Americans are told that the economy is healthy — but also that poverty is increasing, record numbers of people are filing for bankruptcy and the gap between rich and poor is widening. A Washington Post series last fall showed most Americans disagree with the so-called economic experts who are trying to convince the public that the economy is doing great. While the Post patronizingly attributed the angry opinions of  "typical Americans" about the economy to "misperceptions," the question remains: Who is right — these representative Americans or the career economists and the press? 

      The American people are right. And the boasts about a "robust" economy are wishful thinking by people who do not want to see what Eli Siegel, the great American poet, historian and founder of  the Aesthetic Realism education movement, explained in the 1970s. He showed that the basis of our profit economy — in which the wealth people produce with their labor goes not to them but to an owner or stockholder who did not work for it — is contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else." And, he explained, this economy has failed and will never recover because it is inefficient and cruel. 

      I am a union official who has negotiated over 100 collective bargaining agreements covering thousands of workers — including parking attendants in Newark, truck drivers in Jersey City and factory workers in Garwood. And I've organized many shamefully underpaid and brutally treated workers. I see firsthand that the American people are furious over our profit-based economy. No one knows more about economic reality in America than the people who live it every day, worrying about how they are going to feed their children and pay their bills as they work longer hours for less — often without medical insurance. This pain is occurring despite the rosy statistics and assurances that the economy has recovered. 

       In his book "Goodbye Profit System: Update" (Definition Press, 1982), Siegel described what the indicators of a real recovery are: 

      "If there is a recovery, everyone will see it, not just a few economists more pleased than they should be, perhaps, with what the basis of economics has been. If persons who rent apartments, buy groceries, buy clothes, see the recovery so much talked about, these persons will be convincing. Impressive fiscal pundits have not seen the main thing....Recovery begins in the kitchen, is expressed in the bedroom, is agreed to in the street....There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical, is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries." 

      As I talk with workers, I see that the burning question people need — and want — to answer is the one posed by Eli Siegel: "What does a person deserve by being a person?" If it answers this question honestly, America will be truly free and democratic, and its economy will thrive!