By Robert
Reich
A
new report finds more U.S. children living in poverty
than before the Great Recession. According to the report, released Tuesday from
the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 22 percent of American children are living in
poverty (as of 2013, the latest data available) compared with 18 percent in
2008.
Poverty
rates are nearly double among African-Americans and American Indians. Problems
are most severe in South and Southwest. Particularly troubling is a large
increase in the share of children living in poor communities marked by poor
schools and a lack of a safe place to play.
Which
brings me to politics, power, and the progressive movement.
The main event at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Arizona last weekend was a “Presidential Town Hall” featuring one-on-one discussions between journalist and undocumented American Jose Antonio Vargas and presidential candidates Governor Martin O’Malley and Senator Bernie Sanders.
It
was upstaged by #BlackLivesMatter activists
who demanded to be heard.
It’s
impossible to overcome widening economic inequality in America without also
dealing with the legacy of racial inequality.
And
it is impossible to overcome racial inequality without also reversing widening
economic inequality.
They
are not the same but they are intimately related.
Racial
inequalities are baked into our political and economic system.
Police brutality
against black men and women, mass incarceration disproportionately of blacks
and Latinos, housing discrimination that has resulted in racial apartheid
across the nation, and voter suppression in the forms of gerrymandered
districts, voter identification requirements, purges of names from voter
registration lists, and understaffed voting stations in black neighborhoods –
all reveal deep structures of discrimination that undermine economic inequality.
Black
lives matter.
But
it would be a terrible mistake for the progressive movement to split into a
“Black lives matter” movement and an “economic justice” movement.
This
would only play into the hands of the right.
For
decades Republicans have exploited the economic frustrations of the white
working and middle class to drive a wedge between races, channeling those
frustrations into bigotry and resentment.
The
Republican strategy has been to divide-and-conquer. They want to prevent the
majority of Americans – poor, working class, and middle-class, blacks, Latinos,
and whites – from uniting in common cause against the moneyed interests.
We
must not let them.
Our
only hope for genuine change is if poor, working class, middle class, black,
Latino, and white come together in a powerful movement to take back our economy
and democracy from the moneyed interests that now control both.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet
secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including
the best sellers “Aftershock" and “The Work of Nations." His latest,
"Beyond Outrage," is now out in paperback. He is also a founding
editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new
film, "Inequality for All," is now available on Netflix, iTunes, DVD,
and On Demand.