Video: Wealth Inequality in America

The rise and intensity of socioeconomic inequality in the US seems to be getting more attention, and for good reason — as the following video shows, the problem is far worse and more consequential than most Americans realize.

For those concerned about the reliability of such claims, or looking for additional information, the sources are as follows:

• Mother Jones
• Dan Ariely
• ThinkProgress
• CNN Money

Of course, you’re also free to read my long list of posts on the subject. As you can tell, it’s a topic close to my heart (though honestly, even I didn’t realized how much I’d written about it over the past year).

As always, please share your thoughts and concerns. Even if I don’t get around to responding, rest assured that I do read every comment I receive.

A Timeline of the Iraq War

Unbeknowst to most Americans, today is the 10th anniversary of the launching of the Iraq War. In recognition of this sober and increasingly forgotten observance, ThinkProgress has published a great timeline of the Iraq War that recounts all of the details of this understated conflict from beginning to end (including its somber consequences).

It’s remarkable how far removed most of us are from that conflict, even a decade later. Even I’ve had to remind myself that it was going on, and technically still lingers in some form or another (as it likely will for some time). Of course, the same amnesia and apathy does not apply to the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who took part (or their families), and especially to the millions of Iraqis who have been killed, maimed, traumatized, and exiled by the subsequent breakdown in society. Needless to say, the social, economic, and political consequences will likely remain both sides of this conflict for generations (albeit in different ways and degrees).

But given that it’s a busy day at work, I’ll keep my own musings brief. Please feel free to share your own reactions, thoughts, and opinions. At the very least, try to (re)familiarize yourself with this dangerously misunderstood and forgotten war.

Poverty in a Consumer Society

One of the consequences of living in a consumer society is that those who cannot partake in consumption are made to feel bad about it. The person who can’t afford to dine out or buy the latest goods is inadvertently alienated or even humiliated. Essentially, an individual’s worth is judged by their socioeconomic status, which is determined by where they work and how much money they make. We conflate one’s personal value with their monetary one. As if poverty wasn’t difficult enough, one has to struggle with psychological consequences.

This may go a long way towards explaining the aristocratic mentality of most corporate executives. The “underlings” are given increasingly more work with less pay and benefits, while they enrich themselves with millions for doing a job they’re already well-paid for (even if their company is doing poorly). By virtue of not being executives, average workers aren’t invested in or treated as well. Thus, their value is based on what they do and their position in the corporate hierarchy.

Consider how our media and popular culture perpetuates this sentiment. For example, how often do sitcoms, movies, and other entertainment media portray poor characters as protagonists? Occasionally, there is some financial struggle thrown in as a plot point, but by and large being comfortably well-off is seen as a gold standard, even if it’s increasingly tenuous in real life.

Of course, all this is based on my own personal research and observation, so you’re free to weigh in with you own.

Is Socialism Becoming More Popular in America?

In the wake of the worst financial and economic crisis in many decades, it appears many Americans have warmed up to leftist ideas, at least if anecdotes and polls cited by the The Nation are to be believed:

A new Gallup Poll finds that socialism is now viewed positively by 39 percent of Americans, up from 36 percent in 2010. Among self-described liberals, socialism enjoyed a 62 percent positive rating, while 53 percent of Democrats and independent voters who lean Democratic gave socialism a thumb’s up.

Of course, this is something many conservatives wouldn’t bat an eyelash at: they’ve long argued that liberals in general are socialist sympathizers, not that this wouldn’t make many of them nervous. What’s more surprising is which group has seen the largest growth in socialist sympathies:

The most significant increases in sympathy for socialism over the past two years—since the last time Gallup polled on economic and ideological terms such as “socialism” and “capitalism”—have been among self-identified “conservatives” and “Republicans.”

In 2010, only 20 percent of conservatives viewed socialism favorably. Today, the number is 25 percent.That’s right: one-quarter of American conservatives view socialism favorably.

Among Republicans, the increase has been slightly more notable. In 2010, only 17 percent of self-identified Republicans had a positive view of socialism. Now, that number had increased to 23 percent. So if you meet four Republicans, one of them is harboring socialist sentiments.

Perhaps what’s more surprising is that, well, this trend shouldn’t be surprising, as presumably, socialism – or ideas similar to it – have a long history in America:

Socialism has deep America roots—going back to when Tom Paine used his final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, to outline a social-democratic model for establishing a just and equitable society. Socialist communes and political movements flourished in the United States during the first decades of the republic’s history, and the advocates for those movements found a home in the radical experiment that came to be known as the “Republican” Party.

Founded at Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854 by utopian socialists and militant abolitionists, the early Republican Party included many German-American immigrants who arrived in the United States after the European revolutions that stirred in 1848 were repressed. The man who issued the call for that meeting in Ripon, and who is to this day frequently identified as a founding figure for the Republican Party, was Alvan Earle Bovay, a veteran radical who had led militant movements for land reform that urged the poor to organize politically and “Vote Yourself a Farm.”

