Goodwin on Economic Justice

Richard N. Goodwin’s “Economic Justice Dies a Slow Death” (Commentary, Oct. 18) says it all. The so-called Republican revolution beginning with Ronald Reagan’s policies has had one effect: Our country resembles a Third World nation more than ever before. Look at the streets; look at the public infrastructure; look at health statistics. Do the Republicans realize they are presiding over the “Latin Americanization” of the U.S.? The widening gap between the rich and the poor, the growing disregard for working-class people, the declining educational systems, complacency about conditions in the workplace, exorbitant greed at the corporate level and government totally in bed with the high and the mighty are qualities we have come to expect in the world’s undemocratic regimes.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I sense that the electorate is beginning to see where the vicious meanness of the Republican revolution is heading. “If you want peace,” Pope Paul VI said, “work for justice”--as Goodwin trenchantly insists.

ALLAN FIGUEROA DECK

Los Angeles

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* Goodwin would have us believe that the primary reason for the decline of the income of the average American is that the rich are oppressing the middle class and the poor. At first I thought, here’s just another Democrat trying to promote class warfare. Then I came to his credentials as “a principal architect of the Great Society.”

It wasn’t the “rich” Republicans who created the situation we have today. It started with “the Great Society.” Go back and track the costs of medical services before and after Medicare was instituted. It is a program so full of loopholes with so little oversight that it fed the unscrupulous until they became some of the very rich so despised by Goodwin. The Great Society also created welfare programs with no useful training and with no time limit.

At least the Head Start program was a good idea. But it wasn’t well executed and didn’t achieve the results it should have.

Mr. Goodwin, stop telling people they are victims of people more powerful than they are. That only leaves two choices: Turn to violence because you’re helpless and hopeless; or simply give up trying to succeed at all because the deck will always be stacked against you if you believe someone else always holds the cards.

MICHAEL J. McININCH

Arcadia

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* Goodwin’s explanation for the decline of our middle class was more succinctly expressed recently by another writer: We are no longer the United States of America. Instead, we have indeed become the United Corporations of America.

To which, I would add this. One day there will be an amendment to Ronald Reagan’s famous declaration that “government is the problem.” The amendment will read, “And so is the private sector.”

When America finally accepts both statements--the original and the amendment--America will finally have grown up.

BILL COLESON

Camarillo

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* I find it curious that while Goodwin blames the rich and the super-rich for the overall decline in Americans’ purchasing power, he fails to mention the tremendous cost of the Vietnam War to America. Before we enter another war, whether in Bosnia or elsewhere, all Americans should be fully informed of the costs and the repercussions in advance as opposed to an after-the-fact blame game.

FRANK BURTON

Santa Monica