Since the 1970s the productivity of the American worker has increased steadily and the U.S. economy has grown at an impressive rate. Yet while the already-wealthy have grown considerably wealthier in this period, most Americans are no better off than they were four decades ago. Jonathan Tasini, in his new book The Audacity of Greed, calls this phenomenon “the emptying of the wage cupboard,” and he lays out the numbers underlying what is now essentially “a two-tiered earnings system made up of the very rich and the rest of us.” Here’s a sampling:

• The top earners’ share of wages, which was stable from the mid-1940s through the 1970s, nearly doubled from 1979 through 2006, from 7.3 percent to 13.6 percent. This is the result of earnings growth of 144.4 percent for the top 1 percent of earners over the past thirty years, compared to just 15.6 percent growth for the bottom 90 percent.
• Those in the upper 0.1 percent of wage earners have hit the jackpot, as their annual earnings have grown 324 percent since 1979, to over $2.2 million in 2006. As a result, the earnings of the top 0.1 percent of Americans are now 77 times greater than the earnings of the bottom 90 percent, whereas in 1979 it was just 21 times as much.
• The share of our national income hoarded by the top one percent was, as of 2006, 22.1 percent (a rise of three percentage points from 2004.) The last time it was that high was in 1928 (23.9 percent)—just as the Great Depression was about to hit with its full fury.

At the heart of the world hunger epidemic explored in Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty is a cruel paradox. After dipping in the 1970s and 1980s, the ranks of the undernourished have wavered little over the past two decades and now appear to be on the rise; yet we are more capable than ever of producing enough food to feed the world’s population. To begin to understand why is to understand the “Green Revolution” – a major agricultural transformation that made farming possible for millions – and the man who helped make it happen.

A Brilliant Accident

The Green Revolution began with a brilliant accident. In 1943, a young agronomist named Norman Borlaug was recruited by the nonprofit Rockefeller Foundation to assist struggling Mexican wheat farmers, whose crops were being destroyed en masse by a vicious fungal disease. Attempting to engineer a more resistant wheat crop, Borlaug devised a process of “shuttle breeding,” whereby he bred and tinkered with the same crop in different parts of the country to take advantage of growing seasons year-round. The goal was merely to save time, but the results were unexpectedly large: by cross-breeding plants grown in different climates, Borlaug had created a wheat crop far less sensitive to sunlight and other environmental factors that could be planted across the country.

Spreading Seeds

The implications of the discovery were enormous: plants could be engineered to grow in places they could not grow before. The flexible wheat seeds started spreading to India and Pakistan in the 1960s and Borlaug himself followed, demonstrating his breeding techniques to rural farmers and directly lobbying local governments to support farming initiatives. Farmers could easily grow enough to feed themselves and still have some to sell. India’s rural poverty rate was cut almost in half from 1967 to 1984. The seeds kept spreading – to Afghanistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Morocco and beyond – earning Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He died earlier this year at age 95.

Improving the living conditions of hundreds of millions

Today, as Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman argue in Enough, the world food supply is undermined by a web of corporate negligence and lopsided policy arrangements. Yet as we consider how to combat global hunger, we must recognize that the seeds for change were planted long ago. As the Nobel Committee put it in 1970: “This revolution will make it possible to improve the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people in that part of the globe which today might be called as the “non-affluent world.”

Hats off to Liaquat Ahamed, author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (a past selection of the Progressive Book Club), for winning the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2009.

Announcing the award at a gala dinner in London, Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times called Lords of Finance “a brilliant book, which brings to life the 1920s and the role of its great public servants in trying, but ultimately failing, to manage the world financial system. A must for anyone who wants to understand economics.”

Learn more about Lords of Finance at Progressive Book Club. (Click here.)

Of all the alternative energy ideas now in vogue in the fight against climate change, the most controversial is what Al Gore calls “a radioactive white elephant” is nuclear power.

In his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, due out next week, Gore runs down the standard arguments against nuclear power, which center around safety concerns, amplified by memories of notorious accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and the challenge of waste storage. Yet, as the former vice president points out, in the scientific community the overriding concerns are not safety risks – which are in fact far lower than in the past – but economic hurdles.

A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists cautions against investing in new nuclear reactors in the U.S. Though nuclear power may be carbon-neutral, the analysts say, the cost of expanding the country’s nuclear infrastructure would be both burdensome and unnecessary when weighed against other alternative energy options.

