[NYTr] Booming Economy: Americans Believe The American Dream is Dead

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Alternet - Oct 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64831/

Americans Don't Believe in the American Dream

By Joshua Holland

The American Dream is Dead, gone along with the era of good union jobs,
comprehensive employer benefits and real upward mobility, and most
working people are fully aware of the fact.

That's the takeaway from the latest installment of the American Dream
Survey, a study of working Americans' views of the political-economy
released in late September.

It paints a picture of an increasingly frustrated working majority who
are having a harder time raising their families than the generation
before them did, and who believe that things will be even worse for
their kids. They have reason to believe it -- a 30-year assault on
organized labor, neglected minimum wage increases, fewer educational
opportunities and the constant tide of pro-business propaganda being
pumped out by right-wing think tanks and business roundtables that
enforces the idea that working people are faceless "inputs" -- costs
that need to be controlled -- have left Americans with far less social
mobility than they had a generation ago. Contrary to common belief,
Americans have less opportunity to move up the economic ladder than
Canadians and Western Europeans (except for those in the UK).

To some extent the Dream was always a myth, especially for people of
color, but in a very real sense we've reached a point in which we're
looking at a break in America's implied social contract -- we were
supposed to trade security, in the form of the kind of robust safety
nets that they have in social democracies, for "dynamism," for
supposedly unlimited opportunity. But the fact is that working people
are walking a tightrope with little in the way of safety net, and they
have less chances of making it big than their counterparts in other
advanced economies.

Conservatism killed the American Dream, and most working people
understand that on some level. But while they blame the same elite
corporatists as progressives have pointed to as the culprits for years,
they are also deeply uncomfortable with the idea of class and, after 15
years of Democratic Party "triangulation," aren't sure which political
party is responsible for casting them adrift, rudderless, on the
currents of the global economy.

The American Dream survey tested working people's views on a range of
issues that fit into the frame of what people think of when they
contemplate the "American dream." According to the researchers who
conducted the survey, that consists of four cornerstone issues: "jobs
with pay that can support a family, access to quality health care,
chances for your children to succeed, and a secure and dignified
retirement." Only full-time, nonmanagerial working adults with a
household income of less that $100K were eligible for the study.

When asked about these core issues of economic security, three out of
four respondents said it's becoming "harder these days to achieve the
American dream"; two thirds said it was harder for them than it was for
their parents, and a similar number predicted it would be even more
difficult for their kids. Eight of ten said that the economic situation
that the next generation will face is likely to be worse than it is for
adults working today.

While the Bush administration and others on the right try to paint
Americans' growing economic insecurity as some sort of irrational
manifestation of the Zeitgeist -- a common claim is that the economy is
going gang-busters but people are too down about the mess in Iraq to
notice -- the truth is that stagnating wages and rising costs for
housing, food, healthcare and gas are driving working America's
pessimism. As one participant who hadn't seen a raise in some time put
it, "There's no progress. There's no option. No more salary. That's it.
We're static there. We all [have a] fear of being dismissed … if you
leave there's like ten people in line waiting to get your job."

Healthcare and retirement security are both key issues for working
people that the business class in D.C. dance around but never address.
Two-thirds of those surveyed said that they are either now or have
recently been without health insurance, and more than half believe that
they will retire at a later age than they had planned just five years
ago.

Working America doesn't buy the idea that these are the "natural"
consequences of economic modernization -- innate rules of an economy
created by God and untouchable by man -- and they don't believe that
they're to blame for their eroding economic security. More than nine
out of ten respondents -- including self-identified conservatives --
said that in America, hard, full-time work should lead to economic
security for working families. They see run-away corporate power, the
greed of upper management and a short-term fixation on the bottom line
as the primary obstacles to the American dream. Two-thirds agreed with
the statement: "When corporations are profitable, the benefits are not
shared with workers but go only to the top," and a similar number
believed that "the government doesn't do enough to rein in greedy and
unethical behavior by corporations and CEOs."

Finally, the survey showed that the death of activist government
intervention has been greatly exaggerated. More than four in five
workers want their government to "make sure employers keep their
promises to employees, including protecting their pensions and health
care," and to "create a more progressive tax system that is fair to
workers and makes billionaires pay their fair share in taxes." More
than three in four said that it should "hold large, global,
multinational corporations accountable to pay their fair share for the
problems they create in the world, such as environmental pollution and
low wages" and "make it less profitable for companies to outsource jobs
by removing tax breaks for sending jobs overseas."

Intuitively, that should leave the country ready to embrace progressive
economic policies, but they remain ambivalent to notions of class. One
worker in an Illinois plant told researchers, "It's America not England
you know. We don't have that class system," and another said: "I don't
see myself as, I don't, I'm not referring to high class, middle class,
or low class. It's just us -- it relates to work." It's the result of
the great triumph of the corporate class -- the notion that we are all
in the same boat and that it's somehow crass to note that the game is
rigged against ordinary working people.

The real takeaway is for Democrats and the corporatocracy's legion of
Beltway supporters: Overwhelming majorities of working Americans --
self-identified swing voters and conservatives, as well as liberals and
progressives -- are fed up, aren't buying the narrative the Chamber of
Commerce is selling and are ripe for the picking. But they're not being
given a real choice in terms of economic models -- there's only one
that's acceptable to Big Business, and it has unflagging bipartisan
support within the Beltway. As long as people have no alternatives to
choose from, they'll make their decisions based on which candidates
look better or worship at the same church or hate the same people they
do or would be fun to share a beer with.

[Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.]

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.