Contradictory Constitution?

In this article: Are the Eighth and Fifth Amendments in conflict? What happens if they are? And what to make of implied repeal with concurrent Amendments?

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

I: Legal Marriage Precedent

II: The Neo-Neo-Nullificationalists

The Supreme Court should decide the fate of the gay marriage issue sometime around June. In previous decisions, the Court has held that the federal government may not define marriage in the so-called "traditional" sense, and also refused to overturn rulings by appeals courts which struck down state bans on same-sex marriage. But the upcoming consolidated cases pose much more ultimate questions, namely of whether states are allowed to ban gay marriage.

In the dark nether-regions of the country, the "defenders of marriage" (that is, those defending the institution from those who want to get married) are anticipating a ruling that would expand the civil rights of gay people, and they are taking proactive action to prevent such a  travesty. 

I: Legal Marriage Precedent

On their prediction of a positive ruling, the enemies of freedom are probably right. The Roberts Court has steadily moved to the right side of the marriage issue. Antonin Scalia predicted as much in his dissent to US v. Windsor. He wrote:

"As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe. By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition."

Scalia's complaints are more correct than I think he intended. We are fighting against the enemies of human decency, and for well arming us, I thank the majority.  

But in reality, the jurisprudence in question here was settled long before Windsor. This is, as the question presented to the Court betrays, a 14th Amendment issue. Particularly important are the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of this Amendment. They read:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

This essential clause was the Radical Republicans' fix to a problem that has defined civil rights in the the United States: in all of American history, the most egregious civil rights abuses have been committed by state governments. For this reason, the term "states' rights" has become literal code-word for racist policy.    

But the fix is eloquently simple. States may not deprive citizens of liberty, and states must protect the rights of all people equally. The only question remaining is of what is meant by "rights" and "liberty." The Court had its best go of answering this question in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923):

"While this Court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free [people]."

It really could not be clearer for the Justices come June. Not only has the Court directly recognized that marriage is indeed a constitutional liberty, but we can clearly see that the cries of the thousands of marginalized gay couples fall clearly into the category of "privileges...essential to the the  orderly pursuit of happiness." Frankly, it's amazing that the Court has not recognized the unconstitutionality of marriage bans yet. 

II: The Neo-Neo-Nullificationists 

But everyone knows that those fighting for marriage equality are on the right side of history. The legal arguments behind them are in no way new.The really story here is the disgraceful reaction by our nation's reactionaries. There was a must-read article in Wednesday's New York Times about this nostalgic incident. 

The shenanigans include bill proposed in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas that would punish officials who issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples by reducing their salary. Of course, the enforcement of such a law would create a constitutional crisis of sorts. Credit where credit is due -- the bigots are endlessly creative. It does not explicitly violate the Supremacy Clause since it would not literally contradict the Supreme Court's expected ruling. But can a state punish an agent for carrying out federally mandated state laws? I am personally not aware of any precedent on the matter. Surely it is wrong to force some person to do something and then punish them for doing so, but, as far as I know, it is not technically illegal. This would quite seriously put state agents between the clichéd rock and hard place. And this slippery dodge of justice is reminiscent of the whack-a-mole habit of Southern legislators during the Civil Rights Movement, which Ruth Bader Ginsburg described as follows in her Shelby County v. Holder dissent:

"Early attempts to cope with this vile infection resembled battling the Hydra. Whenever one form of voting discrimination was identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place. This Court repeatedly encountered the remarkable 'variety and persistence' of laws disenfranchising minority citizens."

Hopefully this dilemma will be sorted out soon. Maybe Justice Ginsburg, who would likely write an opinion for a liberal-wing-plus-Kennedy coalition, could deal with this childishness in her opinion. 

But the George-Wallace-style throwbacks do not end with these pay-stripping bills. In a much more worrying development, Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, has declared open defiance of the federal courts in a letter he wrote to the governor following a decision overturning Alabama's ban on gay marriage. 

The point of Moore's letter is that the District Court's ruling is illegitimate, and that Alabama officials should not follow it. He proposed three policy actions: that Alabama probate judges should defy the Court and still refuse gay couples, that Moore himself will recognize the Alabama Constitution as superior to this ruling pursuant to the federal Constitution, and that the governor should do likewise in enforcing laws.

The premise of Moore's ideas are dubious. His whole argument is based on the assertion that "nothing in the United States constitution grants the federal government the authority to redefine the institution of marriage." He then goes on to quote a handful of sources illustrating marriage as a religious, man/woman covenant. He cites the Bible above all legal sources, showing his disregard for the spirit of church-state separation. 

