In the face of 9 percent unemployment, a diminishing middle class and more Americans than ever below the poverty line, it was surprising that the President Obama in his State of the Union Speech spoke of the American Dream and said, “We believe that this is a place (America) where you can make it if you try.”

More and more Americans are in poverty (see list below) and Obama’s implication — If you are not making it financially, you must not be trying — no doubt, tickled Republican ears. But it is a line of thinking that in a SOTU speech makes no sense for a Democratic president.

It’s a comforting idea to those who are financially successful that it’s all because of personal effort and merit that they’ve achieved the American Dream of financial security. In his speech, Obama said, “We are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea — the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny. That’s why centuries of pioneers and immigrants have risked everything to come here.”

But, the biggest reason individuals cannot reach the American Dream of personal prosperity is not because of personal failure or personal shortcomings. The problem is system failure, caused by faults and shortcomings in the system. The reason so many poor Americans have done such a poor job of “shaping their own destiny,” is not because of laziness or lack of effort, but because the system is designed to have a few winners and a lot of losers.

It is interesting that people who have money think it has to do with their personal merit, but, in fact, as I say in “Why Are We Rich,” few of us are rich, even minimally, simply by our own efforts or own merit. We have money because of our connection to power within the system.

The “elephant in the room” that everyone seems to want to ignore, is that ours is a very unfair system. It is fascinating how such an unfair structure can be perpetuated and sustained in a system that is supposedly “democratic.”

There are millions of people in poverty (see below) who will never climb out, regardless of how hard they might try. Robert Reich responded to Obama SOTU speech by saying Obama ignored “the central structural flaw in the U.S. economy.” Reich says, “Although the economy is more than twice as large as it was thirty years ago, the median wage has barely budged. Most of the gains from growth have gone to the richest Americans, whose portion of total income soared from around 9 percent in the late 1970s to 23.5 percent in 2007.”

Our economic system has been subverted over the years — via our corrupt political system — to funnel money to the few at the expense of the many.

Obama would have us believe that the problem in our economy is global competition, and that our solution is to mount a national effort to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build” the rest of the world. But, even if the nation could rise to the challenge, if our present system of wealth distribution stays the same, how is the average American helped? If the wealth produced by the system continues to be gobbled up by the very few, how can the American Dream be realized by the average American?

In the last couple of decades, there have been enormous gains in productivity resulting in a huge amounts of new wealth. In his speech Obama noted, “In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100.” But the huge wealth generated via increased productivity has not been fairly distributed.

When he was campaigning for the presidency, Obama said, “While some have prospered beyond imagination in this global economy, middle-class Americans — as well as those working hard to become middle class — are seeing the American dream slip further and further away. I believe that Americans want to come together again behind a common purpose. Americans want to reclaim our American dream.”

But here in 2011, Obama’s answer — “make America the best place on Earth to do business” — is inadequate. The big issue is not how to produce more wealth, but how to create a more fair economic system that will allow more Americans to reclaim the American dream.  Our current “trickle down” system is not a system worthy of a democratic society.

I agree with what Obama said as a candidate, “Americans want to reclaim our American dream.” The dream of “liberty and justice for all” seems just that, a dream, for many Americans.   The only way to reclaim the American dream is via a vitalized American democracy, via vitalized American communities. In his speech, Obama failed to acknowledge that the central crisis of our time is the fact that ours is a weak democracy that the weakness of our democracy is fundamentally the biggest reason so many Americans have little or no chance of financial security.

It’s a goofy notion that it is more technology, more science education by which our nation can “win the future” — “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build” — and maintain world dominance. North Korea and every other totalitarian state would embrace such a strategy, but such an attitude is not worthy of our American democracy.  We win the future by finding the most vibrant, forward looking leadership possible.  We win the future by vitalizing our democracy so that it is effective and so that it ever advances the “common good.”

President Obama in his SOTU Speech Got It Wrong.  At the top of list of tasks this country must accomplish in order to secure a good future, you will not find “Out compete the world in technology.”  You won’t find “Out educate every other nation.”  If the goal is to create an America where Americans universally enjoy the American Dream, then the theory that must guide our thinking is that the best route to a good future is via democracy.  Of most importance, and what should be at the top of our list is that we “Vitalize American Democracy.”

