The fact sheet detailing the actions the Biden-Harris administration has taken to better the lives of Black communities, delivering historic results, was provided by the White House:
Over the past four years, President Biden and Vice President Harris have taken action to ensure the promise of America reaches every community—including Black communities. These actions have delivered historic results, enabling more Black Americans to access a quality education, obtain a good-paying job, start a business, and buy a home—driving significant gains in wealth. From growing economic and educational opportunities to improving health outcomes, from enhancing public trust and public safety to advancing equity, civil rights, and racial justice, the Biden-Harris Administration has demonstrated its deep commitment to ensuring equal opportunity for all and investing in the future of Black Americans.
Securing Economic Mobility, Educational Opportunity, and the American Dream for Black Communities
President Biden and Vice President Harris believe that the promise of America—the American Dream—is that everyone should have a fair shot at getting ahead. Under the Biden-Harris Administration, we have made progress:
Achieved the lowest Black unemployment rate on record and created 2.4 million jobs for Black workers as of August 2024
Lifted 400,000 Black children out of poverty by increased SNAP benefits through updating the Thrifty Food Plan, and continuing to call on Congress to restore the full expanded Child Tax Credit—which, during the COVID-19 pandemic, cut Black child poverty in half benefitting 600,000 and brought racial poverty disparities to a record low Grew Black American business ownership at the fastest rate in over three decades Tripled the number of SBA-backed loans to Black-owned businesses Awarded a record $10 billion in federal contracts to Black-owned small businesses in Fiscal Year 2023 Invested a record of more than $16 billion in Historically Black Colleges and Universities Secured a $900 increase to the maximum Pell Grant award—the largest increase in the past 10 years—and $23 million in first-ever funding to the Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program to increase the number of teachers of color and multilingual educators across the country Approved the cancellation of almost $170 billion in student loan debt for nearly 5 million borrowers, including a significant number of Black borrowers who are disproportionately burdened by student debt Took on racial bias in home appraisals and closed the Black-white home misevaluation gap by 40% Reduced mortgage insurance premiums for FHA loans, saving 76,000 Black households an average of $900/year Cut costs for high-speed internet to 5.5 million Black households with the Affordable Connectivity Program Distributed $2.2 billion in financial assistance to over 43,000 farmers who experienced discrimination
Led a historically equitable economic recovery—Black wealth, even after adjusting for inflation, is up 60% relative to pre-pandemic levels—the largest increase on record
Ending Health Disparities
President Biden and Vice President Harris are committed to keeping health care costs down for individuals and families and improving access to health care to address disparities in Black communities. To improve health outcomes for the Black community, the Biden-Harris Administration has:
Ensured more Black Americans have health care than ever before by lowering premium costs by an average of $800 for millions of Americans, increasing Black enrollment in Affordable Care Act coverage by 95%, or over 1.7 million people since 2020
Lowered monthly premiums for health insurance, capped the cost of insulin at $35 and all out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 for people on Medicare, and announced new negotiated prices for the first ten prescription drugs for Medicare price negotiation—expected to save $1.5 billion in out-of-pocket costs in the first year of the program alone Made sickle cell disease the first focus of the new Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services models, aimed to lower the high cost of drugs, promote accessibility to drug therapies, and improve patient care Expanded Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to 12 months in 46 states and Washington, D.C., covering 700,000 more women in the year after childbirth Secured an additional $1.5 billion for Head Start
Delivered $1 billion to help meet the mental health needs of young people by preparing and hiring a projected 14,000 additional mental health professionals to serve America’s schools
Making Communities Safer and Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice
The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to using every available federal lever to advance effective, accountable policing, build trust, and improve public safety so that the promise of equal justice under the law is a reality for all. To enhance equal justice and public safety for all communities, including the Black community, the President has:
Signed an Executive Order on police reform when Congressional Republicans would not pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; restricted the use of force, banned chokeholds, restricted the use of no-knock warrants and created the first-ever national database of federal law enforcement misconduct
Created the first-ever White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention U.S. Surgeon General named gun violence a public health crisis and issued a public health advisory on how to reduce violence. Signed into the law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), the most significant gun violence reduction legislation enacted in nearly 30 years, and taken more meaningful executive action than any other president to make our schools, churches, grocery stores, and communities safer Secured $400 million in funding dedicated specifically for community violence interventions that invests in evidence-informed strategies to prevent violence Cracked down on the source of illegal firearms by making it illegal to manufacture “ghost gun” kits, enacting the first-ever federal gun trafficking law, taking a “zero tolerance” approach to rogue gun dealers, and regulating the number one source of guns involved in gun trafficking investigations – unlicensed sellers. Pardoned thousands of Americans under federal and D.C. law for simple possession of marijuana