Among the first Republicans were many allies and associates of socialist causes, and even of Karl Marx. Among their number was Joseph Weydemeyer, a former Prussian Army officer who would continue to correspond with Marx as he rose through the ranks as a military officer during the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln, like most of the leading Republicans of his day had read Marx and Engels in the pages of the Horace Greeley’s New York Herald Tribune (for which the two men wrote for many years as European correspondents). The sixteenth president spoke often about the superiority of labor to capital and was highly critical of concentrated wealth. Toward the end of the Civil War, the White House accepted the congratulations of Marx and his fellow London Communists after Lincoln’s 1864 re-election.

Lincoln was no Marxist. But, like a good many of the initial leaders of the Republican Party, he had been exposed to the ideas of Marx and Engels in the Tribune. In fact, Lincoln chose as one of his closest White House aides (and eventually as his assistant secretary of war) Charles Dana, Marx’s long-time editor. Famously, Dana once declared, “Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.

Indeed, the US has long served as something of a petri dish for testing all sorts of political, social, and religious ideas – and for the formation of completely new ones. Being built from scratch, so to speak, this nation was subject to all sorts of ideas of what it should stand for and how it should be governed. A prevailing characteristic of our political culture has been this constant soul searching for what a trust and just America should look like.

And this is perfectly healthy, if not ideal to the founding principles of the country:

…Americans are less inclined to be troubled by mentions of socialism, or by socialist and social democratic ideas today than in the past—just as Americans are less inclined (according to a recent CNN poll) to be unsettled by the mention of Libertarianism  or by libertarian and libertarian-lite ideas. This is healthy. A republic is best served by differing ideas and ideals with regard to economic and social arrangements.

The question is, where will this increasingly polarized country go? Will there ever be a consensus? I think that eventually there will be, albeit after a long and hard slog. Thoughts?

What America Can Learn From Finland’s Education System

Yet again, there’s more attention heaped upon Finland’s impressive primary education system, this time from The Atlantic, which explores what factors makes the Nordic country so successful in educating its youth (and whether it’s applicable here).

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America’s school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what’s called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system’s teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. “There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master’s degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal’s responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: “Real winners do not compete.” It’s hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland’s success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg’s comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don’t exist in Finland.

“Here in America,” Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, “parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It’s the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same.”

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

* * *

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn’t a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland’s students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland — unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway — was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year — or even just the price of a house in a good public school district — and the other “99 percent” is painfully plain to see.

The question is, can this system be replicated to any degree in the United States, or is it too unique to Finland’s culture and society?

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation’s education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country’s school system than the nation’s size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland’s population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state — after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What’s more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country’s education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn’t rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

Why Won’t Businesses Hire?

Supposedly, it’s because the US business environment is unfriendly. Corporations want to place all the blame for our economic problems on the government. It is certainly true that the state has not been guiltless in this mess. But neither have business elites. Let us analyze the facts.

Contrary to popular belief, the United States still remains among the top ten countries in the world in terms of economic freedom, business friendliness, and competitiveness (sources include the Freedom of the World Index , the Index of Economic Freedom, the Ease of Doing Business Index, and the Global Competitiveness Report ; note that many of the countries that surpass us in these areas are what we would otherwise call “socialist” – they have higher wages, universal healthcare, more state intervention, and so on).

Yet companies are firing people, freezing wages, slashing benefits, and refusing to hire, citing the business climate as too unpredictable, unfriendly, and oppressive to facilitate investing in the economy. Really? If that is the case, how have companies managed to gather a total of $2 trillion in cash reserves, continue to pay their CEOs millions in bonuses, and consistently make profits throughout the recession (in some cases even breaking records)? By just about every measure, most businesses are clearly doing well.

The government has screwed a lot of things up, but it has little to do with business leaders deciding they want to pocket more money for themselves while pretending, despite all the evidence, that they can’t afford to do their part.

 

Why the Sikh Temple Shootings Aren’t Treated as Seriously

I’m sharing this excellent New Yorker article by Naunihal Singh in its entirety, for I think it’s spot on.

The media has treated the shootings in Oak Creek very differently from those that happened just two weeks earlier in Aurora. Only one network sent an anchor to report live from Oak Creek, and none of the networks gave the murders in Wisconsin the kind of extensive coverage that the Colorado shootings received. The print media also quickly lost interest, with the story slipping from the front page of the New York Times after Tuesday. If you get all your news from “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” you would have had no idea that anything had even happened on August 5th at all.