Vitalizing our democracy so that we have a government “for the people” is the answer to bringing the American Dream to more and more Americans.

Here are 27 Signs That America’s Poverty Class Is Becoming Larger than America’s Middle Class

1. Only 47 percent of working-age Americans have a full-time job at this point.
2. One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line.
3. In America today, 8.9 million people are working part-time jobs for “economic reasons”.
4. During the last school year, almost half of all school children in the state of Illinois came from families that were considered to be “low-income”.
5. In 2010, more Americans than ever before were living below the official federal poverty line.
6. The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.
7. The Bureau of Labor Statistics originally predicted that the U.S. economy would create approximately 22 million jobs during the decade of the 2000s, but it turns out that the U.S. economy only produced about 7 million jobs during that time period.
8. 108.6 million Americans are either unemployed, underemployed or considered to be “not in the labor force”.
9. The United States now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago.
10. The number of Americans that have become so discouraged that they have given up searching for work completely now stands at an all-time high.
11. Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
12. According to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, visits to soup kitchens are up 24 percent over the past year.
13. Approximately 5 million U.S. homeowners are now at least two months behind on their mortgage payments.
14. The number of Americans filing for bankruptcy rose another 9 percent in 2010.
15. In 2009, total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined in the United States.
16. According to a survey released very close to the end of 2010, 55 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.
17. Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
18. The number of Americans on food stamps set a new all-time record every single month during 2010, and now well over 43 million Americans are enrolled in the program.
19. Even in our nation’s capital stunningly large numbers of Americans are suffering in desperate poverty. Today, 21.5 percent of the population of Washington D.C. is on food stamps.
20. It now takes the average unemployed American over 33 weeks to find a job.
21. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
22. The number of American families that were booted out of their homes and into the streets set a new all-time record in 2010.
23. Some formerly great industrial cities are rapidly turning into ghost towns. For example, in Dayton, Ohio today 18.9 percent of all houses are now standing empty.
24. Ten years ago, the “employment rate” in the United States was about 64%. Since then it has been constantly declining and now the “employment rate” in the United States is only about 58%. So where did all of those jobs go?
25. A recent study by a law professor from the University of Michigan found that Americans that are 55 years of age or older now account for 20 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States. Back in 2001, they only accounted for 12 percent of all bankruptcies. It is getting really, really hard to live on a fixed income in the United States.
26. In the United States today, there are over 6 million Americans that have been unemployed for half a year or longer.
27. One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

This snowy morning I watched an interesting lecture given by George Lakoff on ForaTV. This lecture (embedded below) makes me want to know more about Lackoff’s thinking, and so I am going to get one of his books:  “The Political Mind” or “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”

Lakoff’s message is that progressives are losing to the right wing in the contest to appeal to the thinking of American citizens. Progressives are losing, according to Lakoff, because, in their efforts to communicate and to influence, they are applying an invalid theory of human reason and, on the other hand, the right wing is applying a scientific theory.

Many progressives, says Lakoff, “Still believe in enlightenment reasoning — if you tell people truth, they will reason to the right conclusion.” But, according to Lakoff, this 18th century view of thinking and human reason is dead wrong.  Lakoff says this “folk theory of reason” is widely held, but its “common sense” assumptions are wrong:

• Conscious — you know when you are reasoning
• Abstract and disembodied
• Fits the world as it is — so that if you know the facts you can reasons to the right conclusion
• Dispassionate — emotion is suppose to get in the way of reason
• Universal — we all have the same reason and that’s what makes us human beings
• Purposeful — it seeks to serve the reasoner’s self interest

These assumptions seem so reasonable that it is hard to believe they all are flat wrong.  But, Lakoff in his lecture destroys each of these assumptions, beginning with the first. Lakoff makes the mind numbing assertion that, according to science, 98% of our reasoning, in fact, is unconscious.

If 98% of our reasoning is unconscious, the big question is, “How are issues realized in the brains of our citizens?”

