Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Democratic Primary Makes Clear: A
Populist Revolution is Coming
Regardless of Sanders win, Thomas Piketty predicts 'the end of
the politico-ideological cycle' brought on by Ronald Reagan at the behest of
financial elites
"Sanders’ success demonstrates that a substantial
proportion of America is tired of the rise in inequality," writes the
French economist, "and intends to return to a progressive agenda and the
American tradition of egalitarianism." (Photo: Albert/cc/flickr)
The influential economist Thomas Piketty is the most recent
trans-Atlantic observer to note that the "incredible success of the
'socialist' Bernie Sanders" is indicative of a deeper, populist movement
that's brewing across the United States.
In a column published in the French newspaper Le Monde on
Monday and translated on his website, Piketty argues
that regardless of whether Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, "we are
witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of
Ronald Reagan at the November 1980 elections."
Putting Sanders' rise within historical context, Piketty
revisits the period between 1930 and 1980 when the U.S. "pursued an
ambitious policy of reduction in social inequalities," with economic
policies that included progressive income and estate taxes, as well as the implementation
of a federal minimum wage (which reached above 10 dollars per hour, in 2016
dollars, by the end of the 1960s).
"Half a century of steady fiscal progressivity" came
to an abrupt end in 1980, when Ronald Reagan "surfed" into the
presidency "on a program designed to reinstate a mythical capitalism said
to have existed in the past," propelled largely by the frustrations of
"the financial elites."
Piketty said this culminated with the 1986 fiscal reform, which
lowered the top tax rates to 28 percent (compared to an average rate of 82
percent for the richest Americans during the previous era), as well as the
freezing of the federal minimum wage.
Neither effort, he notes, was "genuinely challenged by the
Democrats of the Clinton years and the Obama era" leading to an
"explosion of inequalities and huge salaries...and stagnation of the
incomes of the majority." Indeed, the French economist rose to global prominence in 2014 when he
argued in his bookCapital in the Twenty-First Century that the
world had entered another Gilded Age.
Piketty concedes, "Faced with the Clinton electoral machine
and the conservatism of the major media, Bernie will perhaps not win the
primary." But he adds, "it has been demonstrated that another
Sanders, possibly younger and less white, could one day soon win the American
presidential elections and change the face of the country."
"Today, Sanders’ success demonstrates that a substantial
proportion of America is tired of the rise in inequality and these
pseudo-alternatives and intends to return to a progressive agenda and the
American tradition of egalitarianism," he concludes.
Bernie Sanders' elder brother, Larry, who lives in the United
Kingdom and is a local leader in the Green Party, made a similar argument last
week. Larry Sanders attributed his brother's popularity to his focus on
economic inequality, telling BBC: "The
distribution of money from the bulk of the population to the very rich is true
and when somebody says it they resonate to that."
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share
Alike 3.0 License
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment