“The game is rigged,” writes Senator Elizabeth Warren in
her new book A Fighting Chance. It’s rigged because the rich and their
lobbyists have rigged the rules of the game to their favor. The rules
are reflected in a tax code and bankruptcy laws that have seen the
greatest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich in U.S.
history.
The result?
America has the
most billionaires in the world, but not a single U.S. city ranks among
the world’s most livable cities. Not a single U.S. airport is among the
top 100 airports in the world. Our bridges, road and rail are falling
apart, and our middle class is being guttered out thanks to three
decades of stagnant wages, while the top 1 percent enjoys 95 percent of
all economic gains.
A rigged tax code and a bloated
military budget are starving the federal and state governments of the
revenue it needs to invest in infrastructure, which means today America
looks increasingly like a second rate nation, and now new data shows
America’s intellectual resources are also in decline.
For
the past three decades, the Republican Party has waged a dangerous
assault on the very idea of public education. Tax cuts for the rich have
been balanced with spending cuts to education. During the New Deal era
of the 1940s to 1970s, public schools were the great leveler of America.
They were our great achievement. It was universal education for all,
but today it’s education for those fortunate enough to be born into
wealthy families or live in wealthy school districts. The right’s
strategy of defunding public education leaves parents with the option of
sending their kids to a for-profit school or a theological school that
teaches kids our ancestors kept dinosaurs as pets.
“What
kind of future society the defectors from the public school rolls
envision I cannot say. However, having spent some time in the Democratic
Republic of Congo—a war-torn hellhole with one of those much coveted
limited central governments, and, not coincidentally, a country in which
fewer than half the school-age population goes to public school—I can
say with certainty that I don’t want to live there,” writes Chuck
Thompson in Better off Without Em.
Read more: America’s rotting empire: Billionaires galore and a crumbling infrastructure - Salon.com
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