Bill O'Reilly made an international spectacle of himself (again) when he proclaimed last week's election was about the end of "traditional America" because the "white establishment is now the minority" and "voters . . . feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff." You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break for President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?
You can watch the clip here:
He then came back to address this and claim he was just stating facts and providing an analysis. In what may be an example of the greatest lack of self-awareness to ever air from US media, he lamented the fact that media had become ideological when claiming that his analysis was just stating of facts.
So, there are a few things Bill needs to understand. First, "women" aren't a racial group. So "women" were part of the "white establishment" before, unless you're admitting that by "white establishment" you're really only talking about are rich, white men - and women should be damned.
But setting that aside, in one fell swoop, O'Reilly said something very poignant and accurate and something very, very inaccurate. First, the accurate part: people, particularly but not exclusively black, Hispanic and female Americans, feel the economic system is stacked against them. There's not much to dispute there. The "Occupy Wall Street" movement isn't, as Fox repeatedly tried to claim, some fringe group of hippies who hate showering and wish the US would just throw away capitalism. The movement captured people's attention because so many people feel they do not actually have an opportunity for economic growth. They feel they have limited power and opportunity to actually make a difference in their economic status because the economic system is stacked against them.
Some of that is racially based, and we need to be honest about that. During this recession, the gap between black and white households nearly doubled, with whites making 22 times more wealth than blacks. There was an average household networth of $110,729 for whites in 2010, while blacks averaged only $4,995 and Hispanics only $7,424. So unless you really believe that blacks are less intelligent, less educated and less motivated, then there is little to say other than there is a systematic problem with the way our society recognizes intelligence and rewards work. In 2010, the median annual earnings of black men was 74.5% of their white counterparts. That's worse than white women - who made only 80.5% of their white male counterparts, but better than black women (69.6%), Hispanic men (65.9%), or Hispanic women (59.8%).
The US has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the industrialized world. Cyclical poverty is likely because in general, and in particular in the US, poverty means reduced access to quality education or health care. The idea that someone can "pick themselves up by their bootstap" is an increasingly rare experience in the US and while we celebrate the outliers, they are, in fact, outliers for a reason. We know their names and their successes because by definition they are not the rule. And this very notion is an affront to the concept of equality that capitalism is supposed to foster. Part of the myth of the "truly free market" - the extreme, unencumbered concept of the market that the extreme right wishes to promote whereby all regulation is bad and the market decides everything from whether we have environmental regulations to what workers are paid - is that it allows people to take control of their own destiny, rewarding hard work and persistence while punishing laziness. But, if extreme inequality leads to limited social mobility and that in turn leads to greater inequality, then you are not rewarding people based on their intelligence, their hard work, or their skills. You are rewarding them based on what their ancestors did. You are promoting not a democracy but an oligarchy of privilege. Some want to claim this is "true" freedom and what the GOP is promoting is simply a true market economy, but for a market economy not to simply become a means for new human rights oppression, there must be some level of equal opportunity. Yet, equal opportunity clearly does not exist in the current US system.
That inequality - both in terms of what is held and in terms of opportunity - actually harms national economic growth. Lower rates of economic inequality are shown to be associated with greater, long-term economic stability. So by creating this "free" economic system without regulation and without social opportunity, we are harming our economic interests not just on an individual basis but on a collective level for our society.
And people feel this. They aren't dumb, despite what O'Reilly, et al., would like you to believe. When you talk to people in the lower class and lower-middle class, they understand the economics of their situation and the cyclical nature of their position in society. They recognize the limited opportunities they have. So, voters - meaning, non-privileged voters - do, in fact feel that the economic system is stacked against them because it is. Study after study supports this, so the only way to actually dismiss this very real, very accurate feeling is to buy into a theory of math's "liberal bias."
But where O'Reilly goes wrong - horribly, horribly wrong - is his assertion that what people were demanding in Obama's reelection was "stuff." It is not stuff, but opportunity that people are demanding. It is an equal playing field that can foster a market economy that allows for people to pull themselves up by the bootstrap. It is a system that supports economic growth not just for the wealthy but for the entire economy. They are demanding the education and social infrastructure that encourages poor children to realize that there are options and opportunities available to them and that helps realize that promise. Because kids now get the promise but not the reality and that's our failing as a society.
