Who won the November election? As usual, it was the wealthy and powerful who really control the country

For the past several days, I have been thinking about what to say about what happened and the significance of the election of Donald Trump and the conservative wave that has seemingly inundated America.

One thing I have learned about myself is that I hate to say the wrong thing. I don’t know exactly where this comes from, perhaps from having been raised by an attorney who had little patience for misguided ideas.

I prefer to wait to speak until I think I might have something worth saying.

So here it is.

A Trump presidency, a Republican-controlled Congress and conservative Supreme Court are likely to be disastrous for women, trans people, BIPOC people and poor people. As the father of three daughters and a close relative to a trans woman, I fear for my loved ones’ futures like I never have before.

I know a national abortion ban — which looks ever more likely — would set women back several generations. An unexpected pregnancy — especially at a young age — can end a woman’s hopes for a better future. 

And the constant attacks on our trans relatives and youth will only increase now that Republicans control the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court. Once they won the House of Representatives, we have only more attacks on women’s and trans people’s rights to look forward to for many more years.

But it’s another section of our population that I want to address today.

But first let me say this — I’ve come to believe that corporations and the politicians who serve them (you’re going to hear me repeat that phrase a few times today) have succeeded in convincing us that we must fight each other on social issues rather than fighting them on economic ones.

So the segment of our population I want to talk about today is the poor, because it is the disintegration of policies that serve the poor that I believe is most responsible for our inability as a nation to fight for truly progressive reforms — like free health care, free education at all levels and systemic changes that benefit women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.

So where shall I start my diatribe? 

Let’s start in the 1980s. I know, yawn, right?

But please stick with me for a few minutes because I think this is important and I’ll try not to bore you too much.

In the 1980s, a Republican named Ronald Reagan won the White House on a platform of tax cuts for the super rich.

Before this period, Civil Rights and union leaders had won many battles against corporations and the politicians who serve them by organizing and informing the public about systemic reforms that needed to be made so that the poor and disenfranchised communities could lift themselves out of poverty and the political systems that oppressed them.

Reagan changed all of this.

Here’s how he did it. He convinced the American public that by cutting the taxes of the super wealthy that those captains of industry would then increase the wages of their workers. This was known as “trickle down economics,” and it became the mantra for both Republican and Democratic politicians for decades and still persists today.

Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton railed against big government and overregulation of corporations and the supposed over-taxation of the super wealthy.

From Clinton to Obama, Democratic administrations took their cues from Wall Street financiers and the multinational corporations that were gutting US jobs and wages.

People have been posting about corporations that didn’t totally support Donald Trump and how we should be giving our business to them, businesses like Costco and Target. I can promise you that their lack of support for Trump had very little to do with anything approaching progressive ideals. They simply didn’t know who was going to win the election and feared being on the wrong side of that race. 

They also understood that their revenues actually increased during Biden’s administration. And the very fact that corporations got fatter under Biden while the salaries of the poor remained stagnant despite the crushing weight of soaring grocery prices is yet another example of how focused presidents — Democratic or Republican — have become when it comes to serving the interests of the super wealthy.

And by the way, when I talk about “the poor,” I am not talking about rednecks from the hills of Alabama, inner city Black people or so-called “lazy Indians.” Those are stereotypes, a means of further dividing America by race so as to prevent those who earn low wages from uniting against their true and common enemy — corporations and the politicians who serve them. This isn’t a race war we’re fighting — or at least it shouldn’t be — it’s a class war.

As for whom I consider poor, it isn’t those living anywhere near the federal poverty guideline, which is atrocious. The federal poverty line is $15,000 a year for a single person and $31,000 for four people. If I earned $15,000 a year, I’d be living on the streets. Heck, if I earned $31,000, I might have a home but I’d be $30,000 in debt trying to pay for a car, groceries and home I couldn’t afford.

I consider to be poor anyone who — despite being responsible with their money — still lives in fear of missing their next paycheck. These days, that very often includes teachers who have to work one or two extra jobs to support their family, adjunct professors earning $45,000 a year, and even lawyers who’ve chosen to work with clients who can’t afford to pay them much.

