The Poor are Getting Poorer; In the Meantime, In Between Time, Aint We Got Fun....
I caught an interview with Matt Bai on "The Young Turks" on June 7. (You need a premium membership to listen to it). At the end of the interview Bai tells Cenk Uygur and Ben Mankowicz that he asked John Edwards if Edwards worried about making poverty the centerpiece of his campaign? What if Edwards lost the nomination? Would poverty then never be at the center of anyone’s campaign again for the next forty years? Edwards said, "It keeps me up at night."
"It keeps me up a night." Another phrase you hear over and over again from Edwards is "it just isn’t right". In an interview you can watch on youtube which was linked to the publishing of the article on poverty in last week’s Sunday Times, Bai again asks why Edwards is so concerned with poverty. He answers again, "It just feels wrong to me... Where does that desire come from, Bai asks? Edwards said that he "came from a humble background and "got lucky." Bai presses and asks whether it was because of the tragedy of losing his 16 year old son. Edwards pauses and says that in his whole career "I’m by instinct for the little guy."
These questions tell me more a lot about the interviewer, pundits, and columnists who just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea that a candidate means what he says and that his fight for justice for millions of Americans is deep seated. There are a lot of folks who are so cynical about politics that when they see integrity that can’t even recognize it. Or if they do, like Bai partially does, they wonder how in the world it comes about?
The interview that Bai conducts in front of a live audience is an excellent example of what drew me to Edwards in 2003. His candor and short clear statements, like Dean’s who I also liked, were the opposite of the meanderings and over explanations with condescending tone that come with many politicians and so-called "experts". He makes the most complicated issues and problems not only understandable, but fixable. Our politicians spend most of their time trying to tell us how complicated things are and how only they can fix things. So we should just trundle off and go shopping. Then two, four, six, eight years pass and nothing happens. Then they tell us to trust them again because of their experience in government. What a bunch of bull.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Edwards has made eradicating poverty the center of his life and the centerpiece of his campaign. And contrary to people who think it’s not a big enough problem, there are a whole lot of people out there that think that the middle class and poor getting poorer is a huge big deal.
Barbara Ehrenreich ‘s piece for "The Nation" "The Rich are Making the Poor Poorer" has all kinds of evidence that the income gap is a huge problem that people are no longer afraid to talk about.
http://www.alternet.org/...
Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a "Marxist."
Now, she points out, even centrist Democrats like economist Lawrence Summers are troubled by latest statistics reporting that:
since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent." Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."
On the other side of the coin is the relativist school that says things are relatively better than they were in the 1920’ s or they are in Africa today.
Ehrenreich assesses Roger Lowenstein ‘s answer to class polarization.
"Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?"
Hmmm? Reminds me of a song.
Oh, but ain't that America, for you and me
Ain't that America, we're somethin' to see, baby
Ain't that America, the home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me
Not "Starving flamboyantly in the streets?" Hasn’t he see homeless vets shuffling through garbage cans and laying by the side of the road? Not even pink houses for them. How flamboyant does it have to be?
Ben tended to agree that "starvation was not a problem". So he felt that John Edwards’ emphasis on poverty would have little resonance with voters. Without the visuals of starving in the streets or the problems with running water that were around when Johnson declared his "War on Poverty" or when FDR tackled the problem, Americans just wouldn’t buy poverty as anything to be concerned with.
But when I had Nick Stump on my radio show last Saturday to talk about rural America and the new poll that came out, he mentioned that people in small towns in the South were having trouble with clean water. Small rural towns had no money for repairs of their water and sewage pipes. Sulfur and other contaminants were now in their drinking water. Add mountain top removal mining that is polluting the streams of Eastern Kentucky, W. Virginia and other regions in Appalachia and we have third world conditions that could be coming to a town near you.
Ben and Cenk may be wrong about clean water and starvation, but they may be right about Americans not caring about something that still remains more hidden than flamboyant. Edwards asked Americans to be patriotic about something other than war. Is that possible?
Trudging on the Treadmill to Oblivion...
