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Bob Herbert: ‘America has lost its way entirely’

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Sad to see that the great New York Times columnist Bob Herbert hung up his Opinion page soapbox yesterday. With Herbert’s departure and of course, Frank Rich leaving as well, the editorial page gravitas of The New York Times will be greatly diminished. How do you fill shoes like theirs? Herberts’s final piece, I gotta say is pretty heavy:

So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.

Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.

Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.

There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.

Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.

The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.

This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.

You can read the entire essay “Losing Our Way” at The New York Times

In a note following his final weekly essay, Herbert, who is now 66, writes that he’s off to “expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society.” Few writers in America could convey the plight of the working poor in America to the readers of the New York Times—in a way that they can understand—the way that Herbert has for nearly two decades. Obviously the NY Times Opinion page is no small propaganda platform from which to advocate for the good of the common man and it’s a disappointment, as a longtime reader, that he’s leaving this post. Isn’t the great Bob Herbert more effective here than he could be anywhere else?

Herbert in his high profile role at the Times editorial department, along with Frank Rich, has been at the moral center of that great organization, In my lifetime, I’ve read enough words written by Bob Herbert that I am convinced—and have been for a long time—that he’s one of the smartest and wisest people in this country. Herbert has been such an important contributor to the American group mind for decades. I hope he’ll write again for the Times, and soon. His career has been one spent in service of a better America and his voice will really—really, desperately—be missed in the current era of such wild historical shit and upheaval. around the world. I will miss reading Bob Herbert and I salute him. He’s a good man.
 
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A great interview with Bob Herbert from The Progressive

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.28.2011
02:01 pm
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