

Analyses based on other data sources — like IRS tax return records — show that top 1 percenters alone are pulling down over 20 percent of America’s household income, essentially triple the top 1 percent income share of a half-century ago.

Presidential candidates should take a pledge: The middle class should not pay one dollar more in new taxes until the super-rich pay their fair share.

Already candidates are outlining ambitious programs to improve health care, combat climate change, and address the opioid crisis — and trying to explain how they’ll pay for it.

President Trump, on the other hand, wants to give corporations and the richest 1 percent more tax breaks to keep goosing a lopsided economic boom — even as deficit hawks moan about the exploding national debt and annual deficits topping $1 trillion.

Eventually someone is going to have to pay the bills. If history is a guide, the first to pay will be the broad middle class, thanks to lobbyists pulling the strings for the wealthy and big corporations.

Here’s a different idea: Whatever spending plan is put forward, the first $1 trillion in new tax revenue should come exclusively from multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Four decades of stagnant wages plus runaway housing and health care costs have clobbered the middle class. In an economy with staggering inequalities — the income and wealth gaps are at their widest level in a century — the middle class shouldn’t be hit up a penny more until the rich pay up.

The biggest winners of the last decade, in terms of income and wealth growth, have not been even the richest 1 percent, but the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. This 0.1 percent includes households with incomes over $2.4 million, and wealth starting at $32 million.

They own more wealth than the bottom 80 percent combined. Yet these multi-millionaires and billionaires have seen their taxes decline over the decades, in part because the tax code favors wealth over work.

This richest 0.1 percent receives two-thirds of their income from investments, while most working families have little capital income and depend on wages. But our rigged system taxes most investment income from wealth at a top rate of about 24 percent — considerably lower than the top 37 percent rate for work.

In a major step forward in the fight for universal health care, the American Medical Association (AMA) has quietly pulled out of a lobbying group that seeks to undermine the growing support for Medicare For All. 

“The AMA has made the right – if overdue – call by leaving the Partnership For America’s Health Care Future, and to stop giving their credibility to this effort by big corporations to put profits before people’s health,” said George Goehl, the director of People’s Action, one of the nation’s largest networks of multiracial grassroots groups, which has made the fight for Medicare For All a top priority. 

In April, nearly a thousand People’s Action members took over the lobby of the Partnership’s offices in Washington, D.C., to demand that the PAHCF and its member organizations end opposition to universal health coverage. 

“We’re here because we’ve had enough,” wrote Goehl and Maria Elena Letona, the board president of People’s Action Institute, in a letter the activists delivered to the PAHCF. “We’re calling on PAHCF to immediately cease and desist from all attempts to undermine Medicare For All, and join us in the fight to ensure that health care is a right for everyone.”

The PAHCF was formed in 2018 by the nation’s largest drugmakers, insurance companies and private hospitals, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the Federation of American Hospitals and Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) to oppose Medicare For All. The AMA was a founding member of the organization.

Despite its benevolent-sounding name, this Partnership was formed with the express intent to kill momentum towards universal health coverage. The PAHCF spent $148 million on lobbying members of Congress in 2018 alone, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. 

The PAHCF has spent millions more this year on lobbying and ads against Medicare For All, including $200,000 on television adsin Iowa alone this month – an effort to influence the views of presidential candidates and voters in that early caucus state. 

In June, People’s Action activists from the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, Physicians for a National Health Care Program and Students for a National Health Program (SNaHP) occupied the main floor of AMA’s national convention in Chicago to demand they end their opposition to Medicare For All.  

“The New York State Commissioner of Health issued an order of evacuation of pregnant women and children under the age of two living in the Love Canal Neighborhood.”

That was on August 2, 1978, when the first emergency action was taken to evacuate families from Love Canal – my neighborhood – in Niagara Falls, New York.  Dangerous chemicals were leaking throughout our community from a 20,000-ton chemical dumpsite, causing birth defects, miscarriages and cancer.

Five days later, Governor Hugh Carey visited Love Canal, and President Carter declared a federal health emergency. Ultimately, the government helped move over 800 families, and our activism led to the creation of Superfund to clean up and protect communities like ours from toxic pollution.

The Love Canal crisis helped give birth to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), commonly known as the Superfund program, and the modern environmental protection movement. 

But today, 41 years after the nation first heard the cries for help from the people living near Love Canal, our country is moving backwards. Our government is not keeping its promise to clean up communities affected by toxic waste. This is ironic, because Trump has long claimed cleaning up Superfund sites is a priority for his administration. 

Superfund’s cornerstone principle was that the “polluter pays.”  President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund bill with this in mind, knowing thousands of polluted communities around the country would need resources to eliminate public exposure to toxic chemicals. Cleanup would be funded by a tax on the industries that use these toxic chemicals.  