The problem for the less-than-honorable Justice Moore is that the federal government does have the authority, not to "define" marriage per se, but rather to mandate who must be included in the right to marry. In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court forced several unwilling states, Alabama predictably included, to grant marriage rights to couples of differing ethnicity. This is, as earlier expressed, a 14th Amendment issue. Surely the Chief Justice knows that the 14th Amendment grants the federal government the responsibility of ensuring equal protection by states. 

CJ Roy Moore

Roy Moore is most definitely not the first to propose state nullification of federal law. The down-home Southern tradition can be traced back to the so-called "Compact Theory" articulated by Thomas Jefferson in his 1798 Kentucky Resolutions. The Theory basically goes that the federal union was created by, and remains contingent upon, the consent of the several states; therefore, the states have the power to dismiss federal interpretation of the US Constitution if they see fit. While this 18th century theory is philosophically interesting and practically unfeasible, Jefferson's successors have followed it to its extreme implications.

The first instance that come to mind is the debacle surrounding the State of Georgia's forceful removal of the Cherokee in 1832. The Cherokee filed suit against Georgia in the Supreme Court, and the Court, led by John Marshall ruled that Georgia may not remove the tribe and ordered president Andrew Jackson to protect the Cherokee. Jackson, not known for being friendly to the natives, ignored the Courts decision, encouraging Georgia to proceed with its illegal ethnic cleansing. Jackson is quoted as saying "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."

Everyone should know of the nullification crises, spearheaded by John Calhoun, that helped initiate the Civil War. Even in the modern era, the opponents of civil rights have used nullification as a last resort, most prominently when denying education to black Americans.

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and integration was ordered. Just as Roy Moore is urging the dismissal of federally mandated civil rights expansion, so did the politicians of the day. In 1962, the admission of James Meredith to Mississippi State University ("Ole Miss") caused massive riots that ended in the wounding of scores and murder of two people. Mississippi governor Ross Barnett personally blocked the entrance of Meredith into the university, an action which would almost earn him jail time. In the end, by order of the Kennedy administration, US Marshalls were deployed to ensure Meredith's safe admission.

And then there is the case of the Little Rock Nine, the first nine black students to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. Ridiculously named governor Orval Faubus made it his personal mission to prevent the admittance of these nine children, in disregard of the unanimous decision by the school board to integrate. The governor went as far as to completely eliminate Central School District for a year to that end. Apparently it would be better for no one to go to school than for black children to go to school. In the end, the moral arc of the universe found its way to justice, but not without the use of force. President Eisenhower had to send in the US Army to escort the nine to school.

People like Moore are definitely familiar with these events, and this makes it all the more disturbing for them to advocate for further nullification. What Moore is pushing is dangerous. There is precedent and cause for the use of military force in the protection of rights should Alabama and company persist in their rebellion. In the interest of internal peace for the nation, they must cease and desist their institutional bigotry in the wake of a positive ruling from the Supreme Court.

Karl Marx was clearly correct in saying that "history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce."

Liberals are Just Wrong on GMO's

In the Conch Republic, the viral diseases dengue and chikungunya pose a threat to the health of people for the first time in decades. The problem for the Florida Keys is that an invasive African mosquito—called Aedes aegypti or "yellow fever mosquito" for its propagation of the so called "American plague"—has spread in its new American habitat despite the rampant use of insecticide. In fact, researchers have found this mosquito to be completely resistant to most all insecticides, including DDT. This has led a British biotechnology group, Oxitec, to develop a genetically-modified mosquito, whose offspring would not survive into maturity and therefore not spread the disease. Releasing this mosquito to breed with others and reduce the population has worked in countries including Brazil and the Cayman Islands, with up to 80% population reduction. But now that Oxitec has offered to use this technology in the Keys, people are up in arms to stop it, being led by an embarrassingly large liberal contingent.

Ignoring the other countries that have seen success, Floridians are decrying their role as the "guinea pigs." Kiera Butler, writing for Mother Jones, describes the situation as "a biotech firm unleash[ing] genetically engineered bloodsuckers." A Change.org petition has even gathered more than 140,000 signatures in the effort to protest this terrible instance of disease prevention. While this story is unique for its focus on a GMO animal, as opposed to crops, this whining is all too familiar.

