www.jewishalliance.org. 
18 Tremont Street, Suite 320, Boston, 02108 - tel: 617-227-3000 fax: 617-227-3453

2000 American military personnel killed in Iraq
Thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians dead.

Dear Friends:
It is a strange congruence that we reach the sad mark of 2000 American solders dead in Iraq in the same week when Boston residents are about to re-enact the civil rights march in Selma. Dr. Martin Luther King was one of the earliest leaders in our country to understand the relationship between war, civil rights, and poverty. Most countries initiate war on the backs of the poor who select or are drafted for military service because of the limited options open to poor young men. And MLK recognized and understood the disproportionate number of persons of color on the battlefields. 
It is also a strange congruence that we re-enact this march for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a week when some members of the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. work to amend Housing Trust Legislation with a rider to penalize non-profit groups that work on voter registration (see earlier JALSA e-mails on that topic).  Will we ever learn from our history?
                                                                                                                            Sheila Decter

1. Outline of Boston area civil rights events, Thursday evening, Saturday afternoon, Sunday afternoon.
2. JALSA's Committee on Law and Social Action
Special Forum on Legislative Redistricting. Does the proposal guarantee "fairer" "more representative" districts?
What are the characteristics of fair, democratic, representative legislative districts?
Thursday, October 27, Brookline, 6:30 supper; 7:00 Forum
3. Annual Meeting, Citizens for Public Schools, Tuesday, November 1, 5:00-7:00 pm
Boston Bar Association, 16 Beacon Street, Boston
4. Important and useful reading

1.  Selma Retracing the Struggle March
Roxbury to Boston Common
Sunday, Oct. 30
Congressman John Lewis, Senator John Kerry, Deval Patrick and others.
Join JALSA and thousands of Greater Bostonians of all colors in
commemorating the story and courage of the 1965 Selma marchers and
honoring Congressman Lewis who was a fighter in 1965 and today remains
a fighter for justice for all. Please RSVP to office@jalsa.org. 
This is a great family opportunity.

Learn more about John Lewis's story:
www.house.gov/johnlewis/bio.html. 
and the sacrifices made by so many for basic freedom and civil rights
on the Selma-Montgomery March, the Pettus Bridge (Bloody Sunday),
the other marches, the Freedom Rides, etc. The event’s purposes are to
a) increase awareness and understanding among young people,
and all people, of the struggle for civil rights and b) highlight the need
for civic engagement today.
www.mfh.org/retracingthestruggle.   

Re-enactment March on Sunday, October 30, 1:00 pm
Congressman John Lewis of Georgia will lead the march
from the First Church in Roxbury (10 Putnam St., about half way
between Dudley Square and the Reggie Lewis Center) to Boston Common.
More than 5,000 people are expected to participate in an effort
to increase awareness and understanding among young people,
and all people, of the struggle for civil rights.
www.mfh.org/retracingthestruggle/march.html.  

JALSA will have a banner on the Boston Common.
Please join us.

Teach-In for Students
Thursday, October 27, 6:30-8:00 pm
Freedom House (on the Roxbury/Dorchester line)
(Old Roxbury neighborhood Hebrew College)
Teach-In for students in preparation for the March.
It will be conducted by Facing History and Ourselves
and will invite young people to explore the historical context
and legacies of this momentous event.
www.facinghistory.org/facing/fhao2.nsf/regional/new+england. 

Major symposium at Boston College, featuring prominent civil rights leaders and commentators.
Saturday, October 29, 12:30-5:00 pm
Robsham Theater, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
Retracing the Struggle:
The Legacy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

I. From Civil Rights to Voting Rights: The History (12:45 – 2:00)
Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize winning historian
Alex Keyssar, Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
Harris Wofford, Former U.S. Senator
Moderated by James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly
II. The Social and Political Impact of the Voting Rights Act (2:15 – 3:30)
Abigail Thernstrom, Manhattan Institute
Patricia Williams, Columbia Law School
Moderated by Alan Wolfe, Boston College
III. Voting Rights and Electoral Politics Today (3:45 – 5:00)
Roger Clegg, Center for Equal Opportunity
Wade Henderson, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
John Lewis, United States Congress (D-GA)
Moderated by Mark Whitaker, Newsweek Magazine
http://www.mfh.org/retracingthestruggle/symposium_sched.html. . 

