Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
In my Social Work career I spent 37 years working primarily with people in poverty, whether from Race, ethnicity, economic situations, criminal history and/or addiction. In my Psychotherapy practice (part time) my patients were middle to upper class economically and yet as the years have passed my memory of them has faded. Still remaining though, burned into my memory, are the lives of those I met who lived in poverty. We see in this current Presidential election a sharp contrast between the philosophies of the two candidates. One believing in lowering peoples expectations for and the receipt of, what he deems “entitlements”. The other who defends what he calls self-funded programs and championing the Federal Government’s intervention to make health care more accessible. There is, however, one economic/social area where both candidates fully agree and this agreement represents exactly what is wrong with our country.
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, by their words and deeds, both believe fervently in the notion of the “American Dream”. If we look at the history of their lives we can understand how from their perspective, their lives have typified the “America Dream”. Romney was born wealthy, went to the best schools and came from a family that was highly prominent in his community. Obama, though born the child of an unwed mother, had the benefit of her intelligence, in addition to Maternal Grandparents who were relatively well to do. Their lives, though having different arcs, led them both to the point where they are competing for the highest office in the land. Neither man is lying when they extol America as the world’s shining light of opportunity for all, because their own lives bear that out. To me the problem is that reality shows that they are wrong in their belief and in their clinging to the myth of the “American Dream”, they ignore the most important issue of our time, American inequality of opportunity.
This week I read an article by Prof. James Karabel, of the UC Berkeley. Its title was: Grand Illusion: Mobility, Equality and the American Dream. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerome-karabel/grand-illusion-mobility-inequality-and-the-american-dream_b_1933238.html I believe my many years working both on the front lines of poverty and as an executive in most areas of Social Services I qualify too as an expert on poverty and its scarring effect on people. Then too in my experiences as a psychotherapist I’ve learned something about the human psyche and how it can be negatively affected. So in my own mind at least I believe that I am enough of an expert to state categorically that the professor knows what he is talking about and that I completely agree with him. Professor Karabel writes:
“[T]his cherished view of America is now a myth. The reality is in fact quite the opposite: Family origins matter more in the United States in determining where one ends up in life compared to other wealthy democratic countries. This is a recent development. Studies of social mobility as far back as the 1950s and 1960s showed that rates of movement in the United States were generally comparable to other developed countries. This finding itself challenged the longstanding image of America as exceptionally open, but it is a far cry from today, when the United States rates at or near the bottom in comparative studies of social mobility.
To take just two examples, a study by Jo Blanden and colleagues at the London School of Economics found that a father’s income was a better predictor of a son’s income in the United States than in seven other countries, including Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. And a review article by Miles Corak at the University of Ottawa, based on 50 studies of nine countries, found the United States tied with the United Kingdom as having the least social mobility, trailing not only Norway and Denmark but France, Germany, and Canada.”
There are many studies that back Professor Karabel’s thesis. One such from the moderate Pew Research Center states the following in its summary of findings regarding the vitality of the “American Dream”. http://www.pewstates.org/research/reports/pursuing-the-american-dream-85899403228
“ Those born at the top and bottom of the income ladder are likely to stay there as adults. More than 40 percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile of the family income ladder remain stuck there as adults, and 70 percent remain below the middle.
African Americans are more likely to be stuck at the bottom and fall from the middle of the economic ladder across a generation.
The renowned Brookings Institution, which is economically “Centrist” also, did a study on upward mobility in America, which was intertwined with how the reality affected the “American Dream” meme. In it they examined all sources including the Pew Report cited above. Among the Brookings conclusions were:
“What is clear is that in at least one regard American mobility is exceptional: not in terms of downward mobility from the middle or from the top, and not in terms of upward mobility from the middle — rather, where we stand out is in our limited upward mobility from the bottom. And in particular, it’s American men who fare worse than their counterparts in other countries.[16] One study compared the United States with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom. It found that in each country, whether looking at sons or at daughters, 23 to 30 percent of children whose fathers were in the bottom fifth of earnings remained in the bottom fifth themselves as adults — except in the United States, where 42 percent of sons remained there.” http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2011/11/09-economic-mobility-winship
A New York Times article in January 2012 by Jason DeParle titled: “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs” examined the research available and also noted that even many o the Right, like Rick Santorum, were beginning to express concern for this American decline of “Upward Mobility”:
“Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion. But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.”
“One reason for the mobility gap may be the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind. Another may be the unusually large premiums that American employers pay for college degrees. Since children generally follow their parents’ educational trajectory, that premium increases the importance of family background and stymies people with less schooling.