This tax on chemical uses provided a financial incentive for corporations to use safer chemicals, and find ways to recycle or send their wastes to other companies for reuse. It also provided funds to clean up sites that were abandoned when a corporation closed or from the legacy disposal of wastes.

The original Superfund bill passed in 1980 with bipartisan support – and this consensus worked well for 20 years, under Presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and, for a while, under President Clinton.

As Americans lament the current sorry state of democracy in Washington, D.C., government by the will of the people was very much alive recently in Puerto Rico, where a prolonged general strike that virtually shut down the island forced Governor Ricardo Rosselló to announce his resignation.

During the strike, huge crowds mobbed the governor’s mansion around the clock, closed highways in the capital of San Juan, and persuaded some presidential candidates in the Democratic Party to join in calling for the governor to resign.

Protesters had multiple grievances, but a “final straw” seems to have been a series of text messages leaked to an independent news organization in which the governor and his closest associates insulted political opponents and allies, members of the news media, and the LGBTQ community. Another notable target for insults in the text exchanges were the island’s public school teachers, whom the governor’s chief financial officer at the time, Christian Sobrino, called “terrorists.” (Sobrino and other top officials participating in the chats have resigned since the messages went public.)

Puerto Rico’s school teachers have been a constant nemesis to the Rosselló regime, and the island’s largest teachers’ union, the Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR), united with other labor unions on the island to organize the general strike. Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers, which AMPR is an affiliate of, joined in the calls for Rosselló’s resignation.

The teachers’ disagreements with Governor Rosselló started long before the release of the insulting texts.

“People in Puerto Rico felt betrayed by the governor,” says Myrna Ortiz-Castillo in a phone conversation. Ortiz-Castillo is a third-grade teacher and serves as finance secretary at the AMPR local in Bayamon. She insists, “He is supposed to be the person who takes care of the people. Instead he took care of his friends.”

One of the “friends” Ortiz-Castillo is referring to is the charter school industry. During his tenure, Rosselló pushed through the first law allowing charter schools on the island, and after the bill passed, he continued to press for opening more charters. Now it seems his ousting, and the legacy of corruption he leaves behind, will likely damage prospects for the charter industry in Puerto Rico for some time.

What happens at America’s state level can sometimes reverse the political momentum of the entire nation. We experienced just such a reversal in 1978, when California conservatives pushed our country to the right. We may be poised to take a new direction, thanks to important victories in New York State for progressives.

Back then, on a calm June day, conservatives engineered a California earthquake. They won nearly two-to-one voter support for a ballot initiative that wrote a cap on local property taxes into the state constitution. This “Prop 13” initiative would in short order crater funding for California’s world-class public services.

For business interests, meanwhile, Prop 13 would prove to be a gift that keeps on giving. Before 1978, corporate property owners footed two-thirds of the state’s property tax bill, homeowners one-third. After 1978, that ratio flipped, leaving the homeowner share at two-thirds.

But Prop 13’s most lasting impact would be political. Prop 13 gave America’s cheerleaders for grand private fortune a simple winning formula for electoral success: Make elections about cutting taxes. Always.

Conservative pols would follow that formula. In the immediate wake of Prop 13, over a dozen other states enacted similar tax caps. In the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan would then ride this tax-cut wave into the White House. Once in office, his administration quickly set about rewriting America’s economic rules — to privilege the rich and the corporations that make them richer.

Today, four decades later, we’re still living amid the extreme inequality Prop 13 did so much to create. But now, in a state a continent away from California, the surprise outcome of another titanic political battle may well signal the dawning of a new and far more egalitarian epoch.

New York has just enacted — over fierce billionaire opposition — legislation that takes a giant step toward defining decent, secure housing as a basic human right.

We have a great deal of statistical data, in America today, about the economic circumstances of Americans who live in poverty. We know far less, by contrast, about Americans who live amid great wealth. And much of what we do know, suggests a revealing new study, turns out to be wrong.

America’s wealthiest, this new study details, almost certainly hold substantially greater personal fortunes than our standard analyses of the nation’s distribution of wealth indicate.

What are these conventional analyses not taking into account? A simple reality of our deeply unequal age: Extravagantly wealthy people cheat on their taxes. Regularly. Extravagantly, too. Our super rich are stashing vast chunks of their personal fortunes in offshore tax havens, generating billions annually in new income that — to their governments — goes unseen and untaxed.

Just how enormous has this tax evasion by the super rich become? University of California-Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman and his Scandinavian colleagues Annette Alstadsæter and Niels Johannesen calculate — in a just-published American Economic Review paper — that offshore tax havens are enabling our world’s richest 0.01 percent to evade 25 percent of the income taxes they ought to be paying.