2. CLSA Forum on the MA Initiative Petition
Establishing an Independent Redistricting
Commission for Legislative Redistricting
October 27,   6:30 pm Light Supper       7:00 pm Forum
First Floor Lounge, 1443 Beacon Street, Brookline
Guest Speakers:
Supporting the proposal: Pam Wilmot, Executive Director, Common Cause, MA
Opposing the proposal: Jeff Wice, Consultant on redistricting, National State Legislators Association

RSVP:  office@jalsa.org      or call 617-227-3000.  See suggested reading below.

3. Citizens for Public Schools
Promoting Excellence & Equity in Education
Annual Meeting
Tuesday, November 1, 5:00-7:00 pm
Boston Bar Association, 16 Beacon Street, Boston
Refreshments will be served
www.citizensforpublicschools.org.   
ACTIVIST FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS AWARD TO
Richard Cole, Office of the Attorney General
Senior Counsel for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
Edward Sullivan, Executive Director - Treasurer
Massachusetts Teachers Association
Rep. Alice Wolf, Representative 25th Middlesex District Massachusetts
Education Committee Member

RSVP:  office@citizensforpublicschools.org    or call 617-227-3000

4.  Useful and Important Reading

On 2000 dead...

We've Been Here Before
What was the cause, the point, the strategy? Suddenly many Americans started to realize that there was no good answer.

By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek

Oct. 31, 2005 issue - The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a tapering wall of black granite cut into the grass of Constitution Gardens. Maya Lin envisioned a scar when she designed it, a scar on this land, which is exactly right. Maybe someday his security detail could drive George W. Bush over to take a look. He'll be able to see himself in the reflective surface.

The list of names etched into the wall begins with a soldier who died in 1959 and ends with one who died in 1975. Nearly 60,000 dead are commemorated here. It is the most personal of war memorials. You can touch the cold names with your warm fingers.

The president never wanted the war in Iraq to be personal. His people forbade photographs of coffins arriving home. They refused to keep track of how many Iraqis had been killed and wounded. When "Nightline" devoted a show to the faces of soldiers who had died, one conservative broadcast outlet even pulled the program from its lineup.

The president wanted this to be about policy, not about people. Even that did not go well. The policy became a moving target. First there were weapons of mass destruction that were not there and direct links to the terrorists who attacked on September 11 that didn't exist. The removal of Saddam Hussein was given as the greatest good; it has been done. Then it became the amorphous goal of bringing freedom to the Iraqi people, as though liberty were flowers and we were FTD. The elections, the constitution, the rubble, the dead. Once again we were destroying the village in order to save it.

This all took an unfortunate turn for the administration during the president's vacation in August, when Cindy Sheehan showed up at his ranch. Say what you would about her politics or tactics, there was no doubt that she was a mother whose soldier son was now dead, and who wanted to know why. What was the cause, the point, the strategy? And suddenly many Americans started to realize that there was no good answer.

The Vietnam Memorial stands, in part, as a monument to blind incrementalism, to men who refused to stop, not because of wisdom but because of ego, because of the fear of looking weak. Not enough troops, not enough planning, no real understanding of the people or the power of the insurgency, dwindling public support. The war in Iraq is a disaster in the image and likeness of its predecessor.

During each election cycle, we ponder the question of whether character matters. Of course it does. Does anyone doubt that the continued prosecution of this war has to do with the personality of the commander in chief, a man who is stubborn and calls it strength, who wears blinders and calls it vision? When he vowed to invade Iraq, the advisers he heeded were those who, like him, had never seen combat. The one who had was marginalized and is now gone. The investigation of who leaked what to whom, of what the reporter knew and how she knew it, may be about national security and journalistic ethics, but at its base it is about something more important: the Nixonian lengths to which these people will go to shore up a bankrupt policy and destroy those who cross them on it.

The most unattractive trait of the American empire is American arrogance, which the president embodies and which this war elevated. It is not simply that we have a good system. It is the system everyone else should have. It is the best system, and we are the best people. We can mend rivalries so ancient that they not only predate our nation but the birth of Christ. We will install the leaders we like in a country we scarcely understand, leaders who will either be seen as puppets by their people or who will eventually turn against us. We have been here before.