Demanding that isn't demanding stuff. It's demanding dignity on an equal basis, not based on your parents' social status. That's an American ideal and that's what the GOP should be joining the Obama administration to help realize.
You can watch the clip here:
He then came back to address this and claim he was just stating facts and providing an analysis. In what may be an example of the greatest lack of self-awareness to ever air from US media, he lamented the fact that media had become ideological when claiming that his analysis was just stating of facts.
So, there are a few things Bill needs to understand. First, "women" aren't a racial group. So "women" were part of the "white establishment" before, unless you're admitting that by "white establishment" you're really only talking about are rich, white men - and women should be damned.
But setting that aside, in one fell swoop, O'Reilly said something very poignant and accurate and something very, very inaccurate. First, the accurate part: people, particularly but not exclusively black, Hispanic and female Americans, feel the economic system is stacked against them. There's not much to dispute there. The "Occupy Wall Street" movement isn't, as Fox repeatedly tried to claim, some fringe group of hippies who hate showering and wish the US would just throw away capitalism. The movement captured people's attention because so many people feel they do not actually have an opportunity for economic growth. They feel they have limited power and opportunity to actually make a difference in their economic status because the economic system is stacked against them.
Some of that is racially based, and we need to be honest about that. During this recession, the gap between black and white households nearly doubled, with whites making 22 times more wealth than blacks. There was an average household networth of $110,729 for whites in 2010, while blacks averaged only $4,995 and Hispanics only $7,424. So unless you really believe that blacks are less intelligent, less educated and less motivated, then there is little to say other than there is a systematic problem with the way our society recognizes intelligence and rewards work. In 2010, the median annual earnings of black men was 74.5% of their white counterparts. That's worse than white women - who made only 80.5% of their white male counterparts, but better than black women (69.6%), Hispanic men (65.9%), or Hispanic women (59.8%).
The US has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the industrialized world. Cyclical poverty is likely because in general, and in particular in the US, poverty means reduced access to quality education or health care. The idea that someone can "pick themselves up by their bootstap" is an increasingly rare experience in the US and while we celebrate the outliers, they are, in fact, outliers for a reason. We know their names and their successes because by definition they are not the rule. And this very notion is an affront to the concept of equality that capitalism is supposed to foster. Part of the myth of the "truly free market" - the extreme, unencumbered concept of the market that the extreme right wishes to promote whereby all regulation is bad and the market decides everything from whether we have environmental regulations to what workers are paid - is that it allows people to take control of their own destiny, rewarding hard work and persistence while punishing laziness. But, if extreme inequality leads to limited social mobility and that in turn leads to greater inequality, then you are not rewarding people based on their intelligence, their hard work, or their skills. You are rewarding them based on what their ancestors did. You are promoting not a democracy but an oligarchy of privilege. Some want to claim this is "true" freedom and what the GOP is promoting is simply a true market economy, but for a market economy not to simply become a means for new human rights oppression, there must be some level of equal opportunity. Yet, equal opportunity clearly does not exist in the current US system.
That inequality - both in terms of what is held and in terms of opportunity - actually harms national economic growth. Lower rates of economic inequality are shown to be associated with greater, long-term economic stability. So by creating this "free" economic system without regulation and without social opportunity, we are harming our economic interests not just on an individual basis but on a collective level for our society.
And people feel this. They aren't dumb, despite what O'Reilly, et al., would like you to believe. When you talk to people in the lower class and lower-middle class, they understand the economics of their situation and the cyclical nature of their position in society. They recognize the limited opportunities they have. So, voters - meaning, non-privileged voters - do, in fact feel that the economic system is stacked against them because it is. Study after study supports this, so the only way to actually dismiss this very real, very accurate feeling is to buy into a theory of math's "liberal bias."
But where O'Reilly goes wrong - horribly, horribly wrong - is his assertion that what people were demanding in Obama's reelection was "stuff." It is not stuff, but opportunity that people are demanding. It is an equal playing field that can foster a market economy that allows for people to pull themselves up by the bootstrap. It is a system that supports economic growth not just for the wealthy but for the entire economy. They are demanding the education and social infrastructure that encourages poor children to realize that there are options and opportunities available to them and that helps realize that promise. Because kids now get the promise but not the reality and that's our failing as a society.
Demanding that isn't demanding stuff. It's demanding dignity on an equal basis, not based on your parents' social status. That's an American ideal and that's what the GOP should be joining the Obama administration to help realize.
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