The holdings of this wealthiest one-hundredth of 1 percent, the three researchers relate, make up about 50 percent of the overall assets parked in tax havens. The super rich are using these havens, add Zucman and his colleagues, to conceal about 40 percent of their total personal fortunes.

The most recent Federal Reserve Board figures on U.S. inequality, released this past March, put the top 1 percent’s share of American personal wealth at 32 percent, up from 23 percent in 1989. Other estimates place the top 1 percent share closer to 40 percent. But with the new calculations from Zucman and his colleagues, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s Matthew Gardner reflects, even this 40 percent estimate could well be a distinctly “low-ball number.”

But can we trust the numbers from the Zucman team? After all, how could a mere trio of researchers unearth hidden fortunes that the super rich spend big bucks to keep hidden? These three particular researchers had some unconventional assistance.

Over recent years, whistleblowers at some of the private banks and legal firms that cater to wealthy tax evaders — remember the “Panama Papers”? — have exposed vast stores of financial records that document the daily nitty-gritty of tax-evading transactions. The Zucman team tapped these records.

By David Dyssegaard Kallick and Daniel Costa

After decades of advocacy, New York stands at the brink of potentially passing the Farmworker Fair Labor Practices Act, a bill that would extend to the agricultural sector the right to organize and the right to overtime pay that most workers in other industries enjoy. Governor Cuomo has said he will sign the measure if it passes.

Democrats recently took leadership of the state senate and have a longstanding majority in the state assembly. Both chambers have an opportunity to take advantage of those majorities in a way that results in a historic improvement for the lives of workers who toil in difficult conditions for low pay in New York’s fields and dairies.

But victory is far from certain: plenty could happen between now and June 19, when New York’s legislative session ends. The New York Farm Bureau, unsurprisingly, is saying the bill “could dramatically change agriculture and hurt our rural economy.”

A new report from the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI) shows how the bill will help farmworkers, be manageable for farm owners, and offer tangible benefits to local communities.

The bill will most obviously be a gain for farmworkers in New York. On average, it will increase weekly earnings by between $34 and $95 per week. That’s money that will also be spent in the local economy, helping boost local businesses (and adding to sales tax revenues).

Other states have enacted laws requiring that at least some overtime be paid to farmworkers after a certain number of hours. In California—the largest agricultural state by far with over $50 billion in cash receipts going to farms and ranches—the legislature and governor enacted a law in late 2016 that gradually phases in overtime pay for farmworkers beginning this year.

Donald Trump has proven himself unfit for the presidency at nearly every twist and turn. The lengths he will go to circumvent the constitution, violate the rule of law, and sink to unthinkable depths of immorality are shamelessly on display.

These efforts are only possible because of a more insidious danger – a man who has conscripted the Republican party to destroy our democracy, and the institutions designed to protect it.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is Trump’s most powerful weapon and one of the greatest threats to democracy, and the health and well-being of everyone in America.

This week, when asked about Democratic proposals including Medicare for All, McConnell said, “If I’m still the majority leader of the Senate after next year, none of those things are going to pass the Senate. They won’t even be voted on. So think of me as the grim reaper. None of that stuff is going to pass. None of it.”

Let that sink in. McConnell wants to be known as the personification of death in the form of a cloaked skeleton wielding a large scythe.

McConnell wields his power in the Senate to diminish the checks and balances designed to protect our nation from autocratic rule. He’s determined to take away your health care, and he’s motivated to do whatever it takes to make sure that happens, just so he can demonstrate this power.

Remember McConnell’s repeated and failed attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, decrying all the while that entitlement programs cost too much and must go? Then he ushered through the GOP tax bill, handing tax cuts to corporations and the wealthy that are estimated to increase the federal debt by $2 trillion over the next 10 years, and triggering cuts to vital programs for middle- and low-income people.

Disguised as a tax cut, this tax giveaway to the rich destabilized Medicaid and crucial resources that offer assistance to our poor, elderly, and people with disabilities. It put Social Security that people have worked a lifetime for, and rely on in retirement, at risk by driving up the deficit. It reworked medical tax deductions and threatens 13 million people who could lose their health care by 2027, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

McConnell exerts his power to destroy the very institution he presides over, and stack the courts with ideologues. By bending the rules to his liking, he has rammed through a record number of judicial confirmations to the lower courts, many to lifetime appointments, and landed two arch-conservative nominees – both hand-picked and groomed by far-right judicial activists – on the Trump Supreme Court.

In our daily lives, as anyone who keeps a household budget can attest, the unexpected happens all the time. A refrigerator motor fails. Some part on your car you never realized existed breaks down. A loved one passes away and you have to — you want to — be at the funeral a thousand miles away.

“Unexpected” expenses like these will, sooner or later, hit all of us. But all of us, says new research out of the Federal Reserve, can’t afford them.

