Make America More Equal Again!

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Piketty-Saez

I have a suggestion for a campaign motto I first wrote about in a 2017 Huffington Post piece that could give a boost to VP Harris’s presidential campaign.

Instead of Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” let’s “Make America More Equal Again,” just as it was in the 1960’s and 70’s, when we had a thriving middle class in which children could hope to exceed their parents’ station in life.

It was our thriving middle class as portrayed in the above graph of pre-tax income that kept the more extreme elements of both political parties and persuasions at bay, so that Republicans and Democrats talked to each other. A middle class will only thrive where there is less income inequality, something that most well-meaning Americans support.

But that was then and we live now, when most children of the baby boomers retiring do not hope to exceed the economic status of their parents, as income inequality has worsened to levels last seen in the 1920s.  Household incomes have stagnated since the 1970s, and the top income earners since the Great Recession now have garnered almost all the increase.

The Great Recession was brought on by the deregulation boom of the Clinton and GW Bush presidencies and a greater inequality that peaked in 2012 per the Piketty-Saez graph. So why not create programs that Make America More Equal Again?

That is why two out of three Americans are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are currently distributed in the U.S. This includes three-fourths of Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup poll.

Overall, the share of Americans living in middle-class households has declined from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent, reported a 2015 Pew Research study. The hollowing out of the middle class has been a source of consternation among many economists, politicians and the public at large, says those surveyed. They say as Americans move toward the economic extremes it is harder to find common ground, and a common sense of what it means to be an American.

Much of that inequality is in the Midwestern rust belt states that lost blue-collar manufacturing jobs during the globalization and multi-nationalization of US corporations that President Trump promised to bring back again.

President Trump was no dummy in recognizing this fact. Then how could Democrats become so blasé and oblivious to this fact among their former supporters? Everyone saw it coming; the disenfranchisement of whole segments of working-class voters that had descended into depression and drug use in those formerly blue and Democrat-voting states.

There were many suggestions of how to bring back higher-paying jobs during Trump’s term, but he only succeeded in enriching the top 1 percent of income earners with his tax cuts. He couldn’t pass an infrastructure bill, did slightly alter NAFTA by drastically raising import tariffs (even on Canadian lumber and dairy products, which raised their prices); built very little wall but imprisoned immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border in camps, and separated immigrant mothers from their children.

Trumps was also unsuccessful in recalling Obamacare that has benefited more than 20 million Americans.

VP Harris has a much better record to run on. For instance, Biden’s Inflation Reduction act is expected to fund $800 billion in green-energy projects, invest $50 billion to foster building computer chip factories, and $1 trillion to fund infrastructure projects that modernizes our public infrastructure; from roads and bridges to our energy grid and water and sanitation facilities.

There are many reasons for Democrats and even truly populist Republicans to support programs that increase income equality in the coming years. But they can’t be about building more walls. A robust and more politically temperate American middle class must include Americans of all nationalities and ethnicities.

A good start would be to bring back the Child Tax Credit that was first enacted in 1997. A better version recently passed the House with a huge majority but its renewal is now stalled in the Senate by Republicans.

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily expanded the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year to $3,600 per child younger than age 6 and $3,000 per child up to age 17. The expanded child tax credit reached over 61 million children in more than 36 million households, and funds were primarily used for child care, food, housing and other basic needs. In 2021 child poverty fell to its lowest level ever in America, but in 2022 Congress did not renew CTC expansion, and child poverty surged by 41%.

Bringing back the middle class is a slogan of the Harris campaign. A corollary can be, "Make America More Equal Again.” Renewal of the CTC that decreases child poverty is perhaps the best way to boost our middle class; by giving hope to our youngest that they might again be able to better their lives.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Peacemaking in E. Congo

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

What could be more important than supporting projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Santa Barbara Rotarians have been supporting projects such as the Congo Peace School in conjunction with an eastern Congo Rotary Club since 2010.

"There are few worse places, if any, to be a child," said Amani Matabaro, former President of the Bukavu Mwangaza Rotary Club of E. Congo.

While we love to share the amazing impact your giving makes in the lives of the children and adults we partner with in eastern Congo, we also know it is important to share the horrific context in which these children we serve are not only surviving but thriving.

As noted in the September 2023 press briefing from the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF on Congo (DRC) and specifically the eastern part of the country where we are located, “the war-torn country had the world's highest number of UN-verified violations against children in armed conflict.”

The violence "has reached unprecedented levels," said Grant Leaity, UNICEF's representative in the country. "There are few worse places, if any, to be a child."

