"My parents were knocked down and almost out by the Depression and stayed poor all their lives. Nevertheless, I went to good public schools, and my brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first car with a borrowed loan of $450, I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and rested in state-maintained public parks. I was one more heir to a growing public legacy that shaped America as a shared project and became the central engine of our national experience.

Until now."

"Between 1998 and 2000, I spent a cumulative three months as a waitress, a housecleaner, and a Wal-Mart sales 'associate'… The jobs were not very glorified. Nevertheless, in almost every case, I was required to pass a drug test and a personality test, and the questions suggested a rigorous standard of personal morality. Before being permitted to pick undergarments off the floor of a Wal-Mart in suburban Minneapolis, for example, I had to respond on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 for 'totally agree,' 5 for 'totally disagree') to the statement that 'all rules must be followed to the letter at all times.' No irony was intended, I can assure you. After some deliberation, I decided to agree strongly rather than totally, so I wouldn't come across as a suckup. A needless concern, it turned out. After the test, the personnel manager disappeared into another room to grade my personality on a computer. 'You got this one wrong,' she said brightly when she returned. 'The correct answer is 'totally agree.''

And total agreement is just what is required in a great many of today's workplaces. People are expected to work hard, follow the rules, and be grateful for the privilege - and many are. Among my fellow 'associates,' who were making $7 to $8 an hour on the sales floor, there was hardly a whisper of talk about Wal-Mart's CEO, H. Lee Scott, who, according to one news account, was pulling down $60 million per annum. The work force as a whole did not pay much attention to such things, I mean. I, personally, did. I remember calculating that I would have to put in another 5,000 years of work in order to earn what Mr. Scott got in one year."

"What was at first widely dismissed as a temporary blip or a misreading of the data is now an undisputed trend - one that, most economists agree, sets the U.S. apart from other developed nations in addition to marking a sharp departure from the course set by this country in earlier decades…

"The numbers tell a clear and consistent story. Inequality has risen to heights not seen in recent memory - some suspect not since the 'Gilded Age' of the late 1800s. Higher inequality has not been accompanied by higher mobility; in fact, the reverse appears to be true, which helps explain the increased concentration of wealth as well as income. If many of us -- experts and nonexperts -- continue to downplay the meaning and magnitude of the inequality trend, then, it is not because of shaky evidence, but perhaps rather because the evidence is telling us something about America that we are not eager to hear."

"After pounding the pavement for a few months, I found myself face to face with the manager of a Dunkin Doughnuts. 'You Chinese are good workers, aren't you?' he said to me.

"He actually said that. And I replied, 'Ah so, velly good,' which tells you how desperate I was. But that's when the lightbulb went off in my head. Suddenly, I understood my place in the economic hierarchy: As an Asian, I would be expected to work harder, for less pay, than my white female co-workers. As a woman, I would be operating in a whole different universe from the men who managed the stores and made the doughnuts. Those were the higher-paying positions in the Dunkin Donuts world, and it seemed to go without saying that women, regardless of color, were unfit for them. It was hard not to wonder: What sort of special doughnut-making equipment could it be that men have, and women don't have?"

"Thirty years ago, a middle-class family with kids might have been content with a four-door sedan of modest size. Imagine the grown-up child of that family, with children of her own, facing with the same decision. She might be tempted to say: 'A 2,500-pound sedan was good enough for my Mom, so it's good enough for me.' But on today's roads, surrounded by 6,000-pound Lincoln Navigators and 7,500-pound Ford Excursions, a 2,500-pound Honda Civic doesn't simply look a lot smaller and frailer than it did in 1975. It's objectively more dangerous. The odds of being killed in a collision rise roughly five-fold if you're driving such a vehicle and the other party sits at the helm of a Ford Excursion. In sheer self-defense, you might want a bulkier - and costlier - car than Mom's…

"In their global proselytizing, our country's leaders preach democratic values with undiminished fervor. Meanwhile, millionaires, who make up about 1 percent of the American people, hold close to half the seats in the Senate; and in the House, incumbents have used their fundraising and redistricting powers to achieve the kind of reelection rate associated with banana republics. (That rate was close to 99 percent last time around: out f 401 House members up for reelection in 2004, five went down to defeat, two of them victims of a partisan redistricting plan in Texas.) Much has been said about the voter apathy that supposedly explains why so many Americans fail to show up at the polls on election day. Surely some of that "apathy" reflects a suspicion on the part of many Americans that meaningful political representation, like regular doctor's visits and a four-year college, has been priced out of reach."

