Is America losing its sense of community? Excerpted from “Citizen Engagement: Policies to Renew National Community,” June 18, 2015

LARRY GERSTON, Professor Emeritus of Politcal Science, San Jose State University; Author, Reviving Citizen Engagement: Policies to Renew National Community
DOUG SOVERN, KCBS Radio Political Reporter—Moderator

LARRY GERSTON: America is adrift, and I don’t use that term lightly. Simply put, so many of us are dis- engaged. Large numbers of people today have no faith in our political institutions. Voting statistics are increasingly dismal, and those who vote are increasingly uninformed; that’s a bad combination.

Large numbers have no faith in our economic system. Low-wage jobs were [worked by] 21 percent of all workers before the Great Recession and 58 percent of all workers after the Great Recession. No wonder they have no faith in our economic system. We’re all going down. Four years after the recovery from the Great Recession, two million fewer people have full-time jobs compared to 2007. Many more are working, but many are cobbling together two, three jobs just to make a go of it.

Large numbers have no faith in our social structure. Government ignored school segregation; with the obliteration of Brown v. Board of Education – it’s all but gone. Forget this notion of desegregation at all speeds. Schools today are incredibly segregated. As of 2012, 80 percent of Latino students and 74 percent of African-American students attended schools with non-white majorities. Unlike in the past, there seems to be little holding us together. More than ever, we live in an “I got mine, go get yours” environment, and I don’t think that’s the greatest way for us to be engaged as a nation.

So you look at these things: the political, the economic, the social structure. The collected sentiments underscore the extent to which America suffers today from weakened citizenship. We’re a detached nation. We are no longer invested. Why? What’s happened? Whatever happened to the greatest generation? Whatever happened to building the country after the war? Whatever happened to these things? Well, here we have to talk about the characteristics of what I call a hollowed-out society: lack of investment, institutional discrimination, corporate abandonment. Those three factors loom large as explanations for why we are so hollowed out today. Let’s look at them one at a time.

Lack of public investment: This is supposed to be the number-one country in the world. The statistics don’t show that. In infrastructure, we’re seventh – that means?six others are ahead.?You don’t need to be?a math whiz to know?that. In income,?we’re 24th – poor?highways, airports,?energy distribution systems – we’re?all down in those?things. Go to an air-?port in Europe. Go ?to the Hong Kong? airport. Go to the Bangkok airport. My good- ness, you’ll see cities there. You’ll see incredible infrastructures where people are brought together by high-speed rail, and they’ve spent the money to make it right. All right, go to SFO. It’s another world. You wonder which one’s the third-world country and which one’s the first-world country. Our public education ranks 15th in per capita expenditures among the world’s 30 most industrialized nations. We’re right in the middle. That means there’s a lot of nations going by us.

Much of this relates to the disdain for taxes by those who could afford to pay the most. Even though the United States has one of the lowest income tax rates among all industrialized economies, apparently for a number of people with wealth, it’s not low enough. The wealthy Americans these days are giving up citizenship rather than paying their fair share of taxes. These numbers are growing. In 2010, 1,300 people said, “I don’t want to have to take the money that I earned here, and put it over there, and bring it back in through taxes. I want to keep it all to myself.” I got mine, you go get yours. That was in 2010. In 2014, 3,000 of the wealthiest Americans in the country, who made their money here, took it somewhere else and never brought it back because they didn’t want to pay taxes. Of those who remain, more than 500,000 wealthy Americans have stored more than one trillion dollars offshore, and as long as they are going to keep it there, they are not going to pay taxes. When you don’t invest, you don’t get much back. As other nations soar past us, we’re leaving Americans behind. We’re leaving America vulnerable. This isn’t something happening in a day or a week. This is happening over time. It’s happening in our education system. It’s happening in our infrastructure. It’s happening in all the things we need to do to stay great.

