America’s class war against the poor is nothing new — it began in earnest in the early 1970s and has been waged with great efficiency over the past 40 years. For about 30 years, from 1933 to the late 1960s, the US followed much the same path as postwar Western Europe, moving towards a social democracy. When former corporate lawyer Lewis Powell joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, the court opened the floodgates for corporate money to enter politics.
When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he reinforced the court’s assault on the public welfare by cutting taxes for the wealthy, launching attacks on organized labor and rolling back environmental protections. That trajectory has not yet reversed.