"In Vietnam we didn't have the lessons of Vietnam to guide us," says David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of that war. "In Iraq we did have those lessons. The tragedy is that we didn't pay attention to them." Or maybe only our leaders did not. The polls show the American people have turned on this war much more quickly than they did on the war in Vietnam. Of course, they are the ones who pay the price.

Perhaps the leaders of the Democratic Party should take time off from their fund-raisers and visit the Vietnam Memorial, too. They should remember one of the most powerful men the party ever produced, Lyndon B. Johnson, and how he was destroyed by opposition to the war in Vietnam and bested by those brave enough to speak against it.

At least Johnson had the good sense to be heartbroken by the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being criticized. Someone with a trumpet should play taps outside the White House for the edification of a president who has not attended a single funeral for the Iraqi war dead. As I am writing this, the number of American soldiers killed is 1, 992. By the time you read it, it may have topped 2,000. Will I be writing these same things when the number is 3,000, 5,000, 10,000? If we are such a great nation, why are we utterly incapable of learning from our mistakes? America's sons and daughters are dying to protect the egos of those whose own children are safe at home. Again.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9785746/site/newsweek/.

On redistricting....

Idea Lab
Who Should Redistrict?      By Dean E. Murphy
Published: October 23, 2005
New York Times

Rising out of the farmland south of Sacramento, Elk Grove is a pleasant, unremarkable collection of scrubbed subdivisions with artificial lakes and velveteen lawns. What makes Elk Grove special - and of intense interest to politicians - is that in a state where political segregation is the norm, Democrats and Republicans live side by side in almost equal numbers.

When the residents of Elk Grove choose their state legislators, however, their votes are divided into two improbable assembly districts that meander into outlying rural areas and give each a Republican majority. Those districts are the legacy of a statewide redistricting in California in 2001 from which both parties benefited. The Democrats retained firm control of the State Legislature and the 53-member Congressional delegation, while Republicans were assured 20 safe seats in Congress and a spoiler's share of the seats in the state Capitol.

And so, on a sunny May afternoon, Elk Grove was the natural backdrop for the Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to stump for Proposition 77, an ostensibly politically neutral ballot initiative that would take the power to set voting districts away from state lawmakers and give it to an independent panel of retired judges. Schwarzenegger stood in the center of a neighborhood of half-million-dollar homes where aides had put down hundreds of feet of red ribbon. The ribbon bisected the street, turning at a right angle on the asphalt in front of the governor's lectern and continuing through the sprinkler-fed turf between homes owned by Darren and Nichola Denney and Garry and Susan Darms, who were standing, Let's-Make-A-Deal fashion, in front of them. A pair of blue signs posted on either side of the red line said "15th Assembly District" and "10th Assembly District."

"The politicians have divided a neighborhood," Schwarzenegger intoned. "They have divided cities, towns and people, and this is what we want to eliminate. And this is why we need redistricting, because the district lines were drawn to favor the incumbents rather than to favor the voters." One of the assemblymen with the governor, Guy Houston, complained that his district stretched across four counties from suburban San Francisco to Elk Grove, 80 miles to the northeast. "I love Elk Grove," said Houston, who lives in San Ramon, on the western fringe of the district. "The people here are so nice, great to represent. But shouldn't we have districts that are more compact and competitive?"

The short answer to Houston's rhetorical question is yes. Politicians tend to be held to account when they represent communities where social ties and common institutions make people more likely to be politically active. Gerrymandered districts like Houston's have been blamed for a host of ills: complacent incumbents, polarized politics, cynical voters, dull elections. The arguments for taking the politics out of drawing political boundaries have been mounting. California and Ohio voters will go to the polls Nov. 8 to decide whether to let outside panels determine how electoral districts - both for State Legislature and for the United States House of Representatives - will be drawn. More than a dozen other states are thinking of doing the same.

And yet, how many of the complaints about elections would really disappear simply by taking the redistricting process out of the hands of elected officials? Houston says districts should be compact and competitive, but in California, like-minded people tend to cluster. Draw a box around San Francisco and you create a safe haven for Democrats; do the same around Bakersfield and Republicans benefit. The districts would have less sinister shapes, but they would not necessarily lead to more meaningful elections. So which is more important to democracy? Compactness or competitiveness? Or something entirely different?

