[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 27, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15-S16]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        ARTICLE BY ROBERT REICH

  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article 
in this past Sunday's New York Times magazine, ``When Naptime Is Over, 
The placid public mood is an illusion. Real Issues rumble beneath the 
calm and could soon send a wake-up call,'' by Robert Reich, former 
Secretary of Labor, be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows;

           [From the New York Times Magazine, Jan. 25, 1998]

                     Whatever Happened to Politics?

                          (By Robert B. Reich)

       There's no longer any political news, a reporter friend 
     confided recently, explaining why ``human interest'' stories 
     were oozing like syrup across his newspaper's front pages. 
     We're in the Bland Decade now, a time when citizens march on 
     Washington not to affect politics but to vow they'll be 
     better people and when politicians speak out mainly to urge 
     niceness: volunteer your time, enter into dialogues on race, 
     hire someone off welfare, please. Apparently we need little 
     more than charity, moral uplift and perhaps a modest program 
     or two. Politics is dead, or so it seems.
       The easiest explanation for this torpor is that the nation 
     is fat, like an overstuffed bear starting hibernation. It's 
     no longer the economy, stupid. Six years ago, a prolonged 
     recession hurt white-collar workers, giving some urgency to 
     the politics of ``change.'' Prosperity, though, is a powerful 
     sedative. Forget politics for now, we seem to be saying. 
     Let's compare stock portfolios, banter about culture and 
     identity and tut-tut over problems decades hence, like an 
     insolvent Social Security trust fund or excessive greenhouse 
     gases.
       The great economic contests have been won. Communism 
     vanished before it was even vanquished. The Japanese 
     competitive threat is now a sorry heap of bad debt. European 
     welfare states heave under double-digit unemployment. And 
     here in the land of plenty we've never had it so good. Wealth 
     is exploding, unemployment is at a 24-year low, inflation is 
     quiescent (the Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan 
     Greenspan, publicly raised concerns about deflation), the 
     stock market is riding high. American capitalism is the envy 
     of the world.
       But look more closely and the easy explanation falls short. 
     Most Americans don't have it so good. They have jobs, but 
     most wages and benefits are stuck or continue to drop. Wealth 
     has exploded at the top, but the wages of people in the 
     bottom half are lower today in terms of purchasing power than 
     they were in 1989, before the last recession. This is in 
     sharp contrast to every previous recovery in the postwar 
     period. Corporate downsizing and mass layoffs are still 
     the order of the day, which partly explains why so few 
     workers demand raises in this tight labor market. They'd 
     rather keep their jobs.
       The reality is that Wall Street's advance hasn't been 
     widely shared. The richest 1 percent hold more than 35 
     percent of the nation's wealth. The typical middle-class 
     family has no more than $7,000 in stocks and $12,500 in 
     mutual funds, according to a 1995 survey by the Federal 
     Reserve and the Treasury Department. Even the recent market 
     surge isn't likely to have changed this very much, given what 
     has happened to wages.
       Whatever savings Americans do have are imperiled by 
     hospital bills. A growing portion of the public lacks health 
     insurance--in 1989, 33 million Americans under age 65 were 
     without it; by 1996, 41.3 million. (The President's proposal 
