It’s the classic story on ESPN about an athlete; how he or she goes from welfare to becoming a super athlete who is super-rich. Consider LeBron James, Michael Oher (“The Blind Side”), and Usain Bolt. We all admire these athletes for their skills, but also their dedication to the principle of hard work to make it from rags to riches. Once they are rich, we like to think that they are well beyond needing any kind of financial support from society in order to further pursue their endeavors.

Let’s say that you are a successful athlete like Kevin Carter, a college football studio analyst for ESPN. Carter was a two-time Pro Bowl selection in his fourteen year career as a defensive end in the NFL. He was a Super Bowl champion with the 1999 St. Louis Rams.

The relationship between an employer and an athlete who once was on welfare is rather curious. Both live, in part, on welfare, but the athlete’s family was obviously poor, and ESPN is extremely rich. ESPN is not an ordinary company. It takes in nearly $6 billion a year, and in truly a grass-roots fashion, with nearly one hundred million household subscribers paying $5.54 a month to receive ESPN. It has a solid business model that gives it a seemingly endless demand for its products. Sports is a multi-billion dollar enterprise in the United States and around the world. While the means of delivering it to the fans will undoubtedly change, it will remain electronic for the foreseeable future. A company like ESPN has been and is likely to remain on the vanguard of any changes.

ESPN’s headquarters is located in Connecticut. But the sports channel’s presence in “the Constitution state” has not been a guaranteed fact as it has expanded. Nor is it guaranteed for the future. Like the many professional sports teams that it covers, ESPN is constantly threatening its home base that it will pick up stakes and move elsewhere if it doesn’t receive “necessary” tax abatements. Maybe it’s necessary if ESPN’s goal is to “keep up with the Joneses” when it comes to wealthy companies squeezing state and local governments for largess that contributes to its profits. But it certainly is not necessary when you think of all the other responsibilities that these state and local governments have.

So, as Connecticut tries to properly fund New Haven and Hartford’s struggling schools, and to address an increasing heroin problem, ESPN has been bilking it for significant dollars over the past dozen years. The New York Times reports that ESPN “has received about $260 million in state tax breaks and credits over the past 12 years. That includes $84.7 million in development tax credits because of a film and digital media program, as well as savings of about $15 million a year after the network successfully lobbied the state for a tax code change in 2000.” Back in 2011, Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy had to visit ESPN three time  to ensure that the proper tax breaks were in place for the sports media giant to begin its nineteenth building on its campus.

Is it possible that ESPN would abandon its existing eighteen buildings and move elsewhere just because it did not receive the tax breaks it wanted? Apparently, the fear is being felt. It’s similar to when the St. Louis Baseball Cardinals owners threatened to move the team out of town in the early 2000s if a new stadium wasn’t built (this at a time when the team had an excellent facility designed by world-famous architect Edward Durrell Stone). It’s hard to imagine St. Louis losing its Cardinals, but sports capitalism allows entrenched teams to threaten to leave their home bases as a way of getting  more concessions from government.

There just seems to be a fundamental irony in the whole system. A sports media conglomerate whose wealth stretches into the millions continues to ask for tax breaks, while it covets athletes, many of whom came from families that really needed welfare to survive. Yet the “makers and shakers” of our society tend to moan about the welfare that goes to needy families, while accepting corporate welfare as just another legitimate cost of doing business. No wonder discussion about redistributing income is becoming acceptable in our society.

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It happens every year, in the early spring.  Right before we become obsessed with NCAA basketball, and several weeks before pollen blankets our patio furniture, Parade Magazine treats us to its annual rundown titled “What People Earn.”  It’s a fascinating, frustrating look at our American economic system and what capitalism has wrought.  It’s one of those articles that makes you sick, but you can’t put it down.

Because Parade is a supplement in the Sunday newspapers in major metropolitan areas, and because so few of us even bother to subscribe to printed newspapers any more, it might be a good idea to recap the highlights and lowlights of “What People Earn.”

Here are some of the lowlights; workers in America who earn under $100,000 per year:

A civilian psychologist for the U.S. Army.  A botanical photographer who searches for rare plants.  A historic preservationist.  A designer who creates 3-D virtual models for Navy stealth destroyer ships.  A library director.  A pediatric speech pathologist.  A sign language instructor.  A waste-water treatment plant operator.  Lab technicians.  Day care providers.  Public safety dispatchers.  Substitute teachers.  An educational theater specialist.  Pastors.  A nuclear security training instructor.  A pathology assistant who analyzes surgical specimens.  An associate professor who teaches welding.  A weapons technician, a bookstore owner, an emergency flight nurse, and a special needs school bus driver.

