From: NLG Civil Liberties Committee <cberlet@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Sklar: D.C. - Divide & Conquer
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 19:19:38 GMT

/* Written  6:47 pm  Sep 28, 1992 by cberlet in cdp:zmagazine */
/* ---------- "Sklar: D.C. - Divide & Conquer" ---------- */

Date: Sat, 26 Sep 92 15:17:38 PDT
From: Holly Sklar <hsklar>
To: cberlet
Subject: articles

Washington, D.C.-Divide and Conquer 

(c) 1992 By Holly Sklar 

The following article appeared in the March 1992
issue of Z magazine. 

Looking out past his teleprompters to that overwhelmingly white,
male, and wealthy group pretending to represent the American
people in Congress, George Bush made an impassioned plea--to cut
the capital gains tax: "This time, at this hour, I cannot take
`No' for an answer...Never has an issue been more demagogued by
its opponents...And I'll tell you, those of you who say, `Oh, no,
someone who's comfortable may benefit from this,' you kind of
remind me of the old definition of the Puritan, who couldn't
sleep at night worrying that somehow someone somewhere was out
having a good time."

That crack alone should be enough to cost the
President reelection, for it epitomizes the state of Bush's mind
in a disUnited States. The problem is not that some people are
having a good time, but that the bills for their party are being
paid for in falling wages, homelessness, decaying schools, and
dying children.

 Wake Up Call

The American Dream--always an impossible dream for many--is dying
a slow death. Living standards are falling for younger
generations. The average earnings of nonsupervisory workers
dropped 19 percent (after adjusting for inflation) between 1973
and 1990. The inflation-adjusted median income for families with
children headed by persons younger than 30 fell 26 percent
between 1973 and 1989, according to the Children's Defense Fund.
For many Americans, the economy has been in permanent depression.

The 1990 median income for a year-round, full-time worker was
$27,866 for men and $19,816 for women. With "givebacks" in health
and other benefits, hikes in payroll taxes, and increased
involuntary part-time work (without benefits), the wage scene is
even worse. Not coincidentally, the share of unionized
nonagricultural workers dropped from 35 percent in 1960 to 17
percent in 1990. Excluding government workers, union membership
was 13 percent; as economist Robert Reich points out in The Work
of Nations, that's less than the early 1930s before the National
Labor Relations Act established a legally protected right to
unionize. Unemployment is high, but the proportion of unemployed
receiving benefits (37 percent in 1990) is smaller than any other
recession since World War II and job programs are scarce. A drop
in unemployment is declared when more despairing people stop
actively seeking a job and are no longer counted.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 1989 and 1990,
median household income (adjusted for inflation) declined by 1.7
percent from $30,468 to $29,943. In 1973, before two-income
families multiplied, median household income was $30,944. White
median household income dropped from $32,431 in 1973 to $31,231
in 1990; Hispanic households dropped from $23,973 to $22,330; and
Black households dropped from $19,090 to $18,676. In the region
now in deepest recession, the Northeast, median household income
declined 5 percent overall between 1989 and 1990--4.7 percent for
whites, 9 percent for Blacks, and 17.1 percent for Hispanics.

Fortune magazine ran an October 21, 1991 cover story, "How the
Average American Lives: Getting by on $45,000 a year." What's a
mere $15,000 gap between median household income and Fortune's
"average American." The tone of the article is upbeat, "Yes,
money's tight, jobs are insecure, salaries frozen. Most families
now find two incomes a necessity. But what statistics don't
capture is their irrepressible spirit." Let them eat spirit!

While wages for most Americans are falling, for the richest 1
percent they more than doubled from 1977 to 1988, after
accounting for inflation. According to Fortune, "by 1990, the
average CEO [chief executive officer] in manufacturing was making
119 times more than the average Joe," compared with 18 times more
in Japan. And the overpaid CEOs became even more undertaxed.