For some unintelligible reason, mainstream American liberals always tend to viciously oppose, in any way they can, genetically modified foods. Not only do the stereotype valley-girl, hippy-dippy, Whole-Foods type think (though I would use that word loosely) that GMO's are some terrible sort of bad, but this border-line hysteria has also been supported by sources ranging in seriousness from The Nation to the Huffington Post, as well as some Fox-News-esque "documentaries". Unfortunately for the yoga types, the anti- GMO position belongs in its proper place among the rest of popular pseudoscience. 

The fact of the matter is that practically every popular liberal contention about the field of genetic engineering is demonstrably false. In the interest of rational public discourse and the betterment of the human condition, we must all recognize and accept the following facts.


1. Genetically-modified foods are not dangerous to health.

This fantasy is definitely the king of anti-truth in the GMO realm. The pesky, stupid, fringe cult of professionals  who perpetuate this claim simply refuses to die, and they are actually convincing people of their lunacy. In fact, sixty percent more people believe that genetically engineered foods are dangerous than believe the contrary. As I have already said, and as deserves repeating, this statement is diametrically opposed to reality. 

Now we can detail the evidence. 

For starters, the entire international scientific community agrees on the safety of GMO's including the following organizations:

• Food and Agriculture Organization (United Nations)
• European Commission
• World Health Organization 
• Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development
• Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation
• Royal Society of London
• German National Science Foundation
• Brazilian Academy of Sciences
• Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Indian National Science Academy
• Mexican Academy of Sciences
• Third World Academy of Sciences
• National Academy of Sciences (United States)
• American Society of Microbiology

sources:http://csis.org/files/publication/131127_Chambers_BiosafetyGMCrops_Web.pdf

http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/a_decade_of_eu-funded_gmo_research.pdf

Unbearable is the irony of the hoards of tow-the-line Democrats who decry the Republicans for believing in a "global conspiracy of scientists" to invent climate change, but who also turn and do the same thing with regards to GM foods. But perhaps we should trust the types of news sites that would have a page dedicated to hot dogs wrapped in fried chicken over the tens of thousands of Ph.D. scholars in the aforementioned groups. Or nah.

Another refuge of this crowd is the perennial cop out "we need more research." Again, the parallelism is striking. Just as the creationists and climate deniers try to masquerade around as honest skeptics, this particular circus troupe whines about a lack of research. Of course, in doing so, they are wrong. 

The consensus of the scientific community is not awarded to claims without sufficient research. That simply does not happen. The truth is that there have been scores of studies every year about GMO's in a wide array of subject areas. A directory of these studies can be found here.

The body research on GMO's is so vast that a team of scientists from the Italian University of Perugia conducted a meta analysis of 1,783 published studies. The analysis concludes: 

"We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE crop safety for the last 10 years that catches the scientific consensus matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide, and we can conclude that the scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazard directly connected with the use of GM crops." 

(emphasis added)

A full list of the studies examined can be found here.

Of course, there are those studies people point to which supposedly validate the idea that "Frankfoods are going to get use after all!" As soon as these studies pop up, they are shot down by the peer-review process. But this does not stop people from trotting them up over and over again. Cornell University professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen explains:

"Several tired old chestnuts concerning the dangers of GM plants crop up again and again in the debate about genetic engineering. We have heard that a diet of GM potatoes killed rats in a laboratory in Scotland; that GM crops could kill harmless insects, even the beautiful monarch butterfly; and that GM soybeans carrying a gene from Brazil nuts contained a substance that could cause severe allergic reactions in consumers. As we have noted in earlier chapters, for all these stories either the results have been disproved by extensive research or the potential problem died a natural death during routine checking procedures."

 A particularly popular junk study for the hippie food brigade is one conducted by French scientist Gilles-Éric Séralini, called "Long-term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize." This study was doomed from the start, suffering from basic procedural errors. In the end, the study was ultimately retracted by the journal that published it and ended up discrediting its primary author. 

Researchers have also been criticized for relying on sensational images of cancerous rats.

There are few stances in mainstream discourse that we should call out as simply untenable, but one is that GMO's are toxic.
Agriculture's response to medicine's antivaccers are so wrong that you, you there who is reading these words, if you are in the US, are living proof of the non-toxicity of GMO's. This is because you eat genetically modified food every single day. Among other crops, more than 90% of our corn has been genetically modified. So, for all intents and purposes, every corn cob you've eaten, every high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden snack you've inhaled, and every animal served to you from a corn-feed diet, have all been products of GMO's. And as we can see, the entire population of the United States does not look like the poor rats pictured above. If the anti-science buffoons were correct, we could simply not survive as a country who eats 70% GMO food. 

2. GMO foods actually help people all over the world.

It is easy for the anti-science crowd to point out to atrocious actions of Monsanto, and thereby justify opposition to GM technology as a whole. Yes, Monsanto did support and enable the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Yes, Monsanto is monopolistic. Practically all of the accusation hurled at that company hold water, but that should not distract us from the wonderful humanitarian potentials of GMO's. To do so would be to dismiss telephones because of the AT&T monopoly,  or to throw out Gandhi for early racist statements. We must not forget the beneficial innovations of GMO's.  

The most prominent of these benefits is probably the potential for relieving hunger in the developing world. I definitely recommend for anyone to read Seeds of Contention, a book on the subject written by the previously cited Cornell professor.

The fact of the matter is that genetic modification can solve some of the issues in the poorest parts of the planet, and everyone should support that. Because foods can be modified in such a wide variety of ways, we have seen many positives already. For instance, I accord to Seeds of Contention:

"In Kenya, prolonged efforts to render sweet potatoes resistant to viral attacks yielded no useful results until the advent of genetic engineering. A simple technique performed during propagation, a tissue culture that some farmers can carry out themselves, ensures healthy cuttings from the new, viral-resistant variety, which is expected to reach the market by 2002. Further work is also being done to make the new variety resistant to a particular beetle, another of its enemies. This doubly strong variety should be ready by 2004. In a really bad year, viral attacks alone can reduce the sweet potato crop by as much as 80 percent, and losses are seldom less than 20 percent when the virus is rife in the field

...

In Kenya, a careful analysis was made of the likely impact of the improved varieties of sweet potatoes. These tubers are typically a poor persons' fare, more often than not grown by women. Most are eaten by the smallholder families themselves and the rest sold at the local market in the poorest square of the town. The GM varriety with a combined resistance to both virus and beetles is expected to increase yield by 43 percent, reducing the growing costs per hectare by 36 percent."

Another impact on the developing world comes in the fight against blindness. The Royal Society Journal of Medicine reports:

"An important example of the potential of this technology is the ‘Golden Rice Project’. Vitamin A deficiency is widespread in the developing world and is estimated to account for the deaths of approximately 2 million children per year. In surviving children it has been identified as the leading cause of blindness. Humans can synthesize vitamin A from its precursor β-carotene, which is commonly found in many plants but not in cereal grains.18 The strategy of the Golden Rice Project was to introduce the correct metabolic steps into rice endosperm to allow β-carotene synthesis. In 2000, Ye et al. engineered rice that contained moderate levels of β-carotene and since then researchers have produced the much higher yielding ‘Golden Rice 2’. It is estimated that 72 g of dry Golden Rice 2 will provide 50% of the RDA [recommended daily allowance] of vitamin A for a 1–3-year-old child. Golden Rice was developed for farmers in the poorest countries, and from the beginning, the aim of the scientists was to provide the technology free of charge, which required the negotiation of more than 100 intellectual and technical property licenses. Golden Rice will be given to subsistence farmers with no additional conditions and is an impressive example of a health solution that can be offered by plant biotechnology."

Surely every bleeding heart wants to help save these kids from blindness. There is a reason that groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation support further research into genetic engineering. 

For anyone wanting to learn more humanitarian benefits of GMO's, here are a few:

• Third-world farmers can save money raising cattle
• Antioxidant-rich tomatoes can help prevent cancer
• GM goat's milk can help stop childhood diarrhea
• GM pigs can reduce phosphorous pollution
• Farmers can grow crops in increasingly desolate soil 
• GM crops help ensure farmer income in the developing world

3. The environmental impacts of GMO's aren't all bad. 

What seems to be the only legitimate objection to GM technology is that pesticide resistant crops enable the spread of pesticide resistant pests. (See here and here and here.) While it is important to note that this is a problem specific to only one usage of GM technology, and that it is irrelevant to the previous two points, it is a true problem nonetheless. 

But if we take a balanced look at the environmental impacts of genetically modified foods, we can see that the story is much more even, and perhaps even preferential to GMO's. 

I've already mentioned EnviroPig, the pig with sans-phosphorous scat, but he is the least of the potential benefits for the Earth.

