Moyers-The Mugging of the American Dream

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Tue, 7 Jun 2005 14:45:30 -0700 (PDT)

Moyers-The Mugging of the American Dream

 

 

 

 

The Mugging of the American Dream

 

By Bill Moyers, AlterNet. Posted June 6, 2005.

 

 

Washington is a divided city -- not between north and south as in

Lincoln's time, but between those who can buy all the government they

want and those who can't even afford a seat in the bleachers.

 

Editor's Note: The following is the prepared text of the speech Bill

Moyers gave June 3 at the Take Back America conference in Washington,

D.C. The transcript of the speech as delivered can be found at

ourfuture.org.

 

 

 

It's good to be with you again. Your passion for democracy is

inspiring and your enthusiasm contagious. I can't imagine a more

exuberant gathering today except possibly at the K Street branch of

the Masters of the Universe where they are celebrating their coup at

the Securities and Exchange Commission

 

 

 

I wish that I could have attended all your sessions, listened to all

the speakers, and heard all the points of view that have been raised

here. But thanks to C-Span I was able to catch enough of your

proceedings to realize you covered so many subjects and touched on so

many ideas that you've left me little to say. That's okay, because as

Bob Borosage reminded us back in January, what matters most isn't what

is said in Washington but what you do on the ground across the country

to build an independent infrastructure, generate ideas, drive local

campaigns, persuade the skeptic, organize your neighbors, and carry on

the movement at the grassroots for social and economic justice.

 

 

 

Before you go home, however, Bob has asked me to talk about what's at

stake in what you are doing. Given all that has already been said, I

will take my cue from the late humorist Robert Benchley who arrived

for his final exam in international law at Harvard to find that the

test consisted of this one instruction: " Discuss the arbitration of

the international fisheries problem in respect to hatcheries protocol

and dragnet and procedure as it affects (a) the point of view of the

United States and (b) the point of view of Great Britain. " Benchley

was desperate but he was also honest, and he wrote: " I know nothing

about the point of view of Great Britain in the arbitration of the

international fisheries problem, and nothing about the point of view

of the United States. I shall therefore discuss the question from the

point of view of the fish. "

 

 

 

That's what I have done in much of my work in journalism. Thirty-five

years ago almost to the day I set out on a three-month trip of over

l0, 000 miles to write a book called " Listening to America. " I

completed the book but I've never finished the trip; never was able to

come off the road; never could stop listening. My worldview has been a

work in progress, molded largely by the stories I've heard from the

people I've met. I want to tell you this morning about some of those

people. They tell us what's at stake.

 

 

 

I begin with two families in Milwaukee. The breadwinners in both

households lost their jobs in that great wave of downsizing in 1991 as

corporations began moving jobs out of the city and out of the country.

In a series of documentaries over the next decade my colleagues and I

chronicled their efforts to cope with the wrenching changes in their

lives and find a place for themselves in the new global economy. I

grew up with people like them. They're the kind my mother called " the

salt of the earth " (takes one to know one!) They love their children,

care about their neighborhoods, go to church every Sunday, and work

hard all week. But like millions of Americans, these two families in

Milwaukee were playing by the rules and still losing. By the end of

the decade they were running harder but slipping behind, and the gap

between them and prosperous America had reached Grand Canyon proportions.

 

 

 

I want to show you a very brief excerpt from that first documentary.

It aired on PBS in January 1992 with the title " Minimum Wages: The New

Economy. " You'll see the father of one family as he looks for work

after losing his machinist's job at the big manufacturer, Briggs and

Stratton. You'll meet his wife in their kitchen as they make a

desperate call to the bank that is threatening to foreclose on their

home after failing to meet their mortgage payments. During our filming

the fathers in both families became seriously ill. One was

hospitalized for two months, leaving the family $30,000 in debt.

You'll hear the second family talk about what it's like when both

parents lose their jobs, depriving them of health insurance and

putting their children's education up for grabs. Take a look.