In fact, just under 40 percent of Americans, says the Fed’s sixth annual household economics survey, “would have difficulty handling an emergency expense as small as $400.”

A fifth of American adults, the new Fed study adds, had major unexpected medical bills last year. An even larger share of Americans — one quarter — “skipped necessary medical care in 2018 because they were unable to afford the cost.”

Meanwhile, 17 percent of American adults can’t afford to pay all their monthly bills, even if they don’t experience an unexpected expense.

The new Fed report offers no anecdotal color, just waves of carefully collected statistical data. For a sense of what these stats mean in human terms, we need only look around where we live, particularly if we live in one of the many metro areas where inequality is squeezing millions of Americans who once considered themselves solidly “middle class.” Places like the Bay Area in California.

San Francisco, recent research shows, now has more billionaires per capita than any other city in the world. By one reckoning, San Francisco also has the highest cost of living in the world, as all those billionaires — and the rest of the city’s ultra rich — bid up prices on the most desirable local real estate.

But the Bay Area squeeze goes beyond the confines of San Francisco. Nearby Oakland and Berkeley are facing enormous affordable housing shortages as well. The Bay Area as a whole now has more than 30,000 homeless.

By David Hatch

What does it mean to move “from protest to power?” That’s the question People’s Action members like me asked at our national convention in Washington, D.C. two years ago. At that time, just a few months into the Trump administration, 72 grassroots leaders out of the more than twelve hundred gathered there took a pledge to take action by running for public office.

Many of these activists – and even more from our network across the country – have now made good on these commitments. They are part of the #PeoplesWave of officials we have helped elect. In all, 300 candidates endorsed by People’s Action got elected in midterm and municipal elections, and 150 of these are movement activists who rose up from the ranks of our own member organizations.

“On election night I didn’t win, WE won!” said Sarah Godlewski, Wisconsin’s newly elected State Treasurer, when she spoke to a gathering of these newly minted electeds last month, as People’s Action members gathered once again in D.C.

At this year’s convention, these leaders celebrated their victories and began to dig in on what it means to move from protest on the outside of government to power on its inside, and importantly, linking the two together.

Sarah had never considered running for office, but as a longtime member of Citizen Action of Wisconsin (CAWI), she was part of the fight in April of 2018 to save the State Treasurer’s office from former governor Scott Walker’s attempt to dissolve the office so he could put the state’s finances under his own control, to eliminate oversight.

Sarah and CAWI won that fight, and when no people’s candidate stepped forward to run for State Treasurer, Sarah put herself in the ring. Sarah has a financial and government background – she co-founded a socially conscious investment fund after working for the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense.

Now, as Wisconsin’s Treasurer, Godlewski has followed through on her commitment to co-govern. She regularly appears on CAWI’s weekly podcasts, and has jointly organized events to build community awareness about the ways she’s using the State Treasurer’s office to lower interest payments on student loans and to solve difficult public pension issues.

Dangerous anti-protest legislation is working its way through state assemblies all across the U.S., chipping away at the right to protest and undermining social justice movements. State legislators have introduced nearly 100 bills curbing your right to protest since the resistance at Standing Rock began. And if oil and gas companies get their way, Illinois will now be added to the list.

HB 1633, a bill targeting activists, has already overwhelmingly passed the Illinois House of Representatives and is now pending in the State Senate. It has been slated for a hearing next Tuesday, May 14, at 5 p.m., and people can submit witness slips for or against the bill here. 

If this bill is enacted, protesters in Illinois will no longer be able to resist the expansion of fossil fuel pipelines in their communities without risking felony charges.

Specifically, this bill seeks to increase criminal penalties for people who trespass on so-called critical infrastructure facilities. The bill almost exactly lifts its language from a model bill authored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group of corporate lobbyists trying to rewrite state laws to benefit corporations over people.

The bill would broadly redefine “critical infrastructure” to include oil and gas pipelines and processing facilities, and turn peaceful activity by protesters into a class four felony punishable by up to three years of incarceration and a heavy fine.

In Illinois as other states, this bill is based almost word-for-word on ALEC’s model critical infrastructure bill, which was inspired by legislation first passed in Oklahoma in 2017, in response to the months-long protests at Standing Rock which stalled construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

People who are trying to do good — with a Green New Deal, for instance, or Medicare for All — regularly find themselves confronting a simple and sometimes sneering gotcha question: So where’s the money coming from?

How about we start putting this same simple question to the top executives of Corporate America?

These execs are currently spending incredibly vast sums buying back their own companies’ shares of stock off the open market. In 2018, researchers at Dow Jones report, 444 of America’s top 500 firms spent dollars on stock buybacks. Lots of dollars: $806.4 billion in all, up 55 percent over the year before and up 37 percent over the previous all-time buyback annual record high.