Gore explains that while technology costs tend to be streamlined over time, the opposite has happened with nuclear energy. Expensive to begin with, the cost of building a nuclear power plant soared from $400 million in the 1970s to more than $4 billion in the 1990s, and is now rising at an estimated rate of 15 percent each year. Most utility companies have given up on the idea of ordering new reactors. Of all the nuclear reactors ordered between 1953 and 2008, about half have been canceled, and only a quarter are currently functional.

After the Three Mile Island accident, in 1979, construction of nuclear power facilities was put on a hiatus that has proved to be open-ended. Fewer young engineers were willing to go into what appeared to be a dying industry, leading to a shortage of trained personnel. Investments have dropped off likewise, and even if inclinations were to shift, the world lacks to manufacturing capacity to expand the current number of nuclear facilities anytime soon.

Despite the prohibitive costs, though, nuclear power is very much a going concern globally. There are 436 nuclear power plants in the world today in 30 different countries. The most prominent example is France, which receives more than three-quarters of its power from nuclear sources at considerable government expense.

Pelosi Unveils House Health Reform Bill

“Today we are about to deliver on the promise of making affordable, quality health care available for all Americans.”

- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, unveiling a health-care reform bill that includes a watered-down public option and a historic expansion of Medicaid. The bill aims to provide health insurance of one form or another to 96 percent of all Americans. (Washington Post)

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir

Obama Beats Defense Lobby Over Pentagon Budget

“They probably get an ‘A’ from the standpoint of their success on their major initiatives. They probably got all of them but one or maybe two, and that’s an extraordinarily high score.”

- Fred Downey, a former Senate aide now with the Aerospace Industries Association. President Obama signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, having overcome defense industry opposition to pare back a number of expensive weapons programs. (New York Times)

* Related Title: The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America by Robert Scheer

Iran Open to IAEA Nuke Plan?

“We welcome cooperation on nuclear fuel, power plants and technology, and we are ready to cooperate.”

- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, commenting on a UN plan to send the country’s uranium abroad for processing. Iran has made an initial response to the United Nations nuclear watchdog but neither the agency nor Iran made the response public. (New York Times)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich

When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

By Gail Collins

New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009

Reviewed by Elaine Showalter

When Betty Draper of the TV series Mad Men had her third child early this season, the blogosphere went wild.  For many viewers, American suburban childbirth rituals of 1963 seemed as primitive and unfamiliar as a confinement in the Dark Ages. Twilight sleep? Shaving? Husbands smoking in the waiting room with bottles of Scotch? I was struck by the degree of shock and indignation in the online posts, and realized how distant the 1960s had become from the normative female experience of today.

In When Everything Changed, Gail Collins, the former editorial page director of the New York Times and author of the best-selling America’s Women, picks up her history of women left off in the 1960s. Collins uses her great sense of revealing anecdotes, engaging personalities, representative case histories, resonant stories, and startling details to defamiliarize a decade we thought we remembered, and to show how truly far American women have come in every aspect of their lives. Whether being forbidden to wear pants in a courtroom,  growing up without seeing “a woman doctor, lawyer, police officer, or bus driver,” or hearing that “for a woman to make decisions… would be unpleasant, dominant, masculine,” Sixties women took for granted a second-class status that would be unthinkable now.  The median age of marriage was twenty, and girls might otherwise aspire to brief mini-careers as  airline stewardesses or school teachers. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963 (just a few months before Betty has her baby on Mad Men) put a label to the malaise of  unhappy,  bored, rebellious, and intellectually frustrated housewives, and the second wave of American feminism, the women’s liberation movement, began.

Collins gives a lively account of the founding of NOW, the National Organization for Women, in 1966  at a conference on job discrimination in Washington. Conceived as an “NAACP for women,” NOW “seems to have been a plant that required only a seed and a thimble of water before it sprouted into something terrific.” Even the leaders of the women’s movement were astonished at its rapid growth. “With no money, no office, no staff, it was impossible to answer all the letters and calls from women who wanted to join NOW,” Betty Friedan recalled. Indeed, many historians call women’s liberation an idea whose time had come, with strong feminist leaders inspired by the civil rights movement and the Left, who emerged in the 1960s to channel and mobilize  women’s aspirations and demands.

