MARC STEINER: Welcome to The Real News Network,
I'm Marc Steiner.
Great to have you with us.
Just seven years ago or so, income inequality
was not the buzzword of the resistance or
the movement as it is now.
As our guest writes, it was a niche field
in the world of academia and social economic
analysis, not deemed to be that important
to really analyze and study deeply.
But now, income inequality is at the center
of the storm, used by right wing populists
like Trump and others around the globe to
marshal the anger and frustrations of many
workers.
But martialing is not done against the wealthy
or the powerful, but creating enemies out
of people like themselves, just people of
color.
Income inequality is also a battle cry for
progressives, radicals and revolutionaries
who see what the neoliberal state and the
conservative political worlds have done to
dismantle all the social underpinnings put
in place to end poverty and save capitalism.
That's true from Nixon through Reagan, especially
Reagan and Clinton, and to all the presidents
since.
Growth, rather than equality, became the operative
system championed in the United States.
Growth was the answer, and relative equality
would be established in its wake, people said.
Well, senior editor at The Nation, author
of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global
Citizen, her cover story is The Inequality
Industry in this issue of The Nation, joins
us now.
And it's a pleasure to have with us Atossa
Araxia Abrahamian.
Welcome, good to have you with us.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: Thanks so much for
having me.
MARC STEINER: So, to me, this is really an
important article.
And I just want to kind of take a step back
a bit and talk a bit why you thought it was
so important to put on the cover and what
you think we're facing.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah, so here at
The Nation, we were thinking about how to
commemorate the tenth anniversary of the financial
crisis.
And there's been so much written about this
already, the state of the world, the rise
of populism, the state of the markets, which
are actually doing very well.
And I thought, well you know, one really good
thing to come out of the crisis, or I thought,
and I still think it is rather a good thing,
is that suddenly everyone really cares about
economic inequality.
You mentioned income inequality a few times,
but I just want to reiterate that it's not
only income, it's economic inequality in the
sense that it includes wealth, income, assets
and so on.
MARC STEINER: Right, absolutely.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: And so, Americans
and people around the world actually are vastly
unequal.
It took the crisis for the media, the public,
politicians, thinkers, pundits to realize
this.
And around 2010 in the aftermath of the crisis,
we started seeing these shocking numbers.
So, this isn't in the story, but between 1993
and 2010, the top one percent in the United
States saw their incomes grow by fifty-eight
percent.
Everybody else saw their incomes grow six-point
four percent.
Also, in 2010, three hundred and eighty-eight
people, that's people, owned half of the world's
wealth.
So, these are really shocking numbers, and
they roll off the tongue.
They're just- you're taken aback.
And I started noticing more and more of these
stats pop up after the crisis.
I think that a really important moment for
this awareness was Occupy Wall Street.
You saw the rise of this concept of the one
percent that was not prevalent before.
You saw posters, you saw marches, you saw
people saying, "How did we get here?"
And as a result, the interest around economic
inequality grew, not just on the streets but
in academic departments, at institutions like
the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund.
You had central banks looking into this, you
have economists everywhere at the U.N.
And what happened there is that this gave
rise to what I call an inequality industrial
complex.
All of this money, all of this research being
funneled into the study of inequality.
And again, that seems like a really good thing.
But what we wanted to do here at The Nation
is take a step back and say, "Is this really
progressive, who is benefiting from this whole
scene, what is the research showing and how
has it significantly changed the conversation?"
So, the article was a result of that kind
of meta-research on inequality, and we found
some pretty interesting stuff.
MARC STEINER: And again, I think it's important
here to talk a little bit about history, as
you do in your article, which is to talk about
how we got to the place that we're in at this
moment.
You can take this back to the 1930s and the
Great Depression, when Roosevelt was desperate
to save capitalism and thought the only way
was kind of to deal with the question of inequality,
in that day during the Depression, and set
up things in motion and set up organizations
and set up laws that would try to end poverty,
put people to work.
Then World War II came, and we saw this kind
of wave of seemingly to caring about this
up until the 70s, when a real shift took place
under Nixon.
And in wake of the antiwar movement, the Black
Panthers and more, that saw this kind of conservative
shift that really took hold in Reagan and
then through Clinton.
So, I mean, talk about what happened there,
and what brought the nation to want to deal
with the beginning, and why we've ended up
where we are now.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: So, this is a caveat.
This is very broad strokes.
MARC STEINER: Yes, that's cool.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: We last saw an all-time
time peak in economic inequality in the U.S.
around the time of the Great Depression.
And after that time, in rebuilding the economy
in the years that followed, which actually
it was a wartime economy for many of those
decades, the economy was growing and recovering
from the recession, from the Depression, rather.
But there was also war.
There were also social movements.
There was the beginning of the welfare state.
And during this time, Americans and America
as a country experienced economic growth,
but the gains were distributed somewhat equitably,
right?
