An America growing apart?

[question everything]

PETER SCHRAG THE SACRAMENTO BEE

An America growing apart?

May 12, 2005

Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now teaching public policy at Berkeley, has being going around asking a portentous question: As the wage and wealth gaps between the rich and poor grow to unprecedented proportions in America, will we snap back or snap apart?

Snapping back is what the nation has always done in the past. After the depredations of the Gilded Age, the sweatshops, the 14-hour days even for children, the Populists and then the Progressives succeeded in enacting antitrust and wage and hour laws, interstate commerce regulation, the progressive income tax, pure food and drug laws and a long list of others. Ditto during the Depression, with laws recognizing the right of labor to organize and strike; enactment of Social Security, banking and securities regulations; and establishment of hundreds of public works projects to put people back to work – roads, bridges, schools, water and power systems.

But Reich, a former Rhodes Scholar, also warns about another scenario. "If we don't snap back," he said, "we snap apart into different societies" that have little contact with one another, and where the poor lose the classic American expectation that with enough effort they can make it into the middle class. That snapping apart fuels the politics of resentment and makes the nation susceptible to all sort of demagoguery – about race and religion, about immigrants, about gays, about elites. As he talked about it recently at the Public Policy Institute of California, it was hard not to believe it was already happening. "Are we living in a madhouse?" Reich asked.

(snip)

The country is beset with urgent issues from the multitrillion-dollar federal debt to a health care system that's as unfair and expensive as it's wasteful and often corrupt, to an education system that now runs a poor second or third to those of the nation's economic competitors. We are stuck in a "war" from which there seems to be no exit in a region where our misbegotten policies grow terrorists faster than we can kill them.

But instead of facing and debating those issues, we're preoccupied with our religious wars – diversionary issues about who's the godliest among us. We are fixated on steroids in baseball, and on Terri Schiavo and Michael Jackson; and about a federal "real ID" bill without any study or test to deny driver's licenses to illegal aliens, which will make things tougher and more expensive for every American at every DMV office, but which probably won't buy us a nickel's worth of additional security.

(snip)


Schrag can be reached via e-mail at [e-mail].


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http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050512/news_lz2e12schrag.html

[triguy46]

1. Snap apart

unfortunately. In general americans have little meaningful contact with people/thoughts/ideas that are not wholly consistent with their own.

There are whole unseen subcultures out there, not the least are the working poor and the very poor. A second would be what i refer to as the full time food service worker: generally female, 40+, scooping ice cream or grilling burgers 50 hours per week. All for $8/hour, a nice poverty wage.

[Double T]

2. The Proletariat and Bourgeoisie will overthrow the Elite....

...peasants, serfs, peons (and those of us that feel like we are) will arm themselves with pitchforks and march over the hill to take back what is rightfully their's also. Robber Barons, your days are numbered!

[GOPFighter]

3. I agree....

These assholes are so ignorant. What makes them think the poor, especially those who were once solidly middle class, are going to sit back and watch the wealthy live the high life while their children starve or die because they can't afford any health care? Their wakeup call could be mighty painful!

[PATRICK]

4. We and they

They are wedging us apart like docile planks of wood being pried by force. WE are drifting not snapping, allowing the division to happen, not reasserting our strength. Scenarios are more predictable by the character of the anatgonists. It is a national shame WE are allowing this injustice to be insolently carried out at all. Neither they or we have any natural health in our dynamisms. Chaos or a farce, unless WE reassert sanity.