 

 

 

 

 

Seeing those people again I thought of the interviews that the

Campaign for America's Future conducted around the country on the eve

of your conference. A woman in Columbus, Ohio, told one interviewer

something that I've heard in different ways in my own reporting over

the past few years. She said: " Everyday life pulls families apart. " It

takes a moment for the implications of that to hit home. Think about

it: Our country, the richest and most powerful nation in the history

of the race -- a place where " everyday life pulls families apart. "

 

 

 

What turns these personal traumas into a political travesty is that

the people we're talking about are deeply patriotic. They love

America. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run

the country. When our film opens, they are watching the inauguration

of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade, when

our final film in the series aired, they were paying little attention

to politics; they simply didn't think their concerns would ever be

addressed by our governing elites. They are not cynical - their

religious faith leaves them little capacity for cynicism -- but they

know the system is rigged against them. As it is.

 

 

 

You know the story: For years now a relatively small fraction of

American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of

wealth and income as large economic and financial institutions

obtained unprecedented levels of power over daily life. In 1960 the

gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was

30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold. (See Joshua

Holland, AlterNet, posted 4/25/05.)

 

 

 

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if

everyone were benefiting proportionally. But that's not the case.

Statistics tell the story. Yes, I know -- statistics can cause the

eyes to glaze over, but as one of my mentors once reminded me, " It is

the mark of a truly educated man [or woman] to be deeply moved by

statistics. "

 

 

 

Let's see if these statistics move you.

 

While we've witnessed several periods of immense growth in recent

decades, the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American

taxpayers - that's a heap of people - fell by 7 percent between l973

and 2000 (ibid).

 

 

 

During 2004 and the first couple of months this year, wages failed to

keep pace with inflation for the first time since the l990 recession.

They were up somewhat in April, but it still means that " working

Americans effectively took an across-the-board pay cut at a time when

the economy grew by a healthy four percent and corporate profits hit

record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while

keeping pay raises down. " (ibid).

 

 

 

Believe it or not, the United States now ranks the highest among the

highly developed countries in each of the seven measures of inequality

tracked by the index. While we enjoy the second highest GDP in the

world (excluding tiny Luxembourg), we rank dead last among the 20 most

developed countries in fighting poverty and we're off the chart in

terms of the number of Americans living on half the median income or

less (ibid).

 

 

 

And the outlook is for more of the same. On the eve of George W.

Bush's second inauguration The Economist - not exactly a Marxist rag -

produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion

that any American can get to the top. With income inequality not seen

since the first Gilded Age (and this is The Economist editors

speaking, not me) - with " an education system increasingly stratified

with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries " and

great universities " increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing

these educational inequalities " - with corporate employees finding it

" harder...to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by

dint of hard work and self-improvement " - " with the yawning gap

between incomes at the top and bottom " - the editors of The Economist

- all friends of business and advocates of capitalism and free markets

-- concluded that " The United States risks calcifying into a

European-style class-based society. "

 

 

 

Let me run that by you again: " The United States risks calcifying into

a European-style class-based society. "

 

Or worse. The Wall Street Journal is no Marxist sheet, either,

although its editorial page can be just as rigid and dogmatic as old

Stalinists. The Journal's reporters, however, are among the best in

the country. They're devoted to getting as close as possible to the

verifiable truth and describing what they find with the varnish off.

Two weeks ago a front-page leader in the Journal concluded that " As

the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a

child born in poverty will climb to wealth - or that a rich child will

fall into middle class - remain stuck....Despite the widespread belief

that the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists

and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical child starting

out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better

chance at prosperity. " (Wall Street Journal, page one, May 13, 2005.)

 

 

 

That knocks the American Dream flat on its back. But it should put

fire in our bellies. Because what's at stake is what it means to be an

American.

 

A few weeks ago my colleague Charlie Rose put a question to the new

president of CNN, Jonathan Klein. He asked: Could there ever be a

successful progressive version of Fox News Channel? Klein didn't think

so. He said Fox appeals to " mostly angry white men " while liberals --

" you know, they don't get too worked up about anything. "

 

 

 

Well, here's something to get worked up about:

 

Under a headline stretching six columns across the page, the New York

Times reported last year that tuition in the city's elite private

schools, kindergarten as well as high school, would hit $26,000 for

the coming school year. On the same page, under a two-column headline,

the Times reported on a school in nearby Mount Vernon, just across the

city line, with a student body that is 97% black. It is the poorest

school in the town: Nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches;

one out of ten lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month

this past February a sixth-grader who wanted to write a report on the

poet Langston Hughes could not find a single book about Hughes in the

library - not one. There is only one book in the library on Frederick

Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or

other path breakers like them in the modern era. Except for a couple

of Newbery Award books bought by the librarian with her own money, the

books are largely from the l950s and l960s, when all the students were

white. A child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how

to be a telegraph delivery boy. There's a l967 book about telephones

with the instruction: " When you phone you usually dial the number. But

on some new phones you can push buttons. " The newest encyclopedia

dates from l99l, with two volumes missing. And there is no card

catalogue in this library. Something worth getting mad about.

