I am a first generation American. My father was born in 1918 on a small island off the coast of Norway. He never finished high school. I grew up poor in the middle of a wealthy area of the Chicago suburbs dreaming about going to college with no financial ability to do so. I saw education as a way to climb out of our poverty and a sure ticket into the middle class.<\/p>\n
I was taught that America is the land of opportunity and all I had to do was work for it. And so I did. <\/p>\n
I worked two part-time jobs to fund my first year of college. Then I got married and 3 children intervened. When I was set to return to school, Reagan had just taken office and access to loans and grants had all but dried up. And so, without knowing anything about non-violent direct civil action, I did my first act of non-violent direct civil action. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I walked into our local bank and asked for a student loan. They said no. They said they don\u2019t do that anymore. I continued that morning up the chain of command until I sat before the Vice President of the bank asking for a student loan. <\/p>\n
\u201cWell, we don\u2019t do that anymore,\u201d he said. In the midst of my grief, I took a deep breath and looked down at the ground. I saw my purse and inside it my small reporter\u2019s notebook. At the time, I was a \u2018stringer\u2019 for a newspaper, earning $25 a story for about 10 hours of work. Without even thinking, I picked up my notebook and told him I was a reporter for the local paper and was going to interview him for a story I was writing about why a local bank is not going to give a local resident a student loan. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe will give you your student loan,\u201d he said, without so much as a three second pause. That was years ago when banks still had a sense of community and a sense of shame. <\/p>\n
I got my degree and my husband and I were able to get our daughters through college. But when my oldest daughter became divorced and lost everything financially, she and her three children had to move in with me. She had spent the past 10 years raising children. But with the changes in our economy, her degree was no longer wanted in our marketplace. And so she is starting her life over again at age forty without a degree. <\/p>\n
I had been so sure college would guarantee financial security and a ticket into the middle class. I was wrong. All that I had worked for to ensure a better life for my children and my grandchildren was taken away in one generation by the 1%.<\/p>\n
We are the 99%.<\/p>\n
I was able to barely grab opportunity at the dawn of the Reagan years but now my daughter and my grandchildren, no matter how hard they work, have what I call the \u2018Deck of Opportunity\u2019 stacked against them. This is the great opportunity rip off.<\/p>\n
Jon Stewart, of The Daily Show, calls it the \u201cWealth Incumbency,\u201d where the wealthy create the rules that restrict access to opportunity to those that already possess wealth. <\/p>\n
Joseph Stiglitz, in his book, \u2018The Price of Inequality,\u2019 makes the case that we now have in our country the least equality of opportunity of all advanced countries\u2014even worse than what was possible in \u2018Old Europe\u2019 centuries ago. Stiglitz states that we have institutionalized the advantages of opportunity to the wealthy. <\/p>\n
The damning issue is not inequality of wealth, but inequality of opportunity. Our nation was founded on equality of opportunity, but we have most assuredly lost that foundation. <\/p>\n
We need to look no further than the last forty years of the Republican Party assault on the middle class as the culprit in this very real crime against average Americans. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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