Prescriptions for a Better America

...For a spell, Michael Harrington actually experienced the euphoria of the intellectual and activist invited into the councils of the mighty...

...unions enroll majorities of the labor force (in Sweden the figure exceeds 90 per cent...

...Although Harrington takes care to say that some of these men and women will secure decent jobs in different places and industries, he is equally certain that the older workers in particular will never again earn anything near the $20,000-$30,000 that for a generation defined them as financially middle-class...

...Kuttner's text is essentially an essay in comparative social and economic policy...

...policy has jeopardized European welfare states...

...17.95...

...Kuttner may be young enough to dream of 1988 or '92 or '96, when an enlightened President on the hunt for progressive policies will cast an approving eye on this excellent prospectus for a more civilized society...

...Harrington recalls, too, the humanitarian impulse that combined with fiscal conservatism and the introduction of powerful tranquilizers to empty the snake pits where the psychotic were stored...

...are locked shut...

...the windows are permanently barred, the fire doors...

...In addition, the current mini-boom in Lucky Ron's America has drained vast sums of needed investment capital from Western Europe...

...have serious fire hazards...

...His The Other America—which I recall reviewing approvingly for the old and lamented New York Herald Tribune without the slightest premonition of its impending celebrity—was brought to the attention first of John Kennedy and then of Lyndon Johnson...

...American steel-workers who accepted wage and benefit give backs two or three years ago raged futilely when management continued to shut plants and acquire unrelated enterprises, instead of investing in modernized facilities...

...Weak unions, by contrast, resist technological change and wage concessions in hard times because they have good reason to believe their employers will give them nothing for their pains...

...final victory over Japanese rivals in domestic and international competition...

...Most of the factories...

...Nonetheless, it is inescapably true that when as ignorant a man as ever became President entered the White House in 1981, he could draw upon the solid analyses of credentialed experts suitably digested by his handlers—much as Franklin Roosevelt half a century earlier adapted the researches of University of Wisconsin institutionalists, and John Kennedy promulgated the message of Keynesian tax-cutters...

...dispersion of meddling federal bureaucrats...

...Twenty years after he rediscovered the presence of poverty in the midst of plenty, Harrington resurveys the national landscape, partly as a student and critic of our statistics and partly in the light of his experiences as a social observer and political organizer...

...As New York's Mayor Koch, in his usual unpleasant fashion, has put it, "The city can no longer afford to have its neighborhoods used as mental wards and its police officers used as orderlies...

...He registers courteous yet firm dissent from the late Arthur Okun's conclusion that advances toward economic equality must be purchased at the price of diminished efficiency...

...Perhaps, he speculates, the working class and the poor will identify their common interests and their common enemies— corporate greed, an unfair tax code that compels the working class to finance most benefits for themselves and those poorer than they are, and a government that unashamedly serves the purposes of the wealthy and powerful...

...More generous Social Security pensions and Medicare have distinctly improved the situation of the elderly, but over 15 per cent of them are nevertheless located below the poverty line...

...Many will sink into poverty and resentfully accept welfare, food stamps and Medicaid...

...It holds that free, competitive markets are the source of everything good: economic growth...

...It envisaged a network of community health centers, counselors and sheltered living environments to cushion the transition from institution to freedom...

...I console myself with derision...

...A sourly inspiring answer is provided by the example of the neoconservatives, supply-siders, right-to-lifers, and Moral Majoritarians...

...The New American Poverty By Michael Harrington Holt, Rinehart & Winston...

...It resembles Kuttner's in its emphasis upon planning, full employment and democratic participation...

...The crowded quarters are always poorly ventilated...

...The sentence in Kuttner's book that provides its title accurately identifies his argument...

...Harrington played a significant role in the design of Johnson's "unconditional" War Against Poverty...

...Today as before, larger percentages of blacks and Hispanics are poor than is the case for the population as a whole...

...The supply-siders in the Reagan Administration have vulgarized the tradeoff Okun reluctantly accepted as a license to cut taxes for the affluent and benefits for the needy...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman What are the politically despondent to do in the wilderness while they await, with flagging spirits and diminishing hope, this country's resumption of its interrupted journey to the Promised Land...

...many have no openable windows or doors, except for the front entrance...

...271 pp...

...Since one must survive, Harrington wistfully hopes for better times...

...and welfare programs are more extensive than most Americans can conceive...

...The New American Poverty makes grim reading...

...Unions, employers and governments also cooperate unashamedly in varieties of planning...

...The old forms of want stubbornly survive...

