it's going to take more job to bring us apart we've got to bring out on the table what income and wealth inequality means to this country this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a few how can we say that this is the greatest country in a road where people in Braddock are starving yeah everything's gotten most of the wealth in this country is in the hands of a few probably and I thought to myself is that a bad thing they really believe that
the only way they can get that if there's someone else who's struggling with it we will make America strong again we will make America wealthy again we will America great again thank you God bless you and God bless america I can't wait for him to get out of it I can't wait for him to get out [Music] [Music] [Music] when I first got out of Vietnam in the army I came back here and jobs were more plentiful I went to the mill I worked there for a little while then I went to part-time police and
constable and I got my own landscaping business Braddock he's had three or four movie theatres five or six car dealerships it was bustling town but it was all because middle class that distills me that's going I don't know if you heard of century 3 mall out of 50 to 100 stores they all moved out now it's a big complex of empty buildings and that's just because the people weren't going there and shopping anymore because people didn't have the money just off three generations of my family my great grandfather my father and father all worked in
Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill as the meal began to decline that's when this area it became very deteriorated it was left abandoned and neglected by the society by the government you used to have thousands of workers here probably over a hundred thousand workers just in the steel industry or with the technology you know you're gonna eventually just go downward in those numbers you know and it's really made these areas suffer and people are just moving away because there's nothing here the younger kids you can't blame them they graduate from school and they get out of
here in 1970 60% of u.s. adults lived in middle-income households currently it's about 50% and this movement is both up and down the economic ladder so what we have is a process of economic polarization more people at the lower end more people at the high end fewer people in the middle and it's a reflection of growing economic in it water our town relied on a steel mill for a really long time and for a long time that bankrolled everything that we had here but now what we see blighted buildings and not a lot of jobs
not a lot of job opportunities and educational disparities also we see a concentration of poor people black people and kind of the intersection of both of those [Music] the loss of industrial jobs in the United States has been happening now for decades and so in many ways the great u.s. middle class was built on people moving out of Industry and a lot of industrial jobs are dangerous lots of safety accidents and they are there are limits on how much one can pay anybody puts time into the mills I'll tell you what I wouldn't do it
I lasted six months it's on the shove-it because they had me under in a in the tunnels underneath the courtroom and it was dirty nasty my dad worked there for 46 years and he eventually died from asbestos in his lungs and finally went to his brain and kill them you know it is hot and hard work I don't know if you've ever been in a steel mill before but you know once you get into your 60s this work becomes very hard if you're not a crane operator or you're maybe not in a pulp and operating
I mean it would be very hard to do that in 1979 I worked for company Westinghouse Electric and I made $8 an hour 10 and fast-forward 35 years later you Pusey started me off at age 50 and we all know the console Evan it's changed dramatically what we have here is at the right-to-work states basically where you can't unionize and you'll see that the pay is tremendously lower you don't have benefits you have no pensions you there's no real way to support yourself after you retire and that would force everybody to work pretty much their
entire life you know you go to the grocery store you get five bags of groceries for $100 used to be $10 a bag you know now people if they don't get help with their taxes and like there's their rent their gas and their electric from the government programs they're in trouble because living paycheck to paycheck is it's rough incomes have been growing at a very low pace for the working classes in the US you have the entire bottom half of the population that that was completely shut off from economic growth 3% growth for the bottom
50% between 1980 and today 3% growth is nothing over a period of 38 years it's tough to keep up with the bills and one of the worst things and they have a medical debt to the company that you work for medical debt do you pmc yes I have some most people who work there had better go debt that they owe to the employer why do we even have to pay for health care when we work for the biggest health care provider in the state can we honestly say that we have a middle class when you
look at just the out-of-control you know income inequality that we had in this country when we look at you know our top earners in society you know when we look at our billionaires and then we can imagine that someone walking down a street in Braddock could you know head housing that's not consistent that we have people who make 725 an hour because that's what our minimum wage is the middle class isn't shrinking is almost non-existent because of the rising income inequality economists are starting to take a hard look at the question and one of the
consequences is that economic growth itself may be negatively impacted that as a result of rising income inequality you end up with slower economic growth in the country that is because demand in the economy Falls you are more income flowing into the hands of people who are less likely to spend it you know you sometimes choose between having medication or food [Music] it's not fair the inequality is just it's tough it's tough I mean it's hard to make it working as an everyday person pliny Trump was elected on an agenda to make the economy work for
the bottom 50% of the American population what he's doing in terms of the economy is going against the objective interests of the bottom 50% of the American population this tax cuts is you know is a clear proof that what he's really interested in is you know the growth rates of the tubs were 1% he could use dog whistles for making America great which harkens us back to a time where black people were immigrants or people of color you know weren't able to avail themselves of the same opportunities you know that's what we're seeing in this
town these are people who never thought that America was great in the way that they're saying because we've always known inequality in any country if there are economic problems the easiest thing for a politician to do is blame someone else we're doing badly because those people are cheating those people are stealing our jobs all of these kinds of caricatures of globalization I think are largely untrue largely fabricated but has now become a dangerous part of our global narrative because it's undercutting many of the forces and structures of the global economy like international trade which have
actually being the bedrock of progress everywhere I think a heightened fear of losing control losing power of the massive power and rule and domination over everything and I think that's was fueling the populism and what that does is it pits people who should be natural allies poor people working-class people of all races of all backgrounds it pits us against each other because we're fighting for that one slice of the pie when in reality the wealthy the top 1% they have their own pie they have the factory if we if you look at you know American
foreign policy today we are already beyond this era of supposedly happy globalization of multilateralism and one of the problem is that what globalization had promised you know largely failed it was supposed to increase the living standards in low-income countries it did so but it was also supposed to increase the living standards of the middle class and of the working classes in rich countries which didn't really do so we're seeing people who were wanting to come back to this neighborhood we're seeing businesses that are starting to want to come here but also we still have pollution
we still have the highest rates of asthma and COPD or respiratory illnesses and on top of that we also have a fracking proposal I'm afraid that Braddock won't recover I'm afraid that this region won't because no one's gonna want to live in a dying town so I think it's quite a natural phenomenon to see people experimenting and saying well do something for us here and I think that what we will see over the next few years is where the governments can deliver on that or not they will be trying to have policies out way market
forces and that's not an easy thing to do that's the American story though it's like the American dichotomy it's like freedom for all but also you know poverty also slavery also that's inequality and it's always kind of existed together it and you will see that nowhere else like you will see that no better than a place like this then Braddock why are we trying to preserve this particular system why are we okay we're preserving inequality that's inequality for the most vulnerable people a town like Braddock exists not in this country somebody has to profit though
with a profit driven country that relies on people in my community being poor if the trend keeps going like this it's good it's going to be more in anarchy you're gonna have a war right here the rich against the poor these people aren't gonna take it too much longer it's amazing that they they're taking as much as they have you got to start taking care of the people because if the people are the ones that are making everything at least treat them right give him a break something [Music] [Music] [Music]
