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Economic Justice and Sustainability

The basic issue is whether government will begin to support average people or continue to support the super-rich and the giant corporations.

The economic security of working people has been destroyed. Workers' wages have been stagnant for nearly 40 years while the top 1 percent appropriated nearly all the gains in economic output and productivity. The economy has been hollowed out by financial speculation, the military pork barrel, and unsustainable trade, private, and public deficits instead of investment in the real economy of public infrastructure and domestic manufacturing. The climate emergency and peak oil demand a World War II scale mobilization to build renewable energy sources, mass transit, railroads, regionalized sustainable manufacturing and agriculture, and other green infrastructure.

After four decades of pro-corporate policies – deregulation, privatization, free trade, union busting, corporate welfare, unprosecuted corporate crime, tax cuts for the rich and tax hikes of workers, spending hikes for the military and spending cuts for public services – the bottom 90 percent of us is worse off in 2008 that we were in 1970.

Hourly wages adjusted for inflation are less in 2008 than in 1970. Working people (including small business owner-operators) have tried to keep up by working more hours than any working class in the industrial world and by going into all-time record levels of household debt.

Per capita income has doubled since 1970, but the $7 trillion increase in gross domestic product in 2008 over 1970 has been appropriated by the almost completely by the super-rich top 1%. This annual transfer of wealth and income created by the sweat of working people to the super-rich is the greatest confiscation of wealth in the history of the world.

As investor Warren Buffet, the world's richest man in 2008, has noted: "If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning."

• It's time to fight back.
• It's time for Congress to finally act upon FDR's 1944 call for an Economic Bill of Rights that will guarantee economic security for all Americans. It should include the right to a job at a living wage or a guaranteed income above poverty, Social Security, pension security, free full-coverage health care, free public education from Head Start through college, and affordable housing, transportation, and energy.
• It's time to Build a Sustainable Green Infrastructure for jobs, peace, energy security, and climate protection.
• It's time for Economic Populism: fair trade, progressive taxation, labor law reform, prosecution of corporate crime, real regulation and transparency, taxes on speculation and pollution.