...Several of this volume's most poignant pages deal with two especially disquieting urban phenomena, the homeless and the horde of deinstitutionalized mental patients...

...Conditions in the rural hollows of Appalachia are little better than those that appalled Kennedy in his 1960 Presidential campaign...

...abolition of poverty and discrimination...

...The idea that has gathered in communion the social science sophisticates who grace the pages of The Public Interest and Commentary, free-enterprise fundamentalists based in the Heritage Foundation and the Mountain States Legal Foundation (James Watts' lair before he became Reagan's Interior Secretary), and born-again Christians actually is an article of faith...

...A rising percentage of the homeless, we learn, are young men and women—not the winos and drug addicts, but those who may be irrevocably separated from the labor force and suffer the debilitating disease of despair...

...It remains to be seen how much, if any, efficiency has been purchased by the rewards for the wealthy and the sacrifices of the needy...

...The steam from the pressing machines makes the temperature and humidity even more intolerable...

...In this context, I salute Robert Kuttner, who identifies himself as a radical democrat, and Michael Harrington, a longstanding Democratic Socialist...

...Until a few years ago, the communities having the best post-World War II record of growth, employment, social protection, price stability, and rising living standards were Austria, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, West Germany, and Japan...

...Add both volumes to your shelf of prescriptions for a better America, to be filled after the Reagan era ends...

...Never underestimate the power of an idea, however foolish, whose time has come, especially when the President of the United States merchandises intellectual junk food with the practiced sincerity of an old-time television host...

...Of course, as Kuttner is entirely aware, the opec oil shock of 1979 has produced economic stagnation in Europe, threatening the political consensus of the quarter century after World War II...

...After gritting their teeth in the 1960s, enduring the treachery of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and suffering Jimmy Carter's crusades for human rights, they lived to see themselves vindicated in the person of that hero for all conservative seasons, Ronald Reagan...

...income and wealth are more equitably distributed than in the land of the free...

...Other draftees to the 1980s' reserve army of the unemployed are the steel-workers mentioned earlier, thanks to their industry's criminally negligent failure to keep abreast of technological advances, and autoworkers similarly victimized by the managerial failures of the overpaid chieftains of General Motors and Ford...

...The United States and Great Britain have been notably kind to capitalists of late, trimming social benefits and pursuing free-market remedies, but they have performed less well than their planned, egalitarian rivals in the post-war years...

...Harrington quotes the liberal Manhattan State Senator Franz Leichter on conditions in the more than 500 New York garment-trade sweatshops: "It is not uncommon for 30 or more sewing machines, several steam pressing machines, and other equipment to be crowded into one small room...

...Along with so many other promising initiatives, however, Vietnam drained funds and public concern away from these vulnerable individuals...

...Harrington has a program awaiting the right moment...

...Life on Indian reservations has not improved...

...They include undocumented aliens who often labor at wages far below legal minimums on Sunbelt farms and in urban sweatshops...

...In the past four years, America has become an even more unequal society...

...In line with the findings of Sar Levitan and John E. Schwarz, though, he now describes as modest successes the Job Corps, Head Start, and even some of the much maligned Community Action and ceta programs...

...For him, "The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth...

...He prudently postpones for other occasions how on earth we are to proceed to a Swedish nirvana from a situation where Walter Mondale and Ger-aldine Ferraro are our extreme liberals...

...With the exception of Japan, where social welfare is largely administered by big corporate employers, these countries share characteristics that are heretical in the eyes of free-enterprisers: Taxes are much higher than in the United States...

...In these mean days, it is unclear whether any alternatives are available...

...As Kuttner emphasizes, strong labor organizations can responsibly negotiate uninflationary wage bargains because they get something substantial in return for their members —improved social benefits, active labor market policies, protection against summary plant closings, and progress toward workplace democracy...

...According to their varying degrees of literacy, the prophets of these converging, if occasionally contradictory, messages tirelessly wrote, spoke, lobbied, and demonstrated, confident that truth, so often despised and ridiculed, would in the end triumph...

...The "new" in Harrington's title applies to the latest recruits to poverty's ranks...

...In short, the combination of opec and recent U.S...

...Even before Vietnam spelled the epitaph for it and other Great Society programs, Harrington realized how pared down and compromised the brave aspirations of the poverty warriors were...

...High American interest rates, the direct result of unprecedentedly huge Federal deficits, have lured to New York European savings vital to the modernization of continental industry...

...Kuttner believes in full employment, democratic participatory planning, strong unions, managed international trade, and the sort of politics that has Social Democrats serving from time to time as prime ministers and cabinet members...