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U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, destiny’s tot, recently
suggested that blue-collar Americans are feeling bitter about their
financial condition, and critics have been whaling on him ever since. How dare Obama suggest that people are bitter? Americans are not bitter! Americans are happy, proud,
peppy, content, and optimistic! Maybe. But if millions of them are not bitter or
angry at this point, there is probably something wrong with them. In his new book, The Big
Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,
Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times writes, “Since 1979, hourly earnings for 80 percent
of American workers (those in private-sector, non-supervisory jobs) have
risen by just 1 percent, after inflation. For male workers, the average
hourly wage actually slid by 5 percent since 1979 . . . the nation’s
economic pie is growing, but corporations by and large have not given their
workers a bigger piece.”
A 1 percent raise in almost 30 years? Still not
bitter?
And who is getting ever-larger chunks of pie? The Wall Street Journal has
isolated some of the most energetic pie pigs: “The wealthiest 1
percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, according
to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19
percent in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8 percent set in
2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks. The bottom 50
percent earned 12.8 percent of all income, down from 13.4 percent in 2004
and a bit less than their 13 percent share in 2000.”
You can be sure that a substantial portion of that
bottom half of the population is living in small towns similar to the ones
in which Obama sniffed out a degree of bitterness. Even the 1 percent increase in hourly wages over the
last generation or so is illusory. During the same period, unavoidable
expenses — such as medical insurance, child care, and transportation
— have expanded explosively. Whatever progress that’s been made
in living a little better has been achieved by working a lot harder —
and a lot longer.
“In a survey by the Families and Work
Institute,” Greenhouse writes, “two-thirds of employed parents
responded that they didn’t have enough time with their kids and just
under two-thirds said they didn’t have enough time with their
spouses. The typical American worker toils 1,804 hours a year — 135
hours more per year than the typical British worker, 240 hours more than
the average French worker, and 370 hours more than the average German
worker. No one in the world’s advanced economies works
more.”
Compared with workers in other countries, where the
standard of living is as high or higher than it is in the U.S., Americans
— with fewer and shorter vacations — are worked like donkeys.
Politicians repeatedly insist on telling the voters that America is the
richest country in the world, which is true enough, but it also provides
little comfort to the massive population of underappreciated workers, in
small towns and big cities, who don’t get their share. Every election season, candidates pretend to tear up
as they assure millions of Americans who are working for less — or
not at all — with the phrase the Clintons made famous: “I feel
your pain.” That empty empathy will get you a bag of groceries in the
basement of that church across town.
This year, the politicians are back with their
speeches about how they are going to arrange for vocational classes so the
voters will be able to compete in the 21st century. The first decade of the
21st century is already almost over. Time to drop that line, lest the
small-town people turn bitter.
Obama is getting drubbed for saying that people, in
their bitterness, are looking to God and their guns. If you had to choose
to whom you would turn for economic assistance, Hillary or God, who would you be clinging to? As for the
guns, American politicians, with their frequently broken promises, are just
lucky that they aren’t picking birdshot from their derrières.
Nicholas von Hoffman
writes regularly for The Nation, is a columnist for the New
York Observer, and is the author of 13 books,
including Citizen Cohn.
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2008.