Helped bring violent crime to its lowest level in 50 years—lower than during any year of the previous administration
Restoring the Soul of Our Nation
President Biden believes that advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our government and requires sustained leadership and partnership with all communities. To make the promise of America real for Black communities, the President has:
Signed two Executive Orders directing the federal government to address inequality
Protected Black history as American history Signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, the first new federal holiday since MLK DayDesignated Springfield 1908 Race Riot and Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monuments Signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act to classify lynching for the first time as a federal hate crime
Worked to protect the sacred right to vote through executive actions and continued calls for legislation
Appointed the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, more Black women to federal circuit courts than all previous presidents combined, and more Black judges in a single term than any other president
This is supposedly the season of “giving,” of “good will to all mankind.” Not with Donald Trump in the White House.
Trump is so giddy to take credit for displacing “Happy Holidays” with “Merry Christmas.” That’s all he cares about. But just as Trump, who makes money off of hotels but has no concept of “hospitality” and is more like the craven Snidely Whiplash than Barron Hilton, he has no clue and no care what “Christmas” means.
Indeed, this Christmas, 9 million children and pregnant women are losing access to health care and the ability to live a good life or realize their full potential. 13 million Americans don’t know if they will be able to afford or access health care. 800,000 Dreamers don’t know whether they will be thrown out of jobs, housing, and the nation, exiled to a country that is completely foreign to them. Seniors and retirees don’t know if they will be able to continue to afford living in their homes and whether their Medicare and Social Security benefits will be cut.
The Tax Scam rammed through by Republicans is just the beginning: they are giddy about how adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt, the same amount (coincidentally) that it redistributes from working people to the already obscenely rich and richest corporations sitting on $2 trillion in cash they refuse to use to raise wages will “justify” slashing the social safety net, cutting Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid – you know the so-called “entitlements” that working people have paid into their entire working lives.
Trump made it clear, in his ignorant, short-hand way, what will come next, in his speech in St. Louis:
“Then we will have done tax cuts, the biggest in history…I know people, they work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn’t work at all. And the person who’s not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off. And it’s not going to happen. Not going to happen. (Applause.) So we’re going to go into welfare reform.”
You only have to look at what is happening in every quarter of civic life which is shifting the balance to the wealthiest while cutting off upward mobility for anyone else. The Trump FCC’s plan to overturn net neutrality is exactly that: it cements the control that the internet oligopoly wields not only to keep out upstart competitors but control what information or culture gets wide viewing. What Pai wants is for money to rule both content and access (that’s what “free market” means). Don’t have money to keep an internet subscription so you can access news, information or jobs? Tough luck. But the FCC intends to couple this with more government surveillance of what goes up over the Internet – quite literally the worst of both worlds.
It is apparent also in how Trump is pawning off national monuments to commercial exploitation – Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, the Arctic Refuge and the Atlantic Marine Sanctuary – basically stealing what is our collective heritage and birthright to give to commercial interests. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has no compunction to waste taxpayer money for his own use, is even raising admission fees to the national parks, further putting what is owned by all Americans off limits for those who can’t pay the freight.
Money is the new “entitlement.” It determines who can afford to weigh the scales of justice in their favor, and, thanks to Citizens United, who runs for election and wins, and therefore what policy gets written and enacted, and even who has access to the voting booth. Billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins actually said that out loud: “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?” Indeed.
This mentality is actually seeping down even into the disasters that have become all too common and catastrophic because of climate change: Freakonomics did a segment that a free market rather than anti-gouging laws should come into play after a disaster. A shopkeeper should be able to sell a bottle of water for $1000 to the father with a child dying of thirst if he wants to, because at $2 a bottle, someone will hoard. (The absurdity is that purchases are rationed for the rich and the poor.)