“The east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is facing one of the world’s most complex and forgotten crises. Around 2.8 million children are bearing the brunt of violent conflict, being recruited by armed groups, losing their families and homes, and being exposed to ever-growing levels of sexual- and gender-based violence.” (ReliefWeb infographic here)

It’s a harrowing and difficult report to read, a content warning for sexual assault and violence against young children.

In this space where so many use violence to control innocent civilians, our Founding Director Amani Matabaro’s vision for active peace is revolutionary. Each week at the Congo Peace School, the students and staff focus on a principle of peace and nonviolence as taught by Martin Luther King, Jr.

This last week the focus was the development and interpretation of Principle Three of Kingian Nonviolence: Nonviolence Seeks to Defeat Injustice, or Evil, Not People.

Training the teachers, Amani helped them put the concept into vocabulary that is easier for the students to understand – to attack the forces of evil, not the persons doing evil, so the students and staff could focus on how to practice the principle in the context of eastern DRC.

Amani spoke to some of the Peace School students to ask how they understood the principle, and how they are putting it into practice in their own lives.

As it is not located in a mining area, The Congo Peace School is in a place of relative peace, but the students and staff and community are surrounded by the violence of militias and war, the threat of being recruited as a child soldier, and the extreme poverty that leads to malnutrition, child marriages, and gender-based violence.

From the UNICEF summary of remarks: “In the first three months of 2023, in North Kivu alone, more than 38,000 cases of sexual- and gender-based violence were reported. That’s a 37 per cent increase compared to the same time period in 2022. Said another way: in just one year, there have been 10,000 additional reports of sexual- and gender-based violence. Those are the ones reported. And in North Kivu alone.”

“As well as unprecedented levels of violence, the lives of children in eastern Congo are threatened by epidemics and malnutrition. Around 1.2 million children under five in the east are facing the risk of acute malnutrition.

UNICEF’s Leaity warned about the risk of "acceptance of something which is unacceptable."

"As the world looks away, we are failing the children of DRC," he said.

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

What is a Livable City?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Chapter Twelve

 I and several others living in Santa Barbara and the Goleta Valley were interested in a more ecologically friendly and less auto-dependent community. Drs. Susanne Lennard, architect, and her husband, child psychologist Henry Lennard, were two disciples of “livable cities”. They influenced our thinking.

The Lennards founded the Making Livable Cities organization in 1986. It began holding Livable Cities conferences, hosting mayors and urban planners from throughout the world.

In one of those conferences that I attended, the Dean of Urban Planning from Venice, Italy, extolled the virtues of pedestrian-friendly Venice and Venice’s many public spaces that created its close-knit community. He even offered his listeners a personal tour of Venice, should we decide to visit him one day!

Mayors and planners from as far away as India, South America, and Singapore attended and presented papers—all wanting to show off their cities’ people-friendly plans that had evolved over centuries of traditional living.

Central to their ideas was that communities had to be safe from crime, with sustainable economic growth that did little environmental damage. This was achieved by creating town centers built around squares, or plazas that became central community meeting places.

The Greeks and Romans had their public forums and amphitheaters that served their communities. Traditional European cities have open squares or plazas surrounded by shops and apartments from which families can watch their children while doing their own work.

The safety of children must be paramount. Its website, MakingCitiesLivable.org, states:

To be sustainable, a neighborhood, town or city must SUSTAIN ITS CHILDREN [their emphasis]. It must provide a physical environment that ensures children’s health, develops their faculties, and fosters their love for community, and for nature. In this way, children grow up to become agents of sustainability.

It is a messianic statement, but saving cities from themselves is a messianic endeavor. These conferences were tremendously exciting for those interested in building sustainable communities that combined good jobs with a human-scale environment. Dr.

Henry Lennard had developed the concept of child-centered communities where children are able to roam and explore their neighborhoods on their own. They could get to school on streets safe for children without being ferried around by a soccer mom, or anyone in a car that prevented them from exploring their surroundings, creating a sense of autonomy and personal responsibility so important for success in later life.

Many Goleta residents were idealistic former UC Santa Barbara students opposed to anything that hinted at urban; that might disturb the largest Monarch Butterfly Preserve in the west coast, for example. Their vision had to be included in a community plan. Similarly, Goleta and the South Coast in general was becoming another Silicon Valley with major tech startups like Mentor and Citrix corporations located there.

Goleta had also been a major aerospace center in the 1970s and 1980s with Raytheon, General Motor’s Delco and other defense contractors. UC Santa Barbara’s technical expertise was nearby, as was Vandenberg Air Force Base where spy and weather satellites were launched into north-south polar trajectories.

How could we accommodate all this diversity in a well- functioning city?

Harlan Green © 2022

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen