Ch 2. The Problem with the Status Quo

 

“The great thing about life on the streets, is you always know how it's gonna be. 

It's always the same. It's always getting worse.”

– Lawrence Fishburne, Deep Cover

Status Quo translates from Latin to English literally as “the existing state of affairs.” Most people have a general idea that maintaining the status quo means nothing ever changes. This is not entirely accurate.

What the status quo really means is maintaining the current balance of power and privilege. In other words, rich people will continue to get richer, poor people will remain poor, and most will be unable to climb social strata. Just like Newton’s law of motion, an object will tend to move in the same direction it’s already traveling.

America is often billed as a place where anyone can make it, where all opportunity is equal. But if that’s true, then why do the buildings in New York all have the same names on them that they did a hundred years ago? Why is Congress still majority white, majority male, majority upper socio-economic class? (Pew Research Center, 2023.)

This is where certain people will often chime in to say that these are the best possible people for the job, which of course, is a ridiculous notion. I think it's time to question the direction in which we are headed. 

We also have to acknowledge that for many people in the country, things are always the same; they’re always getting worse. In fact, the number of people who can escape poverty is decreasing (Stevens, 2023.)

Let’s take a close look at the economy and where it’s heading.

This chart can tell us several things just with a glance. First, from 1940s postwar America until the mid-70s, productivity and hourly wages rose in tandem. In other words, the more laborers produced, the more they were compensated for it.

This is why the middle class grew stronger during this period. Why is a strong middle class important? Strong and stable demand creates the market for goods and services and allows investors to plan for the future (Boushey-Hersch, 2012.)

So what happened? 

A shift in thinking about the working class vs. the owner class occurred in the 1970s. We’ll talk more about the specifics later, but for now, we’re going to look at the results of this paradigm shift. Consulting the above chart, we can see that wages have stagnated, failing to rise at anything near the rate of productivity and profit, which have continued an upward trajectory.

The 70s saw a shift in the status quo, but not in a good way. For nearly 50 years, the economy has seen a loss of generational financial well-being for the vast majority of US citizens. In the chart below, you can see that the entire working class has become more destitute with each passing generation. That’s not progress. That’s the opposite of progress.

The results of this flattening of worker wages and the decline of generational wealth? Those results can be summed up with the chart below...

The top 10% richest Americans own nearly 3/4 of our collective wealth. That’s a staggering statistic. The next 20% share less than 1/4. That bottom 70% represents the working class and the majority of Americans... and together, we only own 9%. 

Whether or not you vote red or you vote blue, the truth is self-evident. The facts remain the facts regardless of whether you like them or not. Alternative facts are lies. The truth is that America displays a staggering degree of income inequality. It’s a positively feudal system in many ways.

Worse, as the facts clearly state, income inequality is only growing as time passes by. This is what is meant by our economic status quo.

But we also need to look at some other status quo factors (remember there are 4 E's).

While it's certainly related to our economy, let's talk about an overlooked and under discussed part of the US budget. Everyone knows that National Defense is a huge tax dollar sink. In fact, we spend more money on National Defense than the next several countries combined!

But surprisingly, there is an even bigger drain on US taxpayers...

According to this chart, (and the International Monetary Fund report of May 2019) that would be the fossil fuels industry. 

Just take a look at any parking lot, which will be dominated by gas-powered rather than electric or even hybrid vehicles. The fossil fuel industry surely rakes in enough cash to be able to afford to pay its taxes and still turn in an extremely high profit, right?

It’s true that the fossil fuel industry makes tons of money, but their secret isn’t just our dependence on fossil fuels or their “business genius.” The fossil fuel industry takes more of America's tax dollars in the form of direct and indirect subsidies than National Defense.

Why exactly does a multi billion-dollar industry need government subsidies at all? It doesn’t make sense, unless you’re interested in preserving the status quo and its profitability at the expense of all else.

And what is this huge taxpayer funded investment in fossil fuels getting us? Skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions. 

In the last 60 years, the volume of greenhouse gasses released into our atmosphere has exponentially increased. Keep in mind, that if we reach a rate of 550 parts per million, we’ll find ourselves in a dire ecological disaster. And if you look around, it’s already started. Sea levels are on the rise, weather patterns are disrupted, and many species are going extinct. 

If the levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere continue to rise, we’ll be looking at some serious problems with no obvious or easy solutions (The World Counts, 2023.)

• Hunger as global food systems come under pressure. Agriculture, fishing, and ranching will all be disrupted, perhaps catastrophically.
• Lack of fresh-water. With more heat and more usage, in many places the drinking water is already drying up.
• Destruction of habitat and loss of species. The species on earth all live in a symbiotic web, complex and profound. If we lose too many species, the whole system will be in danger. You might not think a South American moth in the Amazon jungle matters much, but if the larvae aren’t around to eat parasites, it has a cascading effect that could impact our whole food system. 
• Rise in sea levels could make large parts of the world uninhabitable. Wealthy places like Miami and New York can build bigger and bigger sea walls, but what about the developing world? In Indonesia, they are moving their capital from Jakarta to Borneo because rising sea levels threaten to drown the city.

Just look. We can see a clear picture of what the status quo means. It means economic inequality is increasing. It means a supercharged, fossil fuel-powered race toward ecological disaster. It means a relative handful of human beings are making unfathomable amounts of profit while others struggle to survive.

So ask yourself this question: Is the status quo something we humans can afford any longer? 

In the next section, we’ll discover just how frighteningly little time we have left to make a change.