Since the mid-eighteenth century, American society has been known for its ability to solve problems through innovation. Yet in recent years it has become solution-averse. In an era when the American people are experiencing major deprivation, the powers that be are devoted to the status quo—as long as their share of the pie keeps getting bigger, which it does—and they have the means and propaganda to keep it that way. More than ever, our nation needs change: stronger social safety nets; more effective electoral reforms; greater accountability for corporations; a shift of power away from the few toward the many; a return to communal self-reliance. Yet the public’s expectations about what kind of country we can become are at a low tide.
Despite the stunning technological innovations that have marked our world for more than half a century, these conditions are only getting worse. Our country has far more problems than we deserve . . . and far more solutions than we apply. That gap is the democracy gap, and it underlies the paralyzing feeling of powerlessness shared by too many Americans—a feeling easily mistaken for apathy.
This sense of powerlessness is surprising, given how deeply we are steeped in information. There is no exposé gap in the United States. We are living in a golden age of investigative research: every year we are confronted by new documentary films, new TV reports, new online journalists and bloggers, new newspaper and magazine articles, and new books detailing abuses of power throughout our society—from Pentagon contractors cozying up to politicians for exorbitantly unneeded or fraudulent deals; to perpetrating illegal wars and tax shelters; to critically contaminating land, air, and water; to the looting or draining of trillions of dollars of other people’s money; to the impoverishment of political dialogue within a rigged political system; to the entrenchment of a corporate state of privileges, immunities, and bailouts; to the exacerbation of deepening poverty and casualties brought about by our corporate system—American-style.
Even the mainstream corporate media offer their share of exposés: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fortune, 60 Minutes, ABC’s It’s Your Money, the Wall Street Journal—all routinely publish probing journalistic investigations that far outstrip our undeveloped democracy’s ability, or willingness, to correct the injustices they expose. With few exceptions, the mainstream media pays far less attention to the civic actions that strive to do something with that information. Which is why we cannot claim to enjoy a truly democratic society until we also have a truly democratic, noncommercial media that is owned and controlled by the audience it serves.
Progress is supposed to be America’s trademark. And yet the reality is that, since 1972—the peak year of real wages in our country—80 percent of U.S. households have been sliding downward in standard of living. In the past three years, despite working longer hours, that slide has accelerated. Unemployment and underemployment as of this writing were at 8.2 percent and 15.7 percent (www.bls.gov/cps/), respectively. That is a blot on the face of the world’s largest and richest economy. Fifty million people should not have to fear illness without health insurance. Every year forty-five thousand Americans die because they cannot afford insurance for diagnosis and treatment. One of every three workers earns Walmart-level wages—from $7.25 to $10.50 gross per hour. Even two such workers, many without health insurance, can’t support a household of four on that income.
By any measure, more Americans are poorer today than in 1972. What do we mean by poor? Look at the Department of Labor’s ridiculous definition of poverty: a family of four is not considered poor if it earns $23,050 a year before deductions. Economists have figured that to afford the bare necessities of life for four people would require an annual income of just over $40,000. By that yardstick, half of American households are poor. And statistics cannot begin to capture the sufferings, the impoverishment, the fear and insecurity of tens of millions of our fellow citizens who pick up after us, harvest and serve our food, care for our children, care for our elderly, and, disproportionately, fight our wars.
The poor pay more, often in unexpected ways. Impoverished Americans are especially vulnerable to consumer fraud, shoddy merchandise, and other marketing rackets involving fine-print contracts. For those who live in areas where public transportation is woeful—which means much of the country—just getting to work takes up precious unpaid hours. Many domestic workers leave the inner city at dawn and make two or more connections to reach their employers’ well-appointed suburban homes by nine A.M., then spend much of the evening returning home. Millions of single mothers with long commutes have to send their children to day care centers that can cost around $500 a month.
Those commuters depend on the nation’s public works, which are in great need of repair. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) tells us every year what it estimates it will cost to maintain and repair our public works—highways and roads, schools, clinics, water and sewage systems, public transit, dams, public buildings, and so on. Last year ASCE put the figure at $2 trillion. What they cannot estimate is how decrepit public services inconvenience, deny, and sometimes endanger those who use them day after day, rain, shine, snow, or sleet.
Millions of Americans are shackled to chronic high-interest debt, without any light at the end of the tunnel. We are in a period of record consumer debt, record bankruptcies, and record home foreclosures. To rub salt in the wound, the federal minimum wage has far less in purchasing power than it did in 1968. After accounting for inflation, our current minimum wage of $7.25 would have to be $10 to equal the rate forty-four years ago—even though worker productivity was half of what it is today. The gains from that productivity have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans—and especially to the top 1 percent, who own 40 percent of the nation’s private wealth and receive 25 percent of its income.
