Must be something in the air...as I was preparing this post, I ran across an excellent op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. Here's a quote from the article,"Our Banana Republic":
“The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976...Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent. “
- Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, Nov 7, 2010
Inequality is damaging to a democracy and to the well-being of its citizens. It results in social immobility, health problems, crime, and mental illness. Unfortunately, the moral imperative to correct the injustices resulting from this inequality has been successfully drummed out of the public conversation.
It was not always like this. “As recently as the 1970’s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed.” (Judt) From the decade of the Great Depression through the decades following the Second World War, inequality in income and opportunity was reduced in America through successful government programs such as Social Security, the GI Bill, Medicaid, and Medicare.
What we’ve witnessed since the 1980's (the Thatcher/Reagan years), however, has been a massive accumulation of wealth by the richest of us combined with the privatization and diminishment of public goods and social services for the rest of us .
Over the years, the Right’s propaganda machine, funded by millionaires and billionaires and finding mouthpieces in Republican politicians, has championed the myth of an unregulated market and the worship of the private sector - making them the very definition of freedom.
The argument against regulation is, in itself, laughable and demonstrably false given the Great Depression and more recently the Great Recession. But frame this argument in terms of individual freedom, build it by playing the family values card, and cement it in place by tapping into our fears and prejudices - voilà , you win elections.
In his book, Tony Judt presents examples of the inefficiency of privatizing public goods and social services. He notes that one effect of the disintegration of the public sector is the “increased difficulty in understanding what we have in common with others“. When “people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement, the grounds for altruism and even good behavior become obscured.”
Community, trust and common purpose are essential to sustaining institutions that are for the common good (public schools, health care, transportation systems, etc.) Once self-interest has been made paramount, there is no surer way to destroy a feeling of common purpose and community than to stoke fears and insecurities into fires of prejudice and hate of The Other. Whether this be done deliberately or knowingly really doesn’t matter. The effect is the same. We no longer want to support institutions or programs that help these Others.
When freedom becomes synonymous only with the freedom to make money, when community organizing is mocked as irrelevant, when people are encouraged to find another church if the social Gospel is preached, we can start to realize how badly we have lost our way.
Until next time, here are a couple of thoughts…
Bumper sticker: “Greed and Intolerance Are Not Family Values”
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: “Why are we so sure …progressive taxation and collective ownership of public goods are intolerable restrictions on our liberty; whereas…tapped telephones and expensive foreign wars are acceptable burdens for a free people to bear?”
From a progressive friend:
ReplyDelete"Good stuff. I've believed for some time that capitalism has reached a point in this country at least where the marginal returns of a competitive economy are shrinking and the only way for growth to take place is through the 'invention' of wealth through esoteric financial products that contribute nothing to the real economy, but rather, line the pockets of those who peddle them on a naive investment community (pension funds, 401Ks, municipal funding, etc).
We're now at the point where true growth can only come with the 'cooperative' spirit of investment, where the expertise of all is leveraged for the common good of all. We saw this in action with the rapid development of the Internet, especially in it's early days. The issue though is that the old guard (the rich 'elite') stand to not make as much as they do in the current environment and as long as they remain power brokers in the American political system, real change cannot happen in a meaningful way.
We have GOT to remove the oceans of cash from the political campaign system so real 3rd party candidates with novel ideas can be heard, evaluated and potentially voted into office. Right now the Democrats are nothing more than Reagan-Lite. They offer true progressives no real hope and as such, fuel their apathy which we clearly saw in the midterm elections. Yes, turn out for the party in charge during midterms is often light but in the face of what was to happen (Republican landslide with a fair amount of them far right Tea Party favorites), the stakes were too high to just sit at home and 'let someone else vote'. But that's exactly what people did. Why? Often the excuse is my vote doesn't count much and they're all crooks anyway.
Well, remove the corrupting factor of large sums of cash from rich elites and corporations and maybe we can have the audacity to hope for change we can believe in."