Trickling on down the road
Wow, if you haven’t taken a look at the New York Times Editorial Board’s collection of 16 pages of essays from last weekend detailing what’s wrong with America and how to right the ship, run, don’t walk, to do so now at the link at the bottom of the page. It’s a thoughtful and honest 16 pages of experts on proper taxation, civil rights, banking, labor, healthcare, and more. I would have simply recommended voting the bums out on November 3 but of course it’s not that simple. These are systemic problems decades, and in some respects, centuries in the making.
One article in particular resonated with me, calling for a wholesale revision of the duties of corporations from only stockholders to a fair mix of stockholders, employees and community. Large multi-national corporations dominate and if they can build shared prosperity into their culture everyone will truly benefit. This first article recalls prominent corporate attorney Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo written for the US Chamber of Commerce, which listed critical “threats including Ralph Nader’s campaign for consumer safety regulations, the rise of the environmental movment and the expansion of social welfare programs”, inspiring Joseph Coors to create the conservative Heritage Foundation. As a result a company like GE that had boasted in 1953 about its payments of taxes and to suppliers, employees and longterm research initiatives was touting forty years later its short-term profits, stock buybacks and employee layoffs.
The right and the truly wealthy and powerful it has always represented and cared solely about will always seek to divide “the people” over any issue they can come up with, or use cheap labels like socialist or radical in lieu of actual discussion and change to skew the message and the history away from the truth. The result is that generation after generation consistently vote against self-interest; workers and the middle class struggle; and the wealthy and powerful look more and more like the manic antagonists of a Dickens novel instead of admired leaders in search of the common good that somewhere in their psyches they just might find more rewarding.
No doubt there are flaws and problematic positions in everyone the Democratic Party has put forward in recent memory but they all share a recognition that there is something rotten in the State of Denmark on this side of the Atlantic Ocean and are committed to finding a solution. (Editor’s Note to President Trump: This writer may not be referring to the actual Scandinavian country known as Denmark.) So next time someone tells you this is nothing but class warfare, remember Lewis Powell’s words and know that it always has been, long before the trickle down was shown to be little trickle and lots of down.