It's more or less official now: Everybody but the rich is now "The Other America"

First published in 1962, The Other America told the story of the part of America living -- mostly out of sight of the rest of us -- in poverty.

by Ken

I guess this post is going to come down to more piling onto the naysaying that both Howie and I have been doing fairly regularly in the course of the tax-cut-extension "debate" (I trust DWT readers will understand why I have to put "debate" in quotes), and which Howe covered so well yesterday ("Obama-McConnell Conservative Consensus Triumphs Over Working Families"), and again in today's "Streams of Consciousness" post. But then, sometimes piling on isn't a bad thing.

Again, I need to qualify that I'm still not sure whether "yes" or "no" was the better answer to the tax "compromise" as it was presented to members of Congress, with only those choices: yes or no. The way the end game played out, was designed to play out, legislators had no other way to enact the modest extension of unemployment benefits or to prevent taxes from jumping back up to pre-Bush-tax-cut levels on Jan. 1.

The problem was that the legislative process allowed it, or again was arranged, to come down to that choice. Even in these economically dire times, there were all sorts of other ways of dealing with the strange assortment of tax provisions that wound up being dealt with in this "compromise," whose mostly objectionable components seem to have been determined by what the oligarchical Right decided it could get away with slipping in and then making "nonnegotiable."

Of course, as more and more people are finally coming to appreciate, there's scant evidence that President Obama ever had much interest in negotiating on such features as the rubber-stamping of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (now effectively permanent, since it's hard to believe that in two years' time Congress will have any more gumption to pull the plug on them), the comfy-cozying of the soon-to-return estate tax, and groundwork-laying for the orphaning of Social Security.

As I pointed out yesterday, the Village motif that "70 percent of Americans support the compromise tax package" is so meaningless as to amount to a lie in itself. Do those 70 percenters have any clue that these are actually the central features of the package? Do they understand the short- and long-term implications of each? Of course not. All they know is that the "compromise" package prevents their taxes from jumping come January 1.

In good part, of course, this is because that's all they were encouraged to know by the infotainment news hacks who take their marching orders from the Village aristocracy, which in turn gets its economic "advice" from the PR machine of the oligarchs. But in good part too it's because so many Americans don't want to know more. Oh, they'll be plenty pissed when they discover that Social Security, which most Americans have come to take for granted as a pillar of the American way of growing old, is a shell of its former self, but by then it will be too late by far, and even then they'll be blaming the wrong people. Very few of the "70 percenters," for example, will recall that they "approved" it back in December 2010, and we've got the poll results to prove it. (I'm still not sure that many people understand how insidious this seemingly innocent innovation of a payroll "tax holiday" really is, so even though it's been fairly well explained here as well as other places where they don't drink the Village Kool-Aid, I plan to come back to this in the near future.)

But just as many Americans seem inwardly driven to swallow the steady barrage of lies the Right has been feeding them these last several years (the necessity for and great triumph of the Iraq invasion, the "death panels" contained in the health care package, a "government takeover" of health care, etc., etc.), they seem every bit as adamant against even hearing let alone acknowledging all the truths made available to them over this same period. I can't explain the phenomenon, but I reckon it has to do with some combination of the amount of money the Right has spent on research into "messaging" over the last several decades, and the additional amount of money they've poured into getting the resulting "messages" out; the inclination of calculatedly undereducated and woefully underinformed people to accept realities that conflict with the mental "comfort zone" they've carved out for themselves.

Do I think we would have been better off with Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office? Nah. It would have played out differently, but the Republican tools of the oligarchy would have played their hand essentially the same way, especially once they discovered what a useful tool the wildly uninformed rage of the Teabagging movement could be.

Unfortunately, I don't think we would have been better off either if John Edwards's campaign hadn't self-destructed. Now that we know so much more about Edwards, it's that much clearer that he never had the strength of purpose to make a difference in the way the American economy has been restructured. Somehow I didn't really trust him at the time, and I think part of the reason was that I wanted to hear more from him on a theme that he owned: the Two Americas.

What other pol of national stature has had the audacity to talk about this in recent times. I realize now that it probably wasn't a coincidence that Edwards himself seemed to go mute on the them. I'm guessing that he and his campaign people discovered that if they hoped to raise enough money to remain competitive in a race in which he already wasn't being taken seriously by the Villagers who provide the definitive ratings of seriousness, it wasn't going to happen by mouthing off against the interests of the moneyed classes who are on the other side of the divide between the two Americas.

While Howie and I were in high school Michael Harrington's The Other America was published. It both grew out of and nourished a growing awareness of the problem of poverty in the country, and helped give rise to such '60s initiatives as the War on Poverty and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. My recollection as that in my high school economics class we were required to buy and read the Harrington book, along with the most recent annual report of President Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisers, to supplement our basic textbook, the then-currrent edition of Paul Samuelson's Economics. (As of the 1985 edition Samuelson was joined as coauthor by William Nordhaus, who has continued to produce revisions. Wikipedia says, " It was the best selling economics textbook for many decades and still remains popular, selling over 300,000 copies of each edition from 1961 through 1976.") Of course it was a Brooklyn public high school, so I guess it's not surprising that we were given all this liberal indoctrination.

The actual idea, though, was to encourage us to think of the economics fundamentals we were learning as something that was directly connected to the real lives of real people. In a country that had been mostly focused on sustaining the postwar economic boom Poverty had suddenly become a viable issue in the 1960 presidential issue. It seems likely that, as Theodore White chronicled it in his first Making of the President book, John Kennedy's forced awakening to it, notably in the West Virginia primary, and his believable concern for it, played a major role in winning him the Democratic nomination and the general election.

Now the "other" America in Edwards's Two Americas isn't all living in the kind of abject poverty Harrington was writing about. But that phrase "the other America" is haunting me, now that the oligarchs have succeeded in using their right-wing warrior-tools to seal the rest of us off from active participation in the fruits of our economy. Even the vaunted middle class, which thought itself safely positioned, is finding that it has been more and more cast off into the "Other" role. (At the moment, the standard text on this process if former Labor Secretary Bob Reich's Wednesday post, "Why America’s Two Economies Continue to Drift Apart, and Washington Isn’t Doing Anything About It," for which AlterNet has provided the helpful blurb: "The Big Money corporations are raking it in, and top pay is soaring as well. But the money isn't going into anyone else's pockets."

Maybe when the Teabaggers wake up to the way they've been used by the oligarchs Congress may become slightly less compliant. But for the foreseeable future, the organization and determination are all on the side of Big Money. And really, it's hard to see how we might ever put together a coalition to provide effective resistance.

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