     to extend Medicare coverage to early retirees and displaced 
     workers as young as 55, which would be the largest expansion 
     in 25 years, is expected to add only 300,000 to the rolls.)
       Despite the boom, inequality has widened. The nation's 
     poverty rate is slightly higher than it was before the last 
     recession. In 1989, 12.6 million, or 19.6 percent, of the 
     nation's children lived in poverty; now it's 14.5 million, or 
     20.5 percent. The Conference of Mayors reports rising demand 
     for food and shelter among the homeless. And the successes of 
     the civil rights movement notwithstanding, today's urban 
     schools are more racially segregated than in the 1980's.
       So why, then, the prevailing political somnolence? 
     Traditional politics has been all about who's gaining and 
     who's losing. Yet it has lately become unfashionable, indeed 
     in poor taste, to notice such things. In the present upbeat 
     climate, downbeat data are slightly subversive. It is 
     necessary to minimize all worry about the economy lest the 
     public lose confidence, a perfect tautology. Bankers and 
     business leaders have become cheerleaders in the nationwide 
     pep rally. Onward! Upward!
       Recent polls show, accordingly, high rates of consumer 
     confidence. A record 40 percent of consumers queried in the 
     Conference Board's December survey called jobs ``plentiful,'' 
     although, tellingly, only 28 percent expected their own wages 
     to rise. These are the ones who have heard the distant roar 
     of surging wealth and assume that the rising tide will lift 
     them, too--which may explain the record level of consumer 
     debt. Personal bankruptcies are also at a record high.
       Will politics revive when the economic tide ebbs and 
     hardships appear like shipwrecks on the tidal flats? Not 
     necessarily. Even in 1992, with the nation mired in 
     recession, political engagement was grudging. Americans 
     wanted ``change'' to get the economy moving again. But there 
     was no sense of moral urgency. It was simply time to replace 
     old management with new. Most Americans had long before 
     stopped believing in government as a force for much good 
     in their lives.
       Some people will say we don't need a vital politics to be a 
     vital society. We can expand the circle of prosperity through 
     grass-roots moral activism, spearheaded by community groups, 
     socially responsible businesses, not-for-profits, religious 
     organizations and compassionate individuals--perhaps all 
     deftly linked by fax and modem, a ``virtual'' social 
     movement. Commentators rightly stress the importance of such 
     civic engagement. But they make a serious mistake labeling it 
     as an alternative to politics. Throughout our history, civic 
     activism has been the precursor, and the propellant, of 
     political movements.
       Almost a century ago, American politics appeared similarly 
     listless despite growing social problems. As today, the 
     economy was booming, jobs were plentiful and vast fortunes 
     were being accumulated. Yet real wages had stopped growing, 
     and the gulf between rich and poor was widening into a chasm. 
     New technologies (steam engines, railway locomotives, the 
     telephones, steam turbines, electricity) were transforming 
     the nation, pulling families off the farms and immigrants 
     from aboard and depositing many into fetid slums. Wall Street 
     magnates were consolidating their empires. Government was 
     effectively bought by large corporations, and the broad 
     public was deeply cynical. William McKinley won re-election--
     legened has it, on a pledge to ``stand pat''--and as the 
     century closed, the nation seemed politically comatose.
       Within three years, however, there was an outburst of 
     reform: muckrakers like Lincoln