But Collins is writing for a mass audience, and a large part of this book’s commercial appeal is its even-handedness, balance, and avoidance of an overt liberal agenda. So she plays down the role of feminist leaders and women’s movement organizing, to seek “something else—or a collection of something elses–buried deep in the social fabric.”  These impersonal elements, she argues convincingly, came from large socioeconomic forces, especially the financial need for married women to work, which was “really the key to women’s liberation.” By 1970s working wives provided a third of the family income, and “the decline in men’s paychecks in the 1970s, made women’s participation in the workforce almost a requisite for middle-class life. The birth control pill gave young women confidence that they could pursue a career without interruption by pregnancy. The civil rights movement made women conscious of the ways they had been treated like second-class citizens and made them determined that their own status was one of the things they were going to change. It was, all in all, a benevolent version of the perfect storm.”

On the other hand, Collins argues, when some things didn’t change,  individual women leaders in the opposition were more powerful than large social forces. True, “traditional women, working-class men and conservative churches” resisted the Equal Rights Amendment , for example; but their anger was “channeled and mobilized” by Phyllis Schlafly. In the astonishing 2008 presidential race,  Hillary Clinton changed many voters mind about having a woman in high political office, but Sarah Palin’s campaign transformed the entire political conversation.

I’d prefer to see the feminist leaders of the 1960s and 1970s get more credit, but Collins’s message is inspiring and timely, and all the techniques she employs to make this book fun to read–and impossible to deny–deserve critical praise as well as popular success.  What’s really important, she concludes, is that “the feminist movement of the late twentieth century created a new United States in which women ran for president, fought for their country, argued before the Supreme Court, performed heart surgery, directed movies, and flew into space.” The women’s movement did not solve every problem and dilemma of women’s lives, restructure romance and marriage, or resolve the issues of family and childcare versus work. But what a great start!

Elaine Showalter, a professor emerita at Princeton University, is the author of numerous books, including A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing and, most recently, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

In her new book When Everything Changed, New York Times columnist Gail Collins discusses the television shows, commercials, books and icons that were influenced by as well as influenced the women’s movement from the 1950s to the present. Below are some of the cultural influences that defined generations of women in America.

1952 to 1966
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet came to be thought of as the “prototypical American family: breadwinner father, stay-at-home mom, and their kids, nestled in their comfortable suburban home, eating pancakes.”

1953
Alfred Kinsey stuns the nation with his famous study Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, finding that half of American women had had sex before they were married.

Read More

In The Audacity of Greed: Free Markets, Corporate Thieves, and the Looting of America, Senate candidate and labor organizer Jonathan Tasini argues that the story of the past three or four decades has been that “the better things get for the corporate elite, the worse they get for the American worker.” Consider the raw numbers below. They herald tough times for America’s retirees.

- Only 21 percent of private sector workers have a defined benefit pension plan, and 29 percent have only a defined contribution plan. Fifty percent have nothing.

- At the end of 2007, the average 401(k) account balance was $64,454, while the median account balance was $18,942. And even those numbers are deceptive, as the average was pulled up because the top ten percent of income earners have the ability to put an extra $10,000 to $15,000 into their accounts at the end of the year. In addition, those numbers don’t even reflect the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis.

- If current trends continue, we are heading into a period where income for retired Americans will fall for the first time since the Great Depression.

How can it be that in our world of plenty, 25,000 people die of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases every day?  That’s the question at the heart of Enough, a book Nobel Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus called “a passionate and clearly-reasoned call to action.” Written by Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, Enough blends on-the-ground reporting, vivid human stories, and sharp big-picture analysis to argue that our collective failure to solve the problem of world hunger is a shameful failure of politics and policy. In this video, the authors discuss their book with an audience at Google’s headquarters in Mountainview, California.

Massive Bomb in Pakistan as Clinton Visits

“It was a huge bomb blast, heard in almost all the city.”

- Anwar Shah, a police official in Islamabad, Pakistan, where a car bomb ripped through a crowded market in the northwest city of Peshawar hours before US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived for talks in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. (AFP)

* Related Title: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich

U.S. Sources Say Karzai’s Brother Working for CIA

“If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves.”

- Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan, responding to claims, by current and former US officials and reported today in the New York Times, that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years. (New York Times)

* Related Title: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Lieberman Will Oppose Even Public Option Lite

“I’m sure he’ll have some interesting things to do in the way of an amendment. But Joe Lieberman is the least of Harry Reid’s problems.”

- Sen. Harry Reid, whose decision to bring to the Senate floor a health-care bill containing a government insurance plan was met with skepticism by moderate Democrats, including independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, who remains opposed to a public option even with an “opt-out” provision for states. (Washington Post)

* Related Title: Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform by Howard Dean with Igor Volsky and Faiz Shakir