John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine, and co-author with Robert W. McChesney of “The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China.”
National income can be likened to a pie. If between one year and the next the pie gets bigger, everyone can have a bigger slice. But if, instead, the size of the pie stays the same, a bigger slice for some can only mean a smaller slice for others.
This helps us understand the present dismal state of the U.S. economy and the impetus behind Bernie Sanders’s electoral campaign, which is aimed at the needs of workers and working families. For decades, U.S. economic growth has stagnated, with each succeeding decade experiencing a lower rate of growth. Under these circumstances, the rapidly increasing income of those at the top — or what Sanders likes to call the “billionaire class” — is at the expense of the income shares (slices of the pie) of those at the bottom.
The 400 richest billionaires in the country now have more wealth than the bottom half of income earners, representing some 150 million people. The share of wages in national income has been falling while property income has been increasing. Jobs are more precarious. Vast numbers of people have dropped out of the labor force. Although official unemployment has decreased in the past few years, good jobs paying livable wages remain extremely hard to come by. More people are falling into poverty. A majority of students in public schools are now classified as poor or near-poor.
The political establishment, consisting of the duopoly of the Democratic and Republican parties, has been largely oblivious to the deteriorating conditions of the majority of people. Since the poor, including the working poor, are much less likely to vote and have little financial clout, they are easily discounted. Money dominates U.S. politics at every level. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates to unrestricted large donations from the corporate rich, has enormously tarnished the image of American democracy. It is now common to hear that the United States is, to quote the memorable phrase of economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy in 1966, “democratic in form and plutocratic in content.”
It is this worsening condition of the U.S. body politic that accounts for the extraordinary phenomenon of Bernie Sanders’s campaign for president. Sanders portrays himself as a democratic socialist in the mold of the most radical phase of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, which proposed an Economic Bill of Rights to guaranteed full employment and economic security for all Americans.
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