The tragic events in the Milwaukee suburb were also treated differently by political élites, many fewer of whom issued statements on the matter. While both Presidential candidates at least made public comments, neither visited, nor did they suspend campaigning in the state even for one day, as they did in Colorado. In fact, both candidates were in the vicinity this weekend and failed to appear. Obama hugged his children a little tighter after Aurora, but his remarks after Oak Creek referred to Sikhs as members of the “broader American family,” like some distant relatives. Romney unsurprisingly gaffed, referring on Tuesday to “the people who lost their lives at that sheik temple.” Because the shooting happened in Paul Ryan’s district, the Romney campaign delayed announcement of its Vice-Presidential choice until after Ryan could attend the funerals for the victims, but he did not speak at the service and has said surprisingly little about the incident.

As a result, the massacre in Oak Creek is treated as a tragedy for Sikhs in America rather than a tragedy for all Americans. Unlike Aurora, which prompted nationwide mourning, Oak Creek has had such a limited impact that a number of people walking by the New York City vigil for the dead on Wednesday were confused, some never having heard of the killings in the first place.

The two incidents were obviously different in important ways: Holmes shot more people, did so at the opening of a blockbuster film, and was captured alive. There were also the Olympics. However, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Oak Creek would have similarly dominated the news cycle if the shooter had been Muslim and the victims had been white churchgoers. Both the quantity and content of the coverage has been clearly shaped by the identities of the shooter and his victims.

The relative neglect of Oak Creek was not a foregone conclusion. Although the shooting took place at a gurdwara, or Sikh temple, the narrative of the incident contained enough archetypal elements to be compelling to all Americans. The murders took place at a house of worship on a Sunday. There was the heroic president of the congregation who, even though he was sixty-two, battled an armed attacker, sacrificing his own life. There were the children who sounded the alarm and joined fourteen women huddled in a tiny pantry for hours, listening to the agony of the wounded outside. There were the relatives at home, receiving texts and phone calls from loved ones. There were heroic police officers, a shootout, and the attacker’s death by self-inflicted gunshot.

There is also Wade Page himself, with his hate tattoos, photographs in front of swastikas, and his Southern Poverty Law Center dossier. Page so fits our stereotypes of white supremacists that, if he did not exist, it would have been necessary for Quentin Tarantino to invent him. Page appears to have hated blacks, Jews, Latinos, and probably everything else associated with modern multicultural America. Here is a figure whose malevolence should frighten all Americans, not just Sikhs, in the same way that Holmes should terrify all of us, not just those who watch movies at midnight.

Sadly, the media has ignored the universal elements of this story, distracted perhaps by the unfamiliar names and thick accents of the victims’ families. They present a narrative more reassuring to their viewers, one which rarely uses the word terrorism and which makes it clear that you have little to worry about if you’re not Sikh or Muslim. As a Sikh teaching at a Catholic university in the Midwest, I was both confused and offended by this framing. One need not be Pastor Niemöller to understand our shared loss, or to remember that a similar set of beliefs motivated Timothy McVeigh to kill a hundred and sixty-eight (mainly white) Americans in Oklahoma City.

A week later, post-Paul Ryan, Oak Creek has largely receded from public consciousness, along with the important policy issues it raises. There will be little debate about claims that the Department of Homeland Security has understaffed its analysis of domestic counterrorism in response to political pressure. There will also be little attention to the accusation that the military has repeatedly been willing to accept white supremacists in its ranks. Representative Peter King will continue to hold hearings about the threat posed to America by Islamic extremism while refusing to investigate domestic right-wing groups, even though right-wing groups are more worrisome by any systematic measure.

In the end, the events of Oak Creek are tragic on at least two levels. There is the tragedy inherent in the brutal murders, the heroic sacrifices, the anguished waiting, and the grief of relatives whose lives will never be the same. But there is also the larger one of our inability to understand this attack as an assault upon the American dream and therefore a threat to us all. The cost of this second tragedy is one that the entire nation will bear.

Indeed, as diverse and welcoming as our society can be, many people seem to have a difficult time connecting with certain groups that don’t comport with the “mainstream” American background. To be blunt, the Sikhs are non-white and non-Christian, and are thus subsequently seen as foreign “others.” It matters little that they’re integrated relatively well into their communities, and that they’re some of the most successful and enterprising people in this country.

Despite being a nation ostensibly united by ideas and dreams rather than ethnicity, faith, and the like, most “real” Americans can’t see minorities as being American as well.

Happy Birthday America

John Adams was quite resistant to the fourth of July being our Independence Day, since the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain technically occurred on July second, which was when the Second Continental Congress voted to approve a resolution of independence (which in turn was first suggested in June). That resolution, the Declaration of Independence, was publicly signed on the fourth, and since what occurred on July second was in private, the American people saw the fourth as the true day of independence.