At least five large studies in recent years have found the United States to be less mobile than comparable nations. A project led by Markus Jantti, an economist at a Swedish university, found that 42 percent of American men raised in the bottom fifth of incomes stay there as adults. That shows a level of persistent disadvantage much higher than in Denmark (25 percent) and Britain (30 percent) — a country famous for its class constraints. Meanwhile, just 8 percent of American men at the bottom rose to the top fifth. That compares with 12 percent of the British and 14 percent of the Danes.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
At the end of this piece I’ll offer more proof and studies on the desperate state of the “American Dream”, but I think what I’ve presented so far makes the case that the “American Dream” has become more myth than reality. Now I’d like to examine what I think about all of this and why it is mostly absent from the discussions of the issues in this coming election.
Thinking about the breadth of American History and the fact that it is intertwined with racial, ethnic and economic strife throughout, it is amazing that this country, made up of so many ethnicities and races, has been as stable as it has been when compared to other industrialized nations. I contend that this is because a vast majority of the population has bought into the myth of the “American Dream”. This myth where every child can grow up to be famous, rich and President has lowered the discontent of those born on, or near the bottom and filled them with the demonstrably false presence that rising from a lower caste social state can be done only if they try harder. While on the anecdotal level this is true in that many instances can be found of the “rags to riches” story, on the statistical level the truth is that it is a very rare occurrence. As the studies show if you are born at, or near the bottom you tend to remain there.
When “rags to riches” stories occur it is simply because a given individual has been born with superior abilities and/or has had extraordinary luck. As I have mentioned many times on the Turley blog, the Horatio Alger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger,_Jr. the 19th Century novelist, provided much propaganda for the concept of the “American Dream”, during America’s “Gilded Age” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilded_Age , the great industrial and economic spurt that followed the Civil War and lasted until the end of the 19th Century. Alger’s books contained one overarching theme: The poor boy that with hard work and “pluck” rose from abject poverty to enormous wealth. The fallacy was that in every one of his many novels, the “poor boy” was taken in hand by a wealthy gentleman, who helped his rise and even offered his daughter’s hand in marriage. Nevertheless, to a population made up of the rural poor moving from farms to factory work and of immigrants freeing the chains of European and Asian autocracy, these books had a tremendous influence on their aspirations.
We must understand that after the Civil War killed 600,000 and maimed so many more there were plenty of jobs available during this country’s rise into the Industrial Revolution. Also comparatively at that time the living conditions for most in other countries were characterized by rigid class systems and oppressive governance enforcing the class distinctions. As the 19th Century drew to a close the “American Dream” became entwined in the fabric of American mythology and simultaneously fostered the concept of “American Exceptionalism” that was the main foreign policy feature of “Progressivism”
At this point the “Right” and the “Left” of this country established their main point of agreement, which has lasted until this day. Both sides of the political spectrum accepted the idea that America was a shining land of opportunity for all and exceptional in its system. By both sides of course I’m talking about almost all of the politicians in both parties, in the two party system, which became rigid after Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose Party” run in 1908. This is ot to say that there weren’t many dissidents to the “American Dream” meme, but those dissidents were marginalized in the discussion by the press and the developing media.
So here we are today with evidence that the “American Dream” is in shambles and yet the Presidential Candidates and the majority of people supporting both parties still mouth the myth of America as the land of the greatest opportunity for all. This is destructive, not only because it isn’t rue, but because it prevents any real discussion of the problems we face in this country if we are to begin to return to its purported ideals of opportunity for all. How many of you reading this can say that your own lives were not touched by privilege of some sort? The “American Dream” is in my opinion a chimerical myth, with little substance behind it. Rising from importune circumstance though has always been the lot of humanity, though in our distant past it did depend initially on brawn and/or brains. What we are seeing in America today is the diminution of opportunity and the collapse of our once robust middle class. That as a nation we are so inculcated with this myths that even if a politician had the temerity to tell the truth about the eroding “American Dream” she/he would find their career buried under opprobrium.
I write this because of my anger at the continuing failure of this country to address the real problems endemic in preventing our society from being one of relatively equal opportunity for all. “All men are created equal” has never meant that there aren’t some among us who have greater ability than others. To me it has always meant that most people should at least have a fairly equal chance to achieve their aspirations dependent on their innate abilities. Is that too much to ask?
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
NOTE: The picture used up front is of Horatio Alger, Jr. Those who have read my writing here will see that this is a continuing concern of mine and consists of much of what I have written. I would also recommend Gene Howington’s Propaganda series as providing a view of how this issue continues to be hidden from our political debate. Some links backing my premise:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/17/social-immobility-climbin_n_501788.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/class-mobility_b_1676931.html
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/29/153918852/on-the-economic-ladder-rungs-move-further-apart
http://jonathanturley.org/?s=Gene+Howington
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/09/30/portents-of-the-new-feudalism/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/09/29/the-nfl-and-whats-wrong-with-america/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/07/07/mythology-and-the-new-feudalism/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/10/what-motivates-the-1/
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/07/americas-transcendent-issue/
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/12/18/forget-wall-street-occupy-corporate-boardrooms/
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/08/20/jobless-in-georgia/
The answer is: evidence.
glenn 1, October 6, 2012 at 4:33 pm
What is the difference between “American Trance” and “American Dream”?
bill.
wake up. why do you come to a site like this if your mind is that malignant
.