These stock buybacks have no redeeming social value. Buybacks don’t make corporations more efficient or effective. They just make the rich richer. Buybacks reduce the volume of shares that trade, in the process upping earnings per share and share value. Who benefits from these upticks? Top corporate execs see an immediate boost. Over 80 percent of their pay comes from stock-based compensation.

The wealthy overall benefit, too. America’s top 1 percent, researchers at Goldman Sachs observed earlier this year, now own half of all the nation’s shares of stocks, with nearly 85 percent in the pockets of America’s wealthiest 10 percent.

Anytime a politician proposes a wildly popular idea that helps ordinary people, a few grumpy conservatives will call them “socialists.” Propose to reduce college debt, help sick families, or ensure the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes — suddenly you’re a walking red nightmare.

Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart is so alarmed he’s convened an “Anti-Socialism Caucus” to ward off “the primitive appeal of socialism” that will “infect our institutions.” Democrats’ talk of restoring higher income tax rates on the wealthiest or helping families with childcare was enough to trigger Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to quip, “We’re not going back to socialism.”

These same politicians consistently vote for tax cuts for the rich and to gut taxes and regulations on corporations so they can exercise their full freedom and liberty — to mistreat workers, pollute the environment, and rip off their customers.

The “shrink government” fear-mongers want you to believe there are only two flavors of economic ice cream. Choose strawberry and you get liberty-choking gulag communism. From this vantage, any proposal to rein in the unchecked power of global corporations and the rule-rigging rich is creeping socialism.

America’s billionaires have suddenly realized they just may be facing an existential crisis. A good chunk of the American people, they now understand, would rather billionaires not exist. Every billionaire, as a key aide of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has famously quipped on his popular Twitter feed, represents “a policy failure.” The nation needs, posits a recent New York Times op-ed, to “abolish billionaires.”

Our more pugnacious billionaires — and their devoted admirers — have greeted this new abolitionist thrust with predictable scorn. National Review columnist Kevin Williamson has tagged the case against billionaires as “irredeemably stupid.” Any attempt to tax billionaires out of existence, suggests three-comma investment banker Ken Moelis, would surely “crush the economy.”

More sober defenders of the billionaires in our midst take care to acknowledge the widening — and troubling — gap between the fabulously wealthy and everyone else, but then urge us, all the same, to “think twice before seeking to flatten every tycoon.”

“It may seem counterintuitive,” adds Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, “but billionaires can be good for democracy, and a bulwark against tyranny.”

Bill Gates, the holder of the world’s second-largest fortune, agrees: “The idea that there shouldn’t be billionaires — I’m afraid if you really implemented something like that, that the amount you would gain would be much less than the amount you would lose.”

The guardians of our conventional wisdom on taxing the rich have messed up — and they know it. They slacked off. They started believing their own tripe. Average Americans, they assumed, would never ever smile on proposals to raise tax rates on the richest among us. After all, the conventional wisdom maintains, those average folks figure that someday they’ll be rich, too.

But now, with tax-the-rich proposals proliferating and polling spectacularly well, the keepers of our bless-the-rich faith are panicking. Their old rhetorical zingers no longer zing.

Higher taxes on the rich as a “penalty on success”? Average Americans today don’t see “success” when they gaze up at America’s top 0.1 percent and see a 343 percent increase in earnings, after inflation, over the past four decades. They see monopoly and outsourcing and insider trading.

Some fans of grand fortune see an opportunity amid this cynicism. They’re realizing that riffing off this cynicism may be the only way to keep taxes on rich people low. Raising tax rates on the wealthy may seem reasonable, their argument goes, but high tax rates on the rich can never actually work out as intended. The rich and their paid help — their accountants and lobbyists — can always end run them.

So disregard those high tax rates on the rich in effect back in the middle of the 20th century, the argument continues. Those top rates — 91 percent in the 1950s and into the 1960s, then 70 percent through the 1970s — never made much of a difference on how much the wealthy had in their wallets.

“The overall trend is unmistakable,” pronounced John Carlson, the cofounder of the right-wing Washington Policy Center, earlier this month. “When rates were much higher, the wealthy sheltered their money and paid a smaller share of the nation’s tax bill.”

In other words, seriously taxing the rich will always be impossible. So why bother even trying?

Suddenly Americans are debating big ideas that used to be off the table.

New ways to raise taxes on the rich and big corporations have been proposed by candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders.

A Medicare-style public health system to expand coverage and cut costs has the support of millions and many Presidential candidates – even as we defend Obamacare.  

The Green New Deal has been swept onto the national debate by the dynamic grass-roots Sunrise Movement and by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and colleagues in Congress. With new urgency, sponsors call for massive public investment to retool our economy to stop global warming and create the next generation of good jobs.  