[[Page S16]]

     Steffens and Ida Tarbell exposed corruption, and the middle 
     class demanded fundamental change; small businessmen railed 
     at monopolies; Wisconsin's crusading Governor, Robert La 
     Follette, enacted legislation regulating health and safety in 
     factories; Oregon limited the hours of work for women (no 
     more than 10 per day); Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley's 
     energetic Vice President who took over after McKinley was 
     assassinated, set out to bust the trusts; suffragists 
     marched; campaigns were organized for pure food and drug 
     laws, workers' compensation and a minimum wage. Politics 
     gained new life and meaning.
       What happened? Indignation, which had been rising steadily, 
     suddenly burst out and flooded the country. Citizens were 
     already active at the local level, as they are today. Common 
     morality simply couldn't abide the way things were going. Yet 
     instead of opting for revolution or radical change, Americans 
     preferred to spread the benefits of the emerging industrial 
     economy, thereby saving capitalism from its own excesses.
       Another foreshadowing occurred in the placid Eisenhower 
     era. The overall economy was doing nicely  then as well, even 
     though its benefits had not reached the rural poor, many 
     of whom were black. Politics had grown inert. Ike golfed. 
     In 1954, the Supreme Court decided that separate schools 
     were not equal. In 1957, Eisenhower dispatched Federal 
     troops to Little Rock's Central High School. But who could 
     have predicted that within a few years the civil rights 
     movement would have remolded American politics with the 
     Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 
     1965?
       The next revival of American politics can be expected to 
     follow a similar course. The current economic boom has 
     bypassed too many; the gap between winners and losers has 
     grown too wide. Fortunately, there is a common morality at 
     the heart of this capitalist democracy that ultimately keeps 
     us on track and keeps us together. Glimpses of it can be had 
     even in these languid times. For example, a majority of 
     Americans supported last year's increase in the minimum wage 
     to $5.15, although only a tiny fraction stood to benefit. It 
     was a matter of simple fairness. Or consider the broadscale 
     indignation stirred up by revelations of garment sweatshops.
       We got another glimpse this summer, when a sudden 
     groundswell of support forced a skinflint Congress to extend 
     health care to millions of children. And a majority of 
     Americans supported the United Parcel Service strikers, not 
     because the public is particularly fond of organized labor 
     but because it seemed unfair for U.P.S. to pay its part-time 
     work force so little.
       Recall also the firestorm when, almost exactly two years 
     ago, AT&T announced it was firing some 40,000 employees and 
     then gave the boss stock options that raised his total 
     compensation to $16 million, from $6.7 million. Recall, by 
     contrast, the celebration of Aaron Feuerstein, the owner of 
     Malden Mills in Lawrence, Mass., who, after his synthetic-
     fleece business burned to the ground, assured his employees 
     that he'd stick by them until the factory was rebuilt.
       The pressure keeps rising. A final glimpse came just before 
     the holidays, when the public signaled unease about giving 
     the President ``fast track'' authority to whisk trade 
     treaties through Congress without amendment and most members 
     of the House of Representatives, including many Republicans, 
     refused to support it. That may be a mistake. Trade is good 
     for America. But the public's negative reaction shouldn't be 
     seen as a repudiation of free trade. It was, at bottom, a 
     matter of fairness: trade hurts some people, and we haven't 
     made adequate provision for the losers.
       Trade may, in fact, be the precipitating issue this time 
     around. The economic implosion in East Asia will continue to 
     reverberate here, as bahts, won, rupiahs, ringgit and yen 
     drop in value relative to dollars--one of the biggest price-
     cutting contests in world history. American consumers will 
     have the benefit of bargain-basement sales, but the cheap 
     imports will put additional downward pressure on the wages of 
     lower-skilled Americans. The tumult also will crimp profits 
     of American companies that export to the region, causing more 
     layoffs here. If the Asian flue turns more deadly, the 
     infection here will be all the worse. However resolved, 
     the Asian crisis portends larger jolts, as the global 
     economy absorbs the surging output of 1.2 billion 
     Chinese--more than a fifth of the world's population. When 
     the current recovery ends, the underlying reality will be 
     starkly evident and the political debate surrounding trade 
     will intensify.
       To an extent, that debate has already begun. The tension 
     between economic nationalism and globalism is emerging as one 
     of the most significant fissures in American politics, and it 
     runs through both parties--as shown by the current dispute 
     over financing for the International Monetary Fund.
       But it would be unfortunate indeed if the revival of 
     American politics were to turn on the question of whether the 
     nation should engage in more or less commerce with the rest 
     of the world. The underlying choice is larger, more important 
     and more subtle: ultimately, we must decide whether we want 
     to slow the pace of globalization or else take bold steps to 
     help today's losers share in the benefits of the new economy. 
     I cannot predict the outcome of that great debate to come, 
     but I can express a clear preference. It is that we expand 
     the circle of prosperity and that we do so on a scale that 
     matches the challenge.
       A new nationalism founded on shared prosperity might, for 
     example, support ``re-employment insurance'' that would 
     enable people who lose their jobs to move to new ones with 
     far less disruption and pain than is the norm today. (If the 
     new job paid less, half the difference should be offset for a 
     year by a wage subsidy.)
       In that spirit, we could enlarge and expand the earned-
     income tax credit--a reverse income tax that makes work pay 
     if you're at or near the bottom. We could bring a larger 
     portion of the next generation into the circle of prosperity 
     by rebuilding decaying schools and helping states equalize 
     spending between rich and poor school districts. And we would 
     make sure that everyone has access to adequate health care 
     and child care.
       To finance all of this--and move beyond the small, feel-
     good programs that lack adequate scale to make much of a 
     difference--we could simply reverse the current trend in 
     public finance and adopt a truly progressive tax system 
     (including payroll taxes).
       None of this will come easily or without a fight. But in 
     the end, the nation will be stronger and better for bringing 
     everyone, or nearly everyone, along. Future historians 
     looking back on the Bland Decade will conclude that, as 
     before, American politics wasn't really dead. It was only 
     caught napping.

  Mr. WELLSTONE. I thank the Chair.
  It is really a superb article.

                          ____________________