Professor Confirms: Rich are Getting Richer, While Poor Suffer

Some days, when sociology professor James Spickard is in his “less helpful moments,” he thinks back to 1790’s England where there was a 40-year war against the poor similar to the one the U.S. is seeing today.

“You remember your Dickens and the pictures of poverty in 19^th Century England. If you remember the hulks in ‘Great Expectations’ the prisoner who’s in the hulks,” Spickard told an audience of about 40 people. That’s what comes to mind when a depression slips in.

“(The wealthy) used the ideology of free trade to stifle any attempt by the workers to organize. They created a tremendous inequality. And it wasn’t until the Chartist Movement of the 1840’s and the formation of the Labor Party in the 1860’s that equality then began to come back to England.”

We are once again in an era of inequality, he said.

The number and array of charts had heads shaking Thursday night during the presentation. Spickard, a professor at the University of Redlands, was a guest lecturer at a teach-in hosted by Occupy Redlands at the Renaissance Banquet Hall near downtown.

Spickard took a look at how the social structure on the largest level has changed the direction in which employment has changed and the direction in which profits and wages have changed.

According the statistics he gathered from several well-known publications and federal agencies, corporate profits are at an all-time high while incomes for average workers slowed to a crawl.

The divide between the struggling middle class - whose purchasing power had kept the economy going - and the wealthiest Americans has been growing larger and weakening our economy, he said.

While corporate profits are high, they are “not being invested in new production because business owners rightfully say we don’t have anywhere to sell this stuff,” Spickard said. “So they are returning it to stockholders. They’re doing buybacks of stock. They’re paying dividends, etc., rather than being reinvested in increased production.”

The economy had been chugging along for many years. New technology changed the work force and salaries in the late 1970’s, Spickard said. Families responded by adding a second wage earner, in many cases mom joined the workforce. When that wasn’t enough, people went deeper into debt, Spickard said.

“But then, that collapsed,” he said.

Then he showed another chart. From 1990 to 2005, a production worker's pay was up 4.3 percent. A CEO pay was up almost 300 percent. He added that the number of the worker's pay might have changed somewhat because California’s minimum wage was raised.

“Those productivity gains went to the people on top,” he said. “The wealth went to the people on top. That’s what the figures show.”

Spickard did reference an article from the New York Times. But according to a different story from Sept. 13 – not cited by the professor - 46.2 million people live below the official poverty line according to US Census Bureau.

That is the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

When one audience member asked about the argument that taxing the wealthy is hurting the job creators, Spickard paused. “There’s not much evidence the job creators have created jobs,” he said.

“I’m basically an optimist,” he told the crowd near the end of his presentation. “I think of the progressive era and think, ‘Yeah, we can pull that off if we all work together and if we include all.' There are some in the one percent who want things to be different.”