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-radioactive-louis-martino-taylor-443/
i feel sorry for you.
Jim,
To protect yourself against all that spraying in your neighborhood, why not just war a tinfoil hat and fuhgeddaboudit.
you know when i was a boy growing up in the sixties i knew it was a mans world and if you break the law you go to jail. now i have seen it deteriorate into still a mans world but now you won’t go to jail if you’re caught.
it is a more corrupt world and there is no rule of law anymore unless you are brown skinned.
the young are optimistic only because they know the gloves are off and anything goes.
women are far more objectified as a matter of course and it seems to be a accepted reality.
the world has devolved and while i wake up everyday a optimist, i go to bed a cynic.
hey glenn, people don’t respond to “ask what you can do for your country” bs anymore because while myself and my peers as well as those progressives who came before were campaigning in american towns and cities for a better world, the defense department was walking before us spraying the same neighborhoods with radioactive and chemical materials destroying peoples lives.
but it’s getting late in the day.
A bunch of pointed headed college edumacted folks talking together agreeing on something. WOW. It, of course, is total and complete garbage. All those millions of folks who came here from poverty, from Europe, never helped create the illusion of the American Dream. It never happened. It isn’t happening today with today’s immigrants. Sometimes when you deal with college edumcated folks I wonder if the more edumcation you put into their heads the more common sense comes out the other side. It is unbelievable the total and complete lack of common sense this article lacks. It is amazing, just amazing.
The level of poverty in America has stayed almost EXACTLY the same for 50 years. Why are most people in poverty today? Just think? Take those $70,000 to $120,000 degrees and think? Dropping out of school? Unwed mothers? Teenage Pg? No way right? No let’s look deeper.
The American Dream really isn’t happening today, no way. My father the WWII vet with the 3rd grade edumcation and my mother both lived thru the depression. They somehow raised 7 children in below middle class living. Sometimes well below. ALL their 7 children (some of which didn’t go to college) became more successful than them. ALL of their children’s children, except 1, has become more successful than their children, but NO there American Dream is dead. It doesn’t happen anymore. Just about every person I worked with as a firefighter had children that are MORE successful than they are. This is even after a very tough economic time.
I take it the millions of folks who dream of coming to America don’t believe in the American Dream either. You know growing up as a good, old fashioned, Saul Alinsky liberal in the 1960’s I had a dream of a better America and fought for it. What amazes me today is how negative liberals are about American life. It is even more disheartening about how liberals and too many Democrats are so negative about the American Dream and people doing things for THEMSELVES and creating their own wealth. The only answer ANY liberal and Democrat seems to have for any problem is to look to Gov’t for everything.
Whatever happened to the Democratic Party I grew up with? Whatever happened to the Party that use to ask – “Ask NOT what your Country can do for you. Ask what YOU CAN DO for your Country.” What happened to the party of personal responsibility and individual freedoms? What happened to the party of – you will succeed of if you work hard enough, you can do anything? It seems to have become the Party of Ask the Federal Gov’t for Everything.
THERE’S NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN O and R..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_DztEoQglM
If you want a difference, see this:
Swathmoremom, My immigrant Uncle Charlie, who started as a janitor in a factory and earned his engineering degree working for GM would always say to me, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” He was right.
I am of the opinion that the Koch Brothers and their ilk are actually communist agents. Their actual goal is to make conditions for working people so awful while they wield their wealth to crush any hope of improvement and in ostentatious displays of over excess. The end result, once the morans who are supporting it at the ballot box wake up to what is being done to us will be violent revolution. Revolution because they will be denied any non-violent options. Since they claim communism is the opposite of what they are the revolution will decided that must be the correct solution.
If that is not their goal then they are incredibly short-sighted to the point of being suicidal because that is the direction they are marching us.
Well done Mike. It is sad, but so true. This fact is evidence why the Koch Brothers are spending so many millions to keep the poor and the middle class down.
Mike,
One of the things I find tragic is the members of the middle class who are slipping into poverty.
Here’s an interesting article from Rolling Stone:
The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class
They had good, stable jobs – until the recession hit. Now they’re living out of their cars in parking lots.