Perhaps because of the huge public support for these big ideas, Donald Trump has tried to tar them with the old Cold War scare word: Socialism. This is likely to backfire – just as the Southern racists’ attacks on civil rights workers as “Communist agitators” just helped spread the movement. SNCC organizers were greeted at Mississippi doorsteps with “We are so glad you Communists have come to help us vote.”

Some cautious Democrats have greeted these big ideas with a warning about the dangers of going too far. “Stick to attacking Trump and his policies,” they lecture, “that’s what helped us win in the Congressional campaigns 2018.”

But over 90 well-known veterans of the successful 2018 campaign have signed a bold new Pledge to Fight for Good Jobs, Sustainable Prosperity and Economic Justice. And these initiators (including myself) have now been joined by 20,000 (and growing) grass-roots activists. Our message is “Yes, fight Trump – but Americans also want to hear big solutions to the large economic problem our country faces.”

The Pledge document declares, “We will (continue to) resist Trump. 

If you worry about inequality, and if you want an end to grand — and dangerous — concentrations of income and wealth, pinch yourself. We have entered a new political moment. Egalitarians have suddenly seized the policy momentum. They have forced onto the nation’s political center stage initiatives for shearing the ultra rich down to democratic size that no major elected leader in America would have dared propose only a year ago. Maybe even a few months ago.

This stunning shift began early in January when Rep. Alexandria Olivia-Cortez from New York proposed a new 70 percent tax rate on income over $10 million.

Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, in quick order, then put on the table a “wealth tax” on the grand fortunes of America’s richest 75,000 households. Warren, an announced prime-time candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination, called for a 2 percent federal levy on personal assets over $50 million and a 3 percent wealth tax rate on fortune over $1 billion.

This week, just before month’s end, still another stunning proposal: Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, another likely — and leading — 2020 presidential candidate, urged a 77 percent tax on the value of estates left behind at death over $1 billion.

These three new proposals, each one far bolder than the conventional political wisdom has deemed acceptable over recent decades, did attract some assorted jeers and ridicule. But, more significantly, the three proposals drew widespread public — and even pundit — support.

How much support?

During Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, many of the old, white, Republican Senators and Representatives must have gotten more exercise than in weeks, jumping to their feet to applaud almost every sentence of the endless rhetoric.

One of the moments that got the loudest applause was Trump’s attempt to blame progressive Democrats for the problems of the current Venezuelan government, proclaiming the U.S. “will never be a socialist country” to a loud standing ovation from Republicans (and too many Democrats) and chants of “USA, USA, USA.”

Like so much of Trump’s speech, the statement was false. I have news for the Donald: The United States—like every other country with an advanced economy, such as the U.K., Germany, France, and Japan—is already a partly socialist country, with a mixed economy and many government programs that serve the public good.

By this defintion, Social Security is a “socialist” program: it’s a government-run pension system that cuts out private money managers. Medicare – a single-payer, government-run health insurance program for those over 65 – is too. Medicare-For-All would simply extend this to the rest of the population.

The minimum wage, maximum hour, and child labor laws that go back over a century are likewise “socialist” programs, in that the government intervenes in the capitalist market to require employers to meet minimum standards that might not be met in a pure, unregulated “free” market. Agricultural and energy subsidies are likewise socialist programs. I could go on and on.

Back during the 1960s and 1970s, in cities, suburbs, and small towns across the United States, teacher strikes made headlines on a fairly regular basis. Teachers in those years had a variety of reasons for walking out. They struck for the right to bargain. They struck for decent pay and benefits. They struck for professional dignity.

The teachers’ strike in Los Angeles, America’s second-largest school district, was the latest high-profile walkout in a new surge of teacher activism that began last year. L.A. teachers went on strike to demand the same dignity and decency teachers sought in the mid-20th century. But the L.A. struggle, many observers believe, amounts to much more than a battle over how school officials treat teachers.

Teachers in L.A. went on strike, in a most fundamental way, against how unequal America has become. They’re speaking out against our billionaire class.

In Los Angeles, our billionaires have been up to no good. They’ve essentially staged an unfriendly takeover of the L.A. board of education, shoveling mega millions into the campaigns of school board candidates pledged to advancing an agenda that funnels public tax dollars to “charter schools” that have next to no accountability to the public.

The newly elected billionaire-friendly board majority then proceeded to hire as superintendent a billionaire investment banker with no background in education. That billionaire proceeded to go about making L.A. a model for privatizing big-city school districts the nation over. Teachers in Los Angles are striking to stop him.

As we enter a perilous period in American history, with Donald Trump’s bottomless insecurity fueling white supremacy and fascism on the one hand and environmental Armageddon on the other, there is an opening of historic proportions for mass revolutionary organizing. Will we break out of self-limiting orthodoxies, face oppressive structures head-on, and take risks that swing for the fences?

