By Little Yew
Right now, a lot of Americans are hurting as the cost of being alive is falling out of reach. People on TV keep telling us to blame minorities and women for what’s going on. They tell us that if we disempower these groups, our economic woes will go away. This is a pernicious myth, designed to distract everyone from the real reasons life is so expensive right now: union-busting, privatization, and monopolies.
Union-busting hurts us all. In the 1950s, union membership in the U.S. was at an all-time high. This had a huge impact, boosting quality of life for many Americans. Then came the era of union-busting firms, in which bosses began hiring companies to spread lies and sow derision among workers. Thanks to union-busting tactics, workplace union contracts got derailed, and vital collations dissolved. This has led workers to constantly get a bum deal — or not even get a seat at the bargaining table. Union-busting is the one of the biggest reasons we’re in this current mess. To learn more about union-busting, check out A Collective Bargain by Jane McAlevey.
Privatization is another reason everything is so expensive. There’s this awful pattern that started in California in the late 1960s, and that spread to the whole country by the 1980s. This pattern is called “privatization,” and it’s the trend of eliminating public services and instead giving taxpayer money to for-profit companies to handle the services instead. These companies prioritize their investors above all else, and this leads to a degradation of services. It also means we often must pay for things twice. For example, our tax dollars might be used to hire a private contractor to build a road, and then they charge us a toll to use it. This awful logic is now everywhere in the U.S. — including in education, healthcare, and even military weapons. Privatization has led many of us to become straddled by debt or even go bankrupt over things that are free in other countries — such as attending university or access to healthcare. This entire system makes no sense, and it’s created hundreds of paywalls in our everyday lives through which we are constantly bleeding cash. To learn more about privatization, check out the 5-minute video “The Truth about Privatization” by Robert Reich.
Monopolies have gotten out of hand—and lay the foundations for price gauging. You might have heard that only 10 companies control almost the entire world’s food supply, only 6 companies control 90% of U.S. news media, and local rental markets have been flooded with Wall Street companies buying up all the housing stock. This is all part of a larger pattern in the formation of monopolies, in which fewer and fewer companies control the supply of something. This pattern lays the foundation for a myriad of awful things, including price gouging, thanks to lack of competition.
The bosses and Wall Street want you to blame minorities and women. Don’t fall for it. Disempowering those groups never fixes anything. The way to fix the economy and make life affordable again is to build up worker power, break up monopolies, and put a stop to privatization.