The real "us against them": We must all come together to face economic predators

Once native people lived all across this land—18 million by many estimates. They had thriving towns, farms, cities, nations with laws and vast lands populated by ancient tribes.

The first Europeans to come may have been among the privileged and well-connected, sent by monarchs to claim land for their overlords. But more followed and these were mostly the poor--the workers, the landless, the desperate, those set outside the law. They worked on indenture or were beholden to company towns. And things went even worse for the native people, who died by genocide and disease. Then the overlords brought African people to this land, already in chains.

It is hard to sort out who was more victim and how many times. Often the greatest injustices were those perpetrated by some who were already victims themselves. When poor landless whites faced the choice between starvation labor in eastern factories or a desperate trek to occupy land where native people still lived, they were already caught in a trap. If they wanted a hope of living free at least for a few generations, the choice was to send the men on ahead to scout a piece of land, mark the corners and then travel back east to register their claim. Then they moved their families west in a migration so hard and dangerous that only sheer desperation could spur them to it. And the people already on the land often fought back.

Creative commons image of light snow over fall leaves in front of a rundown neighborhood view by James jordan via flickr.com

There were exceptions, of course. There were a few who crossed the cultural divide and joined forces—white and native together. And these often were the strongest of them, but they were rarely allowed anything but the margins of society. They were, after all, the greatest threat to the rulers of industry and commerce--people of the lower classes, joined across divides.

Today, most of the people who support Trump’s overtly racist regime are poor and marginalized themselves. The administration is seeking a second ethnic cleansing of our country, and those they call to do the dirty work (the deputized paramilitaries called “federal agents”) are those only somewhat less desperate--the people who were recently forced from steady middle-class jobs by the machinations of technology giants and international finance. They were never given much beyond a factory-work education, and all that talk of retraining them for new technologies was never serious. Instead, they’ll be used, at least temporarily, as masked agents to rip families apart, brutalize those with the “wrong” skin color, tear people from their homes and deport people to countries they have often never lived in at all.

I live in a scrappy, working-class neighborhood in a red town in a deep red county. There are known “meth houses” on nearly every block. But interspersed with them, side by side, there are the homes of struggling families, people who work full-time at Walmart and can’t afford food, people who work at the trailer plant or on the railroad or in timber. A few work for the schools or as social workers. Some are retired.

The better houses here are the ones with patchy, partly green lawns and a few flowers. The homes are low and weathered, but the people who are still trying have painted a bit of trim semi-recently or fixed a broken step. There are no easy places here—only the homes of those who have given up and of those who are still fighting for another day of survival.

And most of them support the regime of ethnic cleansing. They want someone to blame for their struggle because it’s obvious to everyone that it should not be this hard, that working full-time has to be enough to survive. There must, then, be someone stealing away our hopes.

Their myriad screens have an answer. It’s the foreigners, the immigrants, the furtive brown faces at windows in some of the rental homes on the edges of town, in the agricultural camps along back roads in the summer, in the back lots of construction-supply stores. “They are the problem.” They are “criminals” or just vaguely “illegal” to begin with. And most of my neighbors believe it.

I try to tell them the facts, the history, the way it’s always been. These quiet neighbors of ours are not illegal. Many are not even immigrants. Some have lived here since before white people came. Others have lived here for 30 years or for a few generations. Many have no other home. But most importantly, they are like us, just struggling to survive. They work for less, take less, exist on less even than we do. And it’s all because of the same thing—the tyrants of industry and commerce, slightly changed in their methods from 200 or 400 years past, but essentially the same, and in an eerie number of cases, they have the same family names, passed down by wealth and privilege.

When, on occasion, my neighbors allow me to explain this, their eyes drift across the tracks, to the nicer houses across town, the tall windows and gabled rooves, the pretty yards with plentiful water and old trees. These, they nod, are the rich. But it’s hard for them to believe that these people are the enemy. They are the doctors who helped their old parents, the lawyers who settled their divorce, the professors who taught the lucky few who went to college and the people who work in the offices. They know them far more than they know those furtive shifters, and so they return to their original belief quickly enough.

I cross the tracks nearly every day, to go to the little health-food shop, the farmers’ market, the bank, the doctor’s office or some other errand. Most of my neighbors drive over the tracks in battered sedans and belching pick-ups. I walk, the gray wind whipping my coat around my knees, because I cannot drive and have no vehicle. And nearly every day, a train stops on the tracks, carrying our timber off to distant cities, carrying away the trailers from the plant, carrying back crates and crates of things sold to us down at Walmart and the other big stores, and more than anything carrying all the goods of America from city to city, merely passing through our mountains. The trains block the road for a good 30 minutes and I stand in the icy wind of winter or the scorching heat of summer.