Five years ago, I published a book called The Seventeen Traditions. In that book, I reached back to my childhood to share seventeen lessons I learned from my family, our heritage, and the small-town New England civic community in which I was raised.
In the decades since then, the world has become a very different place. Corporate globalization has produced a massive exodus of American industries and jobs to repressive regimes abroad that know how to keep their workers in dire straits. Our traditional economy has been “financialized” to the point where it is now fueled by speculators bent on making money from money—enlarging the paper economy at the expense of a real economy that makes goods and services for the necessities of life. Despite the overall expansion of the GDP, poverty and near poverty in our country have grown and become more entrenched for tens of millions of people. The twin forces of militarism and commercialism have distracted money and effort away from civic and community values. Power is more concentrated than ever in fewer corporate and governmental hands—transforming us from a democratic society into a corporate state.
Polls show that between 70 and 80 percent of Americans believe our country is going in the wrong direction—and that corporations have too much control over American lives. Most people have lost faith that those who work hard will be rewarded. Broken political promises, Wall Street bailouts of big-time crooks, and other betrayals have made us cynical and suspicious as a people—a cynicism that usually leads to withdrawal from civic and political engagement. Even the grassroots Occupy initiative, which showed promise in the fall of 2011, has yet to achieve the momentum of a united change agent.
Any working American during these years has felt the need for serious change in the fabric of our society. That appetite for change is what drove the election of Barack Obama, and today it drives the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction with both the president and his opposition. It is behind the cries of “We are the 99 percent,” the disgust over our political discourse, even the contradictions of the Tea Party protestors and their allies in the Republican Party.
Much of the debate engendered by these groups is simplistic at best, poisonous at worst. But the need for change is real. And change cannot happen until we, as Americans, decide to expect more from our country.
Change has always started with people elevating their expectation levels—from the antislavery, women’s suffrage, farmers’ and workers’ revolts of the nineteenth century to the civil rights, consumer, and environmental movements of more recent times. It begins when we, as citizens, look beyond our own fears and prejudices and, in a tone of mutual respect with our friends and neighbors, engage in a vigorous, challenging conversation over the future of our nation.
The Seventeen Solutions is my effort to start a new conversation about our problems.
In these seventeen chapters, I offer fresh ideas on how to solve some of the deepest problems affecting our society today. Some of these ideas, like cracking down on corporate crime and ending corporate welfare, point to changing conditions on the ground. Others, like electoral reforms, call for consumers, workers, and small taxpayers to come together and use the available forums of justice to enact solid change. Still others respond to the assault on our earth’s fragile biosphere—the thin slice of soil, water, and air that sustains living beings on the planet.
These seventeen solutions are in no way an exclusive list. They are merely a jumping-off point for activists. Each solution invites you to participate at whatever level of talent, energy, and resources you are willing and able to devote. No power can stop you from at least taking that first crucial, galvanizing step. For the future, it must be declared, is up to us to organize. As the great freeman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass exclaimed in lecture after lecture: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
In the Depression-racked 1930s, the famous British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In that piece, he made a prophecy that we have shamelessly failed to fulfill. At the time of his writing, the world economy had reached a level of productivity that would enable society to eliminate the “economic problem”—that is, the persistence of abject poverty. “The economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years,” he wrote. “This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.” Keynes argued that there was no economic excuse for not abolishing poverty and for providing everyone with the necessities of life, including retirement security.
I say “shamelessly failed to fulfill” because everyone knows that Keynes was right—that our economy is hugely more productive but also unjustly distributed in its gains and misdirected in its investments. Our wisest voices have historically had an honest disagreement over the best ways to fix this imbalance. But those honest arguments tend to be drowned out by dishonest opposition from the powerful few, who want to decide for the many how the economic pie is to be divided, invested, applied, and inherited.
The Seventeen Solutions I offer here are designed to diminish these worsening injustices. The growing disconnect between GDP figures and corporate profits on one hand, and the conditions of the great majority of American workers and families on the other, represents the expanding failure of corporate capitalism—and the corporate state in Washington, D.C., that protects it—to deliver the goods for the working families of America.
American workers labor longer than any of their counterparts in the Western world. But they are also worse off than any of those counterparts. They are not receiving their just deserts.
Now let’s do something together about this abomination.