Wealth, political power, and influence

The concentration of wealth, political power, and influence go hand in hand and are mutually reinforcing. 

The rest of humanity has little voice in their world.

As the United Nations Human Development Report stated nearly a decade ago: “Disadvantaged groups – poor people, women, rural populations, indigenous communities – are disadvantaged partly because they have a weak political voice, and they have a weak political voice because they are disadvantaged. Where political institutions are seen as vehicles for perpetuating unjust inequalities or advancing the interest of the elites, that undermines the development of democracy and creates conditions for state breakdown.”

When entities become so large that they spend more on lobbying
the congress than they do on advertising and good work, they
 have become agents of domination rather than service.

An individual citizen's right to speak, to assemble, to participate in government has been overwhelmed by louder voices in recent decades.   Corporations are people now, and super PACs are unrestrained.   

Super PACs play an interesting role.  Technically known as independent, expenditure-only committees, super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations, and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates, but they may not contribute to or coordinate with the candidates. Update: 2000+ super PACs took in $1.79 billion for the 2016 election cycle.  PACs and super PACs; good or bad?  Read the list and give it a little thought, perhaps.

When the U.S. was young, there were few eligible voters; only 38,000 voted in our first presidential election.  Today there are 230+ million voters registered.  Does that change things?

Updates needed?  

• Term limits for Congress, perhaps.  
• Some transparency for corporate lobbyists would be interesting.  
• A restatement of constitutional values beginning with the 'equal' issues and an analysis of how well (or poorly) we're doing in that arena would be enlightening.  
• Full accountability for influence would be extraordinarily valuable.  
• And lying to us; how about laws against government lying to the public, deliberately stating as fact things they know are untrue.  Those would be particularly encouraging.  
• Among my personal favorites, mandating a breakup of the 'too big to fail' financial behemoths would be a big step in the right direction, too.  I hope I understand the issues adequately.

Whatever we do to be involved and represented, it's perhaps going to have to be different.  The way it used to work is pretty much obsolete.

Making America Great Again

What does that mean?

James Gustave Speth, professor at Vermont Law School, an environmental lawyer, advocate, and 

author of America the Possible: Roadmap to a New Economy from Yale University Press.

It may be difficult, but there are extraordinary opportunities ahead.

Today's exceptionalism is a mixed retelling of the story of superiority, of rationalizing unilateral actions in world governance and finance  by the last superpower.  To be fair, many who want to 'make America great again' are fondly remembering America's role in the 1950's and 60's when we produced half of the world's GDP, when industry and productivity made a way forward for so many. 

Let's look objectively at the facts we're grappling with.  The graphic (left) from 2012 (based on data compiled by James Gustave Speth) describes our place among the major OECD countries and remains reasonably accurate today.  Some updates --

• Infant mortality: the U.S. is 56th down the world list, worse than Slovenia, Greece, Latvia, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Japan, Iceland, Norway, Cuba, Poland, etc.
• Life expectancy: the U.S. is an unimpressive 42nd down the list.
• Healthcare costs: in the U.S. we spend 2.5 times the OECD per person average and we're not healthier than they are.
• Incarceration: while the United States represents only about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.
• Education: the U.S. is 29th down the list for quality of education (science and math scores for 15 year olds).  Post-secondary education costs have risen 800% over the last forty years while incomes for the bottom 90% have stagnated.  The average Class of 2016 graduate owes $37,172 in student debt; not a helpful starting point for their career.
• Economic inequality: America is the richest and most unequal country.  The rich get richer reliably.  The middle and lower economic quintiles are in decline, and 20% of our children live in poverty.  The cultural norm of a traditional majority middle-class family has faded.

Times have changed; others have caught up and passed us by.  Samantha Powers, before she was U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., asserted that "we're neither the shining example, or even competent meddlers.  It's going to take a generation or so to reclaim American exceptionalism..."  A generation ... or do we perhaps need a better goal.

     What are the issues?

You might want to do your own inquiry into the nation, poverty, inequality, abusive economics, and perspective.

tough love without the love

The poor?  It's their own fault, or so the fortunate say.  Actually it's not.

Laziness isn’t why people are poor.  And iPhones aren’t why they lack health care.

The real reasons people suffer poverty don't reflect well on the United States.

By Stephen Pimpare March 8

In response to a question about his party’s plan to increase the cost of health insurance, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) suggested that people should “invest in their own health care” instead of “getting that new iPhone.” He doubled-down on the point in a later interview: “People need to make a conscious choice, and I believe in self-reliance.” Of course, Chaffetz is wrong. But he isn’t alone.

While he has been met with justifiable criticism, the claim he is making is hardly new. Chaffetz was repeating a commonly held belief that poverty in the United States is, by and large, the result of laziness, immorality and irresponsibility. If only people made better choices -- if they worked harder, stayed in school, got married, didn’t have children they couldn’t afford, spent what money they had more wisely and saved more -- then they wouldn’t be poor, or so the reasoning goes.

Since the invention of the mythic welfare queen in the 1960s, this has been the story we most reliably tell about why people are poor. Never mind that research from across the social sciences shows us, over and again, that it’s a lie. Never mind low wages or lack of jobs, the poor quality of too many schools, the dearth of marriageable males in poor black communities (thanks to a racialized criminal justice system and ongoing discrimination in the labor market), or the high cost of health and day care. Never mind the fact that the largest group of poor people in the United States are children. Never mind the grim reality that most American adults who are poor are not poor from lack of effort but despite it.

This deep denial serves a few functions, however.

