Bernie Sanders–now a declared candidate for President–is not new to the business of truth-telling. The following article, originally published here in 2013, chronicles one of his finest moments…

Want to hear the real story on the destruction of the middle class in this country?  Without spin? Without obfuscation? Watch this excerpt of a rare moment of truth telling on the Senate floor from Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders.

You can trust that Bernie’s talking facts.  In fact, Bernie’s doing not much more than reiterating statistics on the current state of wages and economic inequality gleaned from the United States Census Bureau.  Bernie’s not special.  He didn’t need special clearance to get the facts.  These are facts and figures available to every senator and representative in Congress.

Still, does anyone else in Congress talk this way?  Who else but Bernie is courageous—and angry—enough to tell it like it really is?

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The official poverty rate for the United States in 2010 was 15.1 percent. There were 46.2 million individuals who were poor, defined as a family of four living on an income of under $23,050.  Much has been written about the “invisible poor,” and both major political parties have contributed considerably to this perspective.  So much rhetoric is directed toward the middle class.  We talk about lowering taxes for the middle class; about providing jobs for the middle class; about having affordable housing for the middle class; about educational opportunities for the middle class; about having reasonably priced and skilled health care for the middle class.  One listens to this and it doesn’t sound so bad to be middle class; in fact it sounds downright good.

Much has also been written about the fixation of those people in the United States who are not wealthy but who aspire to be rich.  Occasionally, this happens, because we are a society in which dreams of greater success certainly can come true.  Our political conventions are full of “rags to riches” stories, and even if a tiny handful of them are actually true, the fact remains that there are those who are poor or of modest means who achieve affluence, usually through access to quality education, hard work, and frequently, some well-deserved luck.

One thing that those who are poor and those who are in the middle class have in common is a dream that lightning could strike any day, and they will join the ranks of the very rich.  This is the “tomorrow I’ll win the lottery” syndrome.  Yes, that’s true, if you believe that odds that are millions to one are a good bet.  Enough people believe that this is going to happen that they let this dream trump what is in their economic self-interest and agree to support the Republican ideas of lowering taxes for the very wealthy, and establishing a socialistic-like welfare state for ….. the very wealthy, like Mitt Romney or Donald Trump.

The masses are often numbed to reality and play right into the hands of  wealthy Republicans.  While poor people may hold this dream even more firmly than those in the middle class, the rhetoric of  Republicans, and often Democrats, is directed to those in the middle class. because they are more likely to vote, particularly in an era of increasing voter suppression.

This leads to one of the most remarkable, yet simple, statements by former President Bill Clinton at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday, September 5, 2012.  Clinton said,

“We Democrats think the country works better with a strong middle class, real opportunities for poor people to work their way into it and a relentless focus on the future, with business and government working together to promote growth and broadly shared prosperity. We think ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own.’”

President Clinton took the realistic point of view that it is reasonable for poor people to aspire to rise to the middle class where they can have adequate access to health, education, housing, and a suitable quality of life.  This is a vast improvement for a family of four living on $23,000 a year, or an individual living on $10,000.  By setting a realistic goal for those who are poor, Clinton gives hope that life can improve without waiting for the nearly impossibly happening of winning the lottery.  He educates those who are poor and those who are in the middle class to learn that what is in their self-interest are economic policies that directly help them, rather than unlikely fantasies about becoming as wealthy as Romney.  Access to health care at affordable prices, quality public education, Pell Grants for college, accessible and reasonably priced mortgages, food that is affordable and safe, and perhaps most importantl, jobs that pay decent wages and have the permanence that those of a generation or two ago had is just fine.

President Clinton went on to say,

“It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it, creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.”

Reviews of Clinton’s speech have noted how accurate his facts were, in particular contrast to many speakers at the Republican National Convention, including Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan.  But Clinton not only got his facts right; he got his concepts right.

Clinton knows what American life is like.  He grew up poor in Hope, Arkansas.  With a salary in the mid-$30,000s, his life was middle class even as governor of Arkansas.  Once president, he became well-off, and as a former president he has become both quite wealthy and also extremely charitable.