And when I can wait no longer or when I must get to a doctor’s appointment if I don’t want to lose my place in a waiting game of many months, I call a friend to give me a ride. He drives a red 4Runner and he lives in one of those bigger, nicer houses on the other side of the tracks. He can drive around the blocked railroad on the larger roads to get me. He’s a kindly older man, a friend of my mother’s, who has worked as an insurance appraiser all his life. Because of that, he can be certain that he has earned all he has--his comfortable house in the better part of town with a large yard and in-ground swimming pool and two vehicles in a two-car garage. He worked for what he has, and he looks at the broken-down houses of my neighborhood with benevolent disdain.

“They just need to work a little harder. They’ll see. It’s about effort.”

He too supports the ethnic cleansing, the tyrannical president and the billionaire rulers. “The rich pay the vast majority of taxes,” he tells me on our short drive.

He’s not wrong as far as the taxes go. The top 10 percent of income-earners in the US pay 70 percent of federal taxes. The top 50 percent of earners pay a whopping 97 percent of income taxes. That means half the country pays just three percent of the taxes.

“The whiners just think money grows on trees.” He looks out at the shabby gray houses and the barren streets.

But there he’s wrong. To be at the 50 percent mark of American incomes, one has to earn about $38,000 per year. That’s in a country where economists estimate a family needs at least $100,000 per year to obtain basic necessities, including housing and health security. Those in the lower 50 percent of incomes aren’t paying a lot in taxes because they are struggling just to survive.

But his underlying assumption--that those my neighbors see as wealthy are also struggling--is correct. People at the “top 10 percent” mark of incomes are not the super wealthy. They are upper-middle class with incomes over $250,000 per year. Certainly, that’s comfortable, but it isn’t outrageous or a guarantee that hardship will never strike again. And in fact, they are losing ground in this economy along with everyone else.

We are used to hearing economists complain that the average employee’s inflation-adjusted salary in the US has stagnated over the last 50 years, while the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent have ballooned (by more than 400 percent, in fact). But what is less often said is that even the upper-middle class has lost ground in terms of their share of wealth over the past half century.

One major measure of the health and balance of an economy is the percentage of wealth owned by various economic classes. As astronomical incomes have flowed to the top 1 percent over the past few decades, the share of all the things of economic value in the US (savings, property, stocks, etc.) owned by the top 1 percent has increased from about 22 percent of US wealth in the late 1980’s to 31 percent today.

Given how much the poor and middle class have suffered in recent years, one might assume this is mainly because the very richest are exploiting those classes to gain wealth. But while that contributes, most of their gain came on the backs of what is called “the next 9,” the upper middle class people who are in the top 10 percent, but below the top 1 percent. That group owned 37 percent of US wealth in 1989 and now owns about 33 percent.

At the same time the cost of a college education is 7 times (700 percent) higher than it was 50 years ago, and the cost of a medium home is 20 times (2,000 percent) higher. These costs and most other real costs of living for middle and upper-middle-class families far outstrip the official “inflation rate” which is mainly based on the cost of minor consumer goods.

Although my neighbors on the other side of the tracks may think of the comfortable houses in my friend’s neighborhood as “the rich,” we are all actually in the same “not the top 1 percent” category. My friend is correct that he and his cohort pay tax rates between 26 and 37 percent. What he doesn’t realize is that the wealthiest individuals use a variety of tax loopholes (unrealized capital gains, long-term capital gains, off-shore accounts and things like the “buy, borrow, die” strategy) to avoid paying taxes. The very wealthiest people in our society pay as little as 3.4 percent of their incomes in taxes. Many of the top corporations pay nothing at all and instead receive massive government subsidies.

There is a gigantic monstrosity of an elephant in our national living room that very few of us are acknowledging. We are constantly reminded about the deep divide between red and blue, liberal and conservative, black and white, old and young, even men and women or some other dividing line. All the while, the real divide is 99 percent of the population versus a handful of economic predators.

While it’s possible that not everyone who has ever been in the top 1 percent is an economic predator--using unethical business practices, tax gimmicks, legalized bribery and massive disinformation campaigns to abuse, disenfranchise and exploit the rest of the nation--many have and they continue to.

My struggling, impoverished, Trump-voting neighbors should not be my enemies. Immigrants as well as well-rooted Americans of all colors and speaking various languages have done us no harm and should be natural allies. Even my friend from across the tracks and his more comfortable neighbors have more in common with us than they do with the predators that exploit and divide us.

If we could just realize this and stand firmly against economic exploitation and the legalized bribery that controls our political system, we would all benefit. There is no zero-sum game among us. We all gain if we take down the predators. We all lose if we don’t.