First, it’s founded on the assumption that the United States is a land of opportunity, where upward mobility is readily available and hard work gets you ahead. We’ve recently taken to calling it grit. While grit may have ushered you up the socioeconomic ladder in the late 19th century, it’s no longer up to the task today. Rates of intergenerational income mobility are, in fact, higher in France, Spain, Germany, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and other countries in the world than they are here in the United States. And that mobility is in further decline here, an indicator of the falling fortunes not just of poor and low-income Americans, but of middle-class ones, too.

To accept this as reality is to confront the unpleasant fact that myths of American exceptionalism are just that -- myths -- and many of us would fare better economically (and live longer, healthier lives, too) had we been born elsewhere. That cognitive dissonance is too much for too many Americans, so we believe instead that people can overcome any obstacle if they would simply work hard enough.


Second, to believe that poverty is a result of immorality or irresponsibility helps people believe it can’t happen to them. But it can happen to them (and to me and to you). Poverty in the United States is common, and according to the Census Bureau, over a three-year period, about one-third of all U.S. residents slip below the poverty line at least once for two months or more.

Third -- and conveniently, perhaps, for people like Chaffetz or House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) -- this stubborn insistence that people could have more money or more health care if only they wanted them more absolves the government of having to intervene and use its power on their behalf. In this way of thinking, reducing access to subsidized health insurance isn’t cruel, it’s responsible, a form of tough love in which people are forced to make good choices instead of bad ones. This is both patronizing and, of course, a gross misreading of the actual outcome of laws like these.

There’s one final problem with these kinds of arguments, and that is the implication that we should be worried by the possibility of poor people buying the occasional steak, lottery ticket or, yes, even an iPhone. Set aside the fact that a better cut of meat may be more nutritious than a meal Chaffetz would approve of, or the fact that a smartphone may be your only access to email, job notices, benefit applications, school work and so on. Why do we begrudge people struggling to get by the occasional indulgence? Why do we so little value pleasure and joy? Why do we insist that if you are poor, you should also be miserable? Why do we require penitence?

Fact checked; it's reasonably accurate when reviewed against 2016 data.
Infant mortality (the U.S. is 56th down the list, worse than Slovenia, Austria,
Belgium, Italy, Spain, Iceland, Norway, Cuba, Poland, etc, and Japan)
Life expectancy (the U.S. is an unimpressive 42nd on the list)
Healthcare costs (in the U.S. we spend 2.5 times the OECD per person
and we're not healthier than they are.)

Just because what Chaffetz is saying isn’t novel doesn’t mean it isn’t uninformed and dangerous. Chaffetz, Ryan and their compatriots offer us tough love without the love, made possible through their willful ignorance of (or utter disregard for) what life is actually like for so many Americans who do their very best against great odds and still, nonetheless, have little to show for it. Sometimes not even an iPhone.

Stephen Pimpare is the author of "A People’s History of Poverty in America" and the forthcoming "Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen." He teaches American politics and public policy at the University of New Hampshire.

For my own education, I've researched and written a number of articles on poverty, inequality, abusive economics, and privilege. The blog is a collection of my own attempts at objectivity.  I've included this article by Stephen Pimpare because it paints a perhaps helpful picture of the discussion. It appears that we've become a troublesome culture and economy with moral and ethical contradictions between what we say and what we do.

Accept the things you cannot change ...

Or not.

• If it needs changing, change it.  
• If it's hard, fight hard.  
• If you fight to the end and die, perhaps your children will finish the fight.  Or your grandchildren.

Some things cannot and should not be accepted as they are.

Injustice, oppression and violence, discrimination, prejudice, abuse, and corrupt power ...

I remember Malala Yousafzai who began blogging about life under the Taliban in Afghanistan.  She was eleven.  Her father supported her.  She was later targeted for assassination, shot and almost killed.  Medically evacuated from the country, she survived, but it was close. 

A Nobel laureate now, she's known around the world as an advocate for education and particularly for girls.  Her father explains with a smile how she used to be known as his daughter, but now he's known as her father.  He's proud of her.   Malala's advocacy has since grown into an international movement.

We're all proud of her.  Except the Taliban; they're sort of embarrassed.

A dear friend in western Africa reminded us, today is International Women's Day.  The issues are much larger than western feminism perhaps recognizes.


Ps 82 - Defend the oppressed, stand up for the poor, the disenfranchised, the abused ... how long will you tolerate the wicked?  God did not call us out to be peacefully passive but to be powerfully influential in our sphere of existence, to change lives. Serenity is not at the top of the list. The peace we're offered is with the Father and within ourselves, not with the ways of this world.

A Single Story

What if we heard more than one story?  What if we heard stories from more than one participant?

I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican?

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

As we discovered when the cold war ended and the wall came down, the folks on the other side were just like us.  Their hopes for the future and for their children were the same as ours.  It was power players and politicians on both sides who had bent things so badly, and that 'official' version was the only story that we'd heard.

Liberal and conservative stories might be a good starting place.  When you remove the power players, the goals of the two groups are virtually identical.

What's next

National GDP has made regular progress, and incomes rose ... but only for the wealthy.  The economic middle class is in decline and the poor are trapped.

Folks who work for an average income have made continuing advances in productivity but not in wages.  Their employers are doing well. Stockholders are doing well. Corporate profits are doing well. Working folks haven't seen much improvement, however, since the changes that began in the late 70's.  Today, 21% of our children live in destructive poverty.

Do your own inquiry.  For a starting point, you might look at The GAP, or Poverty is a Weapon of Mass Destruction, or perhaps The century's deadliest idea.