In this week's Sift:
- Connecting the Dots: Economy, Anger, Racism, Policy. A labor leader's speech at Harvard does a rare job of pulling it all together.
- The Sift Bookshelf: Two Books on Social Justice. Unjust Deserts explains what's wrong with the it's-my-money argument against taxation. The Moral Underground reveals how middle-class people subvert the system when they see the reality of life among the working poor.
- Thanks, Everybody. My April 15 message about how I benefit personally from tax-supported programs. Probably you do too.
- The Doublethink Network. Learn from Bill O'Reilly: If people catch you making up facts, make up some more facts to prove them wrong.
- Short Notes. Why airliners avoid ash clouds. The short supply of first-rate sociopaths. Who covers rural stories? Confederate History Month. Could Protestants be locked out of the Supreme Court? And more.
[F]or a generation we have built our economy on a lie — that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit.
Naturally, he says, people are angry about the results of this misguided policy — lack of jobs, stagnant wages, unpayable debts, lack of opportunity for hard-working people. For similar reasons people were angry during the Depression, both here and in Germany. The question then was how that anger would be expressed: in violence against each other, or in united action to fix problems through the democratic process.
Why did our democracy endure through the Great Depression? Because working people discovered it was possible to elect leaders who would fight for them and not for the financial barons who had brought on the catastrophe. Because our politics offered a real choice besides greed and hatred. Because our leaders inspired the confidence to reject hate and charted a path to higher ground through broadly shared prosperity.
This is a similar moment. Our politics have been dominated by greed and the forces of money for a generation. Now, amid the wreckage that came from that experiment, we hear the voices of hatred, of racism and homophobia.
In a good speech, you identify a problem and describe what people-in-general have to do to solve it. In a great speech, you bring it home. You look your audience in the eye and tell them what they have to do. You don't want people walking up the aisles in clumps saying, “What a good speech!” You want individuals staring at the carpet silently, thinking “What am I doing?”
At this moment of economic pain and anger, political intellectuals face a great choice — whether to be servants or critics of economic privilege. And I think this is an important point to make here at Harvard. The economic elites at JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks are happy to hire intellectual servants wherever they can find them. But the stronger the alliance between intellectuals and economic elites, the more the forces of hatred — of anti-intellectualism — will grow. If you want to fight the forces of hatred, you have to help empower the forces of righteous anger.
And at this moment, the labor movement is working to give voice to the justified anger of the American people. We need help. We need public intellectuals who will help design the policies that will replace the bubble economy with a real, sustainable economy that works for all of us.
… Let me be clear: There is no excuse for racism and hatred. All Americans need to unite against it. The labor movement must be a powerful voice against it. But you cannot fight hatred with greed. Working people are angry — and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.
Which side are you on, Harvard? Are you going to keep churning out those talking heads who explain why working people have to tighten their belts and produce more for less money, and why it's right and just for all the economic growth to go to the top 1%? Or are you going to help envision an economy that works for everybody, and find the practical steps that will get us there?
Put together, two well-written recent books tell a powerful story:
- Our economic system is unjust. What individuals receive has very little to do with what they earn as individuals.
- The injustice becomes undeniable when you look at the lives of the working poor.
- When middle class people have to deal with the working poor, many of them start subverting the system to mitigate that injustice.
The books are Unjust Deserts by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly and The Moral Underground by Lisa Dodson. Each is about 200 pages and easy to read, but both have deep roots in academic research.
And that raises the moral and political question discussed in the second half of Unjust Deserts: If this productive economic system is our common inheritance, what justifies extreme inequalities of wealth? Yes, people deserve to receive the value they personally create through their work and talent, but why should a few people also get the lion's share of the common inheritance?
The Moral Underground picks the story up from there. The poor are often portrayed as lazy welfare collectors, but a lot of them are in fact working much harder than the rest of us. They are stuck in low-wage jobs with little flexibility and no future, and they have to juggle that small amount of money and limited free time to take care of their children.
