BETRAYAL (a book review)

                                                     

     I suppose, because it is listed as a NY Times best seller, this book by noted journalists Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, “The Betrayal of the American Dream,” needs no further review. But for this reader the book understates the problem, tip-toes around important issues and omits  some significant ones. The authors take an internal perspective whereas a blend with an external perspective might have strengthened their work. Most notably it is weak on the substance and implications of globalization and tepid in recommendations for restoration of “The American Dream.” Globalization has arguably hurt the American economy, but it is an inexorable aspect of civilization’s plunge into the future. At its present stage it is anarchistic. There are no models to follow. There is no overriding strategy. The omni-present driver is money, as in the ancient quote: Money is the nerve-string of greed, power, war and all piety.1 The world is feeling its way forward and it can be expected that there will be collateral damage, on occasion on a huge scale. The damage can be alleviated, but for that we need leaders who are both knowledgeable about globalization and provide intelligent leadership instead of participating in the anarchy.

    The book is strong on statistical information covering the consequences of transfer of manufacturing jobs to countries where labor costs are less than a tenth that in the United States. The end game, as manufacturing moves from nation to nation for cheap labor, foretells a future when all have made the leap into equally modern status. What then? It is already occurring as jobs are moving out of China into other countries. Not mentioned is that some manufacturing jobs are coming back to the United States as a result of rising foreign costs. But in those cases the scenario changes to one where the new operations are highly automated, so fewer workers are needed to do the same job.

    The writers give short shrift to the importance of unions in negotiating wage levels and benefits. Unions have long carried water for the rest of labor force. Without them we get the Walmart situation where workers are paid below the poverty line, letting the rest of society pick up the tab for medical services, etc. And they take no notice of the fault line in the economy that is the farce of gains in productivity; a familiar word as the President and the labor department find it appropriate to boast of gains. But productivity gains don’t benefit workers, as wages have remained stagnant or are dropping. Instead, productivity is manifested in profit, distributed to shareholders and taxed at a meager 15%. Had workers benefited, they would have been taxed at a higher rate.
   
    Globalization is the new economic driver and there is no stopping it. There are six billion disenfranchised people out there who aspire to lives that are safe, secure, rewarding and enlightened. It’s different now, because the activists are young and they know about the world. The Arab Spring is just the beginning of those stirrings. And again, progress will be slow and sporadic because there is no model and no unifying strategy. It begs for leadership. That leadership should occur here, in the United States. Were it to be seriously undertaken, the benefits would be huge. One aspect of globalization will be the shedding of the stranglehold that religions have had on individuals, communities, societies and nations over the millenia. The bastions are crumbling and the final state devolves into the individual’s sense of equilibrium between the part that copes with reality and the part that is spiritual,  humbled by the beauty and resilience of nature, immensity and majesty of the universe and the mystic powers that account for being here at all.

    Unfortunately the nation is well along on the road to an oligarchy where the rich and powerful hold the reins and American workers are an expendable commodity, since they are cheaply available in other nations around the world. History is littered with the fall of empires where excessive concentration of riches led to downfall. There is no case where it can be cited that concentration of wealth was a good thing. To remove any doubt about a takeover by the elite, here’s an example, cited by the authors: The sixteenth amendment, permitting the Federal Government to collect income taxes, was passed in 1913. In 1940 the tax code numbered thirty-eight pages. Today it numbers over 76,000 pages. It begs the questions: Who did this? Was it the product of committed legislators who detected faults in the original document and set out methodically to fix it? Or was it the product of numerous private interests, without a care that they were yanking the  country around, writing amendments to suit their own interests, and relying on bought politicians to stuff them unnoticed into must-pass legislation? There are many examples. One has only to examine the cozy relationship between corporations and the legislators via a massive lobbyist intrusion into the mechanics of government.  Close to home, for example, California representative Duncan Hunter Jr., like his father before him, is beloved by the military and the industries that support it for unwaveringly championing their causes.

