[Vision2020] Bitter Politics of Envy?

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>
 Reprints<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/opinion/blow-bitter-politics-of-envy.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212&pagewanted=print#>


------------------------------
January 13, 2012
Bitter Politics of Envy? By CHARLES M. BLOW

You’re just jealous. At least that’s how Mitt Romney sees it. The
millionaire who posed for a
picture<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/picture-of-the-day-mitt-romneys-money-shot/246658/>with
the boys at Bain Capital with the long green clinched between their
teeth and poking out of their collars and jackets now says that people who
question what he did there, and what rich people do now, are just green
with envy.

In his New Hampshire victory speech on Tuesday, Romney lambasted his
Republican opponents (who have raised real issues about his role at the
private equity firm Bain Capital) for following the lead of President
Obama, whom he described as a leader who divides us “with the bitter
politics of envy<http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-victorious-romney-warns-against-bitter-politics-of-envy-20120110,0,5706450.story>.”


The next day on “Today” on NBC, Romney defended the statement, rejecting
the notion that there were questions about Wall Street behavior, saying the
whole discussion was about class warfare. He even went so far as to suggest
that such talk shouldn’t even be openly entertained. When the interviewer
asked, “Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth
without it being seen as envy, though?” Romney responded, “I think it’s
fine to talk about those things in quiet
rooms<http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/romney-slams-foes-as-practicing-politics-of-envy.php>and
discussions about tax policy and the like.”

In quiet rooms? That’s the problem. Too many have been too quiet for too
long. And, on this point, we must applaud the efforts of the Occupy Wall
Street movement. It took income inequality and corporate responsibility out
of the shadows and into the streets.

A report released on Wednesday by the Pew Research Center found that about
two-thirds of Americans now perceive a strong conflict between the rich and
poor in this country. That was up 19 percentage points from 2009.

As The New York Times pointed
out<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/us/more-conflict-seen-between-rich-and-poor-survey-finds.html>in
regard to the report, “conflict between rich and poor now eclipses
racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the
greatest source of tension in American society.”

And this has nothing to do with envy and everything to do with fairness.

Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the Senate seat that Romney ran
for in 1994 and didn’t get, probably rebuts this myth of class warfare best
by reframing the discussion in terms of a “social contract” between the
rich and the rest of society. At one of her campaign events, she
explained<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOyDR2b71ag>:


“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built
a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your
goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the
rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police
forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to
worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory
and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us
did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or
a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying
social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid
who comes along.”

That is the corporate Contract With America: societal symbiosis. We create
a society in which smart, hard-working people can be safe and prosper, and
they in turn reinvest a fair share of that prosperity back into society for
posterity.

Everyone benefits.

But somewhere along the way this got lost. Greed got good. The rich wanted
all of the societal benefits and none of the societal responsibilities.
They got addicted to seeing profits go up and taxes go down, by any means
necessary, no matter the damage to the individual or the collective. Those
Maseratis weren’t going to pay for themselves.

And the resulting income inequality helped to stall economic mobility.

As The New York Times reported last
week<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from-lower-rungs.html>,
“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 Times report speculated that: “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.”

Indeed, a November report by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility
Project pointed out, “In the United States, there is a stronger link
between parental education and children’s economic, educational, and
socio-emotional outcomes than in any other country investigated.”

Pew has found that most children raised at the top of the income spectrum
stay there and most raised at the bottom stay at the bottom.

An equal opportunity to success is central to this country’s optimistic
ethos, but income inequality and corporate greed are making a lie of that
most basic American truism. The rich and their handmaidens on the political
right have consolidated America’s wealth on the ever-narrowing peak of a
steep hill and greased the slope. And they want to cast everyone at the
bottom as lazy or jealous, without acknowledging the accident of birth and
collusion of policies that helped grant them their perch.

Income inequality is a threat to this country and the middle class that
made her great. If Romney wants to be president, he needs to understand
that.

As Alan Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic
Advisers, said on
Thursday<http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/kruegers-inequality-speech-seals-obamas-2012-inequality-message.php>,
“I think it is clear that we can’t go back to the type of policies that
exacerbated the rise in inequality and threatened economic mobility in the
first place if we want an economy that builds the middle class.”

Not envy Mr. Romney. Opportunity.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/CharlesMBlow>and follow me on
Twitter <http://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow>, or e-mail me at
chblow at nytimes.com.

  [image: DCSIMG]


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120114/172b00d8/attachment-0001.html>