‘Economic Gap Bodes Ill for U.S.’

We are rapidly growing our own Third World right inside our borders, but this is not generally discussed in polite society; The Times is to be commended.

However, the authors do a grave disservice to the vast majority of Americans in general, and to hundreds of thousands of committed activists and volunteers in particular, when they state that: “Without thinking very hard about it, Americans as a society apparently have chosen to tolerate this level of poverty.” The implication that the American population as a whole (a) played some decision-making role in bringing about the current situation, and (b) is resigned or content with the status quo, is inaccurate. Although I’m sure it was not the authors’ intention, statements of this type serve to maintain or exacerbate poverty in this country by obscuring the causes of the gap between the rich and the poor, and by suggesting that the blame belongs to the victims themselves.

The increasing gap in America between the wealthy (the richest 1% of whom own 50% of the nation’s accumulated wealth) and the impoverished over the last decade is primarily due to powerful and well-coordinated efforts by the former to engineer a diversion of the country’s resources away from the general population and toward themselves. We saw massive deregulation of industry, including virtual non-enforcement of anti-trust law, union-busting actions by the federal government and an increasingly unfavorable climate for organized labor, a substantial migration of labor-intensive manufacturing operations overseas, and vast increases in military spending, all of which were coupled with severe cutbacks in welfare, medical care, food assistance, mental health, low-cost housing and other government programs of the type that benefitted ordinary citizens but which did nothing to help the bottom lines of major corporations.

RANDALL SMITH

Del Mar