Viking Economics (32 page)

200.
Dan Hardy, “Rising up to stop bullying,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, November 14, 2010, p. B1.

201.
Joseph E. Stiglitz,
The Price of Inequality
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. 461, n58.

202.
The
Los Angeles Times
reported one of the many studies showing the United States lagging behind on health care. The Commonwealth Fund found that the United States ranked last among eleven industrial nations on health-care quality and access, despite having by far the costliest care. (The United States
spent $8,508 per person compared, for example, with the top-ranked Britain which spent only $3,406 per person.) Chad Terhune, “U.S. last on health care list,” reprinted by
Philadelphia Inquirer
, June 17, 2014, p. A9.

203.
Jim Nussle, “Don’t punish credit unions for big banks’ sins,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, May 11, 2015, p. A14. Credit unions protect their members’ accounts from loss in their own version of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in the rare case of a local credit union failure. Because the structure of credit unions is decentralized, they are never “too big to fail” and do not ask for taxpayer bailouts.

204.
See the
Philadelphia Inquirer
’s front-page story on the Amtrak crash and Congress, May 17, 2015. In the same newspaper are reported the other facts by Robert Puentes, “With many infrastructure needs, time to get moving,” May 17, 2015, p. C-1.

205.
The
Los Angeles Times
reported that Central Japan Railway is running magnetic levitation trains exceeding 350 mph on a test track.
Philadelphia Inquirer
, April 19, 2015, p. A6.

206.
Wilkinson and Pickett, pp. 185–86.

207.
www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertkenn121273.html
.

208.
Wilkinson and Pickett, p. 268.

209.
The Price of Inequality
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. 27. Stiglitz judges that the U.S. economy has “not been performing well” for over a third of a century, and notes how misleading GDP growth is as a measure. “Although it has managed to increase GDP per capita, from 1980 to 2010 by three-fourths, most fulltime male workers have, as we’ve noted, seen their incomes go down.” The income growth, he notes, occurs among the top 1 percent, and inequalities in wealth are even greater than of income.

210.
Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
6, no. 1 (2011): pp. 9–12. Cited by Joseph E. Stiglitz,
The Price of Inequality
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. 160. Wilkinson and Pickett report that in Britain for the past couple of decades polls have shown that 75–80 percent of the people believe income differences are too big.
The Spirit Level
, p. 249.

211.
Washington Post
columnist Dana Milbank, “Endless source of controversy,” reprinted in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, June 10, 2015, p. A18.

212.
Zachary Goldfarb reviewed recent polls for
The Washington Post
and was cited by Eric Alterman in
The Nation
, December 1–8, 2014, p. 6.

213.
Karthick Ramakrishnan, director of the National Asian American Survey (
www.naasurvey.com
) and associate professor at the University of California at Riverside, reported by Michael Smerconish in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, November 18, 2012, p. C6.

214.
Cited in
The Nation
, “The Invisible Primary,” May 11, 2015, p. 3.

215.
Harper’s Index,
Harper’s Magazine
, April 2014.

216.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reviewed opinion polls between 1987 and 2007. The study, “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987–2007,” is reported by Rick Perlstein in
The Nation
, “Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?” July 9, 2007, p. 11. The last finding was dated 2007.

217.
More on minimum wage, in this connection: voters in four Republican states voted in the November 2014 election on the question of minimum wage. Nebraskans approved a ballot measure to raise minim wage to $8 per hour next year and $9 per hour in 2016; South Dakotans voted to raise it to $8.50 next
year; Arkansas voters approved gradual increase to $8.50 by 2017; Alaskans agreed to raise it to $9.75 by 2016. Charles Lane, “Grand bargain on minimum wage would take politics out of wages,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, November 10, 2014, p. A10.

218.
Timothy Potts, “Major parties vs. the majority,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, December 28, 2011, p. A22.

219.
“The Republican Class War,”
The New Yorker
, November 9, 2015, p. 28.

220.
Barry G. Rabe, public policy professor writing in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, “How Pa. can get severance tax right,” August 2, 2015, p. C1.

221.
Alperovitz, Gar.
What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution
. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013.

222.
Harper’s Index
, April 2016.

223.
“In a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, 68 percent agreed that we live in a country whose economic system favors the rich rather than the rest of us. (About half of Republicans agreed with this too.)” Eric Alterman, “Inequality in Campaign Mode,”
The Nation
, September 28–October 5, 2015. “A June 2015 New York Times/CBS News poll found that more than 80 percent of Americans believe money plays too great a role in campaigns, while two-thirds say that the wealthy have a greater chance of influencing the electoral process than other Americans.” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, “Super-PAC Tsunami.”
The Nation
, October 12, 2015. “Seventy Percent (70%) of Likely U.S. Voters Think Government and Big Business Often Work Together in Ways That Hurt Consumers and Investors.”
www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/september_2013/70_think_government_big_business_often_work_together_against_consumers_investors
(accessed
December 14, 2015). “The view that government and big business work together against the interests of others is shared across partisan, demographic and ideological lines. Seventy percent (70%) of liberals hold that view, along with 69% of conservatives. Seventy-one percent (71%) Republicans think it’s true, and so do 64% of Democrats.” February 7, 2011, Rasmussen Reports.
www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2011/68_believe_government_and_big_business_work_together_against_the_rest_of_us
(accessed December 14, 2015).