Over two centuries, the ambitions of people-powered organizing in this country have grown from stopping material suffering – as in the abolition of slavery – to winning freedoms such as women’s right to vote and the end to child labor, civil rights, and marriage equality. This has advanced to sharing abundance and the common good (Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, and the right to organize). Today, the cutting-edge ambition of organizers is to step up and win governing power.

Three recent books by veteran organizers weave deeply reflective stories about breakthroughs in realizing their ambitions through scalable organizing. As we stand at the edge of a new era of the possible, these authors offer new rules for revolutionaries, roadmaps, and strategic conversations that point the way forward toward the realization of our own deepest ambitions. These are the hopes that we fear to speak aloud, tears of joy streaming down our cheeks, free at last in our lifetimes.

This opportunity is clear as day to Jonathan Smucker, the co-founder of Lancaster Stands Up in Pennsylvania. In Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, Smucker says that,

“Given our weak state of popular organization over the past few decades, the emergence of Occupy Wall Street was a beacon of hope for many in the United States, as it provided a powerful, popular counter-hegemonic narrative that aligned overnight a hitherto fragmented left and created a political opening to connect to far more popular audiences and broader social bases than we had had access to in decades.”

Even before the votes from the recent midterm elections were completely counted  – a process that took nearly two weeks in many races – numerous prominent news outlets were quick to report on the supposed failure of the “education wave,” those school teachers and other educators who ran for office up and down ballots across the country. One report that received particularly widespread circulation, by Associated Press, carried the headline “Tough lessons: Teachers fall short in midterm races.” Another for U.S. News & World Report said, “Poor Marks for Teachers in Midterms.” Clever, huh.

Indeed, numerous news outlets seemed eager to reinforce a narrative that despite an unprecedented number of teachers and public school advocates running for political office, “underwhelming voter interest in education” and a “red wall” of Republican opposition were just too much to overcome.

An exception to this shallow reporting was a piece by The Guardian that reported “teachers made huge gains in the midterm elections.”

But the article quotes union leaders in walkout states Oklahoma and Arizona, as well as president of national American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten, even though unions did not lead the teacher walkouts.

To get a better sense of the real impact teacher walkouts had on the midterms, I called on frontline organizers and public-school advocates in states where there was substantial documentation that education would have a big impact on election results. What I found was overwhelming consensus that yes, teacher walkouts this spring had a significant impact on the midterm elections and will continue to reverberate in politics and policy making.

It was a promise that couldn’t have been clearer: when President Trump sold his tax scam to Congress and the American people, he said the average family would see a $4,000 pay raise from their employers. “I would expect to see an immediate jump in wage growth,” added Kevin Hassett, head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors.

That was last October. The tax bill passed in December, and it’s now Labor Day, a good time to review how if at all the Trump-GOP tax scam is actually serving working people.

For most of them there’s a simple answer: it’s not. They’re still waiting for that $4,000 pay raise they were promised. Trump admitted as much (unknowingly perhaps) when he boasted during a speech marking the six-month anniversary of the tax cuts that “more than 6 million workers have received bonuses, pay raises, and retirement account contributions” because of the new law.

But do the math. Six million workers are barely 4% of the overall U.S. workforce of 155 million. So how about the other 96%? Incredibly, when you add in the rising cost of gasoline, prescription drugs and other necessities, real wages for most Americans have declined from a year ago.

Meanwhile, the wealthy and big corporations – let’s face it, the real intended beneficiaries of the tax cut law – aren’t waiting. They saw an immediate reduction in their taxes. For corporations, their tax rate was slashed from 35% to 21%.

How can we tell when a democracy, or rule by the people, evolves into a plutocracy, the reign of the rich? Easy. We have a democracy when a political system can and does make a good-faith effort to address the problems average people face.

In a plutocracy, on the other hand, the political system pays no more than lip service to average people’s problems and works diligently instead at protecting — and growing — the wealth of the already wealthy.

By this simple standard, we Americans today unquestionably live in a plutocracy. Our latest slam-dunk evidence: the record of the decade since the Wall Street financial crash ushered in the Great Recession.

Almost exactly ten years ago, in late summer 2008, the tremors that had been roiling the U.S. economy ever since the housing bubble popped the year before turned into an economic earthquake. The giant Lehman Brothers investment bank fell into one yawning fissure. The giant insurer AIG stumbled toward another.

“Citigroup appeared poised to go down next, with General Motors and Chrysler to follow,” remembers the New Yorker’s George Packer. “Everything solid in the American economy turned out to be built on sand.”

“Promises made, Promises Kept” will be Donald Trump’s slogan as he campaigns “six or seven days a week” for Republicans this fall. During the 2016 election, Trump promised workers “more jobs and better wages,” that he would bring jobs back from abroad.