According to U.S. News  World Report (November 18, 1991), the
percentage of household income paid as federal taxes by the
wealthiest fifth (incomes over $55,205) fell from 27.3 percent in
1980 to 25.8 percent in 1990, while the percentage paid by the
poorest fifth rose from 8.4 percent to 9.7 percent. In 1977, the
richest 1 percent paid an average of 35.5 percent of their income
in federal taxes. Because of the 1977 and 1981 tax cuts--the ones
promoted as stimulating investment, jobs, and trickle-down
wealth--the richest 1 percent (incomes over $617,000) will save
$84 billion in 1992 taxes alone.

A 1991 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
Selective Prosperity, reports that between 1977 and 1988, the
average after-tax income of the top fifth of the population rose
by 34 percent while the bottom fifth's share fell 10 percent
(adjusted for inflation). In 1988, the wealthiest fifth had as
much after-tax income as the other 80 percent. The average
after-tax income of the richest 1 percent (inflation-adjusted)
rose 122 percent between 1977 and 1988.

The Census Bureau reports that the proportion of (pre-tax) income
received by the top fifth of households increased from 43.3
percent in 1970 to 46.6 percent in 1990. The share of income
received by the middle 60 percent declined from 52.7 percent in
1970 to 49.5 percent in 1990. The income share of the bottom
fifth dropped from 4.1 percent to 3.9 percent. 

Total wealth is even more concentrated at the top than income.
The share of the nation's wealth held by the top 10 percent
climbed from 67.5 percent to 73.1 percent between 1979 and 1988.

 Manufacturing Poverty

The official poverty rate jumped by 2.1 million people (including
840,000 children) from 12.8 percent in 1989 to 13.5 percent in
1990--for a total of 33.6 million people. The official poverty
threshold in 1990 was $6,652 for a person living alone, $10,419
for a family of three, and $13,359 for a family of four. The
ranks of the working poor are swelling as real wages fall.
Minimum wage comes to $8,840 a year for a full-time job, less
than the $9,009 poverty line for a 2-person family with a child
under 18 and an adult under 65. The outdated official poverty
threshold assumes a household spends one-third of its budget on
food and two-thirds on everything else. According to the
Children's Defense Fund, the typical poor family with children
spends 70 percent of its income just to keep a roof over their
heads.

By Census Bureau count, more than 28 percent of the poor received
no assistance of any type whether cash or noncash benefits in
1990. Among poor family householders (the person in whose name
the home is owned or rented)--including retired persons and those
who could not work due to illness or disability--49.8 percent
worked in 1990 and 15.2 percent worked year-round, full-time.
Among poor female-householder families with no husbands present,
43.6 percent worked and 8 percent worked year-round, full-time.

U.S. policy has changed little to accommodate women's growing
participation in the paid labor force. While more than 61 percent
of mothers with children ages three to five worked outside the
home, there are no national programs in the U.S., virtually alone
among industrialized nations, to provide adequate day care or
needed parental leave.

Forget the safety net rhetoric. Can't find a job, can't afford
day care, too disabled to work? Tough. "Welfare reform" means
welfare removal. State governments are competing with each other
to cut crumbs into smaller crumbs and throw people into the
street. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
"Especially sharp reductions occurred in the Aid to Families with
Dependent Children Program...From 1970 to 1991, the maximum AFDC
benefit for a family of three with no other income declined 42
percent in the typical state, after adjusting for inflation. In
fact...the average value of AFDC and food stamp benefits combined
has now fallen to about the same level as the value of AFDC
benefits alone in 1960, before the food stamp program was
created" to combat hunger. Today, one out of eight children goes
hungry.

"In January 1990," says the Children's Defense Fund, "the median
state's maximum AFDC benefit for a family of three without other
income was only $364 per month, 44 percent of the federal poverty
level. Even with the maximum food stamp allowance, that family's
income was still only 73 percent of the poverty level." Remember,
that's 73 percent of the level said to allow subsistence--a level
set much too low. What about the many poor families with earned
income? The "disposable income of a mother who has two
children--and who earns wages equal to 75 percent of the poverty
line--was $3,100 lower in 1990 than in 1973."