For starters, we can tackle the herbicide issue. Again acknowledging the fact that GMO's have increased herbicide use and resistance, the current status quo is still better than the situation before GM crops.

This is because the herbicide that has become more and more used is glyphosate, more commonly known as Monsanto's Roundup. The benefit arises when we remember that (1) glyphosate is considerable less harmful (to mammals, other plants, and the soil) than its predecessors, and (2) our increased use of it has offset the older, more dangerous chemicals. A mixed benefit is still a benefit.

Moving away from herbicides and pesticides, the remaining category of harmful chemical is the fertilizers. Nitrogen based fertilizers, after being washed into rivers and oceans, massively over-stimulate native algae, thereby creating an absence of oxygen in the water. This causes a condition called hypoxia, or a "dead zone." These appropriately named areas become lethal to any marine life therein. Thankfully, this is another problem waiting to be resolved by genetic engineering. In fact, researchers in the European Union have found that the use of GM crops can reduce nitrogen fertilizer use by 30%. No one can call themself an environmentalist if they oppose this technology. 

There are numerous other benefits to GMO farming. It encourages no-till agriculture. It reduces carbon emissions. It helps preserve biodiversity. We can go on and on. The point is that we should not throw the baby out with the glyphosate, especially when we have so much to environmentally gain from GMO's.

In the end, Florida needs to accept Oxitec's mosquitoes. And liberals need to make up their minds. Either they can continue to be environmentally-minded, healthy-living advocates for the global poor, or they can persist in being disciples of ostracized scientists and failed yoga instructors. Meanwhile, the world is waiting, and it needs GMO's.

Blindfolded in Freefall: The Unreported Causes and Impacts of Income Inequality

I: Introduction

II: Unseen Fault Lines

III: The Crisis of the Current Order

IV: Solutions and Conclusion

I: Introduction 

Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith blended art and economic reality in his 1770 poem The Deserted Village when he wrote: "Ill fares the land and to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay." Today, the people of United States witness a level of inequality of wealth and income not seen since the so-called "Gilded Age." But just as Mark Twain subtitled his namesake 1873 novel, the story of the Gilded Age is "A Tale of Today."  There is a lively debate about this topic in public life. However, almost without fail, people are missing the point. Unfortunately but not unexpectedly, American public discourse has largely ignored the major causes and effects of income inequality. This misplacement of focus distracts attention from ultimate solutions to the disparity problem.

What everyone does know is that America faces a gigantic inequality problem. In fact, researchers from UC Berkeley reported in 2013 that the concentration of wealth in the top few percent of earners has "surged" since 1970. In fact, we now find ourselves in a situation where the richest one percent of the country owns 40% of the wealth of the country and makes 23% of the income. The last time that the chasm in this country between haves and have-nots was so wide was in 1928. And of course, it would be an understatement to say that things did not turn out perfectly then. Moreover, 2012 was the first year in all of American history in which the bottom 9-out-of-10 earners made less than half of the country's income (Saez). The vast majority of the country agrees that this level of inequality is in some way "bad," whether immoral or unsustainable, and those who disagree hold a contention simply too preposterous to consider.

This essay will explore the widely untold causes and impacts of income inequality in this country. Accordingly, in part II, I will examine the roots of the widening gap, and in part III, the effects. In part IV, I will explore some solutions to our ailment with the causes in mind.

II: Unseen Fault Lines

What is perhaps least surprising about the inequality debate is that the reported causes are perfectly flipped across the party line. But both of the mainstream political camps believe that the problem is federal economic policy. The Republican Party contends that regulation is holding the free market back, and that individual determination is the way from one side of the divide to the other. The Democrats, on the other hand, believe that a lack of regulation from the federal government has spawned the chasm, and thus the solution is pure Keynesianism. Some players on both sides have gone so far as to claim that federal income tax levels are the problem. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman argues in his 2012 book End this Depression Now! that a burst of government spending can solve the disparity problem (Krugman, in passim). It seems clear to me that all of these arguments fall flat in the face of basic macroeconomics. 

The first thing that must be established when examining the true cause of the great wealth divergence is that the federal government does not have an economic magic wand. Hyper-partisanization of the news media causes public discussion of the income divide to focus on hot-button issues like taxes, government spending, and financial regulation. However, these factors are negligible, almost humorous, when considering the much more significant "unseen fault lines" of our economy. The most logical factor to examine today is population. More specifically, the overwhelming cause of income disparity is the stagnation of real wages, which, in turn, has been caused by the saturation of the labor force since the 1970's.