 

 

 

How about this:

 

Caroline Payne's face and gums are distorted because her

Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit. Her appearance has caused her to

be continuously turned down for jobs. Caroline Payne is one of the

people in David Shipler's recent book, The Working Poor: Invisible in

America. . She was born poor; although she once owned her own home and

earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one

poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will to

move up, but lacking the resources to deal with such unexpected and

overlapping problems as a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken

marriage, and a sudden layoff that forced her to sell her few assets,

pull up roots, and move on. " In the house of the poor... " Shipler

writes, " the walls are thin and fragile, and troubles seep into one

another. " If you believe the Declaration of Independence means what it

says - that all of us are endowed by the Creator with a love of life,

a longing for liberty, and a passion for happiness - and everyone

includes Caroline Payne - this is something to get worked up about.

 

 

 

Or this - courtesy of the columnist, Mark Shields. It seems workers in

the American territory of the Northern Mariana Islands were being

forced to labor under sweatshop conditions producing garments for

Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Gap and Liz Claiborne. The garments were

then shipped tariff-free and quota-free to the American market where

they were entitled to display the coveted " Made in the USA " label.

When Republican Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska heard that these

people were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and

were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid shacks without

plumbing while working l2 hours a day, often seven days a week, with

none of the legal protections U.S. workers are guaranteed, he became

enraged. He got the Senate to pass a bill - unanimously -

 

 

 

that would extend the protection of our laws to the U.S. territory of

the Northern Marianas. But then the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff

moved into action with an SOS to his good friend, Tom DeLay. The

records show they met at least two dozen times. DeLay traveled to the

Marianas with his family and staff - on a " scholarship " provided by

Abramoff's clients -- where they played golf and went snorkeling not

far the sweatshops (some scholarship!) Was Tom DeLay offended by what

he saw? To the contrary. He told the Washington Post that the

sweatshops were " a perfect petri dish of capitalism. ABC-TV News

recorded him praising Abramoff's clients by saying: " You are a shining

light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent

everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and

leading the world in the free-market system. " And Tom Delay - the

rightwing radicals' revisionist incarnation of Saint Francis of Assisi

-- killed the Senate bill. (Mark Shields, CNN.com. 5/28/05.)

 

 

 

If that doesn't get your dander up, maybe this will: The minimum wage

hasn't been raised since l997. After the Republicans recently defeated

an effort to increase it, Rick Wilson wrote for CommonDreams.org about

a single mother of two children working somewhere in his home state of

West Virginia at $5.l5 an hour, 40 hours a week, or $5,378 below the

federal poverty level of $l6,090 for a family that size. Put another

way, " her earnings only reach two-thirds of the poverty level. "

Meanwhile, the base salary of the Members of Congress who voted down

the wage increase is $l62, l00. That single mom would have to work

about 3l, 476 hours to earn what those members of Congress get in a

year. And remember -- the minimum wage she earns is actually worth

less than it was 40 years ago (Rick Wilson, CommonDreams.org. 5/25/05.)

 

 

 

It wasn't supposed to be this way. America was not meant to be a

country where the winner takes all. Through a system of checks and

balances we were going to maintain a decent equilibrium in how

democracy works so that it didn't just work for the powerful and

privileged (If you don't believe me, I'll send you my copy of The

Federalist Papers). The economist Jeffrey Madrick put it well: Because

equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any

democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because

everyone deserves a second chance, debtors - especially the relative

poor - were protected by state laws against their rich creditors.

Charters to establish corporations were open to most if not all

(white) comers, rather than held for elites. Government encouraged

Americans to own their own piece of land and even supported squatters'

rights. The old hope for equal access to opportunity became a reality

for millions. Including yours truly.

 

 

 

More- http://www.alternet.org/story/22163/

 

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