It Is Time to Begin the Process of Rebuilding Our Middle-Class Economy
In The New York Times recently, the paper’s former Washington bureau chief, the veteran journalist Hedrick Smith, asked an important question: “Can the States Save American Democracy?” Smith, who traveled the country to write his latest book, Who Stole the American Dream?, also serves as the executive editor of the Reclaim the American Dreamwebsite, where he keeps a keen eye on efforts to revitalize politics closest to where people live. In his op-ed essay he answered his own question by reporting that “a broad array of state-level citizen movements are pressing for reforms… to give average voters more voice, make elections more competitive and ease gridlock in Congress.”
There’s a lot of energy stirring in the states, including efforts to create a fairer economy. Unlike our paralyzed and polarized Congress, state legislators — those with eyes to see and ears to hear — know the walking-wounded casualties from the long campaign against working people conducted by Big Business and rabid free-marketeers over the past three decades. Among the stunned and shell-shocked are millions of survivors barely hanging on after the financial crash of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. They live down the street and around the corner, a mere few blocks from the state capitol.
Here at BillMoyers.com, just as Hedrick Smith’s essay appeared last weekend, we were finishing a small book — 95 pages — by one of those state legislators: Minnesota’s David Bly. After teaching in the public schools for 30 years he retired and ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives, where he is now serving his fourth term. What he’s seen close-up prompted him to write We All Do Better: Economic Priorities for a Land of Opportunity.You can order a copy from the publisher’s website. It is short in length but not of passion.