This is Why Obama's The One

[Make Newark Clean]

The Obamaphenomenon fever is very catchy! For the first time he has split the total white vote with Hillary, after already beating the vote for white males alone (it is Barack's overwhelming white male support that compensates for his lagging but respectable showing among white females, those largely over 60). He's gaining on all of Hillary's base.

We are all feeling pinched by next to none of this country's wealth trickling down to the workers over the past three decades. The real test of this country's zeitgeist will be if we can sell a progressive, centrist-left candidate to the total electorate and whether Americans can continue to set aside superficial differences in skin color to elect a hero to save the day. A pallid, feisty McCain buried hope, yesterday, when he sneered his attention to Obama for the first time. If this is to be the tenor of McCain's campaign, it will indeed be a titanic clash for the very creed of this country. Like no other time in the recent past, we will witness a referendum on whether we continue to drink what I believe is the ruinous, conservative kool-aid, whether it's the fortified Republican flavor or if we're sipping Democrat lite.

There is a vast unheard, and fiscally hurting, majority in this country who want a fair opportunity to transmit to their children what they have worked very hard for in making America prosperous. The stock market has increased 1300% since the mid 1980s alone, yet few share in that windfall. Where is the money?

There are a lot of people who want to believe in the American dream who now are only able to obtain a dollar and a dream because the things they've been told to do by the rules for success have eroded. The American citizen, the consumer, is spent. Obama must not shirk from his duty to stand up for them--for us. It is in this spirit that we can put aside hue to answer the hew and cry to unite for a movement unlike never before seen in modern times. It must happen now. It's not so much we can as it is we must. Here's one BIG thing that's wrong with America right now:

PS It's time for Hillary to step aside.

February 20, 2008

Higher Education Gap May Slow Economic Mobility (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/us/20mobility.html?adxnnl=1&ref=us&adxnnlx=1203541581-0ONdiEtv3P16M8bE0p9iug)

By ERIK ECKHOLM

A chapter of the report released last fall found startling evidence that a majority of black children born to middle-class parents grew up to have lower incomes and that nearly half of middle-class black children fell into the bottom fifth in adulthood, compared with 16 percent of middle-class white children.

Economic mobility, the chance that children of the poor or middle class will climb up the income ladder, has not changed significantly over the last three decades, a study being released on Wednesday says.

The authors of the study, by scholars at the Brookings Institution in Washington and sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, warned that widening gaps in higher education between rich and poor, whites and minorities, could soon lead to a downturn in opportunities for the poorest families.

The researchers found that Hispanic and black Americans were falling behind whites and Asians in earning college degrees, making it harder for them to enter the middle class or higher.

“A growing difference in education levels between income and racial groups, especially in college degrees, implies that mobility will be lower in the future than it is today,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican official and welfare expert who wrote the education section of the report.

There is some good news. The study highlights the powerful role that college can have in helping people change their station in life. Someone born into a family in the lowest fifth of earners who graduates from college has a 19 percent chance of joining the highest fifth of earners in adulthood and a 62 percent chance of joining the middle class or better.

In recent years, 11 percent of children from the poorest families have earned college degrees, compared with 53 percent of children from the top fifth.

“The American dream of opportunity is alive, but frayed,” said Isabel Sawhill, another author of the report, “Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Mobility in America.” The report is at economicmobility.org

“It’s still alive for immigrants but badly tattered for African-Americans,” said Ms. Sawhill, an economist and a budget official in the Clinton administration. “It’s more alive for people in the middle class than for people at the very bottom.”

The report and planned studies constitute the most comprehensive effort to examine intergenerational mobility, said John E. Morton of the Pew Trusts, who is managing the project. It draws heavily on a federally supported survey by the University of Michigan that has followed thousands of families since the late 1960s.

A chapter of the report released last fall found startling evidence that a majority of black children born to middle-class parents grew up to have lower incomes and that nearly half of middle-class black children fell into the bottom fifth in adulthood, compared with 16 percent of middle-class white children.

The Pew-sponsored studies are continuing with the involvement of research organizations and scholars. Another report expected in the spring by the more conservative Heritage Foundation will focus on explanations for the trends described in the current report.