Think about this.  Some of these people are creative, blazing new trails and looking to make a difference.  Many of them are the people who take care of us, and our children.  They work to make our lives better, healthier, more productive.  If they don’t show up for work, we may suffer.  And most of these individuals make much less than $100,000 per year.

Now here are a few of the highlights; individuals who mostly earn well over $100,000 per year:

A tennis champion.  A pop music sensation.  An actor-producer who collects $500,000 per episode.  Comedians, actresses, football players, singer/songwriters.  A spa owner.  A celebrity chef, who earns an extra $100,000 for each personal appearance.  A bridal shop owner.  A country music star and a reality show coach.  An actor/producer who made $7 million doing perfume ads.  Professional basketball players.  And an actress who made $160,000 per pound for each of the 25 pounds that she lost for her last role.

Oh, and we can’t forget someone named “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson, a seven-year-old star of a reality TV show who makes about $50,000 per episode and whose net worth is estimated to be more than $300,000.

Now think about these folks.  These are people who entertain us.  Certainly, most of them are greatly talented, and we enjoy watching them perform.  They can make us happy.  But they don’t teach us, they don’t take care of us, and they don’t really make our lives better.  More fun, yes.  But not necessarily better.

It’s interesting that Parade fails to include some of the titans of industry; those CEOs and Wall Street wonders whose million-dollar bonuses have become commonplace during the past few years.  Perhaps the editors of the supplement believe that we can read all about them in the Wall Street Journal or in the business pages of our daily papers. Also excluded are politicians, who seem to amass great wealth once they step into the halls of power in Washington, DC.

One week before the Parade magazine article appeared, the New York Times ran an article headlined “Swiss Voters Approve a Plan to Severely Limit Executive Compensation.”  Almost 68 percent of Swiss voters backed a plan to impose some of the world’s most severe restrictions on executive pay.  In the run-up to the vote, bankers and prominent executives were accused of receiving “rip off” pay packages.

Americans are being ripped off, too, and it’s undoubtedly going to take more than a few newspaper articles or Sunday supplements to make us aware of the economic disparities that we seem happy to tolerate right now.  I don’t know what it’s going to take.  But personally, I’d like to see some of the money that Honey Boo Boo is making go to the guy who shows up every day to operate the waste water treatment plant.

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Shortly after assuming the presidency following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson announced his commitment to a war on poverty. That was the unofficial name of legislation first introduced by Johnson in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964.

In the  2012 presidential election, the code word for equality was “middle class.” Certainly the middle class has been and still is in need of economic support from the government as well as from the wealthy households that are making more than a quarter of a million dollars each year. President Obama has been consistent in standing by his pledge that federal income taxes for the wealthy be raised from 35% to 39.6%.

Those in the middle class are generally active voters who were committed to maintaining the limited wealth that they have accumulated and retaining jobs that allow them to garner each year at least a livable wage or more. It is important for every politician who wants to win his or her race to focus the campaign toward the needs of the middle class. Republicans also try to appeal to the middle class, even though their policies generally favor the wealthy, at the expense of the middle class and the poor.

Lyndon Johnson grew up poor along the Pedernales River in central Texas. He experienced the rugged chores of farming as his family struggled to make ends meet. He also went from town to town peddling various wares. In 1926, Johnson enrolled in Southwest Teachers College. from which he graduated,  and then found a job teaching in a one-room school house. This was obviously quite a difference from Mitt Romney, whom you might remember as the most recent Republican candidate for president.

While Barack Obama did not grow up as poor as LBJ, he clearly was aware of the plight of those with little or no money, because of his three years as a community organizer in Chicago. Even though he directed most of his comments in the campaign toward helping the middle class, he never lost sight of the needs of the poor, who he came to know so well after college and in the years that followed. His concern for the poor goes beyond those in the United States; it is essential to his international strategy, in which he strives to eradicate poverty in developing countries. He believes that eliminating income inequality in poor countries around the world is an essential part of strengthening global stability and promoting peace. As Zachary A. Goldfarb reported in the November 23 edition of the Washington Post,

When Barack Obama published his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” about racial identity in 1995, he talked with his neighborhood newspaper in Illinois, the Hyde Park Citizen, about the economic disparities he had seen while exploring the world as a child and young adult.