224.
Paul Krugman,
The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America from the Right
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). Cited by Wilkinson and Pickett, pp. 242–43.

225.
“Here and Now,” interviewed by Jeremy Hobson, National Public Radio, January 27, 2016.
www.npr.org/podcasts/510051/here-x26-now
(accessed January 28, 2016).

226.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, 2014. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.”
scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf
. p. 576.

227.
The result of the Icelanders’ mass insurgency is still unclear as of this writing. One goal was a new constitution that would strengthen democracy. In 2016, Icelanders again showed their ability to force accountability through mass nonviolent action by forcing the resignation of their prime minister for sending money to an offshore account after having urged the people to keep their money in Icelandic banks (
www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/05/iceland-prime-minister-resigns-over-panama-papers-revelations
). If the U.S. public were to take to the streets in outrage over a governmental action in the same proportion
as Icelanders had in 2016, the total number of Americans would be 10 million.
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/what-if-americans-protested-like-icelanders/
.

228.
An excellent place to start absorbing the lessons of the civil rights movement is the book about the 1963 campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, by Martin Luther King, Jr.:
Why We Can’t Wait
. Taylor Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for his history of the Civil Rights Movement;
Pillar of Fire
(1963–65) is a good place to start (Simon & Schuster, 1998). I analyze briefly one of the movement’s strongest strategies here:
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/how-to-create-a-multi-level-movement-for-climate-justice/
. The largest assembly of civil rights campaigns can be found on the searchable Global Nonviolent Action Database: nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu.

229.
Frances Fox Piven,
Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

230.
Joseph E. Stiglitz,
The Price of Inequality
, preface to the paperback edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p. xxxiv; Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett,
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
. (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). Multiple examples of successful direct-action campaigns in the United States (and almost 200 other countries) are offered on the searchable website Global Nonviolent Action Database: www.nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu.

231.
Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,”
The New York Times
, November 26, 2006.

232.
Wisconsin gave our country a clear example of this, first bravely and nonviolently defying Governor Scott Walker’s attack on the labor movement and setting the stage for a win by going on the offensive, then instead turning to the ballot box. Labor lost
once again. The Koch brothers, satisfied with the governor they sponsored, are among his backers for U.S. President.

233.
The documentary film
How to Survive a Plague
reveals the dynamics of one of the most confrontational campaigns, that of ACT-UP opposing the health industry’s neglect of the AIDS epidemic. See also my brief article highlighting strategic principles used in the LGBT movement:
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/lessons-from-the-lgbt-equality-movement/
.

234.
“Gay-rights push follows successes.” Headline in
Philadelphia Inquirer
, April 5, 2015. Article by Tom Davies and Andrew Demillo of
The Associated Press
that describes the response by LGBT advocates to their victory in Indiana and Arkansas where legislatures changed their recently passed religious-objections laws to make sure that they did not allow discrimination. This is typical of the campaigning style of LGBT people that has, since 1965 in the United States, taken the offensive against a form of oppression that has lasted a millennium.

235.
Kevin M. Kruse,
One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
(New York: Basic Books, 2015).

236.
Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal,
Polarized America
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

237.
Reported by Rick Perlstein in
The Nation
, “Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?,” July 9, 2007, p. 11.

238.
“A Recent Gallup Poll on Americans’ Confidence in US Institutions Put ‘Big Business’ Second to Last—Above Only Congress.”
The Economist
cites the poll, quoted by
This Week
, October 16, 2015, p. 38. Even Republicans are showing up in polls as increasingly critical. “[In 2014, a Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Republicans think that the rich should pay more in taxes. Another Poll, by the Pew Research Center, showed that more Republicans favor increased spending on Social Security,
Medicare, education, and infrastructure than favor cutting those programs.” George Packer, “The Republican Class War,”
The New Yorker
, November 9, 2015. The Rasmussen Survey Organization reported that 71 percent of Republicans believe that the government and big business work together against the interests of others.
www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/february_2011/68_believe_government_and_big_business_work_together_against_the_rest_of_us
(accessed December 14, 2015).

239.
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan,
Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

240.
Chenoweth and Stephan addressed this question in their book; they found that movements double their chances of success by focusing on nonviolent tactics. I have written frequently on this subject on waging nonviolence, for example
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/a-diversity-of-tactics-a-paucity-of-participants/
,
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/the-black-panthers-militarist-error/
, and
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/unlikely-allies/
.

241.
Inc. Magazine
, January 20, 2011. www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html/7.

242.
people-press.org/2010/05/04/socialism-not-so-negative-capitalism-not-so-positive/
.

243.
www.gallup.com/poll/125645/socialism-viewed-positively-americans.aspx
.

244.
Margaret Talbot, “The Populist Prophet,”
The New Yorker
, October 12, 2015, p. 64.

245.
John Nichols, “Progressive Honor Roll 2015,”
The Nation
, January 4, 2016, p. 18.

GEORGE LAKEY was the Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change at Swarthmore College, and is a Quaker. He has led 1,500 workshops on five continents, as well as activist projects on local, national, and international levels. He is the author of many books and articles and has written for
Waging Nonviolence
and
Common Dreams
, among other publications.