Stuart Butler, vice president for economic studies at the Heritage Foundation, said, “It does seem in America now that for people at very bottom it’s more difficult to move up than we might have thought or might have been true in the past.”

Mr. Butler said experts were likely to disagree about the reasons and, hence, on policies to improve mobility. Conservative scholars are more apt to fault cultural norms and the breakdown of families while liberals put more emphasis on the changing structure of the economy and the need for government to provide safety nets and aid for poor families.

“We may well have an economy that rewards certain traits that are typically passed on from parents to children, the importance of education, optimism, a propensity to work hard, entrepreneurship and so on,” he said.

To the extent that the economy rewards those traits, he added, “you’d expect the incomes of children to track more with that of their parents.”

The small fraction of poor children who earn college degrees are likely to rise well above their parents’ status, the study showed.

More than half the children born to upper-income parents, those in the top fifth, who finish college remain in that top group. Nearly one in four remains in the top fifth even without completing college.

Evidence from model programs shows that early childhood education can have lasting benefits, Mr. Haskins said, although the Head Start program is too uneven to produce widespread gains.

In addition, he said, studies show that many poor but bright children do not receive good advice about applying for college and scholarships, or do not receive help after starting college.

“If we did more to help them complete college,” Mr. Haskins said, “there’s no question it would improve mobility.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/02/20/education/0220-nat-webMOBILITY.jpg

[Make Newark Clean]

Mr William Domhoff wrote this provocative essay (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html) back in March 2005. His treatise embodies the potential of Obama's campaign (OMG! I'm starting to sound like an Obamaton! :eek: ). Seriously, to follow is a particularly poignant part of it. The rest of it is lengthy, but a worthwhile read. (I love this stuff. :) ) These are propitious times.

Entire essay (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html)


Third Parties Don't Work:
Why and How Egalitarians Should
Transform the Democratic Party

Until as recently as the 1980s, then, the Democrats were first and foremost the party of the Southern rich, who started it as a way to ensure that their plantation system and slavery would survive in the face of the growth of manufacturing in the North. At first they found their allies among the landed rich of the rural North, such as on the vast estates of upstate New York, and later among the well-to-do Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants who made their money in real estate and related businesses in large Northern cities. The Northern rich, of course, had their own party, which was first the Federalists, then the Whigs, and then the Republicans since the 1850s.

Given the structural constraints on third parties, this arrangement meant there was no independent space for the Northern-based liberal-labor coalition when it developed in the context of the New Deal. Despite its confinement within the Democratic Party, however, this coalition did manage to elect about 100 Democrats to the House starting in the 1930s, where they joined with roughly 100 Southern Democrats and 50 machine Democrats to form a strong Democratic majority in all but a few sessions of Congress from 1934 to 1994. They were even able to pass some liberal spending legislation when they could convince the Southern Democrats to join them.

But the picture was more negative when it came to issues concerning class interests. As early as 1938, the Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans formed a conservative voting bloc that stopped the liberal Democrats from passing legislation concerning union rights, civil rights, and the regulation of business, even when they could convince some machine Democrats to support them. These are precisely the issues that define class conflict in the United States. Civil rights fits that generalization because in the past such legislation really concerned keeping the African-American workforce in the South from having any political power. The only way the liberal-labor coalition could pass measures like the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 was to give the Southern Democrats what they wanted, namely, the exclusion of agricultural, seasonal, and domestic labor from its protections.

It might seem that the liberals would have found natural allies among the 50 machine Democrats from big urban areas like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, but more often than not they presented a liberal face to the public and then quietly sided with Southern Democrats in private. They had impressive liberal voting records on legislation that made it to the floor, but they helped the Southerners to gut such legislation behind the scenes and in committee. Most critically, the machine Democrats upheld the tradition of seniority and voted with the Southerners in the party caucus, which meant that the Southern Democrats controlled the Congress thanks to the votes of 50 machine Democrats and the presence of the 100 liberal Democrats who made the party a majority.