To begin, we need further historical context.  In the whole of United States history, wages rose, adjusted for inflation, every decade from the end of the Civil War until the 1970's. However, since that time, wages have stagnated. Professor Richard Wolff of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst reports that median wages were higher in 1978 than they are today, of course adjusting for inflation. Moreover, worker productivity has continued to rise since that time, despite the freeze in pay. For instance, the manufacturing sector now earns more than three times more profit than it did in 1970 (Wolff, in passim). Overall, profits have soared while wages lie limp. This departure of profits from wages is clearly the source of income inequality, as the working class of this country, which today lives in freefall,  gets its money from wages, while the so-called "haves" get money from profit. Such is the classical dichotomy between the European proletariat and bourgeoisie, which accurately applies to the situation today. The more interesting question arises when we ask why wages have stagnated.

Source: Economic Policy Institute

As previously hinted, the stagnation of wages has happened as a response to shifts in population. The economic principle of supply and demand holds that as the rarity of a commodity goes down, so too does the price. This law also applies to the labor market: as the number of workers increases, the employer's necessity to pay higher wages is reduced. Three long-coming workforce population changes all came to fruition in the 1970's, having a disastrous effect on our economy: the replacement of many human workers with machines, the outsourcing of formerly American jobs overseas, and the mass entry of women into the workforce.

The first phenomenon for examination is that the replacement of human workers by computers reduces demand for workers. Since the onset of the "Computer Revolution" in 1957, set off by the invention of the computer network, industries have rushed to automatization, in the stead of human beings. In computer science, Moore's Law holds that, basically stated, the capabilities of computers will double every two years. This, in turn, reduces the cost of computer operations. In fact, Professor Carl Fray of Oxford University wrote in September 2013, that "the cost per computation declined at an annual average of 37 percent between 1945 and 1980...[and] 64 percent between 1980 and 1990." Such a drastic shift from people to machines has led to the outright extinction of many jobs. Casualties include telephone operators, grocery store stock-keepers, assembly line workers, and so forth. (Fray and Osborne) YouTube's own CGP Grey has presented a thoughtful and easily-digestible analysis of this phenomenon.

Next, the increasing corporate preference of cheap, overseas workers to US workers in the past few decades decreases demand in the American labor force. Currently a shell of its former self, the American labor rights movement was once a force to be reckoned with. All too often, pundits moan about those "greedy, meddlesome" labor unions, clearly not knowing where the eight-hour work day, weekend, pension, minimum wage, and end to child labor all came from. The action of workers united, with leaders such as Eugene Debs and Cesar Chavez, has won the American working class a generally acceptable quality of life. However, these victories are expensive for the capitalist class, which is always looking for a way to maximize profits. With the advent of global communication and transportation technology, such as telephone, email, and airplane, it is now feasible for corporations to forego the success of American workers, instead exploiting those in countries like India, China, and Malaysia. Linda Levine of the Congressional Research Service reported in January 2011 that: "Major US companies, initially responding to heightened competition from Japanese and European multinational corporations, opened facilities abroad during the 1970s and 1980s that turned out goods formerly produced by comparatively well paid, often unionized US factory workers" (Levine, 3-4). It only makes economic sense. Why would any company pay Jerome in Chattanooga at $7.25/hour or Sally in Seattle at $15/hour, when all along they could have been paying Sanath in Mumbai at $0.23/hour minimum wage? It is further estimated by the CRS that just in the US service sector, just between 2003 and 2008, five million jobs were removed from the US market to be moved abroad. This represents a devastating evisceration of the labor force.

The final workforce population shift is, by far, the simplest. Because of varied factors, be them the second-wave feminist "Women's Liberation" movement, or simply the need for a second income because of already stagnating wages, women began entering the US labor force in droves in the 1970's. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that between 1970 and 2011, the number of working women grew by 36 million people, or 15% of the population (BLS, 17). Such a gargantuan influx of supply demolishes any remaining demand for labor.

The moral of the story, so to speak, of examining labor population is that demand from employers for workers has disastrously fallen. Now, instead of companies competing for workers, workers compete for jobs. The labor market is now saturated with workers. Because the demand in a saturated market will never rise, wages have frozen, while profits continue to increase. Thus, the working class and the owning class fly apart, while the previously existing "middle class" is torn asunder. The fact that the causes of this divide are unreported makes it impossible for us as a country to truly address the issue.

