The Rule of the Rich.

• Author: Moyers, Bill
• Position: Essay

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Howard Zinn helped us see how big change can start with small acts. He championed grassroots social change and famously chronicled its story as played out over the course of our nation's history. More, those stirring sagas have inspired and continue to inspire countless people to go out and make a difference. The last time we met, I told him that the stories in A People's History of the United States remind me of the fellow who turned the corner just as a big fight broke out down the block. Rushing up to an onlooker he shouted, "Is this a private fight, or can anyone get in it?" For Howard, democracy was one big public fight and everyone should plunge into ir. That's the only way, he said, for everyday folks to get justice--by fighting for it.

So let's begin with some everyday folks. When she heard the news, Connie Brasel cried like a baby. For years she had worked at minimum-wage jobs, until seventeen years ago, when she was hired by the Whirlpool refrigerator factory in Evansville, Indiana. She was making $18.44 an hour when Whirlpool announced in early 2010 that it was closing the operation and moving it to Mexico. She wept. I'm sure many of the other eleven hundred workers who lost their jobs wept, too; they had seen their ticket to the middle class snatched from their hands. The company defended its decision by claiming high costs, underused capacity, and the need to stay competitive. Those excuses didn't console Connie Brasel. "I was becoming part of something bigger than me," she told Steven Greenhouse of The New York Times . "Whirlpool was the best thing that ever happened to me."

She was not only sad, she was mad. "They didn't get world-class quality because they had the best managers. They got world-class quality because of the United States and because of their workers."

Among those workers were Natalie Ford, her husband, and her son; all three lost their jobs. "It's devastating," she told the Times . Her father had worked at Whirlpool before them. Now "there aren't any jobs here. How is this community going to survive?"

And what about the country? Between 2001 and 2008, about 40,000 U.S. manufacturing plants closed. Six million factory jobs have disappeared over the past dozen years, representing one in three manufacturing jobs. Natalie Ford said to the Times what many of us are wondering: "I don't know how without any good-paying jobs here in the United States people are going to pay for their health care, put their children through school."

In polite circles, among our political and financial classes, this is known as "the free market at work." No, it's "wage repression," and it's been happening in our country since around 1980. Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation's economy was growing handsomely, the average income for nine out of ten Americans was growing, too: from $17,719 to $30,941. That's a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars. But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90 percent of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 in twenty-eight years.

Another story in the Times caught my eye a few weeks after the one about Connie Brasel and Natalie Ford. The headline read: "Industries Find Surging Profits in Deeper Cuts." Nelson Schwartz reported that despite falling motorcycle sales, Harley-Davidson profits are...