Another segment suggested that people should be able to pay their way (a premium) to jump a line – that’s okay for a themepark, but they are suggesting the same for access to life-saving organ donation.
Trump is the first president to dare do what the Republicans have been salivating over since the New Deal but dared not do. It’s not that the Republicans haven’t had their sights set on reversing every progressive policy since the 1860s. (Alabama Senate candidate, the defrocked judge Roy Moore, said that every Amendment after the 10th, the state’s rights one, should be abolished, including the 13th amendment ending slavery, 14th amendment giving due process, the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote. Meanwhile, the Republicans are about to cancel the 10th amendment’s State’s Rights provision in order to require New York State to accept Conceal Carry Reciprocity and overturn its own gun safety laws.)
You actually have Senator Chuck Grassley defending abolishing the estate tax which affects only a tiny fraction of the wealthiest families and was intended since the founding to prevent an institutionalized aristocracy, argue that the previous tax code favors poor and working-class Americans who were “just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
Utah’s Orrin Hatch, justifying shifting $1.5 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations and slashing the social safety net, declared, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger, and expect the federal government to do everything.”
Merry Christmas? Bah humbug.
“And so how do we as Christians respond, who serve a God whose prophets call for welcoming immigrants (Deuteronomy, Leviticus), caring for the orphans and widows (Jeremiah, Ezekiel), establishing fair housing (Isaiah), seeking justice (Micah 6), and providing health care (Isaiah),” a twitter conversation between MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Susan Gilbert Zencka wrote.
“What you’re witnessing tonight in the United States Senate is the weaponization of pure, unmitigated greed,” Joy Reid wrote after the Senate’s adoption of its tax plan. “Lobbyists are writing the bill in pen at the last minute. And Republicans are no longer even pretending to care about anyone but the super rich,“ wrote Joy Reid.
The America that Trump and the Republicans envision is not one of an American Dream where anyone who has the ability and works hard enough can rise up, but one in which communities must beg billionaires for funding for a public school, a library, a hospital, and be very grateful for their charity.
Tell me how this is not a modern, nonfiction version of Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.”
California’s Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom delivered a powerful speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 27, 2016, arguing for Hillary Clinton as the best candidate for president to uphold fundamental American values: liberty, diversity, opportunity, while Donald Trump offers a “hostile takeover of the American Dream.” Here is hjighlighted transcript:
I’m proud to be a Democrat from the great state of California! Proud because today’s California is strong and getting stronger. A jet-propelled engine of job creation, the home court for creativity around the world. We’ve done it not just through innovation but by inclusion. Pro-immigrant, pro-environment, pro-women, pro-worker. Proudly pro-gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender.
We aren’t the Golden State despite our values, but because of them. We don’t tolerate diversity, we celebrate it. Those values — liberty, diversity, opportunity — are fundamentally American values. Those values are under attack, not just by enemies abroad, but by a GOP that moved its fearmongering fringe to center stage.
What Trump presented last week wasn’t political discourse, it wasn’t even political incorrectness. What Trump presented last week was defeatist and retreatist. Never has a speech been so long, with so little substance, science, humanity, humor, or hope. His hostile takeover of the American Dream is built on two fundamental lies: That America is a dark and desperate place, and that he has any kind of a plan to make it better. Trump strangled the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan and replaced “tear down that wall” with the cynical bigotry of “build that wall.” Contempt for the Constitution, inhumane mass deportation, malice toward different views and different hues. Those are disqualifications from any office, let alone the highest office in the land.
While it’s refreshing to finally see an openly gay man speak at a Republican convention, it doesn’t remove the stain of selecting Mike Pence, America’s most anti-LGBTQ governor. Pence supported overt discrimination and even advocated diverting taxpayer dollars to so-called “conversion therapy.” That’s not “praying away the gay;” it’s emotional torture against our most innocent citizens, our children. Telling them that to live, they must lie. About who they are, and who they love. That’s fundamentally un-American. The age-old choice has never been more clear: We can live our fears or live our dreams.
Hillary Clinton has dedicated her life to putting the American Dream within reach. She believes in diversity over division. The hard work of pluralism over the “illusion of differences.”
