How Billionaires Destroyed The Middle Class (Script & Sources)

Do you work too much, for too little pay, with few or no benefits, vacation, health care, or plans for retirement, not to mention a never-ending crippling anxiety about losing your job for no reason with no recourse?

Well, that’s because there’s a power struggle between the working class and the ruling class, and in the United States, the ruling class created a fake labor economy that makes it impossible for workers to form effective unions.

Here’s how it works: individually, a worker has no power to improve working conditions or wages, because an employer can just hire someone else. And people will point to that and say, well that’s what a free market is, but American labor is not a free market, it’s tightly controlled through wealth hoarding, which is designed to creating a false sense of scarcity and competition to benefit employers.

To put it simply: there’s enough money being generated by workers to pay everyone a living wage and to create a labor market that is based on paying competitive wages for appropriate skill and productivity. But because the ultra-wealthy control the money supply, and all the laws and regulations, wages are artificially restricted, which creates hyper-competition among low and middle-income workers. Basically, the ultra-rich are intentionally and collectively starving the poor so that the poor will have to compete for scraps.

And by the way, for all intents and purposes, both political parties are anti-labor. But I’m running out of time, so I’ll explain how both Republicans and Democrats are totally screwing you in favor of the ultra-wealthy.

Hey, you’re not being paid enough, because American politicians killed unions because the rich paid them to, and now we have a fake labor market that only exists to make the rich richer, and to make the poor compete for scraps.

We don’t have a labor party in the United States like most other industrialized countries. In fact, there is a direct and clear relationship between countries that have strong labor parties and high union membership, and the health of their middle class, specifically as it relates to wealth inequality.

You can actually see it in the United States too. From the start of World War Two until about the 1970s, most major industries were backed by strong unions that guaranteed job security, good pay, legal protections, benefits, and so on. Since these unions almost exclusively represented lower and middle-income workers, income inequality in the United States was at its lowest point ever, and the middle class wasn’t just thriving, the entire economy was geared towards benefiting them - which is why from the late 40s to the late 70s, most adults could go to college, go to the doctor, buy a house a car a TV, and then retire with benefits - it was the era of the America Dream, and it existed almost exclusively because the middle class had bargaining power through unions, which was good for the real economy.

Then, in the 70s and 80s, union membership collapsed, the middle class economy crashed, and income inequality created two distinct Americas, one that’s generally considered worse than most war-torn countries, and another where Jeff Bezos makes 9 million dollars an hour. 

Now, it has a lot to do with a problematic monetary policy that assumed inflation could be exploited to help unemployment, but I don’t have the time to explain it, and you don’t NEED to know what it is, if you’re interested, google “easy money policy”.

But in the most simplified terms, Richard Nixon wanted to be reelected, so he hired a guy who later went bankrupt himself, to create a money flow that would benefit banks and ostensibly the economy, but this policy ramped up inflation so badly that it crashed the economy, then Jimmy Carter saved the economy, but at the expense of labor industries. And while the world was reeling from this economic back and forth, Ronald Reagan was elected, and took the opportunity to crush those labor industries and institute a wealth-hoarding economy that was fundamentally based on stealing worker productivity and directing it to the ultra-wealthy. You’ve probably heard of it, it’s called trickle-down theory. That’s gonna be a whole other video, so let’s fast forward to today.

Since then, both political parties have just accepted this new economic reality. Republicans openly hate unions, and Democrats have historically failed to protect workers, because they almost always favor corporate interests to promote economic growth within the context of this new fake economy. In general, Democrats believe that economic growth is good for the worker, even if it happens at the expense of the worker, and their main solution for worker exploitation is to provide band-aids instead of structural change in the labor market. Case in point: pandemic hits, unemployment skyrockets, wages go down, stock market goes up, billionaires get 1.5 trillion dollars, and we get $1,400 in stimulus checks.

So, that’s where we are. Our labor economy doesn’t reflect our labor or our economy, and it’s entirely controlled by the very people it benefits, who also control our entire government, except for a few key figures who are genuinely pro-labor, and who are also vilified and attacked by both parties.