On Poverty and
Systemic Collapse:
Challenges to
Education Research
in an Era of
Infrastructure Rebuilding
by
Gregory K. Tanaka
Mills College
American Educational
Research Association
September, 2012
In this essay I argue
the economic inequities of today carve out a very large social condition that
is orders of magnitude greater than can be conveyed by the term “poverty.” This
condition derives from a massive theft of public wealth and abandonment of the
principles of representative democracy.
There is a silver
lining: on encountering “systemic collapse” (a breakdown of society’s largest
social institutions), we as education researchers are presented with a
challenge for which we are uniquely well suited. We do applied work and
as such, are predisposed to building something new. But will we be ready
to make contributions that match the human need in an “Era of Democratic Renewal?”
Most Americans have become poorer and
not as a result of a four-year cyclical downturn. This is systemic. From 1972
to 2012, U.S. hourly earnings adjusted for inflation dropped from $20/hr to
just $8/hr (Nielson, Bullion Bulls Canada, 2/7/11). While social welfare
benefits made up 10% of all salaries and wages in 1960, today it is 35% (Economic
Collapse, 4/16/12). Where in the 1970s the top 1% earned just 8% of all income,
this year they earned 21% (Id). In 1950, household debt as a percentage of disposable
income was 30% but by 2011 rose to 120% of personal income (Tanaka Capital
Management, August, 2011). By 2011, 100 million out of 242 million working age
Americans were not working (Seabridge Gold Annual Report, 2011). Today,
one-fourth of all children in the U.S. are enrolled in the food stamp program
(Economic Collapse, 4/16/12). And since being established in 1913, the Federal
Reserve (representing the largest U.S. banks) has destroyed 96% of the dollar
value of U.S. family savings by printing money (Economic Collapse, 2/9/12).
Meanwhile, the 1% has truly become “the elites”
by boldly stealing from middle and working class Americans. During the
2007-2010 financial crisis, $27 trillion in bailout money was given to U.S.
banks that was “off-budget,” meaning it was not derived from taxes but rather taken
from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid accounts paid into by
taxpayers over a 40-year period (Catherine Austin Fitts, 9/4/12). In 2009-2010,
93% of all new U.S. income went to the top 1% (U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders,
6/29/12). A simple solution is available but Congress won’t act: a return to
the tax rates of the 1950s-1970s would result in a 50% tax on the top 96-99%
and 75% tax on the top 1%. This alone would cover ¾ of the current U.S budget
shortfall.
The net result is
that the U.S. is stuck with $150 trillion in debt and unfunded liabilities,
leaving U.S. taxpayers with more debt per capita than citizens of
Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain (Economic Collapse, 7/14/12). Worse,
the global overhang from debt, derivatives and contingent and unfunded
liabilities and pension accounts is now a whopping $1.5 quadrillion (Greyerz,
King World News, 7/20/12). With global GDP at $50 trillion, the financial
“overhang” is systemic and unredeemable.
Is this the end of democracy as we knew it?
All three branches have certainly failed the American people. It was Congress
that reduced the elites’ income tax from 75% to just 15% (for long-term capital
gains). The White House authored NAFTA (exporting millions of manufacturing
jobs offshore), launched two oil wars and gave trillions to bankers. Most
appalling, it was the U.S. Supreme Court that sanctioned in Citizens United the ability of the super
rich to “buy” U.S. elections, thus bringing to an end the “representative”
characteristic of representative democracy.
To restore
democracy, a massive project of social change is now needed that can model the
contours of a democracy that is participatory and might include the following kinds
of ideas. (I invite others to offer ideas of their own.)
·Exempting
full-time preK-12 public school teachers from having to pay federal
income taxes;
·Paying
off the U.S. bonds with low yield (and later, cheaper) dollars, followed
by a
re-linking of the dollar to gold at $300/ounce, absolving U.S. citizens of
all debt (Iceland model), letting banks restart
as utilities, seizing illegal
accounts held for Americans in the Cayman
Islands, etc, and closing down the
Federal Reserve;
·Paying
for this renewal by deploying already available technology that can
produce far cheaper, clean energy—e.g. artificial
photosynthesis, splitting water
molecules to create ethanol, and passing cars
over electromagnetic rods in roads
(like charging an electric toothbrush);
·A
second Constitutional Convention that is, this time, “by, for and of the
people,” redefines a “person” as a human
being, includes term limits, and enacts
a participatory democracy; and
·The creation
of independent think tanks that are in the public interest and can
conceptualize, operationalize and evaluate
initiatives like those above.
To renew this country, and its democracy,
education researchers will need to do several things differently. We will
need to broaden our work from a tendency to perform narrowly at the “mid-range
level” of change in organizations, schools or programs—to a concerted effort to
combine three registers in one analysis (“macro” systemic change in the largest
social institutions, “micro” reformulations of the self, and “mid-range” change
in organizations).
We will also need
to shift from “assessment overdeterminism” to an emphasis on infrastructure
rebuilding. This will mean more large scale, longitudinal, participatory
projects; theorizing the connection, if any, between performing social change
and development of the self; replacing NCLB/RTTT with policies that teach critical
thinking, creativity, science, history, the arts, and coming into being by helping
others also to come into being; new epistemologies that unite a diverse country;
and change in reward systems to prize the above.
The question,
then, is whether we as researchers in the public interest will be caught in a
propitious moment worshipping old research epistemologies and methodological
registers—or be willing instead to alter the reach and aim of our work to match
the magnitude of the task before us.
