Archive for July, 2013

277. Four Out Of Five

Nebraska’s State Auditor Mike Foley recently commented during a speech to the notoriously conservative group Americans for Prosperity that “if you are a low-income person, you’re probably not managing your money very well anyway.  Sorry to stereotype, that that’s true.”  Foley was soon criticized for blaming the poor for being poor and soon issued an apology.

In it Foley acknowledged that many poor people are ‘hardworking, play by the rules and pay their taxes.’  Foley added that people of all income levels can manage their money poorly and that many low-income Nebraskans “do an exemplary job” of ‘raising their families and contributing to society.’

Foley went on to observe that “Our dignity as human persons is never to be measured by the size of our incomes or quantity of our assets, and many of us are only a serious medical incident or employment-downsizing away from severe financial stress that justifies public assistance.”

I commend Foley for stepping away from stereotyping the poor to acknowledging the complexities that force people to seek public assistance.  If only more Republicans could understand that given the increasingly uneven economic playing field, the problem of poverty is more a reflection on the character failings of the rich than of the poor.  Since the days of Ronald Reagan the rich have been getting richer while everyone else has lost economic ground.  And this is no accident – it is the direct result of Republican economic policies designed to shift wealth away from America’s workers and the Middle Class.

At the moment Republicans are focused on cutting Food Stamps.  Yet survey data just released by the Associated Press indicates that a full 80% of adults “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives,” meaning 4 out of 5 Americans have or will need nutritional assistance. This astounding percentage is blamed on several factors, including “the widening gap between rich and poor.”  “It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position,” said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty.

It’s clear that Americans today are struggling.  People blame President Obama for a lot of this but need to remember how much effort Republicans in Congress have put into blocking every effort the White House has made to turn the economy around.  Republicans seem quite happy to keep millions of Americans unemployed, impoverished and without medical care in order to stymie the efforts of America’s first black president to reverse the economic tailspin our country has been in since the Bush years.

Though traditionally known as the party of the wealthy, the GOP had done a masterful job of attracting low-income whites to their ranks by focusing on issues like abortion, guns and gay marriage.  As a result many of these whites vote against their own economic interest by voting Republican.  But more and more it’s catching up with them.

While statistically minorities have higher rates of poverty, in terms of actual numbers, the majority of poor people today are white.  Professor Wilson believes “There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front.”  If impoverished white people ever do start turning away from helping enrich already wealthy Republicans, the party may implode.  And judging by what’s going on in Washington, that may be the only way this country can start moving forward again.

276. A Failed Revolution?

Expressing one’s opinion is fundamental to being an American.  Foremost among our rights is the right of free speech.  Without free speech democracy is meaningless – democracy by definition means “rule by the people” and cannot exist where the people are silenced.

So I consider my eight and a half years of writing Perspectives as an exercise in Americanism, and I try to keep that in mind when people disagree with me.  While we just take it for granted, the right to publicly express opinions – and publicly dispute others’ opinions — didn’t exist until America was founded.  Any other country that has that right today owes us a debt.

But try telling that to people from other countries.  To mark July 4th this year Canadian historian Paul Pirie pronounced the American Revolution a failure and called upon us to renounce it the way the Russians have renounced the communist revolution.  He claims the rest of England’s former colonies are more progressive than America, implying we’ve regressed back towards a time when social mobility was nonexistent and a wealthy aristocracy ruled.  America, he asserts, has failed to achieve “the ideals the new country set for itself — namely, advancing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Pirie points out that it’s hard to pursue happiness when “most Americans work longer hours and have fewer paid vacations and benefits — including health care — than their counterparts in most advanced countries.”  He also notes that America incarcerates more people than any other country in the world (Canada ranks 136th).  Pirie cites a report co-authored by economist Jeffery Sachs which concluded that in America “uncertainties and anxieties are high, social and economic inequalities have widened considerably, social trust is in decline, and confidence in government is at an all-time low.”  And it’s not without some irony that Pirie notes that the governments of former colonies Canada and Australia can actually address serious issues rather then floundering in perpetual gridlock and partisan vitriol.

Pirie is correct that America is struggling.  Partisan gerrymandering has insured that the federal government can’t decide anything of importance.  Upward socioeconomic mobility has been shown to be lower today than it was BEFORE the Revolution.  Access to healthcare is based on income, and recently more and more women are seeing their access to healthcare restricted just because they’re female.  And just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court struck down a vital portion of the Voting Rights Act, allowing states like Texas, Alabama and North Carolina to impose restrictions on the ability of minorities and the poor to vote.

Despite these and many more problems that America has created for itself, all these other countries that do have greater democracy and social mobility wouldn’t if it weren’t for the grand – if faltering – American ideals of justice and equality.  We were the first, and though the ideals of our Founding Fathers in some ways remain unrealized, without the inspiration of our attempt to form a government based on what is fair, just and right, it’s doubtful other nations would have been able to advance as far as they have.  We may have entered an age when it’s “do as we say, not as we do,” when it comes to encouraging democracy in other lands, but still, had it not started here, where would it have started?  Australia or Canada?  Aren’t they both still subjects of the Crown?