The two Elk Grove districts are neither compact nor particularly competitive, so no doubt there is room for improvement there. As it turned out, the red ribbon running up Grand Point Lane did not divide the 10th from the 15th district; the real boundary was blocks away. But nobody noticed it at the time, not the elected officials nor the residents, and that can't be good for democracy either.

The drawing of legislative boundaries is one of the most politicized and corruptible practices in American-style government, and few people will say they approve of the gerrymandering it has unleashed. Boundary-rigging infamously kept blacks from gaining political power in the South. (One Mississippi district, mapped in the late 1870's with the single purpose of preventing the re-election of a black congressman, was 500 miles long and 40 miles wide.) In the early part of the 20th century, rural lawmakers held onto power by simply ignoring their obligation to draw new boundaries as people migrated to the cities and populations shifted, thus denying the swelling cities the political representation their numbers warranted.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and various rulings by the Supreme Court curtailed such egregious gerrymandering, but the practice endures - sometimes to favor incumbents, sometimes to favor one political party over the other. Lawmakers now use finely tuned demographic information and advanced computer programs to create "safe but slim victory margins in the maximum number of districts, with little risk of cutting their margins too thin," as the Supreme Court justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote last year in a dissenting opinion in a gerrymandering case, Vieth v. Jubelirer. That is what happened in California, where the deal worked out between the two parties created safe seats for incumbents. There was also, of course, the spectacle two years ago in which Tom DeLay, then the Republican majority leader in the House, orchestrated a mid-decade partisan gerrymander in his home state of Texas, which Democratic lawmakers tried to thwart by fleeing to Oklahoma and New Mexico. They failed, and of the seven incumbents defeated in Congress in 2004, four of them were Texas Democrats who had been placed in the newly rigged districts.

But while it's easy to make a case against gerrymandering, it's much harder to say how districts should be drawn. Most states require that district boundaries be revisited every 10 years, after the release of new census data and the reapportionment of the country's Congressional seats. The creation of contiguous districts is the most widely accepted and uncontroversial criterion. Every state requires contiguity, and in 1842, Congress passed the first federal law that mandated the drawing of contiguous Congressional districts. A few other rules apply: the Supreme Court decisions of the 1960's forced Congressional districts to be roughly equal in population. The Voting Rights Act also prohibits "retrogression" in minority voting rights in certain states and the diluting of the political strength of minority communities anywhere. But beyond these piecemeal and often vague criteria - contiguity, after all, can accommodate serpentine shapes - legislators are free to create the maps as they see fit.

The Supreme Court has been little help in separating raw politics from mapmaking, with the justices disagreeing on how to deal with even obvious partisan boundary-rigging. In Vieth v. Jubelirer, Pennsylvania Democrats asked the court to overturn the state's redistricting plan, which was drafted by a Republican-led State Legislature and signed into law by a Republican governor. The new map gave Republicans the advantage in 12 of 19 Congressional districts, even though Democrats outnumbered Republicans statewide. Four of the justices held that redistricting was a political matter that could never be decided by the courts. Five justices agreed that excessive partisanship in redistricting could be unconstitutional, but they didn't settle on a standard for deciding when a party had gone too far. Ultimately, the court allowed the Pennsylvania map to stand.

The Vieth case helped push the issue of gerrymandering into the hands of activists who are pursuing reform one state at a time. Even before Vieth, six states had assigned the task of redistricting Congressional seats to officials outside the State Legislature, and 12 had done so for state legislative districts. In California, Proposition 77 would give mapmaking power to three retired judges chosen in a multistep, excruciatingly choreographed process meant to ensure that both parties are represented; in Ohio, the redistricting power would go to five citizens, with a judge from each of the two major parties choosing one of the panelists. Voters in Florida are expected to take up a redistricting measure next year that would create a 15-member citizen commission.

If these initiatives succeed, people who do not hold elected office will be the ones to weigh and balance competing interests. But as Larry M. Bartels, director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton, points out, changing the mapmakers does not eliminate the vexing philosophical questions behind the mechanics of electoral mapmaking. "Should they attempt to maximize the number of competitive races or to ensure that the partisan distribution of seats in the legislature appropriately reflects the partisan distribution of votes?" he wrote in an e-mail message. "Is it more important for districts to have precisely equal populations or to reflect 'natural communities' defined by political boundaries, media markets or other criteria? Should they attempt to keep as many people as possible in the same districts in order to facilitate accountability, or should each redistricting cycle be treated as a blank slate?"