This remarkable bargain between the machines and the South at the expense of liberals and the urban working class was in part due to their similar backroom political styles, but they also shared a common interest in government spending to subsidize the enterprises of their backers. The basic deal was agricultural subsidies for Southern plantation owners in exchange for housing and urban development subsidies in big cities. In addition -- and this part of the bargain could not be spoken about publicly -- they both shared an interest in keeping African-Americans from voting. This desire to exclude blacks may sound surprising in the case of the Northern machines, but in fact they feared that black voters would eventually replace them with black representatives, which turned out to be the case by the 1980s. Given this sordid pact at the heart of the Democratic Party, it is small wonder that older egalitarians with long memories have no hope of transforming the party and warn new egalitarians away from having anything to do with it.

Thus, the fact that Democrats dominated Congress for the several decades between 1934 and 1994 was mostly irrelevant for those seeking egalitarian social change. Until the 1990s, the Southerners could call the shots on class-oriented legislation through the conservative voting bloc with Republicans and control the Democratic Party through their alliance with the machine types. This is why it is a great mistake for liberal commentators and historians to talk about the "progressive" history of the party, meaning a few pieces of legislation in the mid-1930s and mid-1960s when egalitarian movements were generating serious social disruption.

But all this slowly began to change after 1965 thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, a fact that is often overlooked by most of the egalitarians who continue to rail against the Democratic Party. It began to change because that movement not only brought rights and dignity to African-Americans in the South, but it undercut the disproportionate national power of the Southern rich, which was based on dominating the Democratic Party by denying voting rights to African-Americans as well as many low-income whites. Once African-Americans won the right to vote in the South through the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they were able to help force out the worst racists by voting against them in Democratic Party primaries. At that point the Southern rich started to move over to the Republican Party, where they now felt more at home in any case due to the increasing industrialization of the South -- agricultural subsidies were no longer an issue. Using appeals to racial resentment, religious fundamentalism, and social conservatism, they were able to take a majority of other whites along with them. Rich Southern whites clearly know how to construct and demonize an out-group in order to take the focus off class conflict.

However, this switchover was only gradual because the elected Southern Democrats still had great power in Congress due to the seniority system for picking committee chairs. These old bulls hung on for as long as they could, only to be replaced by Republicans when they died or retired. At a certain point, though, when control of Congress seemed possible for the Republicans, some of these conservative Democrats suddenly switched parties while they were in office. The stage was thereby set for the Republican takeover in Congress in 1994.

The most immediate result of the Republicanization of the South was the break-up of the New Deal coalition at the presidential level, which relied upon Southern involvement far more than liberal commentators like to remember. This break-up meant the election of Republican presidents from 1968 to 1976 and from 1980 to 1992. Even when the Democrats made their presidential comeback in 1992, it was through the efforts of a Southern-based leadership group, the Democratic Leadership Council. In order to win, the rest of the Democrats accepted the Council's two Southern moderates, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, as their ticket because they knew they could not triumph without winning a few Southern states. Clinton and Gore then hit all the right notes on religion, guns, and the death penalty to attract Southern whites, and especially Southern white males. They were better than Republicans on racial, feminist, and environmental issues, but not much else.

In the longer run, however, the Civil Rights Movement had a much bigger impact on the structure of American politics. It freed the Democratic Party from inevitable control by conservatives. For the first time in American history, it became possible to create a nationwide liberal/labor/African-American/environmentalist/Hispanic/feminist/Asian-American/gay-lesbian/left/egalitarian coalition within the Democratic Party. Such a coalition has not been built for a number of reasons, including the fact that the most energetic egalitarians are not willing to join and the trade unionists are only gradually becoming more hospitable to environmentalists, people of color, and feminists. But the potential is now there. Whether it ever will be used is another question.

For this left-of-center coalition to prevail, it has to win a majority in the House, 60 seats in the Senate (to cut off a filibuster), and place a moderate in the White House. This is a daunting challenge, of course. To succeed, it would have to do the difficult grassroots work of creating liberal black-white voting coalitions in the states of the Old South, which now have about 30 percent of Congressional seats and 30 percent of the electoral votes. In other words, the same South that has always held the nation back due to its slave and Jim Crow past remains the biggest problem for egalitarians today. Think Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Bill Frist, Tom DeLay, and George W. Bush, for example.[/SIZE][/I][/B]

Entire essay (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_egalitarians.html)