By Jeff Tietz
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-sharp-sudden-decline-of-americas-middle-class-20120622
Excerpt;
Every night around nine, Janis Adkins falls asleep in the back of her Toyota Sienna van in a church parking lot at the edge of Santa Barbara, California. On the van’s roof is a black Yakima SpaceBooster, full of previous-life belongings like a snorkel and fins and camping gear. Adkins, who is 56 years old, parks the van at the lot’s remotest corner, aligning its side with a row of dense, shading avocado trees. The trees provide privacy, but they are also useful because she can pick their fallen fruit, and she doesn’t always have enough to eat. Despite a continuous, two-year job search, she remains without dependable work. She says she doesn’t need to eat much – if she gets a decent hot meal in the morning, she can get by for the rest of the day on a piece of fruit or bulk-purchased almonds – but food stamps supply only a fraction of her nutritional needs, so foraging opportunities are welcome.
Prior to the Great Recession, Adkins owned and ran a successful plant nursery in Moab, Utah. At its peak, it was grossing $300,000 a year. She had never before been unemployed – she’d worked for 40 years, through three major recessions. During her first year of unemployment, in 2010, she wrote three or four cover letters a day, five days a week. Now, to keep her mind occupied when she’s not looking for work or doing odd jobs, she volunteers at an animal shelter called the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. (“I always ask for the most physically hard jobs just to get out my frustration,” she says.) She has permission to pick fruit directly from the branches of the shelter’s orange and avocado trees. Another benefit is that when she scrambles eggs to hand-feed wounded seabirds, she can surreptitiously make a dish for herself.
By the time Adkins goes to bed – early, because she has to get up soon after sunrise, before parishioners or church employees arrive – the four other people who overnight in the lot have usually settled in: a single mother who lives in a van with her two teenage children and keeps assiduously to herself, and a wrathful, mentally unstable woman in an old Mercedes sedan whom Adkins avoids. By mutual unspoken agreement, the three women park in the same spots every night, keeping a minimum distance from each other. When you live in your car in a parking lot, you value any reliable area of enclosing stillness. “You get very territorial,” Adkins says.
It certainly is difficult to achieve these days. A certain amount of luck, hard work and a very high IQ might be the ticket. I am thinking of the Castro brothers.
kaysieverding,
October 6, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Do you think it is different in states such as Massachusetts where there are a lot of private schools versus states such as Wisconsin where most people go to public universities?
*****
We have excellent public colleges, universities, and community colleges in Massachusetts. Many young residents of this state attend them. I graduated from a state college–as did many of my friends, two of my nieces, most of my student teachers, and my son-in-law. There’s a lot of students who attend private colleges and universities in Massachusetts who come from out of state
The saddest thing seeing Dredd’s?, Genes and ID’s comments is this is a tale that practically writes itself since there is so much proof out there. Yet the majority of the people still don’t know it’s true.
oops …
corrected link: (The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy). You can download the forbidden CiteGroup memos quoted from in my comment above.
The elite 1% certainly know what Mike S has written is true.
The following comes from “The Plutonomy Memos” written by professional CitiGroup investment operatives to their 1% clientele:
(The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy). That memo is verbotten but there are copies of it available for download.
A very recent study by a university shows that the “America” in the dream is no longer there, because the dream has moved offshore and has become a web of a kind that is not generally considered to be real.
A nightmare is a more apt description now.
“What is clear is that in at least one regard American mobility is exceptional: not in terms of downward mobility from the middle or from the top, and not in terms of upward mobility from the middle — rather, where we stand out is in our limited upward mobility from the bottom.”
The essence of “being kept down by the man” which is increasingly becoming the true story of America.
How would Alexander Hamilton have fared today?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNFf7nMIGnE
Not very well, I’m afraid.
Wow, lot’s to discuss. The main theme is a given truth although Amdricans believe otherwise. Here some wise distinguish between jämnställdher=equal opportunity and jämnlikhet=equality.
I will mention my view that we did not have a really burgeoning middle class until after the second WW, when the corporatists discovered the advantages of continuous “war-like” conditions and the advantage of a consuming middle class.
The middle class is being milked to extinction, along with the lower 47 percent.
So the middle class had on economic base, I believe.
It was created and now will be made serfs, educated, qualified, ambitious: but equivalent to computer driven machines or the supervisors to oversee the multitude of workers in agricultural maxi entities in the 1920s in Sweden. In NC we had small leasers of tobacc land, sharecroppers. In Sweden, all were paid in goods and moved once a year if they wished. Serfs, but not bound to the land.
What do the one percent contingent envision now.
I don’t think that either Prez candidate believes in the myth. Just necessary BS to keep the proles quiet. Like heaven to the Christians. BS is useful.
Great work, MikeS.
Do you think it is different in states such as Massachusetts where there are a lot of private schools versus states such as Wisconsin where most people go to public universities?
“Romney was born wealthy, went to the best schools and came from a family that was highly prominent in his community. Obama, though born the child of an unwed mother, had the benefit of her intelligence, in addition to Maternal Grandparents who were relatively well to do.”
What was the Romney family net worth when young Mitt was born?
Obama was born to an unwed mother? That’s news to the rest of us. The story is that she was married on February 2, 1961.