The millions of unemployed and under-employed are facing unprecedented challenges. Jobs that pay enough to cover basic necessities have decreased dramatically in number. People who grew accustomed to earning a livable wage at jobs that they tolerated or actually enjoyed going to every day are being forced into low-paying jobs that they loathe.
The minimum wage has stagnated and fallen way behind
inflation. Millions of people can’t afford health insurance, let alone pay
their increased rental cost. The middle
class is shrinking as the vast gap between the haves and have-nots grows wider.
It is commonly noted today that more than 100 million people in the U.S. are
either poor or classified as low-income workers.
For a good many eye-opening points of view on American poverty,
read “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto” co-authored by Tavis
Smiley, popular PBS talk show host and liberal commentator, and Cornell West, notable
activist and Princeton University Professor. In an interview on Democracy Now!,
a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program hosted by
journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Smiley and West explain how we are
experiencing a societal crisis as one percent of our population now have 42
percent of the wealth, amounting to a greed-at-the-top phenomenon that West referred
to as “an ethical abomination.”[1]
In Chrystia Freeland’s book “Plutocrats,” we are introduced to a rapidly growing modern repeat of the Gilded Age that is producing people of unprecedented wealth. “In the 1970s, the top one percent of earners captured about 10 percent of the national income. Thirty-five years later, their share had risen to nearly a third of the national income,” Freeland writes.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of
American workers, who may be superbly skilled at their jobs and work at them
doggedly, have not only missed these windfalls
— many have found their professions, companies, and life savings
destroyed by the same forces that have enriched and empowered the plutocrats.
Both globalization and technology have led to the rapid obsolescence of many
jobs in the West; they’ve put Western workers in direct competition with
low-paid workers in poorer countries; and they have generally had a punishing
impact on those without the intellect, education, luck, or chutzpah to profit
from them: median wages have stagnated, as machines and developing world
workers have pushed down the value of middle-class labor in the West. [2]
The U.S. is no longer what it used to be and is going
through an unsuccessful restructuring of itself, at least for now. New York
Times journalist Thomas Friedman and foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum
explain in their book “That Used to be
Us” how the U.S. has fallen into a
complacency and that over the past two decades “we as a country have failed to
address our biggest problems —particularly education, deficits and debt, and
energy and climate change — and now they have all worsened to a point where
they cannot be ignored but they cannot be effectively addressed without
collective action and collective sacrifice.” [3]
1. Democracy Now. (April 12, 2012). Tavis Smiley & Cornel West on
"The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto." http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/19/tavis_smiley_cornel_west_on_the.
2. Chrysta
Freeland. (2012). Plutocrats: The Rise of The New Global Super-Rich and the
Fall of Everyone Else. The Penguin Press.
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