from AlterNet found via
Scrutiny Hooligans:
Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city's elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year -- for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library -- no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes -- "b" and "r" -- missing. There is no card catalog in the library -- no index cards or computer.
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Here's something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year -- families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington Post called this "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed," said the Post, "but they're not."
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Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years -- the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it -- among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
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Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on -- the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.
We could have seen this coming if we had followed the money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here -- has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money.
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Small wonder that with the exception of people like John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. Hit the pause button here, and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White House with President Clinton; he wanted help in securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him called before congressional hearings on the financial excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they pressed him he told the senators: "Look, when it comes to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just playing by your rules." One senator then asked if Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in his reply: "No, senator, I think money's a bit more (important) than the vote."
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Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' " Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
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I may have quoted more than I should have. Please read the entire article.
Charlie,
I'm curious. Do you see the last few decades as a significant ratcheting up of the wealthy declaring and winning the class war or do you see it in terms of just par for the course in American history?
• sadly, business interests are not necessarily always in the best interest of the people; the present and growing state of the economy, specifically a living wage, the housing market, health insurance, the weakening dollar, and the national debt, all play into a situation that is not sustainable; furthermore, having had a taste of the good life and armed to the teeth, i doubt the american working poor will care to put up with much more a landslide in living conditions. it will be an interesting 50 years, i hope i live to see them play out.
make things worse: vote republican
• charlie,
Well said.
Uptown Ruler,
Welcome! I've been checking out your blog. I'll add it to my blogroll when I get a chance.
I disagree with you on the "vote republican" thing (although I can appreciate the idea of bringing the entire thing to a head in order for people to bother noticing it enough to do something about it). For me, there will be enough significant differences between a Kerry administration and a second Bush administration to warrant voting for Kerry. Not enough to be that proud of, but there are real consequences and real people that will get hurt because of Bush in a way that they probably wont with Kerry.
• hey thks for the addition to the blog roll, we added yours to ours as well. the vote republican thing is total sarcasm. check out our cafepress store for even more ironic stuff, like:
bomb more brown children: vote republican
shred the constitution: vote republican
im an ole yellow dog democrat from alabama, vote republican? not even if i was drooling in diapers at age 108.
peace,
uptownruler
• I should've recognized the sarcasm. There is a school of thought out there that says we should intentionally let things get worse because it is the only way to get enough people to wake up to what is happening (I think this might be what Nader is getting at)
• I did a google search for "Nader things have to get worse before they get better" and found that some of his supporters have said it and other people have attributed the quote to him, but as far as I can tell he never actually said it.
• I doubt anyone will ever read this since the conversation will be buried behind other posts, but I just wanted to add something I read here:
http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/Ralph-Nader-As-Suicide-Bomber.html
Many people expected Nader not to do much campaigning in 2000. But after a slow start, Nader threw himself into it. I now think that Nader concluded what some observers were also understanding -- that this election showed all the likelihood of being extraordinarily close. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, published on September 10th, 2000, Nader discussed this. In 1996 he had talked to a New York Times reporter about the idea of playing spoiler in a presidential election. The Rolling Stone interviewer asked him if he wished to do so:
Rolling Stone: In 1996, you told the New York Times, "If I really wanted to beat Clinton, I would get out, raise $3 or $4 million, and maybe provide the margin for his defeat. That's not the purpose of this candidacy." Since you're planning to raise $5 million and run hard this year, does that mean you would not have a problem providing the margin of defeat for Gore?
Nader: I would not -- not at all.
This is not the same as saying he wants to produce that effect, but in explaining what he means, Nader gave support for that idea. He excoriated the Democrats in general, called Gore and Clinton "liars," and said: "Let me tell you something: I'd rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House. Remember what James Watt [Reagan's Secretary of the Interior] did for the environmental movement? He galvanized it. Gore and his buddy Clinton are anesthetizers. "
