Inequality and Fairness for All Americans
Floor Speech
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Mr. ELLISON. Madam Speaker, let me thank the gentleman from California for yielding. I appreciate all of the work Congressman DeSaulnier does in this area. And I want to thank him for raising this particular issue for this Special Order.
Madam Speaker, I agree with him that inequality is the issue of the moment. Not only does inequality funnel money from working Americans up to the richest people, but what do they do with the money once it is up there? There is only a certain number of boats you can ski behind, only a certain number of houses you can buy, and only a certain number of luxury cars you can buy.
What do the billions go to? Much of it goes to things like merger and acquisition, and also political influence. It is very important to understand that as economic inequality has grown, political inequality has also grown. Nowadays, the money goes into some super-PAC: some big, giant thing where they do independent expenditures and pour money in against their enemies and pour money in in favor of their friends.
Politics in America has become the battle of the billionaires now. You have to get a billionaire on your side in order to win. I mean, we know that whether it is the Coates', or the Mercers, or the Adelsons, or whoever it is, it is some big, rich person who is going to sponsor a political candidate, and that is who gets to represent us in what is supposed to be a democratic society. So I think that it is critical to make the link between economic inequality and political inequality.
I will say again, when we get economic inequality to the degree that it is, one of the other things that is purchased, besides political influence, is mergers and acquisitions.
I would just like to point out to everybody that it doesn't matter what industry you are talking about, markets are deeply concentrated and anticompetitive. If you are talking about like a pharmacy--not a pharmaceutical company, but a pharmacy--CVS, Walgreens, we used to have Rite Aid and, of course, they merged together. And, of course, there is another merger coming up. Every day you open the paper, there is some other big company buying up some other big company, concentrating markets, making the barriers to entry even higher so that the small- business person is just locked out.
It costs a lot to get into business now. If your opponent, who is some big, huge company, doesn't want you in the market, they can just drop their prices, suffer the losses, because they are big, run you out of business, and raise them right back on up.
But if you look at any market--beer, hamburger, chicken, online search engines, anything you want--almost all of them are deeply concentrated--two, three, maybe four--companies representing 80 or 90 percent of the industry, which cuts off opportunity, limits competition, and it is bad for the American people.
Madam Speaker, I have a few more things to share, but I will kick it back to Congressman DeSaulnier for now. Maybe he can kick it back to me a little later, and we will just have a conversation for a little while.
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Mr. ELLISON. Madam Speaker, I definitely want to thank the gentleman for the important information he has shared with us tonight. Folks who are tuned in definitely, I believe, are interested in this topic. In fact, it is the thing that most people think about.
As I am here tonight, I would say, Madam Speaker, that we just celebrated, or shall I say we just memorialized the loss of Martin Luther King, which it was his 50th anniversary of his passing, of his assassination back on April 4. And just recently, this is the year that we passed the fair housing law in 1968, so it has been 50 years.
A lot of people, when they think of King, they think, oh, he helped African Americans defeat Jim Crow segregation, and that is true. That is one way to look at it.
But when he died, he was marching with sanitation workers who were paid so little they could not make ends meet. They weren't allowed to go into adequate shelter when it was raining, so two of them, one day, happened to go into the back of the garbage truck. The garbage truck had a malfunction, and those two men were crushed in the garbage truck, and so that initiated a strike which Martin Luther King came and joined two times, it being the last fight he was ever in.
Why do I bring up this point? Because we think of America as being more evolved since that time. We think, oh, we have got voting rights; we have gotten rid of discrimination. It is illegal now.
But I will tell you what. Despite the fact that we still are battling for racial equality, we have absolutely slipped backwards in the fight for economic empowerment for working people, no matter what their color.
In 1968, the Federal minimum wage, if it had been adjusted for inflation, would be about $11.62. But as the gentleman just mentioned, it is now $7.25. And the server minimum wage, the tip minimum wage is $2.13. People don't believe me when I say that, but it is $2.13.
How can it be legal to pay a server $2.13? They say, oh, they make it up in tips. Do they? What if their tips aren't given to them? What if there is wage theft, which happens all the time?
I want to thank the gentleman from California for mentioning that in 1968, the average CEO got paid about 20 times more than the average worker. Today, it is above 300 percent, 300 times. So the inequality has dramatically not just enriched the rich, it has made working and middle class and the working poor suffer.
There are--and this is a shocking statistic. There has been a 60 percent growth in people living under the Federal poverty guideline since 1968. That is wrong, and this tax bill that we just passed will do nothing other than make it all that much worse.