“My travels made me sensitive to the plight of those without power and the issues of class and inequalities as it relates to wealth and power,” he said in that interview. “Anytime you have been overseas in these so-called third world countries, one thing you see is a vast disparity of wealth of those who are part of the power structure and those outside of it.”

Goldfarb goes on to say:

Obama’s actions as president provide a glimpse of how he views legislation as a means to his end. His health-care reform law, aimed at covering as many of the uninsured as possible, takes a shot at addressing income inequality by imposing new taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Beginning next year, upper-income earners will pay new surcharges that will result in an average additional tax bill of $20,000 for the top 1 percent.

The poverty rate in the United States has grown considerably in recent years. As Bloomberg Businessweek reports,

For half a decade, the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has increased each year, from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15.1 percent in 2010. Today the Census Bureau released its analysis of U.S. poverty in 2011, and the official poverty rate essentially held at 15 percent, meaning that 46.2 million people live below the poverty line.

A recent Frontline program on PBS explored the plight of poor children in Iowa. As I watched it, I couldn’t help but wish that John Boehner, Eric Kantor, and Mitch McConnell had been in the same room as me. I would have been most interested in their response to this depiction of poverty. I would have wanted to think that they would have a cathartic moment and changed their policies to favor legislation to address the needs of the poor. However, my reality bone told me that in all likelihood they would have blamed the victims, the poor children of eastern Iowa, rather than support any action to improve their lives.

Most progressives hope that Barack Obama has a secret, and so far undisclosed set of policies, that he wants to propose and see enacted in his second term. These may include stricter gun control laws, a new stimulus package, and a quicker withdrawal from Afghanistan. If the president “wins” the battle over the so-called “fiscal cliff,” it would be refreshing and encouraging to have him advance more of a comprehensive policy toward meeting the needs of the poor. There is little doubt that he would support such a policy. The question is whether he thinks that it would be a battle that he could win. The key to this decision lies primarily in restoring a veto-proof majority in the Senate as well as a new majority in the House in the 2014 mid-term elections.

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At a recent town hall meeting in Joliet, Illinois, Ed Cole, a local organizer for moveon.org examined effects of income inequality and wage theft. Cole explained how the negative effects of income equality directly bring down consumption, which hurts the economy. When consumers are unable to purchase items, production goes down, which leads manufacturers and service providers to lay people off, which further reduces demand since laid off people have less to spend, which leads to further reductions in production, etc…

In “Aftershock”, Robert Reich details how the cycle of lay-offs and reduced consumption directly led to the Great Depression. In fact, the greatest disparities in income occurred just prior to the great depression. Some argue that the wealthy are “job creators,” but, in fact, the wealthy do not consume enough to offset large numbers of middle class workers. Wealthy people already have pretty much everything – thus the term wealthy.

The growing disparity between the uber-rich and what used to be the working class has been allowed to continue after stock market debacles, as a direct result of the political power that money buys. At the very moment when assistance is most needed, the power that money buys is pushing for further tax-cuts for the wealthy, along with further cuts to aid for those most negatively impacted, such as Medicare, TANF and other assistance programs for the needy. The US census bureau released information indicating that poverty levels are the highest since the bureau has been measuring them. The bureau is beginning to refer to the past decade as a “lost decade,” in terms of income for average Americans.

Some of the effects of the continued economic hardship include increased crime rates in some areas. In 2011, East Saint Louis is on track to far surpass the murder rate of 2010. Unemployment continues to remain high, but is highest among minority groups – African Americans and Hispanics in particular. Young people also suffer from disproportionately high unemployment.

The last time America’s economy granted steady increases to middle class families ran from 1950 to sometime in the early 1970s. This was a time when CEO compensation packages were more tightly controlled, and financial regulations created to prevent another great depression were still in place. The understanding at the time was that allowing the middle class to prosper by giving blue collar and low level white collar workers decent paying jobs would insure prosperity for the country as a whole.