"'The first in her family to graduate from college.' How many times have we heard that phrase (or one like it) used to describe a successful American with a modest background? In today's United States, a four-year degree has become the all-but-official ticket to middle class security. But if your parents don't have much money or higher education in their own right, the road to college - and beyond - looks increasingly treacherous… [I]n fact, gaps in enrollment by class and race, after declining in the 1960s and 70s, are once again as wide as they were 30 years ago, and getting wider, even as college has become far more crucial to lifetime fortunes."

"'Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,' George Wallace declared, to a thunderous ovation from a crowd of Alabamans who had gathered to see him sworn in as Governor in 1963. More than forty years later, it is hard to imagine any group of Americans applauding those words. Yet the everyday reality lived by millions of schoolchildren is not too far from Wallace's defiant vision. "No longer segregated in name, the nation's schools are once again largely segregated in fact - by race and ethnicity, and, increasingly, by class."

"At the time of the 2002 elections, I was a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. A Republican strategist dropped in one night to give a speech and attend a private dinner afterward. He radiated success, having just won five gubernatorial and Senate races, and he wanted to tell us all how he'd done it - and how his party would go on winning victory after victory. To get working class people and many middle-class people, he explained, we use abortion, marriage, and family-the social, moral and cultural issues that Democrats don't understand. By hooking people on those issues, he continued, we get them to vote against their economic self-interest. Since the rich are with us anyway, we win elections.

"I raised my hand and asked the following question: What if you were up against a candidate who was solid on moral and family values--who cared about personal responsibility and the environment in which children are brought up, and would support strengthening families without blaming gay and lesbian people for their breakdown. What if that morally centered candidate, with those values, was also an economic populist, defending working people against corporate power and talking about the sins of inequality and economic injustice, and an internationalist on foreign policy, preferring international law to preemptive and unilateral war? What, I asked, would you do with that kind of candidate?

"There was a long pause. 'We would panic,' he said."

"It is becoming increasingly apparent that Americans' future retirement years - if they have them - are poised to mirror the anxiety, insecurity, and inequality of their working lives."

"[It] defies common sense as well as economic logic to believe that a poorly skilled and badly paid American workforce could, in anything but the very short run, be the key to global competitiveness (never mind an attractive society). Which road a firm chooses depends on the social context in which its managers operate. They are more likely to take the high road if they are connected to institutions, public and private, that promote such alternatives… Managers are also more likely to choose the high road if they face a strong progressive union that can make abusing workers costly while simultaneously making collaborative efforts between workers and managers easier… Perhaps most important, managers will be more likely to take the high road if they are honored and rewarded for doing so. Too often, sadly, the honor and the rewards go to those who drive wages down instead of up."

"[Health care] in the U.S. today is shamefully unequal. At one extreme stand the emergency rooms and old-style outpatient clinics where patients wait on hard benches for hours to see a different provider each time they come, with little continuity or acknowledgement of barriers to communication and a high chance of being used as 'teaching material' for untrained students. At the other extreme are the new luxury wings of hospitals where the nurses and aides wear hotel livery, the latest films are shown and gourmet meals are delivered. The differences are not just in ambience or bedside manner; lower-income patients may receive lower-quality treatment and die as a result. Imagine two car accidents, identical in all respects but one: Victim A has insurance, Victim B does not. Somewhere between the crash site and the intensive-care room, the health-care system starts treating the two cases differently. The end result is a 37 percent better chance of survival for Victim A."

"This country, as many Americans know, has a conspicuously bad record, by the standards of other democracies, when it comes to political participation. What is not so well known is the close correlation in the U.S. between voter turnout and economic status. High-income Americans are dependable voters, and, as the American Political Science Association report cited by Charles Lewis shows, are likely to participate in other, more active forms of political participation as well. In fact, high-income Americans vote almost as consistently as the high-income citizens of other countries. What sets the U.S. apart are its very low voter turnout rates for middle- and low-income citizens. That problem, in turn, can be traced to an array of policies and procedural barriers that affect them disproportionately.

"In other words, our political system has been infected and disabled by the same pervasive inequality that disfigures our economy."