When I was growing up there was a phrase commonly used to describe the core benefit of the American economy: upward mobility. That was the engine of the American dream, that you started wherever you started but if you worked hard enough the sky was the limit to how far you could go. There was even a time when for a majority of Americans that was more true than not.

But you rarely hear the term “upward mobility” anymore. Why? Because for most workers in America today, there’s really no mobility at all. The majority are economically locked in, able to barely pay their bills but that’s pretty much it. As the current conflict between railroad companies and their labor force makes painfully clear, for many workers even asking for paid sick leave is too much to ask.

The Senate has voted to impose a railroad contract which increases wages by 24 percent by 2024 and gives $1,000 annual bonuses over a period of five years, but allows workers no paid sick time whatsoever. While the president hailed the deal for its support of the “dignity” of workers, it barely enables them to keep up with inflation - therefore should not be considered a raise at all. While railroad workers will continue to have to go to work even when they’re sick or else lose needed pay, the average pay of the CEOs of the five major rail companies was more than $16 million in 2021 alone. The CEO of Canadian Pacific Railway scored a 58 percent raise in 2021, taking home $26 million in compensation. Guaranteeing 7 paid sick days to rail workers would have cost the rail industry a grand total of $321 million a year – less than 2% of its profits. And the rail companies spent $25.5 billion on stock buybacks and dividends in 2022.

This is more than income inequality; this is easily-able-to-survive inequality. Are we getting clearer, do you think, why people are so angry?

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And where are they to turn?

The "most labor-friendly President since FDR" backed management and abandoned workers in the railroad deal, not even lobbying Senate Democrats to vote for the sick day amendment proposed by Bernie Sanders. Is the Biden administration thinking that by moving Michigan up in the primary calendar, labor is going to feel the love? I don’t see how they could. The idea that the Democrats are the party of the working class has been taking a hit for decades; with Biden’s latest hypocritical move supporting management in the railroad dispute, it’s pretty much smashed to bits. In this situation at least, the president who has called himself “pro-labor” would be called by FDR an “economic royalist.”

FDR Democrats work unapologetically and unabashedly to support the working people of the United States. But they are only part of the Democratic Party, as the corporatist wing of the party is all for making people feel better - but only so far as it doesn’t challenge the fundamentals of profit maximization for their major corporate donors. Wall Street clearly still owns both parties and while the Republicans are definitely much worse, that cannot remain our excuse forever.

Economic injustice is baked into the cake today. It is inherent in the business model that prevails within corporate America, supported more often than it is kept in check by corporatists within both major parties. In the midst of such societal injustice Roosevelt argued that the alleviation of stress would not be enough; we would need fundamental economic reform. This is as true in our time as it was in his, but fundamental reform is considered too outside the box by leaders of the Democratic Party now. They’re all for the alleviation of stress, but they refuse to challenge the underlying forces that make the return of all that stress inevitable.

FDR would hardly be allowed into the Democratic Party today. The corporatists would see him as a wild-eyed leftist radical, given his audacity to argue for something as non-incremental, as challenging to those he referred to as “forces of greed and lust for power,” as audaciously just as an Economic Bill of Rights. Universal health care, as in every other advanced democracy? Free education, as in every other advanced democracy? Guaranteed housing? What, are you nuts??

Yet it is exactly his legacy that we need to resurrect now, reclaiming his assertion that “we must become fairly radical for a generation.” In America today, the poor, the near poor, and the afraid-of-becoming poor make up a third of our population. 63 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, which means they are stricken with chronic economic anxiety. Such anxiety is a rolling form of PTSD, not a past traumatic stress but rather a present traumatic stress, one that accompanies them daily and throughout their lives. This is not a mental health issue; it is an economic justice issue.

The corporatist status quo has no intention of disrupting itself, however. Rather, the system seamlessly perpetuates itself. The retirement of Nancy Pelosi from Democratic House leadership was hailed as a generational change, but in fact there is no fundamental change whatsoever. Wall Street is firmly in control, as it was with a woman in her 80s and remains with a man in his 50s. Hakeem Jeffries is well known for his antipathy to non-corporate backed, FDR Democratic candidates, and the fact that there was not even a peep of challenge to his taking over the baton from Pelosi is very disappointing. The question however is bigger than whether this or that individual needs to be challenged. The entire system needs to be challenged.

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Again in the words of FDR, “Necessitous men are not free men." Too many in America today are economically necessitous, and their frustration, even anger, will not remain quiet forever. Too many politicians have promised them nothing, and too many have made promises that then they have not kept. It’s not just the details of one railroad dispute that is at issue here. The corruption of our government, the whoredom of our political system, and the hypocrisy of our leaders - none of it no longer “remains to be seen.” Oh, we see it now. The next item on the agenda should be that we disrupt the corrupt, rising up with a rambunctiousness that’s the most traditionally American outlook and say “No, not now, not ever” to tyranny - whether it comes from across the sea or from the corporate boardroom. It’s simply not tenable for so few to have so much and for so many to have too little to live comfortably. The last forty years have been an ethical and economic detour in America, an aberrational chapter in which trickle down economics has trickled down economic prosperity and poured down desperation and misery to more millions of Americans than we care to admit.

In Roosevelt’s Inaugural Address in 1937 he said, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." Almost a hundred years later, we should think about those words again. And act upon them. Soon.

TRANSFORM with Marianne Williamson

FDR WOULD BE SPITTING OUT HIS COFFEE