And as a father of four, I want to say something to all the children who are watching and listening at home. When you hear people say that you and your family don’t matter because of who you are, or where you came from, or what you look like, or who you love, I want you to know one thing: The people in this room, and all across the country, believe that you matter.
Hillary Clinton believes you matter. We believe that you belong here. We need you here. We believe that you can be whoever you are, and become whatever you want to be. And we’re going to fight for you, not just over the next 100 days, but over the next 100 years. Because, no matter what people tell you, that’s what America is about, and that’s what makes America great.
I have a love/hate relationship with Christmas. As we start the New Year. let me tell you about the “hate” part.
I hate that Christmas becomes the one day of the year that is supposed to make up for all the actions that have resulted in the greatest inequality and lowest upward mobility since the Gilded Age and the greatest of all advanced countries. The American Dream has been exported, outsourced, and rendered to myth rather than reality here at home.
This year, Republicans – even as they cling more ardently than ever to Guns and God – don’t even pretend to care about the less fortunate, and promise to perpetuate and make worse the very policies that have resulted in 22 out of every 100 school-age children living in poverty (16 million), while 45% of children live in low income families; and 14.3 percent of households (17.5 million, or one in seven households) were living with food insecurity. Rather than doing anything to correct the societal conditions that promulgate these travesties, they prey on people’s insecurities, foment their fears and anxieties (Ebola! ISIS!), but do everything possible to thwart progress to alleviate the real source of daily desperation.
I particularly hate the obsession with Toys for Tots – as if handing out a gift at Christmas will make up for all the misery and anxiety that children live through the rest of the year.
Many of the same people who make a show of handing out a turkey for Christmas also withdrew Food Stamps and attacked the school nutrition program, two of the mightiest tools in a limited tool chest to keep people out of poverty, while helping children succeed in school (hunger is a viscously powerful impediment to learning) – and not incidentally, stimulating local economies to break the vicious cycle.
“There are neighborhoods in Baltimore in which the life expectancy is 19 years less than other neighborhoods in the same city,” Susan Grisby reported in “The Most Racist Areas in the United States” (Daily Kos, May 3, 2015). “Residents of the Downtown/Seaton Hill neighborhood have a life expectancy lower than 229 other nations, exceeded only by Yemen. According to the Washington Post, 15 neighborhoods in Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than North Korea…And while those figures represent some of the most dramatic disparities in the life expectancy of black Americans as opposed to whites, a recent study of the health impacts of racism in America reveals that racist attitudes may cause up to 30,000 early deaths every year.”
We are living Charles Dickens “Christmas Carol” but while the classic story sets out the problems, I have always been troubled by the “moral”: that the rich guy who got so rich by exploiting the desperation of others can simply buy presents and give money away to redeem his soul. That’s not the solution.
But the “billionaire class” as Bernie Sanders likes to call them (George W. Bush called them “the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base.”) has no real interest in correcting the institutional causes of systemic poverty – public education system, tax policy, criminal justice system, health care, environmental policy and rigged election system – all of which also bolster the “haves” and “have-mores”. That’s because the demise of the middle class as more and more sink into poverty suits their greater purpose, and what the hey, if you can just throw around some bucks here and there to redeem your soul and your reputation, while lording over everybody else, so much the better.
And because “cash” is increasingly linked with “political power” (the Right Wing Majority on the Supreme Court equated cash with speech and corporations with people for the purpose of buying politicians), the more cash the more power. The converse is the less cash, the more politically silent and invisible you are. People who are juggling multiple jobs and living pay check to pay check tend not to have the same political influence.
The Republicans are working feverishly to increase the invisibility of the underclass, mounting a Supreme Court challenge that will effectively erase unregistered voters from the census altogether, meaning less representation, less funding (which is also apportioned based on that head count).
“Wages are too high,” self-proclaimed billionaire Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, bellowed in response to a call to raise the federal minimum wage, doing a perfect but unintended imitation of Ebenezer Scrooge.
The United States of America is not supposed to have an aristocracy or a class system of privileges, but these policies have done exactly that. And in the nation with the highest percentage of incarcerated prisoners in the world (5% of population but 25% of the world’s incarcerated), you even have a new criminal classification, “Affluenza” – the “affliction” that resulted in a 16 year old getting off scot free after murdering four people with a car he was driving unlicensed and drunk (he has since fled after violating the terms of his probation). It’s a justice system which sees the very bankers who bankrupted millions of Americans and clawed back pensions and health benefits of bankrupt cities (Detroit), collecting millions of dollars on their parachutes.