Second, we suffer from institutionalized discrimination. We have a form of voter suppression that is nothing else but sophisticated racism. You might remember hearing about the Shelby v. Holder case in 2013. That’s the case that basically ripped apart what we call Title V of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. What it said was that if you’re going to change the way you register voters and your voting rules, you must let us know. The Supreme Court overturned that. Those [new] laws alone allowed states to come up with their own rules – shorter time limits, more demands in terms of requirements for people to vote, identification – and those laws alone reduced participation by 2 percent in 2014. When you’re talking about 2 percent in closely monitored elections, that’s a lot. The result? Disenfranchisement and hopelessness. Particularly among whom? Among minorities and the poor.

If you look at education, we are a nation with different opportunities. High school graduation rates – consider this for a moment: whites, 83 percent; Latinos, 71 percent; African-Americans, 66 percent. These things are not by coincidence; it’s not by the luck of the draw. The performance differences [between] races are found as early as the fourth grade. Thanks to segregated schools and skewed public investments, with poor education foundations, minorities never catch up. By the eighth or ninth grade, they are dropping out because they are giving up. After that, who knows? There’s no future if you don’t have an education. So given this data, is there any reason to wonder why minorities feel left behind? Because they are.

Let’s not forget women. As of 2010, women received 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, 67 percent of all master’s degrees, 53 percent of all Ph.D.s. Women are the ones who are getting education today. I see it in my classrooms all the time. It happens with similar training – they’ve got the experience, they’ve got the credentials. Women are still paid less than 80 percent of [what] men with the same experience, the same credentials earned. That’s unconscionable. There’s no reason for this other than discrimination. So we talk a good game when it comes to equality, but providing it is at an all-time low. No wonder so many citizens are disengaged.

The third element here is corporate abandonment. Let’s start with taxes. Officially, the corporate tax rate is 35 percent, and you hear corporations moaning and groaning about this all the time: “We’ve got the highest tax rates in the country. Blah, blah blah.” [But] 65 percent of all corporations pay no taxes. That’s a pretty good figure. Why? Because of thousands of pages of loopholes. I’ll give you a couple examples.

As of 2012, Apple paid nothing. Ditto for GE. Verizon paid nothing. Facebook paid nothing and received a $469 million refund. Now that’s good math. So when we hear all this moaning and groaning about how corporations can’t make it, just look at what they are doing with taxes and how they are working it to their benefit. There’s something wrong with that. There’s some pretty good tax escapes: storing two trillion dollars offshore, inversion – merging a U.S. corporation with a company in a low tax country so that you can pay lower taxes.

Let’s look at their employees for a moment, the people who make the corporations successful. With respect to their employees, corporations have forsaken benefits in the name of greater profits. The haves and have-nots story here is just all over the place. In 1965, the typical CEO earned 20 times the average [salary at] his or her company. In 2011, the typical CEO earned 260 times the average [salary] at his or her company. At some – Dollar General, McDonalds, Starbucks – as much as a thousand times as the average worker in their company. How about defining benefits, retirement, all that stuff? Working 35 years to know that you’re going to have something from your company? Those pensions have given way to 401k’s, and some of those programs are underfunded. The workers have been left behind while the C-level folks go on and prosper.

So what can we do about this? How can we make America whole again? How can we make everyone appreciate the need to do his or her part? I think there are a few things we can do. One, we have got to in- vest in public education. I’m talking about longer school days, longer school years. Look at how we are [compared] to other countries. We sometimes [have] 30 school days less than others. That catches up to us. I’m talking about requiring every child to learn a second language. Why are we the only country where English is so sacred and nothing else? Are we that arrogant? Other countries around the world teach English as the second or third language. They’ve already learned a second language. When talking about bolstering education, we need meaningful job programs instead of cutting back in the community colleges and the places where they have these programs that teach people how to be solar technicians and other jobs like that. We need to have more of those, not less. We need a collocation of universal American values beginning with civic learning. It just scares me to death how many students don’t really know what democracy is, and that democracy depends upon citizen knowledge and citizen involvement. It includes a whole range of things, such as tolerance, compromise and other elements that we leave out of the classrooms because we’re too busy giving tests.