 Child Abuse

In this superpower for the superrich, millions of children are
sacrificial lambs being offered to the gods of greed. They are
dying a thousand cuts in health care and housing, day care and
welfare, abuse prevention and education. They are paying for a
massive redistribution of wealth up the income pyramid. They are
paying as real wages plummet for their parents and they look
ahead to even lower living standards.

Nearly one out of four children is born into poverty--the highest
official rate of any industrialized nation. Poverty kills. The
Maine Health Bureau found that poor children were more than three
times as likely as other children to die during childhood.

The U.S. has the world's Number 1 military and economy, but ranks
only 24th in infant mortality. Black America has a higher infant
mortality rate than Nigeria, Jamaica, and Bulgaria. The Black
infant mortality rate is more than twice that of whites and the
gap is widening. From 1988 to 1989, white infant mortality
dropped 4 percent while Black infant deaths increased. The
leading cause of death for white infants is birth defects. For
Black infants, it is prematurity or low birth weight. We have
laws requiring newborns to leave the hospital in carseats, but
none requiring full funding of WIC, the Supplemental Food Program
for (pregnant and nursing) women and children. 

Forty percent of all poor people in the United States are
children under 18. The child poverty rate jumped from 16.4
percent in 1979 to 20.6 percent in 1990 (25 percent for children
under age three). For white children, the poverty rate increased
from 11.8 percent to 15.9 percent; for Hispanic children, 28
percent to 38.4 percent; and for Black children, 41.2 percent to
44.8 percent. Most poor children have a parent who works at least
part of the year. The poverty rate for families with children in
which the householder works jumped one-third between 1979 and
1990.

As reported in Selective Prosperity, the Luxembourg Income
Study--a comprehensive comparison of income levels, poverty
rates, and government policies in the United States, Australia,
Canada, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden,
Switzerland, and the U.K.--showed that American income is the
most unevenly distributed and found "that the child poverty rate
in the U.S., after taxes and benefits are considered, was more
than twice that in Canada and four times the average child
poverty rate in the other nations in the study. It also showed
that the poverty rate just among white children in the U.S. was
higher than the poverty rate among all children in all other
countries in the study except Australia. In short, the private
economy in the United States generates more relative poverty
among children than the private economies of many other western,
industrialized nations--and the U.S. then does far less than the
other nations to address this problem."

According to the Children's Defense Fund, "if low-income families
with children had received government assistance payments at the
same per capita rate as the rest of the low-income population
(including the elderly and adult couples without children), they
would have received an additional $69 billion in 1987--nearly
four times as much as they actually received and more than enough
to lift all poor families with children out of poverty." The
Children's Defense Fund has launched an election-year campaign to
"Leave No Child Behind."

 School Caste System

The New American Order is marked by growing inequality,
polarization, and violence to the mind, body, and spirit. 

Education, like health care, is rationed by income. Overall, the
U.S. ranks only 18th in school-age population per teacher.
Education disparities are widening as affluent cities and towns
maintain decent schools while others slash public education along
with other government services. More and more suburban schools
are following the deplorable trend of the cities, where it has
become "normal" to find dirty, overcrowded classrooms where
textbooks are not only obsolete, there aren't enough to go
around, and music, art, gym, and libraries are considered
luxuries. As with homelessness, school conditions that would have
been considered intolerable a decade ago are commonplace today.

Democracy is a mockery in a country where education is
increasingly separate and unequal. The title of Jonathan Kozol's
Savage Inequalities does not exaggerate. Comparing rich and poor
districts in New Jersey, he describes a visit to Paterson's East
Side High which "became well known some years ago when its former
principal...Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education
Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school `a mecca of

education' and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300
students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs.

