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Robert Reich's big question: Do facts still matter?
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PDT Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, now
teaching public policy at Berkeley, has been going around asking a
portentous question: As the wage and wealth gaps between the rich and
poor grow to unprecedented proportions in America, will we snap back
or snap apart?

Snapping back is what the nation has always done in the past. After
the depredations of the Gilded Age, the sweatshops, the 14-hour days
even for children, the Populists and then the Progressives succeeded
in enacting antitrust and wage and hour laws, interstate commerce
regulation, the progressive income tax, pure food and drug laws and a
long list of others.

Together, Reich said, those reforms brought things back to tolerable
levels.

Ditto during the Depression, with laws recognizing the right of labor
to organize and strike; enactment of Social Security, banking and
securities regulations; and establishment of hundreds of public works
projects to put people back to work - roads, bridges, schools, water
and power systems.

But Reich, a former Rhodes Scholar, also warns about another
scenario. "If we don't snap back," he said, "we snap apart into
different societies" that have little contact with one another, and
where the poor lose the classic American expectation that with enough
effort they can make it into the middle class.

That snapping apart fuels the politics of resentment and makes the
nation susceptible to all sorts of demagoguery - about race and
religion, about immigrants, about gays, about elites. As he talked
about it recently at the Public Policy Institute of California, it was
hard not to believe it was already happening. "Are we living in a
madhouse?" Reich asked.

And then another question: Do facts still matter? Every day brings
more material to underline the question: yet another round of
attempts, at a time when the nation is already falling behind China,
India and Korea in science education, to eviscerate Darwinian
evolution. Teachers all over the country are afraid to fully discuss
it.

And as we all know, there's the ongoing falsification by one
government agency after another of data on everything from the WMDs
Iraq didn't have to the cost of the Medicare drug bill to the effects
of global warming. Instead, we have the facile morphing of "values"
with sectarian beliefs.

The country is beset with urgent issues from the multitrillion-dollar
federal debt to a health care system that's as unfair and expensive as
it's wasteful and often corrupt, to an education system that now runs
a poor second or third to those of the nation's economic
competitors. We are stuck in a "war" from which there seems to be no
exit in a region where our misbegotten policies grow terrorists faster
than we can kill them.

But instead of facing and debating those issues, we're preoccupied
with our religious wars - diversionary issues about who's the godliest
among us. We are fixated on steroids in baseball, and on Terri Schiavo
and Michael Jackson; and about a federal REAL ID Act bill without any
study or test to deny driver's licenses to illegal aliens, which will
make things tougher and more expensive for every American at every DMV
office, but which probably won't buy us a nickel's worth of additional
security.

In the past, tough times brought waves of reformist legislative trials
in the states - a lot of federal reform legislation was further tested
and implemented in the states. But in this state, a generation of
efforts to dig ourselves out of our self-inflicted budgetary and
governmental mess seems just to have dug the hole deeper and made the
system even less comprehensible.

It may not be all our fault. Given the global economy and the
technological revolutions that enlarge the gaps in income and wealth
between those with an advanced education and those without, along with
the federal tax, health and foreign policies that, rather than
ameliorating the gaps, exacerbate their effects, there may be only so
much that even a state such as California can do.

That's not to say we couldn't do a lot better - in education, in
health care, in housing. And we could certainly stop trying to do
worse, as the state has been doing. By themselves, the piecemeal and
inconsistent ad hoc lunges of the governor and Legislature don't
address any fundamental problems. As the Legislative Analyst's Office
has pointed out, the governor's budget reform initiative, the only big
thing proposed, can only make the system more rigid and opaque.

Even if everything passes that the governor has said he wanted,
including his long string of abandoned "oh, nevermind" proposals, it
will not change California government and budgeting very much.

In another era, we might have helped lead the nation to brighter
prospects. We did that with our pioneering environmental and civil
rights laws; in creating the greatest public higher education system
on Earth; and with our parks and freeways. But does anyone expect
anything like that now?

Snap back or snap apart.