Organized labor started to gain power.
Deficit spending rose.
And this is a period that economists and historians
call the Great Compression.
And as a result, inequality fell since the
Depression through to the 1970s.
What we saw in the 1970s is now a pretty familiar
narrative, the narrative of deregulation and
neoliberalism.
Unions had less and less power, cuts to social
services under Bush and under Clinton created
a more unstable situation for working Americans,
for lower class people.
And while social movements did raise awareness
of other types of inequalities, gender inequality,
there was a civil rights movement, this is
all really important stuff, economics didn't
really catch on in the same way.
And that's because there's a persistent myth,
very closely linked to this notion of trickle-down
economics, that if the country is experiencing
growth, that's the important thing, and that
this rising tide, that this growth is going
to lift all boats, that everyone is going
to end up better off.
And the general- the gist of this way of thinking
is that as long as everyone is less poor,
we're okay.
It doesn't matter if the rich are a million
times richer than the poorest person as long
as the poorest person is getting less poor.
Now we know that this creates really complicated
situations in the country, because when rich
people have so much more money, and when the
political system is rigged to benefit people
with so much more money, they have more power,
right?
They have more power over politics, they have
more power over what the private sector does,
they have a role in shaping laws.
When the private sector is unduly powerful,
it creates political conflicts of interest-
well, not for them, but for the rest of us.
And basically, now we know- and this wasn't
really acknowledged fully before- now we know
that when rich people have way more money
than everybody else, it not only creates economic
inequalities, but also political ones and
social ones.
And a lot of the research that's come out
of this inequality industrial complex is aimed
at showing how this happens and showing the
broader social ills that come out of a vastly
unequal society.
MARC STEINER: So, I want to explore for a
moment here where we are politically and what
it means about how people use this moment
of deep inequality for their own political
purposes on many levels.
Let me start for our listeners here, to watch
for a moment President Barack Obama talking
about this income inequality and wealth inequality
in America, and what it means for him.
And then we're going to parse through why
there are so many different ideas about what
this means and how to address it.
BARACK OBAMA: A dangerous and growing inequality
and lack of upward mobility that has jeopardized
middle class America's basic bargain, that
if you work hard, you have a chance to get
ahead.
I believe this is the defining challenge of
our time, making sure our economy works for
every working American.
I am convinced that the decisions we make
on these issues over the next few years will
determine whether or not our children will
grow up in an America where opportunity is
real.
MARC STEINER: So, one of the things here that
really hit me about your piece, and you also
refer to this particular speech in your article
that Obama gave, is what are we looking for
here?
I mean, when you look at the neoliberal government,
they're looking to not necessarily eliminate
poverty completely, but to make sure people
think they can get ahead, and that it's okay
if folks, as you write, get wealthy and rich
as long as people aren't left completely behind.
And you see the right-wing using this here
and across the globe as a way to get workers
and others to come to their side, to say it's
someone else's fault and we're going to need
a more authoritarian government make this
happen and to change things.
And then you've got the left, who's working
on the same inequality issues.
And the question comes up, as you raised in
your article, are we talking about really
creating equality or just making us less unequal?
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah.
So, just to recap the narrative, the sort
of conventional wisdom went from inequality
doesn't matter because growth matters to a
version of that that stipulates that inequality
is bad because it's bad for growth.
So, it's different, but it's kind of the same,
right?
Growth is still the operative term here.
The point is to have more growth, and maybe
we need less inequality to have more growth.
I think that this is a convincing argument
insofar that it is apolitical, everyone can
get behind growth.
You know, technocrats love growth, politicians
love growth, workers love growth, unions love
growth and bosses love growth.
I can't find anyone who is really opposed
to growth except a small group of environmentally
minded people.
And so, it's a very easy sell politically.
And you can see why the IMF has started saying
things like this, you can see why Obama says
things like this.
The problem is that it doesn't really make
a case for egalitarianism and it doesn't really
make a case for equality in moral terms.
And I think that that is a really crucial
part of this discussion that we're not having
right now.
If we're just arguing for less inequality
on instrumental grounds, I think that people
are going to be left out, right?
Because if you get sort of enough equality,
leave a bunch of people out and you still
get growth, then you can say, "Oh, it's okay,
we have growth, so forget about those people."
And we're at a time when Americans feel so
unequal.
You know, I mentioned this in this story,
but women feel unequal, African Americans
feel unequal.
Heck, even white men feel unequal, even white
men feel discriminated against, right?
So, there's clearly a moral case to be made
for equality, and I think that we're really
missing out on that.
And by only focusing on inequality, I think
it really does highlight the differences rather
than something that we should be aiming for
as a common goal.
MARC STEINER: So, the question does become
what we mean by a political platform and ideas
about equality and how we define that equality
and what that means.