It’s “free money” (actually, not really free, it comes out of others’ pockets) that they turn around and “invest” in political campaigns and, yes, in philanthropy.
Some of the most notorious “banksters”, like Madoff and Great Neck’s own Steven Cohen, whose investment company SAC racked up $9.4 billion, are also some of the most generous. Cohen is a $1 billion patron of the Robin Hood Foundation among other philanthropic contributions (museums, hospitals, schools).
Another Great Necker, Leonard Litwin, who made a fortune with his Glenwood Real Estate company, has been a generous supporter of Temple Beth-el of Great Neck, funding the Litwin Challenge that enabled the synagogue to pay off its multi-million dollar mortgage. Glenwood Real Estate was at the heart of the corruption scandal that has (so far) taken down state leaders, Democrat Sheldon Silver and Republican Dean Skelos. In essence, his company made tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions that helped put these politicians in power, then gave favors in order to secure favorable legislation, like tax abatements.
“The money, according to Mr. Dorego, Glenwood’s senior vice president and general counsel, was used to ensure the developer would continue to benefit from tax breaks, government financing and favorable rent laws. One program alone saved them as much as $100 million, he said,” William K. Rashbaum reported in the New York Times (“Albany Trials Exposed the Power of a Real Estate Firm,” Dec. 18, 2015).
“Glenwood also benefited from another state-administered program, using it to obtain more than $1 billion in low-interest, tax-exempt bond financing since 2000, to buy land and construct eight buildings it has put up since 2001, according to testimony at Mr. Silver’s trial.”
This is far from benign, but has a big ripple effect on working stiffs. It is a big reason why New York City, with the richest property in the world, doesn’t raise enough in property taxes to pay for its public schools, but depends New York State aid for 50 percent of its $25 billion operating budget. That $12.5 billion comes from income taxes from the rest of us, and is a major reason why Long Islanders pay such high property taxes (we don’t get 50% of our public school budgets paid for out of state aid). Who pays for tax abatements? Why working stiffs, of course.
That’s where philanthropy comes in. Charity does not just buy redemption, it also buys respect and resurrects a reputation. Take the Koch Brothers, for example. They are the singularly greatest example of money buying political power (and vow to spend $889 million in the 2016 campaign) in order to direct policy to their own interest and against average people (promoting fossil fuels over renewables, overturning environmental regulations, tax policy that favors the rich especially a repeal of the estate tax, gun rights, anti-reproductive rights, and the latest, criminal justice “reform” so that their companies can pollute and claim ignorance of the law to evade accountability).
They slap their name on everything, from the Smithsonian Institution’s Hall of Human Origins to PBS programming, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so we are to feel grateful for their patronage, like the Medicis. What we should feel is like peons, increasingly dependent on their largesse while public coffers are bankrupted.
It is especially dangerous when the contributions come with strings – like the Kochs funding economics departments at colleges in order to pick and choose the academics and the particular brand of economic philosophy. Or the Waltons (the six Waltons have more wealth than the bottom 30 percent of all Americans, 100 million people) funding charter schools in order to insert their own particular educational agenda (creationism as science, worker bees instead of independent thinkers).
It is in this same vein that we have Ebenezer Scrooge, who by the end of his spiritual awakening, “solves” the problems of horrendous poverty and inequality by throwing toys and money at it. It is like putting a band-aid on a patient with tuberculosis.
“The world may need a reimagined charter of philanthropy — a ‘Gospel of Wealth’ for the 21st century — that serves not just American philanthropists, but the vast array of new donors emerging around the world,” wrote Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, in a New York Times op-ed, “Why Giving Back Isn’t Enough,” (Dec. 16, 2015).
“This new gospel might begin where the previous one fell short: addressing the underlying causes that perpetuate human suffering. In other words, philanthropy can no longer grapple simply with what is happening in the world, but also with how and why.