"`He was a perfect hero,' says a school official...`for an age in
which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the
sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and
walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn't know
he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a
jail...

"`This is a very popular approach in the United States today.
Don't provide the kids with a new building. Don't provide them
with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don't even
breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so
they can't subvert the education of the suburbs. Don't permit
them `frills' like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell
them they're no good if they can't pass the state exam. Then,
when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise
you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it need
space to build a jail?'"

Kozol indicts the attitudes behind the inequality of school
funding--largely based on property taxes. "Now and then, in
private, affluent suburbanites concede that certain aspects of
the game may be a trifle rigged to their advantage. `Sure, it's a
bit unjust,' they many concede, `but that's reality and that's
the way the game is played...

"`In any case,' they sometimes add...`there's no real evidence
that spending money makes much difference in the outcome of a
child's education. We have it. So we spend it. But it's probably
a secondary matter. Other factors--family and background--seem to
be a great deal more important.'

"In these ways they fend off dangers of disturbing
introspections; and this, in turn enables them to give their
children something far more precious than the simple gift of
pedagogic privilege. They give them uncontaminated satisfaction
in their victories. Their children learn to shut from mind the
possibility that they are winners in an unfair race, and they
seldom let themselves lose sleep about the losers." 

George Bush, who was schooled at elite Andover and then Yale,
calls himself the "education President." Kozol told reporter Mary
McGrory, "The worst thing is Bush saying that money won't make a
difference...His parents spent money on his education. They sent
him to Andover, where this year they are spending $16,000 on each
pupil...I'm embarrassed at the absurdity of arguing that money
doesn't matter--that it's good for the rich but not for the
poor." In Texas, where Bush claims his legal residence to avoid
state income tax, per-pupil spending ranges from $2,000 in the
poorest districts to $19,000 in the richest.

As if to ensure that most lower-income students who graduate high
school still can't escape their caste, state university systems
are being decimated. In Harvard's Massachusetts, state public
higher education funding has been slashed by a third since 1988,
leaving a $476 million budget--half the price of one B-2 bomber (the
Pentagon still wants to build 20). Yale's Connecticut had one of
the nation's highest median incomes in 1990, yet public higher
education spending dropped to about $380 million, less per capita
than Mississippi, the state with the lowest income. The
proportion of the U.S. population attending college has begun to
decline as reduced loans and grants means reduced access for
lower-income students.


It is common for white males today to talk of racial and gender
discrimination as relics of the past and claim that where society
isn't color-blind there is reverse discrimination. Summing up the
findings of focus groups exploring the views of young whites for
People for the American Way (Washington Post Weekly, January
6-12, 1992), pollster Geoffrey Garin says a theme especially
strong among working-class whites is: "Whatever prejudice whites
feel to blacks is provoked by things that blacks do, and whatever
prejudice blacks might feel to whites is provoked by something
that happened long ago."

Kozol pierces the myth of "past injustice" (slavery, Jim Crow)
which is used to explain, if any explanation is offered, the
obstacles faced by Black children today: "The hundreds of
classrooms without teachers in Chicago's public schools, the
thousands of children without classrooms in the schools of
Irvington and Paterson and East Orange...and the lifelong
poisoning of children in the streets and schools of East St.
Louis are not matters of anterior injustice. They are injustices
of 1991."

"Research experts want to know what can be done about the values
of poor segregated children," he writes. "But they do not ask
what can be done about the values of the people who have
segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the
pathological detachment of the very rich."

Behind the stale rhetoric of equal opportunity is the reality of
discrimination. "It doesn't make sense to offer something that
most of these urban kids will never use," a Chicago businessman
told Kozol. "No one expects these ghetto kids to go to college.
Most of them are lucky if they're even literate. If we can teach
them some useful skills, get them to stay in school and graduate,
and maybe into jobs, we're giving them the most that they can
hope for."