So what about the second part of Lowenstein’s statement? As long as "the middle class is still trudging along what’s the problem with the rich getting a bigger and bigger chunk of the pie? After all they baked it didn’t they? Well, no they didn’t bake it. Labor creates wealth. Labor creates stuff, not just chits of paper.
Anyway, so how’s the middle class doing? "There are reports out there that things are not rotten in the state of Denmark, but right here in the glorious U. S. of A. The middle class is indeed "trudging" with more and more burdens on their backs as they trudge.
Sam Pizzigati reports on CEO pay at Qwest being 1600 times the average worker at Qwest while retirees are having their healthcare and life insurance coverage slashed. http://www.alternet.org/...
Robert Reich has arguments for supply-siders who think everything is Okey Dokey because the stock market is reaching new highs.
http://www.alternet.org/...
In an article entitled "US Graduates Suffer Income Inequality" by Krishna Guha and Alex Barker for the Financial Times of London, we get an unnerving study that disagrees with the Tom Friedman theory that all you need is a college degree and you will weather globalization’s down side. http://www.truthout.org/...
Male graduates in particular failed to capture a full share of productivity advances, with female graduates keeping pace until the last five years – probably due to increasing opportunities for women in the workplace. This casts doubt on the conventional argument that the solution to rising in-equality is to improve the standard of education across the workforce as a whole, and encourage more people to go to university.
"Is the average bachelor's degree still sufficient to catch the rising tide? In the case of men at least, the answer is no," the authors conclude.
The latest Gallop Poll shows that 7 out of 10 Americans are down on the economy; http://www.galluppoll.com/...
The perception that the U.S. economy is getting worse has now reached as high a level as at any point since 2001. Seventy percent of Americans say conditions are getting worse.
We need another FDR; somebody who can tackle the hard issues of our day with the tenacity. Edwards is the kind of lawyer that doesn’t want to settle out of court. That’s what’s been happening for over thirty years as Democrats have sought process over principle. They have sought compromise over commitment to a cause. They have lost their fighting faith as they’ve become merely players and not statesmen or women. They are chained to money interests as surely as any slave had shackles.
Elizabeth Edwards said that her husband’s questioning of Judge Pickering for a position on the Fifth District Court of Appeals was "civil, thorough, and unrelenting." I like the "unrelenting" part especially. I like that injustice keeps this man up at night. I like that he feels that things "just shouldn’t be that way". I like that I’ve found an advocate for my worries about getting sick or how I’m going to get to work. I like a man that won’t settle out of court but wants to win the case despite the odds. But above all, it ‘s a man who knows what he wants to win and for whom. He fights for justice in every conceivable way and he has plans to do it. He will roll up his sleeves and pick up the shovel and dig in with the rest of us. "We have to do this together", he said at Take Back America. What a glorious idea to be a band of brothers and sisters again and leave no one behind. What a glorious idea to be proud again to be an American who knows that with freedom comes moral obligations to each other.
Bill Moyers says that the opposition party can’t tell the difference between "a compass and a weather vane. " Well, I’ve got my compass and so has John Edwards. Injustice makes me crazy. Rigged systems whether they are voting machines or handouts to cronies are just plain wrong. I admire the people who in Seattle fought greed in the streets as they fought it in the streets of Berlin recently. "We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed," said FDR in his State of the Union in 1936. So has John Edwards. So I will stand by him and behind him to watch his back. Will you? Will you stand up to entrenched greed? Will you hold that we are all in this together to right this ship of state and set her back on course? Liberty, Egality, Fraternity and Sorority. To the Barricades.! Viva Zapata, Viva Las Vegas, Viva Chicago!
UPDATE: There are excerpts at politico from Edwards speech today at the Cooper Union in New York City. http://www.politico.com/...
"I want to talk about what we have to do to put our economy back in line with those fundamental values – and to put our government back in the service of America’s best interests, not the special interests. ... We call it the American Dream: The right to succeed on the strength of your own merits – and the responsibility to help others to do the same. ... Nobody gets to pull the ladder up behind them, once they’ve gotten to the top, and everybody has a chance to make the climb. It’s a simple principle of fairness and opportunity, first and always, even in a complex world.
More at politico.com