This idea that the working class is solely made up of working folk like plumbers, electricians and contractors, who today often earn in excess of $100,000 and even $200,000 a year, is a bit ludicrous to me.

But back to Reagan and the downfall of the American empire, which by the way may not be the worst thing. I’m just saying.

Something shifted with Reagan. Maybe it shifted long before that, but many progressive thinkers believe it became most pronounced with the theory that wealthy corporate owners, or as Noam Chomsky calls them, the masters of mankind, would share the wealth granted to them by extravagant tax cuts with their workers.

Here’s a surprise to no one. It never happened. Once corporations understood that the American public could be so easily deceived into believing that increased profits for them would lead to higher wages for workers, it was all over.

Corporations hired very intelligent people to begin to map strategies to further deceive a gullible and often misinformed electorate into voting against their best interests. Thus began the information war.

And by convincing the American people that voting against unregulated capitalism is a form of socialism or even communism, corporations and the politicians who serve them have been winning this information war. Those politicians have included both Republicans and Democrats.

Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration reduced the tax on corporate profits from 28 percent to 20 percent. And his successor, Republican George W. Bush, cut corporate tax rates from 20 percent to 15 percent. Now imagine if the federal government had cut the tax rate on wages earned by the poor by nearly half over the course of just two presidential administrations.

But there is some hope. Recent polling shows that nearly 70 percent of voters say corporations must pay their fair share in taxes. In other words, people are waking up to the truth that greater wealth for the super rich does not lead to higher wages for the poor.

Now it’s up to all of us to devise a strategy to beat the corporations and the politicians who serve them. It’s time for us to organize.

One idea, as put forth by the late William Greider, a progressive-thinking journalist, was that voters should demand of politicians seeking election that they take a pledge to fight any measures that cut taxes for corporations and then vote them out of office if they fail to live up to that pledge.

If we don’t start supporting truly progressive leaders, we will never get truly progressive leaders.

So all of this begs the question of each of us: Am I a Democrat or a Republican? 

For myself, I’ll say that despite being an avowed Democrat, I understand that politicians today almost always vote for big money.

This is true in national politics and it’s true in local politics.

I’ve seen members of my own party vote against the interests of minority and LGBTQ+ people when those interests conflicted with the interests of the wealthy here in Lincoln. Just try and fight a real estate corporation or a Big Box retailer in your community and you’ll find out quickly from whom the political elite in your town takes their cues.

Just try to institute reforms that take away the rights of employers to fire you because they don’t like your color, your sexual orientation or your gender, and you’ll find out who’s on your side and who is on the side of the wealthy.

Politicians know who pays for their campaigns and who will pay for the campaigns of their opponents if they vote against the interests of the super wealthy.

One of my favorite progressive public service announcements this election season was a public relations campaign that espoused ways to “Vote Like a Radical.”

I’ll sum it up like this: Unless you know otherwise, you should assume every political candidate will ultimately serve the super wealthy and that in this regard every politician, once elected, will become an opponent to radical progressives seeking to upend this nation’s corporate emperors. Thus, instead of voting for candidates of any particular political party, we should vote for politicians we believe we can beat. 

I want to end this with one final suggestion to my Indigenous relatives: Don’t swoon too easily when a politician visits your community or promises you anything. Native people hold a lot of political power in this country — when we choose to wield it — and politicians have awakened to this fact. Nothing good has ever come to our people unless it was in the best interest of the political elite to give us something that we needed.

In my own community, I have seen this. Local politicians — who had just voted against the interests of my local Native community — came to us seeking absolution and forgiveness.

The truth is that it’s not forgiveness they were seeking but the votes of the people who supported my Native community and whose votes they feared they might lose.

Politicians understand the nature of power, and in this society, that power is derived from corporations and the super wealthy. It’s time to focus our attention on corporations and the politicians who serve them.

That’s it. Have a great day my relatives. We have survived 500 years of genocide. We will survive 500 more.

Toksha.*

Kevin Abourezk is the deputy managing editor of Indian Country Today and an award-winning film producer who has spent his 24-year career in journalism documenting the lives, accomplishments and tragedies of Native American people. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of South Dakota and a master’s in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

*Later