    One wonders what was going on in the minds of the framers of the constitution. They were all skilled men with combinations of financial and political experience. But theirs was a nation of under three million people, less than the population of Connecticut. Could they possibly have thought that they were producing a document that would hold together a nation with a population two orders of magnitude greater? That is not likely as they knew from the start that they had produced an imperfect document. Only thirty-nine of the original fifty-five framers signed it. There was an immediate need for corrections and James Madison introduced seventeen potential amendments in the first Congress. They were eventually boiled down to ten, which comprise the Bill of Rights. At best they must have believed that they had produced a document with a strong core, but with elastic boundaries, susceptible to subversion, and that common sense in the citizenry and the government would combine to preserve its integrity. For that, hopefully, they believed the legislative and deliberative bodies of Congress, the Justice department and the Supreme Court would be adequate. They hoped for the best, and it is remarkable how well it has worked.

    The writers do not treat adequately the hoax that was foisted on the Americn people embodied in the argument that manufacturing is so yesterday - that this advanced nation is advancing into the service business, doing things like generating software and inventing new stuff. The trouble was that there was not that much employment opportunity in those venues. Fifty-year-old iron workers and furniture makers who have lost their jobs to China  are unlikely to become software specialists, and worse still, corporations soon discovered that they could outsource service jobs cheaper to places like India. So the entire premise disappeared like morning fog after sunrise.

     Across the population there really is not that much difference between conservatives, liberals and moderates. They face and cope with the same daily problems. Safey, security, comfortable housing, affordable medical care, ability to raise and provide a good education for their children and providing for retirement are major concerns. But powerful schemers see it profitable to split them, gain the allegiance of the side most likely to support their aims, and maneuver elections so that legislation is passed to favor their desires. All that is constitutionally permissible, but really stretches the boundaries of what the framers produced and intended, especially in the First Amendment.

         The authors dwell on internal machinations that work to the advantage of individuals who want to shape the nation to fit their specific ideologies. A notorious example discussed at some length is the extremely wealthy Koch family, which owns and operates numerous continental industries in the energy field. Fred Koch, founder of Koch industries, was also one of the founders of the John Birch Society in 1958,  headed by Robert C. Welch. Although Welch died in 1985, the society still has chapters in all fifty states. Its agenda includes promotion of anti-collectivism, limited government, personal freedom and dismantling of the Federal Reserve System. Two sons, David and Charles, inherited the Koch fortune. They were well schooled by the father and continued the Birch Society ideology with measures of their own, such as the funding of think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Society which publish papers that are supportive of the Koch brothers’ beliefs and aims to shape the nation to their liking. The brothers are heavily involved in elections, spending millions through organizations like Americans For Prosperity and Freedom Works to elect State and Federal legislators they can influence and manage. Such activities are unhelpful. They are potholes on the road to evolving  globalization, which is unstoppable.

    Finally, the writers are weak in their closing recommendations for “Restoration of the American Dream.” For one thing, the dream can only be restored within the context of globalization and the burgeoning attendant issue, which may become critical to survival: climate change.  Climate change can only be managed if the entire world is committed. It cannot be solved by a single nation, no matter how well its own situation is improved.  They are correct in stating that for four decades public policy has been driven by the elite, and that has led to the current dilemma. They are correct in calling for abandonment of “Free Trade” notions and instituting and enforcing “Fair Trade”practices regardless of damage to multinational corporations that are currently engaged in what can only be described as economic anarchy.  They are correct in assessment of requirements to revise the tax code, but they tread softly on the idea of heavily taxing the super-rich. This seems to coincide with President Obama’s astonishingly timid stand in this matter, saying “We are going to ask the rich to pay a little bit more.” Ask the rich? The correct stand should be “We are going to tell the rich they must pay more... a lot more.”

    Raising taxes on the rich isn’t going to solve the debt problem, but  instead of further exacerbation of the middle class, it will provide government funding to rebuild existing infrastructure, build new infrastructure, corral the globalization phenomenon and learn to guide it, fund sustainability technology for averting climate change and conserving resources, modernize education, and undertake other advancements that can only be done by the people together, with the government as the operational medium and strategic planner. A recovered middle class will solve the rest of the debt dilemma.

    What a ride it’s going to be.  If handled right, living can be safe, secure and even exhilarating far into the future. If we botch it, even the super-rich will know misery.


1. A version of this quote is in the novel “Forever Ulysses,” by C.P Rodocanachi. Viking Press, 1938.