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Foundation of security has been fraying for 30 years

By John Burbank

Last week I was planning to write about Saturday's precinct caucuses in our state, and how we actually have a voice in deciding the next presidential candidates. But now I am writing this column from Vermont, where my mother just had a massive stroke and died. Events in our lives overtake us, and give us perspective on who we are and what we do and say.

My mom was lucky -- she lived a long, productive and full life. She was my father's wife and help-mate for almost 65 years. She had four children and seven grandchildren. We often think about the scope of someone's life by marveling how she was born in an era when rag buyers and ice peddlers would still be on the streets with their horses and carts, when automobiles were still a novelty, before television, rockets, flights to the moon, DVDs and the Internet.

We can also measure our progress as a society by acknowledging those social supports and regulations for shared well-being that were absent when my mom was born and were considered unnecessary during the Roaring '20s. Of course, this only helped pave the way for the collapse of the stock market and the Great Depression that followed in the 1930s. Out of that folly our country built the Social Security system of social insurance, and public jobs programs such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps to preserve our historical and natural heritage and build public buildings, lodges, trails and roads throughout the United States. We learned the value of Keynesian economics, by which the government runs a deficit to stimulate the economy, and the importance of taxation, especially on high incomes, at rates greater than 90 percent for the wealthy, to capture revenues to be put to the good of the country. We built the foundation to defeat Nazism in World War II.

My mom was born a year before women got the right to vote and when segregation, Jim Crow, and lynch mobs forced blacks into second class citizenship. She lived to see the two ground-breaking Democratic presidential candidates -- a woman who is already a U.S. senator and a man whose mom was from Kansas and dad from Kenya. She saw one of her own daughters be named the best teacher in Massachusetts in 2001, the other a university professor, and two of her granddaughters become medical doctors. She rooted for Venus and Serena Williams and Tiger Woods in their respective sports, sports that were more or less off-limits to people of color 60 years ago.

Mom lived and worked in an era when we made sure that through the G-I Bill, returning veterans had good health care and the chance at a government-paid higher education. She applauded as we added Medicare to Social Security in the 1960s and Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement that resulted in the Voting Rights Act and the end to legal segregation.

When you reflect upon this course of events in the life of my mom and our country, you'll note that the legal aspects of equality have continued advancing. However, the economic aspects for equality, opportunity and the "general welfare" declared in our Constitution have been gradually slipping from our fingers.

Without Social Security and without Medicare, that is, without the government, my mom would have faced an old age of health and financial insecurity. Thanks to our government, she lived a long and full life. But all these advances for economic security stalled out 30 years ago, and since then our systems for social insurance have been stagnant and fraying at the edges. Mom wouldn't want to see a world in which the foundations for her security are taken away from other Americans in the name of the "market." She certainly disapproved of the obstinacy of the current president to deny health coverage for children because this might impinge on market forces.

We are teetering on the edge of a society of selfishness, in which our motivations are only for ourselves and privilege is enshrined as a good. This is a far cry from the New Deal that brought us out of the Great Depression and enabled us to win World War II. It is a far cry from the America in which my mom was a citizen.



John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org ), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him in care of the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.