So first we talk about bolstering education. Second, we need to restore our rights and, just as important, we need to restore our obligation. Now, we’re all good about rights. We’re not so good about our obligations. This is a real weak spot. I would argue that if we are part of this great country, and if we want to make it better, we should have mandatory national service for two years or so upon leaving high school. Let’s all join up together. Participants would receive a modest wage during their work period, and a lump sum at the end. They could spend that lump sum on college, job training, other uses; you name it, whatever they want to do. Think about the labor; think about the talent with tens of millions of young people unleashed. They could be working with the police as assistants; they could go into the military; they could be going into forestry; they could be going to hospitals, you name it. There are so many areas [in which] we need people to help make our lives better. These kids, after working a couple years, will have a better appreciation for who they are, and what they’re doing, and where they are going to go. We all talk a good game about patriotism. Patriotism is not about waving a flag. Patriotism is not about citing an amendment or two from the Constitution. Patriotism is about citizen commitment to ensure that flag always waves.

Third, we need to talk about substantive tax reform. The cost of all tax breaks in this country came to $1.2 trillion in 2013, far exceeding, by the way, the deficit that year, which was almost half. The deficit was $700 billion. Corporations should be taxed for their profits wherever they occur – if it’s here, if it’s in Iceland, if it’s in Mongolia, it doesn’t matter. Just because you moved people over there does not mean you are not a U.S. corporation. They should be taxed for their profits, pure and simple. That’s a lot of money. They are not paying their fair share. As far as a defined-benefit program, Congress should make it mandatory. There’s a loyalty [when] you work for the company, and the company takes care of you. You give them your all for 30 or 35 years, and when you leave, they make sure you’re whole. That once was the case; it’s not the case now. That has to be reversed.

Regarding personal income taxes and capital gains, tax rates should go up with income. There’s something so screwy with a person who is selling $100,000 of stock and pays 15 percent and a person who sells a billion dollars of stock and pays 15 percent. Does it take a math genius to figure this out? Apparently so. That’s got to change. We’ve got a class now of super billionaires who are paying the 39 percent maximum with the rest of the people who are making $200,000 to $400,000 a year. That just doesn’t make sense. Combined, these changes would bring in enough money to wipe out the annual national budget deficit and pay for what I’ve already asked for: pay for the education, pay for the job training and pay for the national service programs. All of that would come without any additional costs if we just made some commonsense changes.

The bottom line is, it’s time for this country to embrace all of its members, not just the privileged. Only when everyone has the same opportunities to learn, only when everyone has the same opportunities to work up to their potential, will there be full citizen- ship. Only when everyone shares the same rights, only when everyone shares the same obligations, pays their share, earns their way through, will there be meaningful citizenship. Only when everyone and every corporation pays their fair share, will there be equitable citizenship. We know that the United States is a country of unlimited potential. Absolutely, but you know what? It’s time we lived up to it. It’s time we did what we talked about. Only then will we be a re-engaged society that truly lives up to those words: “Liberty and justice for all.”

From the question & answer session with political reporter Doug Sovern
DOUG SOVERN: People want to know how they can help. How can they get more engaged? How can they get involved?

GERSTON: Part of the answer is so basic. The first thing we need to do is become knowledgeable about what is going on. That means reading a newspaper. That means looking at things besides cable television. That means digesting what’s going on out there, reacting to it, discussing it, becoming part of the solution. So many of us [turn] away, don’t want to be part of it. We need an attitude adjustment, a big one. People have to come around to this, and if they don’t, I can promise you, less than 50 years from now, this [won’t] be the American century. It’ll be somebody else’s century, and it will be something that we did to ourselves.

I start with newspapers. Read it, under- stand it – and not just newspapers alone. If you go online, there are some great online sites. But if you go to these sites that are one sided, that’s not going to help. You don’t want to hear what you already believe. You need to be challenged. Our ideas need to be challenged, and in doing so we become better people for it. It’s a matter of investing in ourselves which will allow us to invest in the country.