Jeremy Gantz - The Age of Inequality - Corporate America’s War on Working People

Inequality is timeless; the danger it poses to any society varies by degree. The title of this book therefore could, I suppose, refer to almost any period of time. A central tension courses throughout the history of the United States, between the promise of equal opportunitywe were all created equal, right?and the reality of inequality. The great struggles of U.S. history, from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, have at their core been fights over the gap between this promise and reality.

Yet since the late 1970s, as the economy globalized and the rich grew much richer, this gap has widened dramatically. More and more Americans admit this and are refusing to tolerate growing divides as the inevitable cost of globalization. But thirty-five years before the Occupy movement drew the publics attention to a broken system, and forty years before presidential candidates across the political spectrum acknowledged inequality as a problem, In These Times was on the case. Launching an independent socialist weekly, founding editor and publisher James Weinstein looked forward to covering a growing left movement buoyed by the election of Jimmy Carter. Instead, his magazine would chronicle a faltering movement, a newly conservative political era, and the emergence of the countrys new gilded age. With a mission to expose the struggles of the powerless, In These Times was well positioned to report on a government and economy more and more tilted toward the powerful.

U.S. incomes began growing more unequal in 1979, and money has been flowing upward ever since. Fast-forward nearly forty years, and:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.

The richest .01 percent of Americans controls 22 percent of the wealth, up from 7 percent in the late 1970s.

The countrys median household income (adjusted for inflation) is less today than it was in 1989.

More and more Americans are aware of the wealth disparity that now characterizes the country. But while these numbers make clear who has been winning the class waras Warren Buffet has said, its his sidethey dont show us how inequality grew since the 1970s and what it felt like to be left behind. They dont show us the lives of striking workers permanently replaced by union-busting companies. They dont show us fast-food workers impoverished by a stagnant minimum wage or the migrant farm laborers making less than that wage. They dont show us the army of permatemps and independent contractors that corporations have raised to avoid providing the benefits that middle-class Americans once expected as their birthright.

Many books about the growth of inequality illuminate the problem through historical data and research. This book takes a different approach, collecting In These Times articles from the last forty years to show why the country became so unequal so quicklyand how people pushed back against this trend. Think of it as a real-time narrative of a still-unfolding man-made disaster: a history of the present. In the introductions to each chapter, longtime contributors and current editors reflect on the view from 2017.

captures what all this has meant for many U.S. workers: precarity.

In Search of Solidarity, Christopher Hayes interlude following , we focus on those who have pushed for changestruggles that In These Times has reported from the front lines, providing an inside take on movements as they unfolded.

Intensifying globalization has both undermined and heightened the power of borders, sparking transnational solidarity and protest. focuses on movements and political campaigns that have challenged our unequal order since the recent financial crash exposed the economy for what it is: broken. From Occupy to Black Lives Matter to Bernie Sanders, radical change is starting to look more attractive to many.