Ralph Nader: New Orleans
I was riding in a car last week with an old friend. He worked with me many years ago to set up a nationwide network of student run citizen groups. Now, he is organizing in Ohio for congressional redistricting reform. We were talking about New Orleans. And his snap observation? Those people in New Orleans should have gotten out when they were told to evacuate. Many did, but what if some 100,000 couldn’t, I asked? If it were me, I would have crawled out, he said. What if there was no way out – no car, sickness, caring for ailing relatives, no seats on public transportation, streets blocked, nowhere to go, fear of the unknown? There always is a way, he said. And this from a highly educated and accomplished “liberal.”
Many in America are in denial. Especially “highly educated” America is in denial. They know, but still are in denial, about the deep poverty of tens of millions in our midst. Ancient Chinese proverb – To know and not to act is not to know. Even after television showed the poor – day after day – being left behind in New Orleans, many in America remained in denial. How else to explain the poverty of response from both the Democrats and Republicans?
Watching the disaster in New Orleans made me think back over 80 years to Huey Long, the former Governor and Senator from Louisiana. Long’s mission – defend the people against the avarice of corporate America. He taxed the oil companies to pay for text books for the children of Louisiana. His response to poverty? Share the wealth – with those who worked to create it. Long’s was a detailed program – during the 1930s Depression – which would impose a capital tax that would prevent any family from owning a fortune of more than $5 million or more 350 times that of the average family. And it would have imposed an income tax that would prohibit a family from earning more than one million dollars a year, or more than 300 times the income of the average family. The income from these taxes would provide every family in the country with a home valued at not less than $5,000. The government would further guarantee that every family would receive an annual income of $2,000 to $3,000. He knew that defending the people meant a showdown with the greed of corporations and their super-rich bosses. His expected run for the Presidency on a wave of popular support for his Share the Wealth platform pushed Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats to enact more of the New Deal.
With his dramatic proposals, Long got people thinking about the concentration of wealth. That was then. Now, Katrina has exposed to all the mass poverty in our midst. A quarter of America’s working families are living in poverty. And yet, the ratio of average annual large company CEO pay (now $11.8 million) to average worker pay (now $27,460) spiked up last year from 301-to-1 in 2003 to 431-to-1 in 2004. If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour.
Some of the nation’s most enlightened wealthy are fearful of what these numbers portend. Led by William Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins, more than 1,000 of these wealthy Americans have organized to defend taxes on the super wealthy. Gates and Collins argue that individual wealth is a product not only of hard work and smart choices but of the society that provides the fertile soil for success. They don’t subscribe to the “Great Man” theory of wealth creation but contend that society’s investments – such as public works, government research, economic development, education, and health care – all contribute to any individual’s good fortune. They have written a blockbuster book – Wealth and Our Commonwealth – Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.
In response to New Orleans, will the Democratic Party stand up with William Gates Sr. and say out loud – tax accumulated fortunes, defend the estate tax, and defend our progressive income tax structure? Will the Democratic Party stand against the massive redistribution of wealth and income upward over the past twenty years from the many to the few? The corporate Democrats fear opening up this topic of fair return for hard work done – staying silent on a living wage demand. They want the business campaign money too much. This despite the falling median household income, now in its fifth straight year, and the widening gap between rich and poor. And so, the issue of the rising poverty rate and the widening gap between rich and poor will remain untouched. The wealth gap, the income gap and mass poverty are too hot to handle by the corporate Democrats and Republicans alike.
wow-inspiring words from someone who “gets it.” I’m so sick of people denying that the poor response was indeed America’s inability to understand the extend and results of poverty and race in this country. I wish that this would be a catalyst for radical change, but somehow I’m afraid it won’t.
You’re exactly right, Dharma. I don’t think what happened to dredge up what it means to be poor (not the common misconception amongst the well-off that making under $40K is “poor”) will effect lasting change. Already, a mere two weeks later, America is moving it’s MTV mind elsewhere. So much that should be paid attention to, especially in the aftermath of such HUMAN proportions, is falling by the wayside because we all are bombarded constantly by new, distracting information. It’s tiring and exhausting. I’m more tired now than I ever have been in my life and I truly think it is because I am media exhausted. We have a new issue that will cram the wedge further into our national division that, to me, merits neither the time nor the attention it will get. Yesterday’s decision that “under God” included within the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional when said in public schools is one of those “surface” issues that will get all kinds of air time and take up all of our news outlets while we forget that there are yet people who will not have lives returned to normal for months or years. People will be broke and with the impending bankruptcy bill, these same people are set to suffer even more at the will of the corporations that hold all of our very dollars to paper cut our throats slowly but surely. The people who died BECAUSE of the storm have passed, and God bless them. There are literally millions who stand to die now and in the future because of our government and the corporations that hold us all hostage. These already poor people will all be murder victims.
The first thing that came to my mind this morning when I read this very same email was a promise. I promised myself that, no matter what, all of my voting powers will side with the candidate that has shown he or she has worked for the eradication of poverty. The key word there is “worked.” The term poverty is thrown around so much and I firmly believe that it has lost its meaning among too many people. Every time we hear on the news that the poverty level has shifted to a lower amount; every time we hear that more people live in poverty; every time we see families that live in America but look like they live in Darfur, we all just don’t understand because we cannot understand. Poverty, as we now see, effects us ALL. I, for one, do not mind if my tax dollars go to help poor people. Hell, I’ll pitch in some more. I do, however, mind that my dollars go to fight a war for empire. Now our country will have more of the poor to take care of, but the resources will not be there. The landed gentry have their coffers full of gold and still worry about the “Death Tax.” It is sad when we collectively refuse to see that we live in a nation of kings bent on enslaving the peasants. And, yes, you Mr. and Mrs. Republican making over $100k a year are peasants, too.
yeah, you are so right-america has moved on to the next distraction. after spending the first few days of this mess glued to cnn i literally felt nauseous by the coverage. it seems like a cop-out to blame the media but i can’t help thinking that we get so bombarded on a news item that we do become desensitized and frankly just sick of hearing about it. i think it starts to make you feel hopeless and cynical, because it just becomes another tragedy given a movie-sounding name (on CNN i think it was “State of Emergency”).
What must it have been like to witness less cynical times when people really believed they could do something about the fucked up world and because they believed it, they did affect change???