I mean, as you allude to in your article and
you say in your article, in many ways the
efforts taken by the Western governments-
different in Europe than they have been in
America for reasons, maybe the power of unions
and also the depth of racism in our country
that blocked what could have happened in the
United States.
But even there right now, you're seeing in
Europe and the United States, people kind
of attacking the system, the inequality growing
in all these societies.
So, the question is, what does equality mean
as a political struggle, and how do you see
that developing, how do you see that conversation
happening?
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: Well, I wish I had
all the answers.
MARC STEINER: No, I don't expect you to.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: I think it's about
power, right?
It's not just about tweaking the tax code
so that rich people give a little bit more
of their money to people who are less rich.
Because then, you have to decide how you're
going to spend the money, and that's really
political too.
If you just tax the rich and use the money
on war, okay, maybe on some level it will
redistribute some money, but I don't know
if that's really a progressive policy.
What you want is to, I think you have to take
money out of politics, a decision like Citizens
United is a catastrophe, it really exacerbates
how much power wealthy people have over the
political process and politicians.
So, that's a start.
Don't think that's going to happen at the
rate we're going.
I think that giving more power to labor unions
or people who are collectively organizing,
whether it's in their neighborhoods, whether
it's in their workplace, whether it's on the
state level, giving people more power and
more say in what happens.
And that's really hard to do, right?
You have to start from the ground up, but
you also have to have deep structural change
in the political system.
And I didn't want to discount redistribution,
because I do think it's important.
But that also has to happen from the bottom
up and the top down.
Higher wages, better benefits.
All of these things make it easier for people
to not be poor.
And then when they stop being poor, then they
can start being better, they can start doing
better and start working their way up.
By the same token, I really think that rich
people, and some of them acknowledge this
and some of them don't, something's got to
give.
Some of that money has got to go to the bottom.
Some of that money has got to be invested
in public programs.
The president of the Ford Foundation I spoke
to for this story, and the Ford Foundation
has started to pivot towards putting most
of its resources to studying inequality and
funding people who do so.
Even the Ford Foundation are talking about
this.
They're a really, really mainstream organization.
So, these things are really important to talk
about.
We've got to start talking about them now.
We've got to keep up the hard work.
It's really hard with the Senate and Congress
entirely controlled by Republicans whose tax
bill is doing the opposite of all of the things
I'm mentioning.
I mean, this is a classic case of redistributing
wealth to the top.
So, it's an uphill battle and it's a really,
really hard time to be working at passing
policies around this issue.
But the research there, the enthusiasm is
there.
Right now, the political will is not.
MARC STEINER: So, I'd like to conclude with
a thought that's pulling from two different
sections of your piece in The Nation.
So, one is when you talk about Darren Walker,
who is leading the Ford Foundation's pivot
around inequality.
And the quote was, "I refuse to believe that
this is just a natural phenomenon or part
of capitalism," was the quote that you quoted
of him in your piece.
And then in another part of the piece, you
write, in talking about how we end all this,
"That might mean pressuring governments to
take from the few to give to the many.
It might mean more cooperative models of ownership.
It might involve burning the whole thing down."
So, to me, those two places in your article
are almost at the kernel of people having
to wrestle with what we do to address it.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: Yeah.
Two things are going on.
I think that the smarter wealthy people, people
who are running institutions, people who have
a lot of power, are realizing that these levels
of economic inequality are destabilizing.
That's part of what the research has shown.
It's bad for society, it's bad for democracy,
and in the end, heads will roll.
And that's part of why there's so much enthusiasm
for reducing inequality from people who go
to Davos, right?
The World Economic Forum has been talking
about this for years, to their great credit.
But you also have to realize that this isn't
necessarily a very radical conversation.
Reducing inequality is not a radical conversation,
necessarily.
It can be purely out of self-preservation,
historically.
And there's been quite a good book written
about this by Walter Scheidel called The Great
Leveler.
Inequality has only really fallen in significant
ways in countries that have experienced some
pretty bad stuff; war, plague, famine, immiseration,
these are really equalizers.
And so, if we look at history, there's very
little to be excited about when it comes to
incrementalism, when it comes to tweaking
the tax code, for instance.
And so, there is kind of a tension here, right?
Do we do damage control and try to reduce
inequality inasmuch as possible, so that there
isn't a horrible revolution?
Do we let it keep going and see what happens?
I'm not convinced either of these are a good
solution, but these are kind of the stakes.
MARC STEINER: This has been fascinating.
It's a great article, I appreciate you taking
the time with us here at The Real News, Atossa.
We've been talking with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian,
who is the senior editor at The Nation magazine.
Atossa, thanks for your work, thanks for being
with us, and we're looking forward to seeing
what else comes down the pike with you and
your fellows at The Nation.
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN: Thanks for having
me.
MARC STEINER: Thank you.
And I'm Marc Steiner, here for The Real News
Network.
Thanks for joining us.
We'll be talking together soon.
