The greatest, most broadly beneficial prosperity in U.S. history occurred in the post WWII era when labor unions were at their strongest and wealthy individuals and Big Business paid a fairer, progressive rate of taxation.

It was in that period that American industrial workers, previously forced by intensely oppressive, exploitative conditions to largely live in urban slums, finally acquired the good pay, decent benefits, and an uplifting New Deal legacy that allowed them to migrate to the suburbs.

With sufficient taxes from the rich helping fill governmental coffers, highways, schools, dams, bridges, power lines, and other vital infrastructure projects were built, giving the economy and our quality of life a tremendous boost.

Returned veterans used the GI Bill to advance their education, which their children would also do in subsequent years with the aid of federal Pell Grants.

Getting union wages, the backbone of our society was able to purchase homes and big-ticket items. Detroit and other manufacturing centers were booming.

Happy folks drove Plymouths and Pontiacs, plus many other makes as well.

That reality prevailed for decades.

Then Ronald Reagan became president and fired the air traffic controllers, unleashing a wave of union busting within the private sector (accompanied by extreme favoritism and deregulation for the societal top tier).

With conservative/Republican emphasis focused entirely on maximum short-term profit for the narrowest group, a "me-before-we" social orientation took tenacious hold. Gains that American workers had won began to vanish.

Our industrial base crumbled as corporations sought superprofits overseas. Factory workers found themselves first unemployed, and then having to take inferior jobs, often at big box retailers or in fast food restaurants, at vastly reduced pay.

The resulting inability of millions of working-class families to remain cash solvent spurred the credit phenomenon, building a growing mountain of individual and national debt that generated insoluble contradictions.

Finally, in the last quarter of 2008, all of the chickens of conservative-fostered social irresponsibility -- and abject greed in the financial world -- came home to roost.

The American people could no longer afford the lives they'd grown accustomed to.

More and more of us defaulted on our mortgages, and Pontiacs gathered dust on dealers' unvisited lots.

We had swallowed right-wing political bromides for far too long, at an enormous cost that includes soon being unable to turn the key and step on the accelerator of a brand new Pontiac ever again.

How do we get out of this mess?

There's only one possible way.

It involves rebuilding union-scale mass employment, and taxing the affluent beneficiaries of ruthless labor-relation parasitism at rates that return to us -- in widely constructive ways -- the wealth that our blood, sweat, and tears originally created, but which was essentially stolen under increasingly predacious, primarily Republican rule.

It definitely includes passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which would prevent the corporate deceit and pressure that currently keeps America's wage-earning majority from becoming the well-paid, confident consumers absolutely crucial to spurring growth and attaining a much higher living standard.

Absent that, we'll collectively drive discontinued relics into a cold, capitalist night, never to see the warming glow of a better tomorrow.
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About author
Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the Sixties.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22845