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Always fans of Dolly Parton, Corky and I watched the TV movie “A Coat of Many Colors” the other night, a story about her early life as a member of a poor Tennessee family that in many ways was much richer than many in the One Percent. About 35 years ago we motorhomed through Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a one-street town running through a valley in the Smokey Mountains for about five miles. Almost everybody was “dirt poor,” and Dolly was the fourth child of twelve fathered by a poor tobacco farmer. Dolly’s mother made her a coat of many-colored scraps of cloth which is now in a museum at Dollywood, a theme park near Pigeon Forge developed by Dolly. Dolly started to play a homemade guitar when she was eight, went to Nashville immediately after high school, and has grown to be the biggest country music star ever. She has written over 3,000 songs and is one of the few performers to have won Academy, Grammy, Tony, and Emmy Awards. Dolly always has been-well-Dolly. I remember when a reporter asked her about her appearance, her huge shock of blonde hair, the tight dresses, the uppffront bustline, and the very red lips. She laughed and shot back:   “Hey, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap!” And she never forgot the “coat of many colors” her mother made for her in her famous song about it. She is proud of her background and family, saying: “My family had a lot of the important stuff money don’t buy you anyway.”  This column is about people who have many different colored coats and those who have none.

There I was, sitting in a pew at Cormorant Lutheran Church, when I heard about coats again. It was John in the gospel by Saint Luke 3:7-18: “God is able from these stories to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  And the crowds asked him what they should do. He said to them: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food, must do likewise.”    Isn’t that a novel idea?  

Why Two-Thirds Of Americans Cannot Afford To Fix Their Cars

We are rapidly becoming a third-world country. In 1971 61% of Americans were in the middle class, bumped up to that class by union collective bargaining and the recognition by business owners and management that productivity gains by workers should be adequately compensated. But by 2015 politics and the power of unlimited corporate and inherited money has reduced the middle class to 50%, a shocking drop in one employee’s work cycle of 44 years. We are now practicing what economists say is third-world or “dual” economics. We no longer have a middle class that means anything politically or economically. We have a top 30% who have received an excellent education that qualifies them to work in technology, finance, and all of the electronic industries such as Microsoft, Google, and thousands of other companies utilizing the Internet. Now we have almost 70% who are low-wage, live paycheck to paycheck if possible, and cannot afford to go to college to realize the American Dream. The “Dream” died in a tsunami of corporate-government-Republican decisions to make the rich richer and the middle class and poor poorer. As billionaire Warren Buffett said: “We have had a class war and the rich have won.” The dual economy started in the 1980’s with the idea that all of the money and assets made by the rich would create a Niagara of wealth tumbling over the waterfall. It was called the “trickle-down theory.”  Cut taxes on the rich, cut the safety net, cut education, let the infrastructure crumble, destroy the unions, and wealth trickles down on everybody. The theory wasn’t worth the napkin it was first scribbled on. These “cut” programs have turned the trickle-down theory into a “pissed-on fact.”  

The most critical cuts were made in higher education as tuition increased dramatically, driving many students into overwhelming student debt. Back in 1950 I started college with about $500 in my pocket, all earned in high school jobs, paid out about half of it for two semesters’ tuition the first day, and then worked my way through four years and graduated—playing football and baseball all four years. My parents were great but were dirt-poor Minnesota farmers who couldn’t give me a dime. But I lived the American Dream. College gave me knowledge and what economists call “social capital,” which is learning new ways of interacting with all kinds of people and how to choose people you can trust—and how to convey to other people that they can trust you. This is how people learn to move up in any economic sector to another area of opportunity. College students can’t earn $25,000 these days working part-time to pay tuition—when about 70% of the parents can’t make that much working full-time! Everyone with the ability to succeed in higher education must have the opportunity or our 240 years of empire will end with a whimper.  

Does America Know That Half Of America Is Living In Poverty?

