Like President Bush cherry-picking intelligence reports to show Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Gerald Liles cherry-picks stats in his latest column to assert that the American dream is alive and well, although nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that working Americans have been at the job longer and working harder for wages that have been relatively stagnant since the Vietnam War.
With the rise of corporate power and its strong influence on the government, the power of labor - and the power of workers to band together to petition for better wages - has been seriously diminished. The tax structure has also been altered to lessen the rates by which corporations and the rich pay their fair share of taxes. And while income mobility has remained relatively constant over this period, income inequality has grown rapidly worse.
We are the richest country in the world. We are also a country where tens of millions of its citizens are without basic health care, where 15 million children live below the poverty level. So the reality is, we live in a country where the American dream has died for most citizens.
