If Inequality is Such a Growing Concern, Why are No Americans Taking to the Streets?

THE END OF OUTRAGE? These days, everyone from Jeb Bush to Barack Obama to Naomi Klein frets about economic inequality. Yet wages continue to stagnate, unions scuffle to survive, the income of CEOs keeps climbing (even for those execs who run their companies into the ground), and anyone who seriously hopes to become president first has to secure the patronage of a billionaire or two. 

Why do so few Americans seem genuinely outraged? Why is no one taking to the streets? 

The United States was once home to wave upon wave of organized indignation against corporate “monopolies” and their Wall Street enablers. During the heyday of the industrial era, movements that fought to redistribute wealth and power attracted millions of ordinary people. 

From the late 19^th century through the 1940s, they persuaded—or pressured—government officials to regulate big business, establish a minimum wage and unemployment insurance, protect union organizers, and create Social Security. 

More recently, the black and feminist movements, with help from several presidents and judges, interred the entire corpus of discriminatory laws. But neither did much to challenge an economic order in which those with big money make nearly all the important rules. 

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In a provocative new book, the critic and historian Steve Fraser tries to explain why mass protest on the left has become so scarce in what he aptly calls The Age of Acquiescence.   

For Fraser, the main culprits are not such usual suspects as right-wing politicians and the market power of global corporations but public admiration for workaholic entrepreneurs whose self-serving definition of freedom legitimizes their reign.  (Read the rest.)  

-cw

 

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 15

Pub: Feb 20, 2015