In other words, what are the electoral building blocks of a representative democracy? The answers are not always obvious. In Arizona, an independent commission was given the power to create "fair and competitive" districts. That commission drew some districts with large Latino populations, with the stated goal of giving a historically underrepresented group a stronger voice. Some Democratic and Latino groups complained that the real intention was to dilute their strength in other districts. First the Department of Justice, and later the courts, sent the mapmakers back to the drawing board. "The problem is that people have different expectations about the outcomes," Bruce E. Cain, who served as a special master for the Arizona redistricting, told me. "You can change the process, but you can't take away the controversy."

Independent redistricting wears the cloak of a good-government reform movement, but like most things in politics, its proponents have many motives. Schwarzenegger may truly believe that it's an affront to democracy to carve the state into safe districts for incumbents, but he would also benefit from a quick change in the cast of characters in the Democratic-controlled State Legislature - preferably in time for a hoped-for second term. (He called a special election - costing the state $45 million - rather than waiting until the regular statewide elections next year.) In Ohio, the group pushing redistricting is a nonpartisan organization called Reform Ohio Now. But the Democrats and union officials who dominate the group also view new boundaries as a way to break the Republican hold on both the statehouse and the Congressional delegation, and to revive a lackluster Democratic Party.

In any case, engineering districts for the benefit of incumbents or political parties seems easier to accomplish than creating more competition. Despite all the work on a new Arizona map done by the independent commission, nearly half of the State Senate seats weren't even contested in last year's election, according to the Center for Voting and Democracy, which promotes competitive elections. In Iowa, where an independent commission serves in an advisory role and is often cited as a reform model, the group found that Congressional incumbents have still won 98 percent of their re-election bids since 1982. In the end, the process had changed but the results were much the same.

Nicole Boyle is known around the University of California at Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies as the "G.I.S. queen." For nine years, starting when she was an undergraduate, she has analyzed election data with a technology known as Geographic Information Systems. On a morning in late August, Boyle was typing on her keyboard in front of an oversize screen covered with thousands of shapes splashed in multiple colors. Since the mid-1990's, the institute has maintained California's official redistricting data. With funding from a private grant, the institute is now using the data to test a central premise of the redistricting reform movement: can you draw districts that increase competitiveness while also accommodating other desires, like compactness? Boyle has been crunching demographic and census numbers since the spring trying to come up with an answer.

On this morning, she had run into a brick wall with an experimental version of Congressional District 29 in Los Angeles County, as she used the keyboard to move the boundaries, dropping some census tracts and adding others. "This district has almost no chance of being a competitive district," Boyle conceded with some frustration.

Bruce Cain, who also runs the Berkeley institute, says that competitiveness comes down to which factors are given priority - and that, ultimately, is a political determination. How much weight, for example, should mapmakers give to so-called communities of interest - areas where people work in the same industry or use the same reservoir, say, but don't live within the same political boundaries? Where you begin drawing lines even makes a difference because, like a stone dropped in a pond, the ripples of one district's boundaries affect others. Boyle and Karin Mac Donald, the statewide database director, demonstrated that the final map for California would be different if you just started drawing upward from the Mexican border instead of downward from the Oregon one. "Good luck finding 24 willing judges," Mac Donald said, referring to the the independent panel from which the three California mapmakers would be picked. "I can't imagine they're lining the streets saying 'Pick me!"'

A top priority of Proposition 77 is to keep cities and counties whole. That would make it very difficult to create many competitive districts because Californians - and most Americans, for that matter - don't live in politically integrated communities. "It's not going to lead to a massive transformation, with 50 percent of the seats being competitive, because the state isn't laid out that way," Cain said of the measure. The institute's computer modeling shows, so far, that at most a dozen or so of the state's 53 Congressional districts could have competitive races.

The problem is not unique to California. Last year, The Austin American-Statesman conducted a county-by-county statistical analysis of presidential election returns since 1948. The survey found that Americans increasingly reside in "landslide counties" - in which a presidential candidate receives at least 60 percent of the vote - and that "political segregation" in counties had grown by 47 percent from 1976 to 2000. The Ohio measure tries to get around partisan clustering by requiring that competitiveness, rather than keeping cities and counties whole, be the most important consideration in drawing a redistricting plan. It even includes a mathematical formula for determining competitiveness.

