Reich: Honor and Shame...

[Ike Bana]

...his read on the culture we inhabit.

One of the things that I had been oblivious to and suddenly realized right away when back in 1993, when I was 47 years old, I got out of the well paying plastic container business and into the social work business...was how the culture actually works. When I found out what kind of obscene caseloads that child protective services social workers had, the responsibilities for the welfare of children, most often poor children, and the pittance they were paid by the blue State of Illinois. How many of these kids fall through the cracks...how many end up scarred for life, how many end up dead.

And in 1993 when I thought about how Bill Gates, the Waltons, Oprah, George Lucas, Donald Trump and Michael Jordan are compensated, compared with those child protective workers, it became clear to me.

The culture decides what it wants to reward and the size of the reward, and the culture gets exactly what it deserves. And it's monumentally worse now than it was back in 1993. Milken and Taubman with their names glorified, and their criminal behavior excused, even in the highly liberal world of US academia.

Robert Reich: Resurrecting the Common Good: Honor and Shame

Beware...it's long.