Lingering for a few moments on the ground floor of the state office building in Springfield, Massachusetts, it is easy to see the difference between the 1930s and the present in terms of what the federal government was willing (pressured) to do for workers.  Huge beautiful murals line one side of the corridor on this floor of the spotlessly clean government building.  Created by an artist during the Works Progress Administration, the paintings depict the history of both colonial and post-colonial Western Massachusetts.

Springfield was the city that produced the first automobile in the nation.  It is still home to the Smith & Wesson Company, the manufacturer of firearms.  Here also the game of basketball was invented.  The legendary Indian Motorcycle was produced here until 1953. Close by was the famous Springfield Armory, the weapons and ammunition depot selected by George Washington during the American Revolution.  Daniel Shays organized farmers in 1787 and seized the armory in an attempt to stop the government from taking their lands to repay their debt.  Here, in 1800, the famous radical abolitionist John Brown was born.

Only blocks away from the government office building in this storied industrial city are triple-decker wood-framed houses similar to those that line the streets of so many of New England’s once prosperous cities.  Many are blighted and speak of the failure of the late 20th and early 21st century post-industrial economy to provide jobs for its people.  This city, however, reflecting the great ironies of a wealthy nation, is also a city of mansions and is part of an intellectual corridor that extends down the entire swath of Western Massachusetts through the Pioneer Valley and into Connecticut that is home to institutions such as the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, Hampshire College, and Mount Holyoke College.

Here, as in much of the larger New England area, was a great manufacturing base that created unimaginable wealth for an elite, but left in its wake large masses of people, mainly minorities, that had neither decent jobs nor educations.  By the time the industrial boom ended following World War II, there was little left for a new generation of Americans who had supplanted the waves of immigrants from Ireland, Southern Europe, and Eastern Europe who were absorbed into the society during the early 20th century and provided the labor that drove the U.S. to become an economic behemoth.

Instead of massive economic retraining programs, came the largest redistribution of wealth in U.S. history by way of the Reagan Revolution of supply side (read voodoo) economics.  In place of the safety net that had been enacted by the great and unfinished reforms of Roosevelt’s New Deal, came the raw deal of dead-end jobs with no benefits and the largest growth of prisons of any highly industrialized modern economic power.

Statistics are always easy to comprehend when it comes to how a society deals with its people.  The well-respected Pew Center released the following statistics in a recent study.  One in 31 Americans is now either behind bars, on probation, or on parole. One in 11 African-Americans falls into this category, while 1 in 27 people who are Hispanic is in the same situation, while only 1 in 45 white adults is either in prison, on parole, or on probation.  The number of men, 1 in 18, dwarfs the number of women under correctional control (1 in 89). 

Even politicians seen as liberal by the mainstream, such as former President Bill Clinton helped accelerate the worsening economic state of minorities in the U.S. through anti-welfare legislation and the acceleration of death penalty appeals (read denials) across the nation.

Returning to statistics, it is impossible to deny how the power elite sets the stage for social engineering and social policy.  It is no accident that the rise in prison populations grew as the U.S. lost its manufacturing base resulting in a race to the bottom for U.S. workers.  Here are income figures from the 2000 census for Springfield and nearby Holyoke, Massachusetts.  In Springfield, household income was $30,417, while family income was $36,285. In Holyoke, household income was $30,441, while family income was $36,130. When income for women is considered from Springfield, it drops to $26,536.  In Holyoke, a city particularly hard hit by the loss of its manufacturing base, 26.4 percent of residents fell below the poverty level as measured by the 2000 census.  Those figures are compared to a 2007 estimate of income from the city of Brookline, a well-to-do suburb of Boston. Brookline’s household income stood at $82,496, while family income was $120,933.  It is easy to conclude from figures like these that many of the people from Springfield and Holyoke will work at low-paying jobs, or worse, face incarceration.  Few in Brookline will ever want for food, decent housing, economic insecurity, or ever have to worry about being imprisoned.

So as not to single out Massachusetts (with 8.8 percent unemployment in July 2009), the economic statistics noted there can easily be compared to data from states such as Michigan (15 percent unemployment), Florida (10.7 percent unemployment), California (11.9 percent unemployment), and Rhode Island (12.7 percent unemployment), to cite just a few of the places hit hard by the economic downturn.

While the Obama administration addressed the needs of Wall Street and Detroit immediately after taking office, almost nothing has been done to address the pain among the great majority of workers and homeowners in the U.S. who had seen a steady slide in their earnings that began during the 1970s.  The mural in the state office building in Springfield gives credence to how the power of government can be harnessed to put people to work in difficult economic times.  Unlike the Great Depression, however, there is no uprising among workers and a vibrant union movement to express the collective concerns of ordinary people.  Instead of creating jobs in green industries, building schools, and retraining workers, the money went to the already well off.  And in a parallel denial of the protection of its citizens’ health, nearly 50 million of those in the U.S. go without health insurance, while the present administration in Washington, D.C. panders to the powerful health insurance industry that includes medical professionals, private insurers, the pharmaceutical industry, and hospitals.

Two contending myths operate in U.S. society.  The first is the Protestant Work Ethic that holds that an individual can succeed through hard work.  The second myth is that of Horatio Alger, or the rags to riches myth.  These myths combine to create the fallacy that with enough hard work anyone can succeed, and perhaps become wealthy.  The statistics about what is happening in an almost completely globalized economy tell quite a different story, and the government of the U.S. is too timid to intervene.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer.  He can be reached at his website howielisnoff.com.

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