“Every policy decision we make must pass a simple test,” he said, “Does it create more jobs and better wages for Americans?”

Trump not only hasn’t delivered for workers; he’s joined the other side. It’s not an accident that workers in America have suffered stagnant wages and reduced benefits. It is the result of a systematic corporate campaign to crush unions, rig trading rules to benefit investors and undermine workers, and roll back public regulations and investments that benefit working people. Trump’s administration and the Republican Congress are doubling down on that assault.

Workers get a better share of the profits they help to produce when they can organize and bargain collectively. Union workers still enjoy better wages and benefits than non-union workers. When unions are strong, even non-union workers benefit. But under a decades-long relentless corporate assault, unions now represent only 11 percent of all workers and less than 7 percent of those in the private sector.

What’s the best way to push profit-seeking corporations out of the public sphere? Don’t let them take over in the first place. Residents of Lancaster County, Penn. were thrilled to learn this lesson with their recent victory against Geo Group, a giant of the private prison industry.

Geo Group has gained notoriety for its shady practices, with a rap sheet as varied as the so-called services it provides. Geo has turned into a household name in recent weeks for profiting off the youth and family detention centers that have become hallmarks of President Donald Trump’s inhumane immigration policies. But the company’s heinous practices predate Trump — though their highly suspect lobbying relationship with the current administration is well-documented.

The private prison profiteers have misspent millions in federal funds, only to manage facilities that one federal judge called “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions.” Despite their abhorrent track record, Geo has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in federal government contracts in the last year, with a staggering $9.7 million lining the pockets of CEO George Zoley in 2017.

Donald Trump has been bragging about the economy a lot lately. He says the United States is now the “economic envy” of the world. Unfortunately, Trump is once again trying to reshape reality to fit his own delusions. Reality is refusing to cooperate.

It’s true the U.S. economy is in the fast lane, by some measures, just as it was in the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency.  But where, exactly, is it headed?

And what will happen when the next blowout comes, as it inevitably will?

We know one thing: average Americans, who have seen their incomes stagnate while inequality rises, and their wealth declines, will bear the brunt of the next recession.

Less Than Amazing

First, it should be noted that what Trump calls an “amazing” economy isn’t amazing for everyone. As Bernie Sanders correctly notes, 40 percent of Americans don’t have $400 on hand for an emergency – a brake job, for example, costs $567 on average for both axles – and 43 percent of Americans (50 million households) can’t afford to meet their basic monthly expenses.

A full two-thirds of Americans would have trouble coming up with $1,000 for an emergency.

More than 44 million Americans are struggling with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt. Others struggle to pay credit card debt, mortgages, and usurious payday loans.

Nor is the world likely to “envy” the tens of millions of Americans living in poverty, including the estimated 5.3 million Americans living in deep poverty like that of the poorest Third World countries.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision against workers in the Janus vs. AFSCME case surprised no one who pays attention to America’s highest judicial panel. Every analyst following the case expected the Supremes to rule against America’s public sector unions. And that’s exactly what the high court, by a 5-4 margin, did.

The impact from this decision? That will surprise no one who pays attention to how modern economies work: The Supreme Court’s decision in Janus will leave the United States still more unequal.

The five justices who decided Janus never, of course, mentioned anything about inequality in their ruling that public sector unions cannot collect representational fees from the nonmembers they are legally required to represent. The Janus majority justices talked instead about protecting First Amendment rights. But that lofty philosophizing merely served as a convenient cover for our right wing’s continuing assault on the basic human right to justice on the job.

This assault — an effort bankrolled over the years by a relentless gang of fiercely anti-union deep pockets — has been remarkably effective.

Back in the 1950s, over a third of America’s workers belonged to unions. And that statistic underplayed the actual extent of the nation’s trade union presence. In the private sector, outside the South, unions represented over half the workforce in the decades right after World War II.

The United States ended the 20th century on a roll — for the rich. Between 1973 and 2000, the nation’s most prosperous 1 percent tripled their incomes, after taking inflation into account.

The even more prosperous top tenth of that 1 percent did quite a bit better. Their incomes more than quintupled between 1973 and 2000, rising an amazing 414.6 percent.

And what about Americans of less exalted means, those stuck in the nation’s bottom 90 percent? Between 1973 and 2000, their incomes rose all of… 2.6 percent.

Something, in other words, went horribly wrong over the last quarter of the 20th century. And what has happened so far in century 21? Our decision makers in Washington have done their best to make things even worse.

How much worse? We now have a new report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute on Taxation and Economic and Policy that offers a distressing new answer.

The Institute’s researchers looked at all the major tax bills that members of Congress have passed — and Presidents have signed into law — since the start of our 21st century, every piece of legislation right up through the GOP tax cut signed into law this past December.