 Divide and Conquer

Prosperous white American males are so intent on keeping their
monopoly privileges of race, sex, and class they are resurrecting
arguments, in the guise of countering "political correctness" 
and "quotas," that they and their "Western civilization"
forefathers are superior to women and people of color and their
ancestors. Instead of explicitly claiming genetic superiority,
they imply that all women and people of color at top
universities or corporate headquarters or Pulitzer prize winners
owe their places to "standard-lowering" affirmative action
"quotas." Except those like Clarence Thomas they anoint through
affirmative tokenism.

The powers that be don't want students and young adults trying to
change a system providing them less for more work and higher
taxes. They want them blaming each other--in particular, white
males blaming women and people of color.

While "glass ceilings" keep upper Corporate America an almost
exclusively white male enclave, "quota" has become the current
sexist and racist codeword. As United Mineworkers President
Richard Trumka put it at the June 1991 National Rainbow Coalition
conference, "`Quota' is a substitute for Black, Hispanic,
women....`Quotas are nice but I wouldn't want my daughter to date
one...'"

We're not supposed to know that private universities have long
had defacto affirmative action programs for the parentally
correct offspring of rich white alumni. As Jim Hightower, former

Texas Agriculture commissioner, said about Bush, he was "born on
third base and decided that he'd hit a triple."

A Boston Globe article on so-called "legacy admissions" noted
that the acceptance rate for all Harvard applicants, class of
1992, was 15.6 percent, while for children of alumni, 35.2
percent. As the article put it, "far from being more qualified,
or even equally qualified, the average admitted legacy at Harvard
between 1981 and 1988 was significantly less qualified than the
average nonlegacy."

College is a ticket to higher wages, but not an equitable one.
The average annual earnings of full-time workers 25 years and
older with four or more years of college was $41,090 for white
men, $31,380 for Black men, $27,440 for white women, and $26,730
for Black women. 

As journalist Susan Faludi argues in Backlash: "If American women
are so equal, why do they represent two thirds of all poor
adults? Why are more than 80 percent of full-time working women
making less than $20,000 a year, nearly double the male rate?...Why does the
average female college graduate today earn less than a man with
no more than a high school diploma (just as she did in the
'50s)--and why does the average female high school graduate today
earn less than a male high school dropout?...

"If women have `made it,' then why are nearly 80 percent of
working women still stuck in traditional `female' jobs--as
secretaries, administrative `support' workers and salesclerks?
And, conversely, why are they less than 8 percent of all federal
and state judges, less than 6 percent of all law partners, and
less than one half of 1 percent of top corporate managers? Why
are there only three female state governors, two female U.S.
Senators, and two Fortune 500 chief executives? Why are only
nineteen of the four thousand corporate officers and directors
women--and why do more than half the boards of Fortune companies
still lack even one female member?"

Faludi lets CEOs indict themselves. "In a 1990 national poll of
chief executives at Fortune 1000 companies, more than 80 percent
acknowledged that discrimination impedes female employees'
progress--yet, less than 1 percent of these same companies
regarded remedying sex discrimination as a goal that their
personnel departments should pursue." So much for affirmative
action, much less "reverse discrimination."

Studies have shown that today, Blacks and other people of color
are discriminated against (after adjusting for such factors as
income and education) in everything from job interviews, to
mortgages and home improvement loans, to renting apartments and
buying cars. That shouldn't be a surprise since racist attitudes
remain rampant. 

A December 2, 1991 New York Times article reported that,
"according to the General Social Survey, an annual polling of
1,500 American adults of all races...a significant proportion of
whites--1 in 5--still believe interracial marriage should be
illegal, as against 2 in 5 whites asked the question in 1972...

"Further, 66 percent of whites said they would oppose a close
relative's marrying a black person...About 45 percent of whites
said they would oppose a close relative's marriage to an Asian or
Hispanic person and 15 percent said they would oppose a marriage
between a close relative and a Jew."