Ronald Reagan was the political candidate who first made it big by criticizing the effectiveness of government in comparison to the market. This criticism of the government led directly to the lifting of those pesky regulations that had worked so well for a prolonged period of time. We now see the long term effects of de-regulation.

In Southern Illinois, the continued effects of the recession are hitting rural areas just as hard as urban areas. Rural residents were more likely to have received high cost mortgages than were urban residents. Child poverty is higher in rural areas than in urban areas. Even during the last period of economic expansion, poverty continued to rise in rural areas. Once again, children experience some of the worst effects of poverty, with some southern Illinois counties having rates of poverty as high as 44%. This seems to matter little to legislators, when education and Medicaid are once again slated for budgets slashing. At the same time, Illinois is instituting a tax break for big companies that will cost the state an estimated $750 million. The problem may be tied to a lack of lobbyists working for the impoverished and children.

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In the current issue of Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, paints a picture of the United States that we may not recognize. He delivers the stark message that the America we thought we knew— “the land of opportunity,”—is no more. Today, the top 1% of Americans take nearly 25% of the national income and control 40% of the wealth. (For reference, the yearly income of the top 1% starts at $500,000 and goes on up to billions.)

Twenty-five years ago, Stiglitz reports, the top 12% controlled 33% of the wealth, which was bad enough. But the income inequality we have today would make third world countries blush. He warns that this continued amassing of wealth and power by a small elite group—one that is served by our elected officials in return for rewards when they leave office—has put the country on a very dangerous course.

Stiglitz offers more statistics to ponder:

While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia, with its oligarchs, and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

In his essay, Stiglitz is describing a country in decline, and there are plenty of facts to back up his assertion:

As 2007 began, only about 26 million Americans were on food stamps, but today over 44 million Americans, or 14% of the population are on food stamps, which is an all-time record high.

The real unemployment rate, the one that includes discouraged and underemployed workers stands near 18%.

The White House is celebrating the adding of new jobs, and a slight reduction of the unemployment rate, but the jobs being added pay significantly lower wages than the 8.4 million lost jobs between January 2008 and February 2010.:

• Lower-wage industries (those paying $9.03 -$12.91 per hour) accounted for just 23 percent of job losses, but fully 49 percent of recent growth.
• Midwage industries ($12.92 -$19.04 per hour) accounted for 36 percent of job losses, and 37 percent of recent growth.
• Higher-wage industries ($19.05 -$31.40 per hour) accounted for 40 percent of job loss, but only 14 percent of recent growth.

Employee compensation in the United States has been the lowest that it has been relative to gross domestic product in over 50 years. Another startling figure is that approximately half of all American workers make $25,000 a year or less.

Today, there are 52 million uninsured adults, slightly more than when the Affordable Care Act of 2010 was passed.

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, nearly 15 million children in the United States—21% of all children—live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level, which is $22,050 a year for a family of four. Research shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice that level to cover basic expenses. Using this standard, 42% of children live in low-income families. The United States measures poverty by an outdated standard developed in the 1960s.

Stiglitz makes three important observations about the economic realities we are experiencing today:

First, growing inequality translates into shrinking opportunity, and when opportunity declines we are not using the most important asset we have—the people of this country.

Second, preferential tax treatment for corporations and wealthy individuals has undermined the economy. And as Stiglitz points out, the existence of income inequality and lack of opportunity further distorts the economy. For example, talented college graduates, lured by lucrative salaries and bonuses, have gone into finance rather than into other fields that would lead to a more productive, and balanced economy.

Stiglitz’s third point, and I think most important, is that we have lost our sense of the common good. A modern economy requires “collective action, ” that is, we need the government (working with a healthy and fair tax base) to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology for the good of the country as a whole. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure. Our highways, bridges, railroads, airports are in bad shape. And even though basic research and education are suffering, our elected officials’ response (in service of the 1% who do not want to pay a fair share in taxes) is to plan further cutbacks.

The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.

In closing, Stiglitz quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who held that “the welfare of all is a precondition for one’s own wellbeing.” That sentiment, of course, is not held by the top 1%, nor, I would argue, by the majority of Americans, who continue to embrace the “winner take all” mentality and the false notion of the “self made man.”

I would argue that if America is to return to being a place of hope and opportunity, then we Americans will have to embrace a different value system—one that is invested in the good of all, rather than wealth creation for the top 1%.

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