The Social Security Administration just announced that over half of Americans make less than $30,000 a year. The Alliance for a Just Society has estimated that it would take both parents in a family of four, each making a living wage of $16.87, to attain a “modest living standard,” which it determines must be over $60,000. The Alliance also reports that there are seven job seekers for every job that pays above $15 an hour or more, a sum required for a single adult to live on. The very reliable Pew Research organization reports that over half of American families are spending more than they earn! A Go Banking Rates study reports half of Americans have no savings and that 62% can’t pay for a brake job costing $500. With huge student debts, now totaling over $1.2 trillion, many young adults have a negative savings rate and are unable to marry or buy cars and homes. Any good news? Not for the 70%. Nine of the ten fastest growing occupations don’t require a college degree. In other words, they don’t pay worth a damn. Jobs gained after the latest recession pay 23% less than the jobs that were lost. The Labor Department has advertised 5% unemployment rate.  Baloney.  Add in all short-term and long-term unemployed and the rate skyrockets to 23%. Between 2007 and 2013 the median wealth dropped 40%, leaving 50% with negative wealth! There’s deep trouble in River City.  

Why is Donald Trump leading the gang of a baker’s dozen trying to get the Republican presidential nomination? We lived in the South long enough during Jim Crow to know any Republican leading a poll automatically picks up the anti-black, and anti-Latino vote as a result of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.   Fifty-three percent of voting Republicans think Obama is a member of ISIS who spent his early life in Kenya as a black witch doctor. Guess where they live. Trump also leads among those who only have a high school education. But the major reason is Congress pays no attention to the bottom 70% except at election time. The 70% think so much of Congress they give it an approval rating of about 8%. House rats and scam artists are rated higher.  The 70% are just bright enough to know that Congress has failed them. Instead of providing some of the 70% with good jobs by funding, building, and repairing our second-class infrastructure, the only jobs available are temporary “on-demand” jobs that are without benefits or a living wage. The lifespans of the 70% are actually getting shorter and shorter, often due to stress, drugs, alcohol, and suicide. It is an anxious class, feeling they have no power to change the maelstrom they are caught in. Safety nets are full of holes. Many of the 70% who lose their jobs don’t qualify for unemployment. They watch good jobs going to the slave markets in Asia while they sleep on street grates. They watch while millions of undocumented “immigrants” destroy the wage structure of the society they live in. The grapes of mighty wrath are growing on hillsides in every state. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich sums it up well: “They view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. Government is working for the big guys and fat cats—the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.” It’s a perfect time for a ranting “Presbyterian” psychopath who is one of the big fat cats to come along and talk bullshit. The Donald just might win.

Do You Really Want To Live In A Country Where Everything Is For Sale?

In the Citizens United decision the Republican Supreme Court put a big “For Sale” sign on local, state, and national politicians, state capitals, the White House, and the 535 heads of the House and Senate. The world now has 1,826 billionaires, adding 290 just in the last year. Forbes magazine will soon tell us how many have been added to the U.S. list of that exalted class. The free market for American democracy in 2016 is now open for business. Records indicate that half of all the money--$176 million--contributed to this point in the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns has come from only 158 families. My Little Falls math tells me that’s over $500,000 each. The characteristics of these contributors should give us all pause. They are almost exclusively white, rich, older, and male. They live in restricted neighborhoods protected by both private security guards and public police departments, send kids to exclusive private schools, have their own recreation areas, fly in private jets and ride in their own limos. They live in a very private society of their own making. They invest in politicians who will  lower their taxes, expand tax loopholes, eliminate regulations that protect the health, safety, and environments of the 70%, cut food and job programs for the poor, and cut Social Security so it can be privatized. The Koch boys have already indicated they will spend almost $1 billion to elect “sympathetic” politicians. The Gates, Broads, Kochs, Waltons, Singers, and other billionaires spend millions supporting private and public charter schools so that public K-12 education will be destroyed. They almost succeeded by backing Leave No Child Behind, a program designed to have all schools listed as failures by 2015. To all American politicians: France spends only 12% of its Gross National Product on medical care while we spend 17%. Why do the French live three years longer than we do?

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has said in a letter to his daughter that he is going to give 99% of his $45 billion fortune away to try to change the world. Of course, that will leave him only $450 million to maintain a minimum standard of living. So far, 138 of the world’s billionaires have signed on to give half of their fortunes away before they kick the bucket. I bet they fulfill their bucket list before they kick it. Not all billionaires are so philanthropic-minded as Bill Gates and Zuckerberg. Billionaire Ira Rennert lives in a $248 million, 110,000 square-ft “cottage” in the Hamptons by himself. He has not volunteered to give anything away. I bet he has lots of coats. The last verse of Dolly’s “coat” song makes a point about being rich:
“But they didn’t understand it and I tried to make them see, that one is only poor only if they choose to be/ Now I know we had no money but I was rich as I could be, in my coat of many colors my momma made for me/ made just for me.”