A 2018 Secular Profit for America

Listen carefully!  Philosopher/historian, Matthew Stewart, has something important to say.

When the rich rule, the rest of us stagnate, decline or become poor.

In an article in the June, 2018 Atlantic, Matthew Stewart wrote, "The birth of a New Aristocracy."
"The gilded future of the top 10 percent--and the end of opportunity for everyone else."

Since Stewart is a secular prophet, he doesn't use the religious language of an Amos, Isaiah or Jeremiah, but to me, his message is about oppression, justice and judgement.  Stewart's conclusions approximate those of Amos, Isaiah or Jeremiah.

To use the phrasing of the ethicist, D.T., "The system is rigged."  And rigged by and for the rich 10 percent and against, in varying degrees, the other 90 percent.  For some of the 90 percent, they remain economically stagnant; for others, they are in decline.  For others, they experience exploitation/oppression.

The American church has not, by and large, risen up as a religious prophet, so God called a secular prophet--a very good one who knows how to use data to do analysis, to reveal systems at work that most of us don't see and to paint the larger picture which most of us miss.

My grandfather purchased the Noble family farm in 1896.  My father was born in 1891.  Neither one killed any Iowa Indians to obtain the family farm, but fifty years earlier, some Iowans did so, or drove Indians out of the state. My father benefited from an oppressive system that gave him access to rich Iowa farmland.  My father was a knowledgeable farmer, he worked hard, but he still benefitted from the system that oppressed Indians, going way back to the founding fathers, even the Puritans.

Many Ivy League University graduates, who now dominate the 10 percent, would protest about being portrayed as oppressors.  They would say they studied hard, worked hard, and earned their high incomes, but Stewart shows the System has been rigged in their favor.

Now some quotations from Stewart's article:
"The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people's children.  We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time.  We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy.  Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents.  We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club.  But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we're playing, everybody loses badly in the end."

"We're a well-behaved, flannel-suited crowd of lawyers, doctors, dentists, mid-level investment bankers, M.B.A.s with opaque job titles, and assorted other professionals--the kind of people you might invite to dinner.  In fact, we're so self-effacing, we deny our own existence.  We keep insisting that we're "middle class"."

"If you are starting at the median for people of color, you'll want to practice your financial pole-vaulting .  The Institute for Policy Studies calculated that, setting aside money invested in "durable goods" such as furniture and a family car, the median black family had net wealth of $1700 in 2013, and the median Latino family had $2,000, compared with $116,800 for the median white family.  A 2015 study in Boston found that the wealth of the median white family there was $247,500, while the wealth of the median African American family was $8.  That is not a typo.  That's two grande cappuccinos.  That and another 300,000 cups of coffee will get you into the 9.9 percent."

You may want to compare these quotations with Jeremiah 6:13-14, Jeremiah 7, Amos 5:21-24,
Isaiah 58, and James 5:1-6.

Now more quotations from Stewart:
"Money may be the measure of wealth, but it is far from the only form of it.  Family, friends, social networks, personal health, culture, education, and even location are all ways of being rich, too.  These nonfinancial forms of wealth, as it turns out, aren't simply perks of membership in our aristocracy.  They define us."

"We are the people of good family, good health, good schools, good neighborhoods, and good jobs.  We may want to call ourselves the "5Gs" rather than the 9.9 percent.  We are so far from the not-so-good people on all of these dimensions, we are beginning to resemble a new species."

"Let us count our blessings: Every year, the federal government doles out tax expenditures through deductions for retirement savings (worth $137 billion in 2013); employer-sponsored health plans ($250 billion); mortgage-interest payments ($70 billion); and, sweetest of all, income from watching the value of your home, stock portfolio, and private-equity partnerships grow ($161 billion).  In total, federal tax-expenditures exceeded $900 billion in 2013.  That's more than the cost of Medicare, more than the cost of Medicaid, more than the cost of all other federal safety-net programs put together.  And--such is the beauty of the system--51 percent of those handouts went to the top quintile of earners, and 39 percent to the top decile."

As a sociologist I long ago discovered how difficult it is for the average white American to think sociologically.  To think in terms of social systems.  We almost, inevitably, revert back to individuals, individual progress, and individual responsibility.  The systems of evil remain invisible to many of us.  So Matthew Stewart will help you bring Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah up into 2018 and make them relevant.

A final thought.  You reject these truths at your peril.  The scriptures teach us again and again that people who reject truth, fail to repent, fail to do justice, sooner or later face a judgement in which they lose it all.

P.S.
The historical past does haunt the sociological present.  The following chart illustrates how it can happen:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18TPSZWH16lHPpnaSg8OC2hO2wQ4R_SPV/view?usp=sharing