“Feeding the hungry is among our society’s most fundamental obligations, but we should also question why our neighbors are without nutritious food to eat. Housing the homeless is an imperative, but we should also question why our housing markets are so distorted. As a nation, we need more investment in education, but not without questioning educational disparities based on race, class and geography….
“Whatever our intentions, the truth is that we can inadvertently widen inequality in the course of making money, even though we claim to support equality and justice when giving it away. And while our end-of-year giving might support worthy organizations, we must also ask if these financial donations contribute to larger social change.
“In other words, ‘giving back’ is necessary, but not sufficient. We should seek to bring about lasting, systemic change, even if that change might adversely affect us. We must bend each act of generosity toward justice.”
What would make a difference to break systemic poverty and inequality? Here are key ones:
Tax policy, which is supposedly “progressive” but in toto perpetuating extraordinary advantage to the wealthiest, taxing wages more than wealth. Raising the cap on income taxed to pay for Medicare and Social Security would alleviate the burden which is disproportionately placed on workers (if all income was subject to tax, you could reduce the percentage by a lot, which would mean a big boost in take-home income for everyone). Transaction tax on securities to de-incentivize short-term investing and make capital function more productively, as it is supposed to; making corporations pay their share, and taking away the incentive to offshore profits and jobs. (See, “For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions,” New York Times, Dec. 30, 2015).
Promote a living wage: raise the minimum wage and cease the war on unions.
Reform immigrationand provide a path to legal status for the undocumented residents (deal with the question of citizenship separately). This will eliminate a gigantic underclass which presently depresses the wages of everyone while suppressing the economic stimulus that would come from legal status.
Reform criminal justice that unfairly penalizes and imprisons poor people, disadvantaged people, people of color, and destroys families as well as that individual’s ability to get a decent job.
Continue the progress of Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) to make health care more affordable, accessible. Continue putting more resources into prevention and wellness, which will increase productivity and savings. Expand, don’t shut down, Planned Parenthood and access to contraception and reproductive rights. Treat gun violence as the public health crisis it is – not just in the dead, but in the lifetime of lost productivity due to injury, a cost estimated at $228 billion ($8.6 billion in direct costs, $221 billion in indirect costs, according to SmartGunLaws.org),
College affordability – eliminating a barrier to the best ticket to upward mobility, as well as the chains that result from student debt. Now amounting to $1.2 trillion, student debt is like indentured servitude, preventing graduates from buying a home, taking a loan to start a business or even pursuing careers of choice.
Improve access to home ownership – this not only gives a family an asset, a hedge against ever-rising rents, stability, roots, but a connection to community (and likely greater inclination to vote).
Make quality child care accessible and affordable.
Improve mass transportation and safe streets, so that people can get to work affordably, efficiently and without fear.
Give the underclass a voice and a force: Improve access to voting. Make voter registration more efficient and reliable and clear. Make Election Day a holiday, expand voting to include a weekend, overturn arbitrary limitations to absentee ballot. Have standards for polling places and voting machines so that some districts are not forced to wait hours to vote. Make sure the census counts everyone (not just registered voters). Eliminate gerrymandering. Because, just as money is becoming a greater factor in campaigns, politicians are increasingly beholden to maintaining the policies that only add to inequality and social injustice.
It’s scary how much “A Christmas Carol” and Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” still resonate today.
Consider what George Bailey says to Mr. Potter, speaking about George’s father who founded the Building & Loan: “He didn’t save enough money to send Harry away to college, let alone me. But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter, and what’s wrong with that? Why… here, you’re all businessmen here. Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? You… you said… what’d you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken down that they… Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about… they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well in my book, my father died a much richer man than you’ll ever be!”
In essence, such systemic improvements to our society would directly benefit, rather than detract from the wealthiest. It is the “rising tides lift all boats” scenario – not just in requiring less of society’s resources to go to “save” the destitute, but in a healthier, more productive society altogether. There will still be rich, middle class and even poor, but the difference is that poverty would not be as severe, as prolonged, or a generational sentence. Society would restore upward mobility – the essence of the American Dream – and benefit from individuals being able to fulfill their full potential.
So let’s turn to New Year’s resolutions, when we make pledges to be better people. And let’s hope this resolution carries through the Presidential Campaign season which already seems to be a test of who can be the cruelest (which to many interpret as “powerful” and “leadership”).