Even more interesting: many historians believe that despite the claim of the Founding Fathers, the Declaration was actually signed nearly a month after its adoption, on August 2, 1776. Coincidentally, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – the only signers of the Declaration who would later serve as Presidents – died on the same day: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration.

Who Represents Us?

One wonders to what extent this is due to our own lack of effort and civic engagement?

How Americans View Christianity’s Affect on Society

Close to 80% of Americans identify as Christians of some form or another, and most of them are pretty devout. Given that Christianity is touted for its moral and ethical teachings, it should be expected that a society that is this overwhelmingly religious – more so than any other developed country – should see a positive impact in overall societal wellbeing. Wouldn’t Christians themselves no doubt expect this?

The survey above examined this very question. Produced by Grey Matter Research and Consulting, a private research organization, the report is called “What Difference Does Christianity Make? How People Feel the Christian Faith Really Impacts (or Doesn’t Impact) America.” The data is drawn from a demographically representative sample of 1,000US adults* who were asked how they feel the Christian faith impacts 16 different areas. The sample included Christians of different denominations, people of other faiths, and the nonreligious. Again, since most Americans, and thus most respondents, describe themselves as Christian, the results more or less show how our Christian society views the impact of its own teachings.

Needless to say, the answers are very interesting, considering that many Christians viewed their own faith as having little or no impact in many areas. From the report:

“Over half of all Americans (54%) believe the Christian faith really does not impact how people treat the environment. Almost half believe the faith has no impact on ethics in the business world (44%), participation in politics and voting (44%), the amount of substance abuse in society (43%), or differences of opinion being discussed in a civil manner (42%). Christianity is considered to lack any real impact in eight other areas by around one out of three Americans”

Even more fascinating is the complex view that different believers – as well as nonbelievers – have towards one another. The popular perception is that most Christians find their teachings to be effective and superior, while secular folks would strongly beg to differ. But a break down of the data muddles this black-and-white concept of religious versus nonreligious.

Consider that when asked about their religion’s affect on helping the less fortunate, Christians answered overwhelmingly (79%) that Christianity has a positive impact, which isn’t too surprising – Christians generally pride themselves on the charitable nature of their belief system.

However, atheist and agnostics were pretty much in agreement with them: 67% stated Christianity had a positive impact in this area. In fact, secular respondents gave Christianity a far more positive score on this question than did members of other religions  – by contrast, only 49% of non-Christian religious believers believed Christianity had a positive impact on helping the less fortunate.

But it’d interesting to note that for the most part, those identifying as “atheist/agnostic” had similar answers to people of “other (non-Christian) religions,” which may be because that both groups feel marginalized or ostracized by an overwhelmingly Christian society. Maybe there is some level for kinship too, since a lot of minorities tend to find common cause with each other. I’d be curious to know how this dynamic works out in other developed countries, in which non-Christians are a much larger force, while devout believers – especially conservative ones – are a relative minority.

Another interesting point to consider are the differences that exist within Christianity, namely between Protestants – consisting mostly of conservative Evangelicals and a smaller number of  liberal Mainline groups – and Roman Catholics, who are also divided politically. According to the data, while Protestants generally see Christianity as having a positive impact on everything, Catholics are more nuanced: if you look at the breakdown of the report, 41% of Catholics view Christianity as having a negative impact on sexuality, compared to only 27% of Protestants. This also puts a lot of Catholics at odds with their own Church.

In conclusion, it is clear that Christianity’s influence in society is more complex than most people think. It’s perceived as something of a mixed bag even by its own believers, having a positive effect only in certain social areas, and an outright negative effect on others (namely sexuality, tolerance, and our global image). More importantly for secularists, these results give lie to the frequent and simplistic claim that nonreligious people (especially self-identified atheists) viscerally reject and despise religion at every turn. While that may certainly be true of some of us (and is no different than how some Christians treat nonbelievers), it’s apparent that many atheists, along with non-Christians, give credit to Christianity in certain areas, especially in poverty alleviation (which owes itself more to the fact that Christian churches have an organized and well-established structure, as well as a broader belief base, through which to give aid). Furthermore, religious and nonreligious people alike didn’t differ in their answers all that much, even agreeing that religion had no impact one way or the other in many areas.

So as with most social and ideological phenomenon, there is far more complexity and nuance than meets the eye.

*In every post I’ve made in which poll data is referenced, someone inevitably brings up the point that only a small number of people are questioned, and thus the results should not be seen as representative of the population as a whole. However, that is why the sample is designed to represent society’s demographics as closely as possible. Given that we cannot ask these questions on the census, which is the only poll of its kind to include everyone in the country, studies like these are the closest we have to figuring out what the country believes. I’m not saying it’s 100% definitive, but it shouldn’t be reflexively dismissed either, unless you’re willing to disbelieve any and all statistical data (which a lot of people do anyway, so in that case disregard this post).