To achieve districts with a political-party balance in California would require, in some instances, extending lines from the Pacific Ocean to the Nevada border - contortions that conflict with the goal of compactness. Even trying to draw the most competitive map that conformed to the basic principles of equal population and contiguity would require "waiting until the sun exploded for us to find a solution," as Michael P. McDonald, a redistricting expert and a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, told me.

When I visited Berkeley, Karin Mac Donald had just returned from giving a talk on redistricting, this one to the League of Women Voters, which considers Proposition 77 flawed because the panel of retired judges would be too small to reflect the state's diversity. One lesson that she has taken from the lecture circuit is that many Americans, no matter how much they complain about the poison of partisanship, are comfortable with their like-minded communities. "People always say it would be great to have competitive districts," Mac Donald explained. "But you talk to them for two minutes about what that would mean, and in the end they say, 'I don't want to live in a competitive district, but everyone else should."' Why, I asked? "Because in a competitive district they might not get what they want."

Dean E. Murphy is The NY Times's bureau chief in San Francisco.

©  2005  The NYTimes

On Economic Inequality....

A State Of Inequality
By Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel
10/24/05 "AlterNet" -- -- Fall is inequality season. Every autumn, as the leaves change color, we get a vivid new picture of the trends that pull us apart as a country.

This year is no different. But after almost three decades of incrementally widening disparities of wealth and income, it's worth noting that we've entered a new version of economic apartheid, American-style. Let's call it Inequality 2.0.

The United States is now the third most unequal industrialized society after Russia and Mexico. This is not a club we want to be part of. Russia is a recovering kleptocracy, with a post-Soviet oligarchy enriched by looting. And Mexico, despite joining the rich-nations club of the Organization for Economic and Community Development, has some of the most glaring poverty in the hemisphere.

In 2004, after three years of economic recovery, the U.S. Census reports that poverty continues to grow, while the real median income for full-time workers has declined. Since 2001, when the economy hit bottom, the ranks of our nation's poor have grown by 4 million, and the number of people without health insurance has swelled by 4.6 million to over 45 million.

Income inequality is now near all-time highs, with over 50 percent of 2004 income going to the top fifth of households, and the biggest gains going to the top 5 percent and 1 percent of households. The average CEO now takes home a paycheck 431 times that of their average worker.

At the pinnacle of U.S. wealth, 2004 saw a dramatic increase in the number of billionaires. According to Forbes Magazine, there are now 374 U.S. billionaires. The growth in billionaires took a dramatic leap since the early 1980s, when the average net worth of the individuals on the Forbes 400 list was $400 million. Today, the average net worth is $2.8 billion. Wal-Mart's Walton family now has 771,287 times more than the median U.S. household.
Does inequality matter? One problem is that concentrations of wealth and power pose a danger to our democratic system. The corruption of politics by big money might explain why for the last five years the President and Congress have been more interested in repealing the federal estate tax, paid only by multi-millionaires, than on reinforcing levees along the Gulf Coast.

Now, to pay for hurricane reconstruction and the war in Iraq, Congress is considering cuts in programs that help poor people, such as Medicaid and Food Stamps. They have not yet considered fairer ways of reducing the deficit by reversing special tax breaks for the rich, such as the recent cuts in capital gains and dividend taxes.

Inequality is non-partisan. The pace of inequality has grown steadily over three decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses. The Gini index, the global measure of inequality, grew as quickly under President Clinton as it has under President George W. Bush. Widening disparities in the U.S. are the result of three decades of bi-partisan public policies that have tilted the rules of the economy to the benefit of major corporations and large asset owners at the expense of people whose security comes from a paycheck.

Public policies in trade, taxes, wages and social spending can make a difference in mitigating national and global trends toward prolonged inequality. But our priorities are moving in the wrong direction.

For example, the failure to raise the minimum wage from its 1997 level of $5.15 an hour guarantees continued income stagnation for the working poor for years to come. The President and Congress's focus on tax cuts for the wealthy and their disinterest in government spending to expand equal opportunity sets the stage for Inequality Version 3.0.

We shouldn't tolerate this drift toward an economic apartheid society.

Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel are co-authors of the new book, "Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity" (The New Press).
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.