It is a cruel irony that, in the face of this spread, this gap that working people are experiencing relative to their richer fellow Americans, that we would say, oh, you know what we need to do? Give the rich people even more money.
Now, again, I am not anti-rich. I wouldn't mind being rich myself one day. But I do hope that if I ever were to be doing well financially, that I would not pull the ladder up, climb up the ladder and then pull it up so that people can't even follow me.
Wait a minute. That is exactly what they are doing. They are trying to take away the Affordable Care Act, which actually gave millions of people healthcare for the first time. They want to put work requirements on receiving Federal benefit and aid. They want to make it tougher to be working class and poor. It is outrageous.
I just want to wrap my own comments up tonight by just saying it doesn't have to be this way. Poverty is not something that simply happens like the weather. It is not a storm and, oh, boy, how did that ever happen? No, it is a series of decisions made by people who have political power, who advantage some and disadvantage others.
It is things that we do, and it is also things that we don't do. It is when we just let markets concentrate and don't engage in legitimate anti-trust action; and it is when we pass a tax bill that we know, before anything has happened, that 83 percent of the benefits will go to the top 1 percent. This is how you create massive inequality.
There are things we can do about it. I think we could start by passing a policy that links CEO pay to raises for workers. What if a CEO thinking about, you know, I am going to get my pay, I am going to get a big fat old bonus. Oh, okay. If I do that, I have got to make sure my folks get some of this too. What if we passed a policy like that?
What if we said you couldn't deduct those bonuses off your taxes the way that they do now?
What if we actually said to ourselves, we are going to have a very high estate tax? I think that is fair enough. I mean, what did you do, other than negotiate a birth canal, to get all that money? I think that we should reward work, not just birth.
I think, what if we said we are going to make majo investments in public wealth? What do I mean by public wealth? Well, I don't know, the parks, the roads, the bridges, the transit, the schools. What if we invested in those public institutions that actually help everybody come up?
Even the rich folks can go to the public park. We don't ration that. We say it is something for all of us.
What if we said we are going to make sure that the right to join a union is a right that we are going to protect and defend, knowing that the fortunes of unions--when union density goes up, working class people do better. When union density goes down, working class people's wages stagnate and go down.
What if we lifted the minimum wage to a livable wage?
What if we had real consumer protection?
What if we said that everybody can go to the doctor?
I believe that we should have universal single-payer healthcare. That is my opinion, and I hope others join me.
What if we did things like looked at the labor policies that they have in some countries around the world?
Do you know, in Germany, Madam Speaker, that workers have to be on the board of the corporation if the corporation is above a certain size?
That makes sense. They certainly are affected by what the company does.
In Germany, if there is a slowdown, a recession, and that happens, everybody takes fewer hours rather than just laying off people who are just relegated to the unemployment lines, who see their skills deteriorate and who are just out of the workforce and it is hard to get back in.
What if we did these things? What if we said to ourselves that we were going to have a trade policy that really factored in how is this policy going to impact the local economy and workers? I definitely think trade is a good thing, but what if we thought about how it is going to impact this worker, these workers, this factory right here?
What if we got rid of the idea of right to work and said everybody in American can join a union?
This would make America a stronger country for working Americans. It would improve our economy. It would put money in the hands of working Americans, and it wouldn't stop people from getting rich if they got a great idea and made a lot of money. It wouldn't stop people from amassing any wealth, but what it would do is make sure that people at the middle and the bottom of the economy had a greater shot and a better share.
My Republican friends' vision for the economy is that, look, you know, here is how you have a good economy: You don't make rich people or big companies pay any taxes, and you shuffle all the property taxes and the sales taxes. You let those things be on the shoulders of the working folk. Then you don't spend on public institutions like public schools or anything. You just let those folks do the best they can.
If those kids aren't smart enough to be born to rich parents who send them to private school, forget about it. We are just going to underfund that, or we are going to do charters, and then we will let individuals own those schools and make money off of them.
Their idea of a business model is to smash the workers down, treat the workers like a cost, push their labor costs as far down as they can get it, and amass the wealth at the top as much as they can, allow stock buybacks, and don't regulate anybody, and don't have any rules of the game so that you get a free-for-all, and then when the economy finally goes bust, oh, you know, we just go back to John Q. Taxpayer and Jane Q. Taxpayer and make them bail them out.
Anyway, I think there is a better way. I think we can have a better economy. We can have a democracy. We can have an economy that allows for free enterprise and we can have a public sector that makes sure that liberty and justice and opportunity are for everyone, not just a few.
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