IV: The Crisis of the Current Order

Once again, with regards to the most serious consequences of income inequality,

the mainstream imagines that the president and Congress are in some sort of divine Pantheon—that once again, every issue is a matter a federal government policy. Despite this fantasy, the calamities of personal debt and political oligarchy simply cannot be solved by a wave of Barack Obama's pen. Rather, they are both direct results of income inequality. 

In December 2007, the American economy tanked, and it has not recovered since. As a result of a bursted housing bubble, the financial sector fell off a cliff. As a surprise to absolutely no one, the Republicans and Democrats presented different explanations for the problem. The Democrats say the nefarious bankers tricked the public into taking garbage loans, while the Republicans blame subprime borrowers for defaulting. However, the one thing on which both teams agree is the factor that they gloss over: personal debt. Both parties acknowledge that the crisis was set off by some incarnation of personal debt, but it perplexes me why Republicans and Democrats alike never ask the question of exactly why our working class felt it necessary to take on so much debt in the first place. As Mark Twain quipped in The Gilded Age, "That is a peculiar condition of society which enables…this remark: 'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars'" (Twain and Warner, 171).

The answer to this question is the very stagnation of wages that was detailed in part I. The underlying theme of the American psyche is the so-called "American Dream." That is, that with a potion of sweat and elbow grease, every successive generation can have a higher quality of life and higher level of consumption than its parents did. Americans, after decades, began to define themselves by their material achievements. This culturally ingrained perception was not washed away when wages stagnated in the 70's. As Professor Richard Wolff explains, "[Our working class] could not and did not forego rising consumption. It found other ways to cope and thereby laid the groundwork for one part of the current crisis" (Wolff, 3)

We coped by dramatically expanding our borrowing of money. If we could not make the money, we would take out a loan. The American working class now lives in a rampant credit card culture. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco finds that: "U.S. household leverage, as measured by the ratio of debt to personal disposable income, increased modestly from 55% in 1960 to 65% by the mid-1980s. Then, over the next two decades, leverage proceeded to more than double, reaching an all-time high of 133% in 2007. That dramatic rise in debt was accompanied by a steady decline in the personal saving rate. The combination of higher debt and lower saving enabled personal consumption expenditures to grow faster than disposable income" (Reuven and Lansing).  By the time that the financial crisis began, the American people were literally under water; they owed more than they had in disposable income. It was just a matter of time before we had taken out so much more debt than we could afford. Eventually—say, 2007—the leverage façade would collapse, and recession would emerge. Therefore, the most fundamental cause of the debt-fueled depression in which we find ourselves is income inequality from wage stagnation.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Even more egregious than our personal debt addiction, the American political system is trending toward oligarchy. Oligarchy is defined as a government controlled by a small group of elite individuals, while a democracy is a government controlled by the masses. Perhaps obviously, when the concentration of wealth surges to the top, the elites will have increased control over politics. The United States is a fantastic example of this. Our oligarchs include Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, and the infamous Koch Brothers. After construction of the constitution by the Supreme Court that allows corporate money to be protected as speech, most notably in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, politicians in this country have been completely taken over by their donors. More than two billion dollars was spent in the 2012 presidential election, and approximately 95% of federal elections are won by the candidate with the most money (Hickey).

The correlation between donors’ interests and legislative results has also been empirically documented. A 2014 study by researchers from Princeton and Northwestern University examined scores of policy decisions since the 1980’s and concluded: “Majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts...In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose” (Giles et al., 37). It logically follows that our oligarchy will only further solidify if income inequality continues to increase.  

IV: Solutions and Conclusion

Yet another bothersome trait of the mainstream is their love of "Band-Aid" fixes. According to the Democrats, what is the solution to income inequality? Raise the minimum wage to $10.10, of course. Maybe spend more money on public schools. It is not as if we just got stupider as a nation since 1970, and the minimum wage has been raised several times, to no permanent avail. The Republicans, on the other hand, still cling to their "trickle down" economic theory, which was called "voodoo economics" by their very own George Bush. With the vast amount of cash already surging to the top, the "trickle down" would have become a "deluge down" by this point if only the Republican theory actually held any water. As a country, we need to prefer ultimate solutions.  

Ultimate, fundamental solutions, by definition, attack the root source of the problem. Therefore, we must establish this cause of income inequality, which we did in part I. The broadest, most significant cause of the great divergence is the contrast between stagnating wages and rising profits. So how do we stop wage stagnation?

