5
Street roots
Jan 17, 2014
POVERTY, from page 4
According to the
2013 report by the
United Nations
Children's Fund,
UNICEF, more
than one in five
American children
fall below a
relative poverty
line, which
UNICEF defines
as living in a
household that
earns less than
half of the national
median. The
United States
ranks 34th of the
35 countries
surveyed with
regard to the well
being of children,
above only
Romania and
below virtually alt
of Europe plus
Canada, Australia,
New Zealand and
Japan.
huge part of the American story, that notion
of pushing for change. I do think we’re
going to see that over the coming decade,
because if we don’t, we’re witnessing such a
transformation of what it means to be
America and be American. That’s a huge
thing to just stand by and watch.
J.T.: I know you write from time to time in
The N ation Magazine, and recently wrote
about the woman in Seattle’s City Council
who is a socialist. She’s called fa r a $15
m inim um wage. (See our story in this edition,
Page 10.) The Northwest has a history o f being
very socialistic and very progressive, but I see
that as one indication as a real push fo r a
broad movement & that people are ripe fo r that
reform.
SA.: One of the solutions that I advocate
for is an educational opportunity fund.
With Social Security, we essentially
created a social insurance for the back end
of people’s lives. Do the same thing with
higher education. If you leave it purely to
individuals, with more and more of them
going into debt just to finance higher
education, you build up massive levels of
debt There’s more student debt in the
country now then there is credit card debt.
What if we socialized the risk? We create a
line-item tax, like we do with Medicare and
Social Security, for education. It could be
one quarter of 1 percent That would
generate enough money so that every
individual, at birth, would have $5,000
invested into an education account By the
time they were of college age, it would be
nearer to $20,000 by most measures. That’s
not going to pay for higher education, but it
will do a lot to reduce debt Move it tip to
one percent, and that’s $20,000 for every
child at birth.
That’s one idea. There are many other
ideas. There is absolutely no reason that we
have to accept the status quo on this. That
also goes to the level of debt we accept
around health care. There are other models
being talked about in America.
S A.: I do think that locally we’re starting
to see interesting political movements and
ideas emerge, and that goes from the $15
living wage movement, but also to local
initiatives to try to create better health care
delivery systems. There are all kinds of
experiments going on, new ways of doing
business.
That’s all to the good, but there’s no
organizing or institution with the muscle of
the federal government. It’s a unique
institution. Even though I think it’s great
that these things are happening locally,
ultimately, there also has to be action at the
federal level. There has to be things like the
creation of a higher federal minimum wage.
There has to be a massive investment in
public infrastructure. There has to be a
massive national conversation about
taxation. Because one of the things that has
happened in recent years is that an
extraordinary amount of money has been
lost to the federal treasury by under taxing
wealthy individuals, corporations, wealthy
S .A.: I think Republicans fought so hard
against the Affordable Care Act from the
beginning because they realized that if it
actually became a success, it would be
something that would actually motivate
people to get out and vote to maintain it.
. But it’s still frying to patch together
universal coverage from an extremely messy
system. In the coming years, however, we
will come to expect that the vast majority of
estates and so on. And there are all kinds of
Americans will be covered w ith health’ '
solutions out there.
You could create a financial transaction
tax, for example, and because hedge funds
and other investors are doing so many
transactions, by sheer volume you could
raise tens, and by some measure hundreds
of billions of dollars by an almost invisibly
small transaction tax. And that money could
be used to reinvest—in schools, in public
workers’ programs, job training. It could be
used to build up public transport, used to
subsidize the purchase of gas where there
is no public transport and people are going
bankrupt just driving to and from work. We
could reinvest in the commons. We’re going
to have to but it’s going to have to come
from the federal government.
insurance through the various exchanges or
through the other parts of the patchwork.
So I think it will become part of the debate
in the coming years in election cycles.
. J.T.: I think that there’s intervention called
fo r in the financial industry. You talk about
student debt, and fo r vets coming back and
getting aid. How m ight the federal government
intervene?
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J.T.: Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced
legislation: Medicare fo r all, is a good way to
describe it.
J.T.: I t ’s the norm in so many other
industrialized countries.
SA.: Exactly. When it comes to poverty,
when it comes to things that trigger poverty
like unequal access to health care, we do a
whole bunch worse than most of the nations
we like to compare ourselves with; and we
have a lot to learn. When you realize the
unique scale of not just American poverty,
but American inequality in the 21st century,
the fact that France doesn’t have it,
Germany doesn’t have it; Canada doesn’t,
Australia doesn’t Even England, which is
the closest to us in terms of economic
models. Even the United Kingdom doesn’t
have the levels of inequality and social
immobility that America has.
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S A.: I think the current way the media
functions — there are areas where it’s
literally Fox News or nothing, or Rush
Limbaugh or nothing — where basically the
shriller you are, the
louder you are, the
more your message
I think Republicans iougbi
reverberates. Noise
carries in this media
so hard against the
culture. It’s very
M iw ia b le Care f c t from the
destructive of a
beginning because they
common political :
realized that 11 It actually
language or of
became a success, It would
understanding our
community. It’s a
be something that would
language of division.
actually motivate people to
It’s a language that
get
out and vote to m aintain
sells by being divisive.
it.
It isn’t only a
conservative issue.
There are plenty of
very shrill
commentators on the left as well. I think
one of the problems in the modern moment
is we’ve lost our ability to think outside of
our bubble. We’re so saturated by media
that we basically gravitate to someone
who’s going to say something we’ve already
agreed with. I think increasingly readers are
looking to be reaffirmed rather than be
challenged.
J.T.: You had a terrifying piece in your
book m entioning the English political
philosopher Stephen Lucas and writing about
power. Could you describe that?
SA.: It’s thé idea that there are different
ways of manipulating a society or an
individual. That power is expressed at its
most basic level with brute force. And then
there are progressive lëvels of subtlety. You
can get someone to do something by
shifting the kind of information they have
available to them. And at its most
sophisticated level, you create a framework
that’s so uber-pervasive that it becomes
invisible. It just becomes the backdrop and
you no longer realize you’re being
manipulated; that the way you understand
events or respond to authority has in a
sense been predetermined. You think you’re
absolutely free to make decisions because
you don’t really understand where those
decisions are coming from. The more
sophisticated a machinery of propaganda
becomes, the harder it is to see that
machinery at work.
T his interview originally aired on K B O O
radio, courtesy o f Jay Thiemeyer.
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J.T.: I think one o f the ironic things is
when people are struggling to survive, working
as hard as they can, they don’t have the time
or energy to listen to really good news coverage
and they get the shock jocks. The news is ju st
to shock and manipulate. To me that is very
scary.
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