A recent study by the National Opinion Research Center at the
University of Chicago shows, as reported in the Washington Post,
that "whites' negative images of blacks and other minorities
continue to be pervasive." In the 1991 survey of individuals
(mostly white) in randomly selected households in 300
communities, a majority of the "non-black respondents--78
percent--said blacks are more likely than whites to `prefer to
live off welfare' and less likely to `prefer to be
self-supporting.' Further, 62 percent said blacks are more likely
to be lazy; 56 percent said they are violence-prone; 53 percent
said they are less intelligent; 51 percent said they think blacks
are less patriotic."

"Among non-Hispanics, 74 percent said Hispanics are more likely
to prefer to live off welfare; 56 percent thought them more lazy;
50 percent thought them more violence-prone; 55 percent thought
them less intelligent and 61 percent thought them less
patriotic." Asians fared better, but 34 percent of the
respondents said they are "likely to be lazy, 30 percent said
they are violence-prone, 36 percent said they are less
intelligent, 46 percent said they prefer to live off welfare, and
55 percent said they are less patriotic."

The media is part of the problem. In 1991, according to the
American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), only 8.7 percent of
newsroom employees were not white. More than half of all daily
newspapers employed no people of color. Susan Faludi cites an
ASNE study showing that, "By the late '80s, 76 percent of
newspaper dailies had no female associate editors, executive
editors, managing editors, editors, editorial chiefs, or any
women in variations of these job titles...The problem wasn't on
the supply end...throughout the decade two-thirds of all
journalism school graduates were women. A 1989 ASNE survey found
these female journalists had even higher grades and expressed
more ambition than their male colleagues. Yet, in this same
period, newsrooms remained 65 percent male and continued to hire
far more men than women." According to Faludi, a Radio-Television
News Directors Association survey reported that by 1983, the
number of female anchors was falling at commercial TV stations
nationwide. "By 1989, only eight women were among the one hundred
most frequently seen correspondents--down from fifteen just a
year earlier."

Faludi points out one of the many divide-and-conquer tactics used
to mask reality. "Fears of a `feminized' profession may have been
reinforced by the tendency of the media's personnel officers to
use affirmative action as the all-purpose alibi when rejecting
white male applicants. `I've seen them send out these rejection
letters saying, "Sorry, but we had to to hire a black or a
woman," when the real reason they didn't hire the guy was that
he's unqualified,' says an editor who witnessed this practice
firsthand at the New York Times." 

 Unite and Conquer

The assault on multicultural diversity and "PC"--that's
politically correct, not parentally correct--reflects the growing
backlash as more women work outside the home and the United
States evolves into a 21st century nation in which whites are a
minority.

U.S. elites have carried out a mass redistribution of wealth and
dismantling of social programs, laughing all the way to the bank
and the FDIC as they divert, divide, and conquer with racism,
sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia; young vs. old, poor vs.
middle class, Black vs. Jewish, HIV positive vs. HIV negative,
U.S. workers vs. Mexican and Japanese; Gulf wars, drug wars, and
quota wars. 

We need to revitalize democracy with vigorous debate over who
really benefits and who loses from government policy, who gets
bailed out and who gets locked in poverty.

It's much easier to divide and conquer if people believe that
resources for basic necessities are scarce. We have to expose the
connection between the budget deficit and greed surplus. We have
to show that the money is there to do what is needed and right.
It is there if we have the rich pay their fair share (those
opposed call this "soaking the rich") and if we redo the $300
billion military budget, which even former defense secretaries
say can be cut in half. With a minimum of $150 billion a year
rescued from the military, we could make major investments in
decent education, health and safety, child care, jobs and
training, housing, infrastructure repair, mass transit, 
environmental protection. Much more could be done by reclaiming 
the billions of dollars in tax breaks used by the wealthy to 
create islands of luxury while the nation sinks.

                          -30-





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