His path to wealth involved taking advantage of fair and reasonable opportunities that were available to him, including good public schooling, scholarship aid to Georgetown University and Yale Law School.  He worked extremely hard and had a clear sense of direction.  He did not spend idle hours dreaming of stashing his money away in the Cayman Islands or banks in the Swiss Alps.  He voted in both his own interest as well as those of the many poor and middle income individuals and families in Arkansas and elsewhere.

Republicans succeed in large part because they hoodwink many individuals into voting against their self-interest (as described particularly well in Thomas Frank’s book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”)  This is one of America’s greatest tragedies.  As a very wise person said following the speech, Bill Clinton ought to be “Secretary of Explaining Things.”  If he was, we’d be a much wiser country and improvements in the quality of life for those who need it most would improve exponentially.  Since that’s not possible, perhaps it’s time for President Obama to make Bill Clinton a full-time member of the team with the more realistic title of: community organizer.

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Out of sight, out of mind. That’s been a major problem for poor people in the United States. When John F. Kennedy was a candidate for president in 1960, he traveled to West Virginia to see Appalachian poverty (and campaign for votes). He was appalled at the extent of poverty in America even though he had previously read Michael Harrington’s The Other America.

Eight years later, Kennedy’s brother, Robert, had a similar experience when campaigning in Mississippi. Combined with his visits to inner urban neighborhoods in Detroit, Indianapolis, and elsewhere, he made the eradication of poverty one of the key planks of his platform.

As he was doing this, President Lyndon Johnson was fighting his “War on Poverty.” He didn’t have to learn about poverty; he grew up poor in rural Texas. He knew that the New Deal was incomplete and he wanted to provide economic opportunities for all Americans.

The focus of economic dialogue in the U.S. now is economic distribution. As the rich have become richer, the middle class has lagged. On Nov. 1, 2011, the Congressional Budget Office reported that over the past thirty years, the rate at which income grew for the top 1% was nine times that for the middle 60%.

 The CBO released an analysis of America’s distribution of wealth over the last three decades. Their findings were shocking: Among the top 1% of households, income grew by an amazing 275% over the last 30 years. In the same period, the middle 60% of households saw their incomes increase by less than 40%.

This analysis confirms what has been the central component in recent American dialogue about the economy. The middle class is getting hammered economically in relation to the top 1%.. Each political party feels that it has a corner on wisdom as to how to jump-start economic growth for the middle class. This is an area where progressives clearly have the moral and logical high ground because their proposals involve creating new jobs for those out of work and thereby directly increasing the incomes of middle income families.

But what’s wrong with this picture? What’s wrong is that it’s all about the middle class. That’s a legitimate concern, but it says nothing about America’s poor. The poor are not only out of the sightlines of many Americans, they are invisible in most of our political dialogue.

One of the more appalling facts is that in his 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama used neither the word “poor” nor “poverty.” You may not find that omission significant until you recognize that President Obama was the first president to not use either of these words in a State of the Union Address since Harry Truman, in 1948. Since 1948, every president, including Republican stalwarts like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have all made commitments, or at least offered platitudes towards concerns for the poor. President Obama, who cut his professional teeth as a community organizer on Chicago’s south side serving the needs of the community’s poor, felt that it was more important to address the needs of the satisfied wealthy and the struggling middle class. It’s as if the poor didn’t exist.

He wasn’t the only leader in Washington to do so. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked if class warfare was brewing between the rich and the poor. She said that wasn’t her main concern; her priority was the well-being of middle-income families.

The bottom line is that it’s one of the worst periods in modern American history for an individual or family to be poor.

On November 3, 2011, the Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times reported:

The number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty grew by a third over the past decade, according to a new report, erasing most of the gains from the 1990s when concentrated poverty declined.

More than 10 percent of America’s poor now live in such neighborhoods, up from 9.1 percent in the beginning of the decade, an addition of more than two million people, according to the report by the Brookings Institution, an independent research group.

That evening, the CBS Evening News lead with a story that one in fifteen American now rank as the poorest poor, meaning that they live on incomes half that of the official poverty level.

It may be that the Occupy movement will have to make a distinction within the 99%. After all, that 99% includes all the very wealthy people in the U.S. besides the top 1%. It would undermine the simplicity and clarity of the argument if the 99% were excessively sliced and diced. However, at the risk of sounding too much like Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 proposal, we might look for a new moniker that recognizes that poverty is omnipresent in our society, and that the increasing burdens of the middle class should not overshadow the presence of the poor.