If understanding is not based on enlightenment reasoning, and organized logic, then how does understanding come about?  As I read him now, Lakoff argues that understanding comes from the manipulation of metaphors and frames of thinking. He makes the point that the right wing has been much more effective in framing issues to their advantage.

Lakoff says, “if you want to be a good citizen, you should know how your brain is working.” He explains: “The brain is not a general purpose reasoning devise — it is structured to run a body. You are not understanding the world in itself. You do not understand the world just in itself. What you always understand is what your brain allows you to understand.”

I want to read Lakoff’s books to better understand his POV. His work on human reason, human understanding, has big implications for public education.

President Obama, in his  Tucson speech, acknowledged that “Much of this process, of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future, is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government.” But the main thrust of the speech was to condemn, “pointing fingers or assigning blame.” Obama said, “What we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other.”

The main point that I received in the speech was this message: “It’s important for us to … make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

It’s interesting that this speech urging everyone to be nice to each other has received high praise from Glen Beck and other right wing spokespersons. I guess the reason for such praise is because the thesis of the speech is that there is no responsibility.  The subtext of the speech seems to be:

• Rather than assigning blame to Arizona’s gun laws that allows any deranged moron with the retail price to buy a powerful weapon,
• Rather than pointing fingers at a dysfunctional educational and mental health system,
• Rather than questioning whether Sarah Palin’s careless language or her gun target advertisement aimed at Tucson had any effect,

let’s find a way of talking about this violent act in a way that avoids hurting anyone’s feelings.

Obama quoted Job: "But when I looked for good, evil came; and when I waited for light, darkness came." Here, William Blake shows God appearing to Job.

In his efforts to deflect blame, it seems to me that Obama crossed a line when he asserted, “Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding.” Of all the phrases in the speech, this one hit my ear as demagoguery — “appealing to popular prejudices rather than by using rational argument.”

The idea of “evil” reappeared later in the speech when Obama said, “We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us.”

It’s hard to fathom, but 40% of Americans believe that, according to scripture, the earth is a “young earth” — only 6000 or 10,000 years old. When Obama says, “Scripture tells us,” he is speaking, as in code, to millions of Americans and millions of Muslims around the world who insist on accepting the literal words of “scripture” as revealed truth. In this literal view, evil is a supernatural force, and humanity is marching inexorably toward a final battle between good and evil, between people aligned with “good” and people aligned with “evil.”  Heaven help us.

No doubt, Obama, personally, has a nuanced and sophisticated POV concerning evil. I read he is influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.  According to this report, “What Neibuhr means by ‘evil’ … is not necessarily a will to kill and enslave, but ‘excessive self-interest’ and a ‘lust for power’ that leads to the tolerance of injustice.”

Obama, it seems to me, if called upon directly, probably would give such a Neibuhrian definition of evil.  But the definition of evil that Obama delivered in his speech was quite different — what the scriptures say about evil — that there is a supernatural force of evil in the world that causes bad things to happen. This view of evil isn’t appropriate for a president to advance. It’s an idea that downright dangerous to advance, in fact, because it gives credibility to lunatic ideas, which in turn gives rise to lunatic actions.

Obama implies that an act of violence by a disturbed 22 year old misfit is among the “terrible things that defy human understanding.” Yes, the confused and violent thinking in the mentally ill is frightful and defies human understanding — in some absolute sense. But it makes sense that disturbed thinking is influenced by the culture it lives in, the same culture that influences all of us. As a democracy we need to investigate and understand what is the source of sickness in our culture and how we can make our culture more healthful.

What doesn’t make sense is to propose that self destructive mental states are evidence of an “evil force.” Good grief. We need to rise above medieval thinking. Normal or creative mental states defy human understanding, as well. As humans we don’t understand either the negative or positive parts of ourselves.

The topic of evil is one that deserves a lot of attention — There is the theory that the reason there is starvation and war in the world is because the world is in the grip of a supernatural evil. Such a theory, or some version of, is attractive because it conveniently gets us all off the hook from making much of an effort to change things.  How to overcome evil is the question. I appreciate the scripture about overcoming evil that President Bill Clinton used in his speech after the Oklahoma bombing. Here are Clinton’s words:

To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life. Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness: Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail.

Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear. When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, Let us “not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”