[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.
____________________