But all that showing-up-well-prepared requires a support system. You need reliable transportation. You need people to watch your kids when you have to be on the job. And most of all you need someone to cover for you during those small emergencies that happen to everybody: You get sick; your kid gets sick; the baby-sitter doesn't show up; there's a problem at school — and so on.
Many of the working poor don't have that support system, so they're forced into choices that wealthier people in more flexible work environments don't have to make: Do you send a sick kid to school, leave her at home by herself, or stay home with her and get fired? Do you cut out on work early to make the bus, or rely on your 9-year-old to take care of the toddler until you can get home some other way? Do you bring the kids with you to your night job and hope that you can keep them safely out of sight while you fulfill your duties? No matter what you choose, you are immoral from somebody's point of view. You're a bad worker, a bad parent, or both.
The working poor should be heirs to the vast social inheritance of America, but they are not. They deserve not handouts and charity — which they usually don't get either — but a fair social contract: In exchange for your hard work, you can not only survive, but thrive. You can raise children and give them a chance to thrive as well.
If your intuition tells you there's something fundamentally unfair about our economic system, Unjust Deserts explains why you're right. And if you feel driven to subvert that unjust system in your everyday life, The Moral Underground tells you that you're not alone.
J. K. Rowling is a billionaire now, but she can't vote Tory because she remembers belonging to the working poor:
Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the message”. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money.
It doesn't happen [on this show], and we researched to find out if anybody on Fox News had ever said you're going to jail if you don't buy health insurance. Nobody's ever said it.
Nobody. Well, TPM's researchers must be more thorough than O'Reilly's, because they put together more than three minutes worth of clips in which one Fox talking head after another — including Glenn Beck being interviewed by O'Reilly himself — says that people will go to jail if they don't buy health insurance.
Cocktail Party Physics explains why airliners can't fly through volcanic ash clouds: A jet engine's combustion chamber melts the ash particles, which then stick to its turbine blades. Eventually the engine stops. (In addition to an ash cloud, the Iceland eruption is producing some great pictures.)
KFC's new Double Down — two chicken patties surrounding cheese and bacon — sounds like the unhealthiest sandwich ever, but it can't hold a fat-dripping candle to Wendy's Triple Baconator.
the CEOs of the world largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings. Only about 1 to 3 percent of [people] are sociopaths– people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things.
The other skills a CEO needs are rare enough, but when you add in sociopathy it becomes a hard slot to fill.
I had to smile at the implied smugness of Rural Blog's recent coverage of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. It's as if they're saying “You city folks just noticed this guy, did you?” Yes, RB, I did just notice him.
Yet another panel says Climategate amounted to nothing: “We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit.”
Stephen Colbert and Ta-Nehisi Coates comment on Confederate History Month.
Rick Perlstein's piece on the Tea Party is worth a read. This “spontaneous grass-roots anger” shows up like clockwork every time a Democratic administration takes office.
John Paul Stevens is the only Protestant on the Supreme Court, serving with six Catholics and two Jews.
The death toll at Big Branch Mine is only twice the daily national average of workplace deaths.
Comments
Regarding Bill O'Reilly, Fox, John McCain and the proud legacy of bare-faced BS, see Hunter's dead-on column at DailyKos “Ceci n'est pas une Maverick” (http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/4/18/856411/-Ceci-nest-pas-une-Maverick)
If you want a far less-restrained calling-out of the usual BS, visit the ascerbic and definitely NSFW Driftglass on the many crimes of BS of (for example) David Brooks (http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2010/04/weird-political-science.html)
” … low wage, high consumption …”
Could the contradiction be resolved with low consumption?
Implicit in most contemporary ideologies, progressive or otherwise, is the assumption that the lifestyle of middle class citizens of industrialized western democracies (let alone upper middle class citizens) is sustainable, if only we were politically and/or economically “just” or “rational”.
Hidden deeper is the assumption that such lifestyles are exportable to the rest of the world in a sustainable manner (how could we justify such a lifestyle for ourselves if that lifestyle dictated the others elsewhere live in relative deprivation?)
Both assumptions are false.