What It's Going to Take to Claw Back Middle Class Wealth from the 1%

[Left Turn Only]

23. checkmate

You are absolutely right, but while progressives have been saying these things for decades, a large part of the public is too ignorant to know that a divide and conquer strategy was implemented by the corporate world, and globalization of the economy was the winning move. Because American workers are competing with wages and benefits (or lack thereof) with workers from the developing world, they are no longer needed if they are going to demand just compensations. You don't want to work for what we're giving you...fine, we'll move to Indonesia. Globalization has been so successful that the billions of people of China and India have become consumers, meaning Americans aren't even absolutely necessary as consumers anymore. And the American workers have been made to hate the few unionized workers that remain because compared to themselves people like teachers appear overcompensated.

What's the answer? Since even Democratic presidents like Clinton and Obama continue to push the free trade agreements that ultimately give away more decent jobs than we gain, other than a radical restructuring of the world economy (like what we almost had with the Great Recession), the future doesn't look good for the true middle class in America. When I saw how quickly the status quo was put back in place by a Democratic president, no less, I realized that the days of FDR are gone. Checkmate.