Wages have stopped rising as a result of fallen demand for labor, in relation to the labor supply. Can we fix the problem on the supply side? 

It would be socially unjust to prevent women and immigrants from entering the workforce. Only the most reactionary thinkers would propose that. Also, halting computerization retards the progress of technology, which is a definite benefit to humanity. Finally, a ban on outsourcing jobs could theoretically be enacted, but such a provision would be devilishly hard to enforce. Even if US companies did end up stopping their employment of Third World citizens, American workers would still be at a global disadvantage. Clearly, we cannot quell the skyrocketing supply of labor. That leaves demand. 

Under our current system–the very system that spawned this crisis—demand for labor is determined by employers, who will only pay a certain amount of workers a certain amount of money, so that they stay as profitable as possible. Economists call this the "Law of Surplus Value." In order for wages to continue rising alongside corporate revenue, this set up must inevitably be changed. The clearest improvement would be to eliminate the demand-restricting  employer. 

The majority of people who have been soaking long enough in the backwash of the mainstream will panic at this proposal, before properly understanding what it really means. Firstly, eliminating the employer does not mean eliminating employment. What this alternative entails is the removal of the "owner" position. A company under the current system has several employees doing jobs while the employer controls the fruits of their labor just by virtue of having bought whatever means they use in their work. Any actual task which employers might do notwithstanding, the "boss" contributes nothing by simply possessing the means of production. Instead, we could organize our businesses in such a way that they would be owned by all the workers who actually create the enterprise's success. 

Such a "cooperative" enterprise would not fall prey to all of the ills detailed in part I precisely because the workers would be fulfilling their own interests. If corporate decisions were to be made in this democratic manner, no workers would decide to fire themselves in favor of some child factory workers in China. No workers would lay themselves off to avoid paying health benefits. If workers made decisions that effect themselves on their own, it is inconceivable that working people would take any action which would harm them to spare a dime. And moreover, the fundamental cause of income inequality, identified to be the divergence of profits and wages, would be erased. Wages and profit would become inseparable. There would be no more people on top of the corporation demanding that the workers give up money for the owner's profit. 

"How would such workplace democracy actually work?" the mainstream might ask. This is not an earth-shattering difference, in reality. In the status quo, most corporations are governed by a board of directors, the most prolific stockholders. The board meets periodically and votes to determine company matters. Now, instead of directors gaining a stake based on a monstrous amount of wealth, the board of directors could be composed of the workers. The entire company could decide what course of action was the most beneficial for all. Of course, a large body of laborers could not decide every single matter of minutia. Managerial positions would still be a necessary ingredient in the corporate structure. However, managers ought to be elected and recalled democratically so that they can be assured to act in the best interest of the workers as a whole. Cooperative businesses bring the justice of democracy into the place where we spend most of our adult lives: the workplace. 

Though they are certainly far from the majority, cooperatives, or "co-ops," do indeed exist today, and many of them are successful. The largest cooperative corporation in the world is the Mondragon corporation, a global enterprise based in the Basque region of Spain. This federation of smaller co-ops, which works mainly in the area of industry and finance, has a revenue of more than $15 billion, and it employs nearly 75,000 people, the most of any company in northern Spain (Mondragon, in passim). For many working families, Mondragon has been a savior. Because of a 2008 bursting property bubble, not unlike our own, Spain's labor sector has gone down the drain. Unemployment peaked in the first quarter of 2013 at an astounding 27%, higher than the American Great Depression. It stands today at 24% (Trading Economics). However, the Basque region, dominated by the worker driven Mondragon co-op, has the lowest unemployment in all of Spain, at 16% (El Pais). This astounding achievement is due to the fact, as explained in the company's mission statement, that Mobdragon's chief priority is giving people jobs. When workers are in control, they simply will not fire themselves if other courses of action are possible.

Democratic enterprises end disastrous income equality by stopping the "surge" of this country's wealth into the hands of a few, and by reversing the trend of companies to stop hiring people. It dissolves the division between the haves and have-nots.

Even if Republicans, Democrats, and their surrogate news media continue to miss the mark on the income inequality issue, the causes thereof will not disappear. Quasi-feudal wealth relations such as the status quo are indefensible and unsustainable, both economically and socially. If America was a human body, the economy would be the cardiovascular system, and income inequality is a massive tick that sucks all the blood to one place. If the mainstream refuses to address the issues, we must take the economy into our own hands. And there is no better way to do so than to literally take the economy into our own hands—all of our hands.

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