All of this lends itself well to “what-if” games. What if Lyndon Johnson had chosen to not mire America in the Vietnam War? Is it possible that his War on Poverty could have been a success?

What if President George W. Bush had focused on quick and effective action in Afghanistan and not engaged in his quixotic adventure in Iraq? Would the American economy be stronger, providing more jobs for middle and low income families?

What if President Barack Obama had gotten out of Iraq in one year rather than three, and his surge in Afghanistan had been to get out rather than to increase American military presence? Would he have been in a better position to protect middle- and low- income people by fashioning structural changes on Wall Street rather than band-aids?

Some Americans have the luxury of playing these games. Others are mired in poverty or struggling on the low end of the middle class. Their focus is on survival today rather than hypotheticals from the past or into the future.

What is important is that we recognize that the level of poverty in the United States is unacceptable and easily could have been preventable. It’s also correctable. As we work to strengthen the position of the middle class, let us not forget those who suffer the most, the poor.

The post Is concern about the diminishing middle class causing us to forget the poor? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Peter S. Goodman’s recent article in the New York Times, “The New Poor: Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs,” paints a bleak picture for millions of long-term unemployed Americans.  Once solidly middle-class, many are relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives.  Beyond the damage caused by the recession, current American business practices discourage the creation of jobs.

Large companies are increasingly owned by institutional investors who crave swift profits, a feat often achieved by cutting payroll. The declining influence of unions has made it easier for employers to shift work to part-time and temporary employees. Factory work and even white-collar jobs have moved in recent years to low-cost countries in Asia and Latin America. Automation has helped manufacturing cut 5.6 million jobs since 2000 — the sort of jobs that once provided lower-skilled workers with middle-class paychecks.

‘American business is about maximizing shareholder value,’ said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. ‘You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.’

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Elizabeth Warren has been predicting the collapse of the middle class for years and unfortunately, her predictions are coming true. In this hour-long lecture, she deconstructs the myth that middle class Americans are in trouble because they are irresponsible, or spent too much at the mall. Instead, she shows in fascinating detail how flat-lining salaries, rising prices for housing and education, and the need for two cars (because it takes two incomes to cover expenses) have put many families not only in debt, but one paycheck, or one medical emergency, away from financial disaster. These economic realities combined with ruthless financial industry practices have brought working families to their knees.  According to Warren:

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

There are many factors that caused this train wreck, yet the business and financial deregulation of the Reagan, Clinton and Bush years is probably central to this disaster.

Deregulation unleashed the anti-social mentality of the business elite, allowing them to engage in business practices that fueled dangerous bubbles in the tech and housing markets. They maximized profits for themselves and their stockholders and left middle class Americans struggling to stay afloat. Any sense of responsibility toward the ordinary working person was incinerated in the rush to create “innovative” financial products, such as credit swaps and derivatives. It was all a giant ponzi scheme and as long they were making vast amounts of money, they didn’t care what was happening to the rest of America. Their salaries and bonuses entered the realm of the obscene while families continued to sink under unmanageable debt. Throwing gas on the fire, “savvy” businessmen created tricks and traps for the consumer, shipped middle class jobs overseas, hid profits in the Cayman Islands, or passed on toxic environmental pollution to the taxpayer.

Defenders of deregulation believe that an anti-social, ruthless business class has to be tolerated because it creates wealth for the rest of us. This is the old “rising yachts float all boats” mythology propagated by yacht owners. In reality, deregulation produces the wreckage of the middle class we are experiencing today. Thanks to our deregulated “free market system,” America is on its way to becoming a second rate country.  A yawning gap between the very rich and the newly minted poor, who once considered themselves solidly in the ranks of the middle class, will continue to grow.  If we do not reform our electoral process, our government and our economy so that it supports a viable, solid and secure middle class, the United States will continue to deteriorate.

In order to strengthen our middle class, and our country, we need an educational system that links training to careers, a single-payer health care system that cares for all, a regulated market economy that encourages innovation and entrepreneurship, and socially responsible business practices.

Photo: courtesy of Susan Walsh/Associated Press

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