In his inaugural address on January 30, 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of the "millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day...I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."
In this, the third year of the Great Recession, more than 14.8 million Americans adults are unemployed, many of whom have been without work for more than a year. At least fifteen million more are underemployed, and others have given up any hopes of gainful employment. These latter have become what Michael Harrington once described as, "The Other America." In addition, at least fifty million Americans, conservatively estimated, remain without health insurance for themselves and their loved ones.
A US Department of Housing and Urban Development report noted there were 643,067 sheltered and unsheltered homeless nationwide on a single night in January 2008. Further, about 1.6 million persons used an emergency shelter or a transitional housing program during the 12-month period between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008.That number, extrapolated, suggested that at least 1 in every 50 persons in this country needed to use shelter system at some point in that period. Lastly, the US Department of Agriculture reported last month that, in 2009, 17.4 million U.S. households struggled to get enough food to eat because money and that in more than a third of those households - around one in eight US homes - at least one person did not get enough to eat at some time during the year.
What caused this misery? The public policies of the Reagan administration and the successor administrations of Bush 41 and Bush 43 expressed the three verities of classical liberal economic orthodoxy (or, at very least, its libertarian strand): deregulation of business, tax cuts for the wealthy, and free trade that would enable businesses to seek the lowest costs for labor and to pay lowest prices for the purchase of goods and commodities anywhere in the world. Each of these policies was sold to a gullible American public on the basis of sonorous platitudes such as "A rising tide lifts all boats."
The cumulative results of these public policies, even before the onset of the recession in 2008, were a disaster for ordinary Americans. Among the thirty countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only the citizens of Mexico, South Korea, and Greece paid less in taxes than did Americans. As a result of Republican-sponsored tax cuts, as of 2006, the richest 1 percent of the U.S. population enjoyed the largest share of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), possibly since 1929, yet their average tax rate declined to its lowest level in at least eighteen years. The United States also ranked near the bottom on spending for social programs: 19 percent of the country's GDP in 2003 as compared to 29 percent in Sweden, 23 percent in Portugal, and almost 30 percent in France.
What can we do as concerned citizens to address problems of this magnitude? Fifty years ago, in his only inaugural speech, John Kennedy emphasized that "here on earth, God's work must truly be our own." This Thanksgiving, in addition to our giving thanks, we need to reaffirm the conviction that our collective capacity to secure social justice is greater than the sum of reckless individuals and corporations who have chosen to pursue only their short-term, selfish objectives. If we commit ourselves to actively support, and to lobby for, public policies that will re-create the American economy and extend the hand of our government, as the expression of the shared duty to one another, to everyone who is in need, we will thereby redeem the promise of America.
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My book - which discusses in greater detail the background to many of the topics I discuss - may be purchased on-line from distributors throughout Europe, Asia and in the U.S. It is also now available for purchase at many independent book sellers and may be found in many university libraries and public libraries.
Best regards,
Paul Nevins
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Alton, Ich glaube Sie aber Ich wunchsche, dass Sie nicht das gemacht hat.Ich bin nur ein Scrifteller und Rechtsanwalt, nie mals. Ich werde aufkreuzen(?).Konnen Sie mir helfen? Ich danke Ihnen sehr.