Here's what was the lead article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/opinion/18herbert.html?ref=opinion
Two Different Worlds
By Bob Herbert:
NY Times Op-Ed: September 18, 2010
I didn't notice much when a terrific storm slammed into parts of New York
City on Thursday evening. I was working at my computer in a quiet apartment
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The skies darkened and it began to
rain, and I could hear thunder. But that's all. I made a cup of coffee and
kept working.
While I remained oblivious, the storm took a frightening toll in the
boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. A woman who was trying to
walk home with her 10-year-old daughter from Prospect Park in Brooklyn told
me the next day that it had been the most harrowing experience of her life.
"With the wind and the rain, it was like being trapped in a car wash," she
said. "And then a tree crashed down on a car right in front of us."
They ran soaking wet up the steps of a brownstone and the owner, a stranger,
let them come inside.
The winds reached tornadolike intensity. Trees were uprooted and blown into
electrical power lines. Roofs were blown from buildings. One woman was
killed, and several neighborhoods were devastated.
I eventually heard about it on the news.
The movers and shakers of our society seem similarly oblivious to the
terrible destruction wrought by the economic storm that has roared through
America. They've heard some thunder, perhaps, and seen some lightning, and
maybe felt a bit of the wind. But there is nothing that society's leaders
are doing - no sense of urgency in their policies or attitudes - that
suggests they understand the extent of the economic devastation that has
come crashing down like a plague on the poor and much of the middle class.
The American economy is on its knees and the suffering has reached historic
levels. Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty last year, which is
more than 14 percent of the population. That is an increase of 4 million
over the previous year, the highest percentage in 15 years, and the highest
number in more than a half-century of record-keeping. Millions more are
teetering on the edge, poised to fall into poverty.
More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are
poor. More than 15 million children are poor.
The movers and shakers, including most of the mainstream media, have paid
precious little attention to this wide-scale economic disaster.
Meanwhile, the middle class, hobbled for years with the stagnant incomes
that accompany extreme employment insecurity, is now in retreat.
Joblessness, home foreclosures, personal bankruptcy - pick your poison.
Median family incomes were 5 percent lower in 2009 than they were a decade
earlier. The Harvard economist Lawrence Katz told The Times, "This is the
first time in memory that an entire decade has produced essentially no
economic growth for the typical American household."
I don't know what it will take, maybe a full-blown depression, for policy
makers to decide that they need to take extraordinary additional steps to
cope with this drastic economic and employment emergency. Nothing currently
on the table will turn things around in a meaningful way. We're facing a
jobs deficit of about 11 million, which is about how many new ones we'd have
to create just to get our heads above water. It will take years - years -
just to get employment back to where it was when the recession struck in
December 2007.
If Republicans take over the policy levers, forget about it. The party of
Palin, Limbaugh and Boehner - with its tax cuts for the rich and obsession
with the deregulatory, free-market zealotry that brought us the Great
Recession - will only accelerate the mass march into poverty.
The G.O.P. wants to further shred the safety net, wants to give corporations
even greater clout over already debased workers, and wants to fatten the
coffers of the already obscenely rich.
While working people are suffering the torments of joblessness,
underemployment and dwindling compensation, corporate profits have rebounded
and the financial sector is once again living the high life. This helps to
keep the people at the top comfortably in denial about the extent of the
carnage.
Millions of struggling voters have no idea which way to turn. They are
suffering under the status quo, but those with any memory at all are afraid
of a rerun of the catastrophic George W. Bush era. An Associated Press
article, based on recent polling, summed the matter up: "Glum and
distrusting, a majority of Americans today are very confident in - nobody."
What is desperately needed is leadership that recognizes the depth and
intensity of the economic crisis facing so many ordinary Americans. It's
time for the movers and shakers to lift the shroud of oblivion and reach out
to those many millions of Americans trapped in a world of hurt.
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