Meet Barbara Joy Whitehouse, known as Joy, whose life story seems to constitute a catalogue of misfortune.
The widow of a long-haul truck driver killed in a highway accident, she is a cancer survivor whose lung disease keeps her attached part-time to an oxygen tank. At 69, she resides in a mobile home near Salt Lake City and subsists on a modest Social Security payment and the cash she earns by recycling aluminum.
Whitehouse’s situation has been rendered particularly dire by the loss of the death benefits promised by her husband’s company. After four years of payments, the company went bankrupt and that obligation was erased, leaving Whitehouse penurious but still upbeat. “You put your pride in your pocket, and you learn to help yourself,” she says.
It is telling that Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, the ace investigative team that has won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Magazine Awards, dedicate their latest book, The Betrayal of the American Dream, to Whitehouse’s memory. The dedication reveals the emotional heart of their enterprise: Not merely number-crunching chroniclers of middle-class decline, they are invested in the fate of the people who exemplify it.
Barlett and Steele’s preeminent talent is their knack for combining the micro and the macro. They look systemically at issues and policies, from the US tax code to healthcare. The questions they ask are both pragmatic (Does the system work?) and ideological (Who is benefiting, and at whose expense?). Their conclusions are buttressed by details gleaned from public records. But they also use the paper trail to track down the system’s apparent victims, people like Joy—the laid-off, the discarded, the pensionless, and the uninsured.
Now contributing editors at Vanity Fair, the two men have collaborated for an astonishing four decades, initially at The Philadelphia Inquirer (1971-1997) and then at Time magazine (1997-2006). Their stories have examined the growing economic divide between the rich and everyone else in America—Barlett and Steele were talking about “the top 1 percenters” well before Occupy Wall Street. This divide, they argue, is the product of government policies that favor big business and the wealthy. They write as crestfallen progressives, with faith in the power of the federal government to promote economic justice and dismay at how far short it has fallen of that goal.
The Betrayal of the American Dream, their eighth book, won’t seem revelatory to anyone who has been following the team’s reporting, reading Paul Krugman and David Cay Johnston, or watching MSNBC. The idea of an imperiled middle class—for some reason, hardly anyone talks about the poor anymore—has become commonplace in our political discourse. Here, Barlett and Steele lay out the factors responsible for middle-class decline—in effect, updating their iconic 1992 work, America: What Went Wrong? The new book is a useful addition to the debate, even if it doesn’t diagram convincingly just how to make things go right or how to truly reform a political system dependent on big money and susceptible to corporate lobbying.
America: What Went Wrong? expanded on an ambitious series that Barlett and Steele wrote for the Inquirer (where I was once their colleague). That series was, in turn, a follow-up to a riveting, Pulitzer-winning series on the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which showed how the revised tax code, sold as a move toward greater fairness, disproportionately benefited specific corporations and individuals. (Barlett and Steele have been mucking about in the thickets of the US tax system a very long time. They won their first Pulitzer, in 1975, for an examination of unequal enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service, and have since written two books on taxes.)
So Reagan killed this lady's husband and drove his employer into bankruptcy with tax reform 26 years ago!
It wasn't $4.50 a gallon diesel fuel. Or federal regs that make it impossible to hire enough drivers. Or the highest corporate income tax rate in the known Universe. Nah... It wasn't any of that. It was Reagan, alright!
Oh, and the Tea Party helped.
Of course, we have the standard "people are too stupid to vote - we know what's good for them, why don't they vote the way we tell them to?" liberal schtick.
And, above all, it's not Obama's fault.
Gotcha!
I'm sure we'll get a book report on a conservative take from one of our CJR "watchdogs" any day now, right?
#1 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 6 Aug 2012 at 12:18 PM
Someone should send these robo-Left guys on a travelling fellowship to countries that do not have a political system that stands up only for 'the rich' - places such as Spain, Greece, Italy, France, etc. They will be shocked to discover that people in those places have hard times, too, especially the young and immigrants. Gee, who will they blame?
Actually, you don't have to go overseas. How about a compare/contrast from Bartlett & Steele on Democratic California vs. Republican Texas, let's say. I have always had the impression that these guys (writing for Vanity Fair - there's something for those with a sense of irony to discuss in and of itself) know the story that they are going to write, and then go out and cherry-pick factoids to support that frozen narrative. The idea that regulation and taxes and the rest of the leftist laundry list could (as in the European crisis) end up having negative effects on people who are always, no matter what set of 'policies' they live under, going to be vulnerable is too complex for the followers of the conventional political/media echo chamber's narrative to comprehend. There is no policy 'magic bullet'. You could put Bartlett and Steele themselves in as dicators and they still wouldn't have the answers (and throw in Krugman) - only scapegoat-seeking explanations of their failures.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 7 Aug 2012 at 12:40 PM
Barlett & Steele continue to be among the few who write about the one big story of our time. They do get it right, too. No way to deny that, unless you think that, suddenly, right around 1978, American workers all got lazy en mass & stopped deserving any share of the productivity gains that have occurred ever since.
But in regard to the Big Bubble, the review says "they fail to apportion any responsibility to careless home-buyers who signed contracts providing for adjustable-rate mortgages without reading or understanding them. Or, for that matter, to the power of the American Dream itself, which so exalts home ownership."
The missing piece of analysis on the housing boom has always been this: lack of decent-paying, secure jobs pushed millions of ordinary idiots into the "real estate investment" world--and into the arms of predatory lenders and other sharks. Millions of otherwise poor and working-class people saw themselves, however briefly, as budding moguls, free from the timeclock tether, living on their wits and creativity.
Many of these "investors" (maybe a majority) started committing mortgage fraud, since the originate-to-securitize mortgage model encouraged that up and down the chain.
They were emulating their financial betters.
They mostly got away with it.
As there are still no "middle class" jobs for such folks, most are still living by their wits. It's a huge bubble of desperate hucksters running little scams on everyone who surrounds them--multi-level nutritional supplements, "we buy houses," Amway, debt consolidation and bankruptcy consulting . . . a wild bloom of new "entrepreneurs" for the "new economy." The implications for both the economy and the polity are yet unexamined.
#3 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Tue 7 Aug 2012 at 02:10 PM