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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmericans have to transform their anxiety into indignation & reclaim their stake in nation's future
THE FORTY YEAR SLUMP
BY: Harold Meyerson
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In the three decades following World War II, the United States experienced both high levels of growth and rising levels of equality, a combination that confounded historical precedent and the theories of conservative economists. By 1973, the share of Americans living in poverty bottomed out at 11.1 percent.
It has never been that low since. By the early 1980s, the Treaty of Detroit had been unilaterally repealed.
Three signal eventsFederal Reserve Chairman Paul Volckers deliberately induced recession, President Ronald Reagans firing of striking air-traffic controllers, and General Electric CEO Jack Welchs declaration that his company would reward its shareholders at the expense of its workersmade clear that the age of broadly shared prosperity was over.
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What has vanished over the past 40 years isnt just Americans rising incomes. Its their sense of control over their lives. The young college graduates working in jobs requiring no more than a high-school degree, the middle-aged unemployed who have permanently opted out of a labor market that has no place for them, the 45- to 60-year-olds who say they will have to delay their retirement because they have insufficient savingsall these and more are leading lives that have diverged from the aspirations that Americans until recently believed they could fulfill. This May, a Pew poll asked respondents if they thought that todays children would be better or worse off than their parents. Sixty-two percent said worse off, while 33 percent said better. Studies that document the decline of intergenerational mobility suggest that this newfound pessimism is well grounded.
The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class isnt ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. Many of the impediments to creating anew a broadly prosperous America are ultimately political creations that are susceptible to political remedy. Amassing the power to secure those remedies will require an extraordinary, sustained, and heroic political mobilization. Americans will have to transform their anxiety into indignation and direct that indignation to the task of reclaiming their stake in the nations future.
- See more at: http://prospect.org/article/40-year-slump
MisterP
(23,730 posts)two prolonged Red Scares (against Jews and Blacks, too), the Lavender Scare, the think-tank counterrevolution of the mid-70s, the soldier-of-fortune far right surging after OPEC and Entebbe, the DLC purges, veal-penning--it's a vast, expensive mass designed to realign what's unacceptable, even if 70-90% of Americans are for it
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth