Inequality, invisible

I drove to the train station this morning and parked amidst a variety of nice cars (most of which are even nicer than my year-old Honda).   It's a white-collar commuter station in a well-off suburb, and the cars look like it.  The occasional "beater car" stands out as unusual.

If it weren't for the sequester and budget effects on grants and science (and if I were a different sort of person)  I could actually live relatively unaware of the bad economy.  I bet most of my fellow commuters are blissfully unaware of it.  We live in the blessed bubble of the suburban professional classes, gifted with education and privileged by social class.  We don't see the shuttered stores or the rows of foreclosures in our neighborhood;  houses are selling briskly, and values are coming up.   (The stability is illusory, as most of us are probably only a medical disaster away from financial crisis, which is why I call it a bubble....).  This isn't the 1%, but it's probably the 5%.

But our economically sheltered life shields us from what's really going on.

There's a new Frontline documentary on PBS that profiles two American Families, and their decline.  Solid union jobs disappeared, and they had to scramble.  And as a result, they fell off the "American Dream".    Salon describes it thusly:

To use the regrettable cliché, both families “played by the rules.” They are in fact superhumanly devoted to the rules. They both attend church — Claude is actually a minister — and they hate the idea of going on the dole and they take any available work and the kids are Boy Scouts and their parents are dedicated to their educations. The families are so virtuous, so imbued with the great American work ethic, that it is practically unfair to other struggling Americans; families that fuck up deserve our sympathy, and the support of a social safety net, as well. But as George Packer wrote earlier this month, the film serves as a rebuke to right-wing social critics like the execrable Charles Murray, “who believe that the decline of America’s working class comes from a collapse of moral values, social capital, personal responsibility, and traditional authority…” These people are overflowing with personal responsibility.... 

Terry Neumann sums it up: “We’ll just work until we collapse and keel over and die.”

In the New Yorker, George Packer writes,

[T]he overwhelming impression in “Two American Families” is not of mistakes but of fierce persistence: how hard the Stanleys and Neumanns work, how much they believe in playing by the rules, how remarkable the cohesion of the Stanley family is, how tough Terry Neumann has to become. Both families devoutly attend church. Government assistance is alien and hateful to them. Keith Stanley says, “I don't know what drugs or even alcohol looks like.” [T]hese people do what they’re supposed to do. They have to navigate this heartless economy by themselves. And they keep sinking and sinking. 

On Sunday, the Times reported that C.E.O. pay in 2012 increased by sixteen per cent over the previous year, with the median compensation package now at $15.1 million. The blessings at the top grow more fruitful year by year, in good times and bad. There must be a social or economic theory somewhere that explains why all this is necessary and just. 

How is it that we've gotten to a place in our society where the crises of families like those profiled in this documentary are invisible to the chattering classes and the politicians?  Is it all social segregation?

Or I wonder if it has something to do with the worship of money as the end-all and be-all.  I mean, think about it:  the Koch brothers, who are outrageously rich, want to game the system to get even richer.

The complete lack of values in corporate-run America can be summed up by considering Walmart, which infamously pays its employees so little they quality for public assistance.  But there is an alternative, as in this article about Costco:

Costco went public in 1985, and over the years, Wall Street repeatedly asked it to reduce wages and health benefits. [The CEO]  instead boosted them every three years.

Think about that:  Wall Street penalizes a company because it pays its workers well and gives them health care.  How do we get to a point where pure money is NOT the only form of profit?  We need the dignity of work and the security of families to also be considered a profit.  More Costco, less Walmart.

And above all, we need to be "one", not segregated into fractured interest groups.

Attacks on Unions (updated)

Union-busting Republican Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin, survived his recall election yesterday.  While the Democrats handled the campaign badly, a big part of his success must be seen as the antipathy towards unions, especially those affecting state employees.  Wisconsin isn't alone, as this has become a rallying cry of Republican governors nationwide.

In San Diego, a different union-busting measure passed, despite the likelihood of negative effects on the city.  Cutting off the nose to spite the face?

Proposition A, a measure that would ban San Diego from using labor-friendly development contracts on city-funded projects, passed by a wide margin Tuesday, which could put San Diego at risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds....

Project-labor agreements outline standards for wages, local hiring and health care coverage for workers on a project, which critics say give an unfair advantage to union companies and workers. ...

On April 27, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that will likely lead to legal battles if the measure receives voter approval. The law denies state construction funds to cities that have a blanket ban on the agreements. 

In this recent must-read piece in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lehmann reviews several recent books on the subject of our economy and politics.

Public-employee pensions and employment contracts, which Tony Judt thinks of as a socially binding force, are now—from Athens to Madison, Wisconsin—the object of hostility by people who don’t have them and of fierce, to-the-barricades protectiveness by people who do. None of this bodes well for a politics aimed at alleviating inequality.

But WHY this antipathy to unions?    Unions are what give us 40 hour workweeks, job benefits, and decent wages.  Why do so many voters distrust them? Why have attacks on the working class (which is predominantly whom unions represent) become so entrenched?  Is it just resentment that some people have unions, while others have to fend for themselves?

As commented at America blog:

But the real winning argument for the voters...is "the politics of envy." Watch for it, even in the CNN-type coverage.

But it's not envy of the rich — that's not what "good peasants" do (to borrow from Matt Taibbi).

It's envy of the poor slob next to you, the one you closely resemble, who has the extra nickel you don't. His pension (on your dime, mind you) is that extra nickel.

Divide and conquer.  Fellow blogger David posted this quote on his facebook:

QotD: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." --- Jay Gould (19th cent. railroad magnate and archetypal robber baron)

It appears the Koch brothers have taken it to heart.

Wisconsin Governor: financial martial law?

This already happened in Michigan. Now, Wisconsin's right wing governor continues his plans to eviscerate democracy in his state. From Forbes:

Reports are surfacing that Scott Walker is now preparing his next assault on the democratic political process in the State of Wisconsin.

Following the lead of Michigan GOP Governor Rick Snyder, Walker is said to be preparing a plan that would allow him to force local governments to submit to a financial stress test with an eye towards permitting the governor to take over municipalities that fail to meet with Walker’s approval.

According to the reports, should a locality’s financial position come up short, the Walker legislation would empower the governor to insert a financial manager of his choosing into local government with the ability to cancel union contracts, push aside duly elected local government officials and school board members and take control of Wisconsin cities and towns whenever he sees fit to do so.

Such a law would additionally give Walker unchallenged power to end municipal services of which he disapproves, including safety net assistance to those in need...

And given his history with cronyism, I doubt very much any good would come of giving him such martial powers.

I continue to be puzzled over the ostensible link between conservative Christians and this kind of politics. I'll bet you that Gov Walker considers himself a good Christian. These days, I doubt you can be a Republican if you aren't nominally Christian. So, how does Scott Walker justify his attacks on working people and the poor in Christian terms?

How do hard-core anti-tax conservatives justify it?

Well, apparently their love of money trumps their social contract.EJ Dionne writes,

At other moments in our history, the informal networks of the wealthy and powerful who often wield at least as much influence as our elected politicians accepted that their good fortune imposed an obligation: to reform and thus preserve the system that allowed them to do so well. They advocated social decency out of self-interest (reasonably fair societies are more stable) but also from an old-fashioned sense of civic duty. “Noblesse oblige” sounds bad until it doesn’t exist anymore..... a funny thing happened to the American ruling class: It stopped being concerned with the health of society as a whole and became almost entirely obsessed with money.

And the Koch Brothers are laughing all the way to the bank.

Selling Congress

You may recall a few months ago we talked about the fact that the Arizona anti-immigrant bill was basically written by a group called ALEC, that brings together corporate interests (like prisons-for-profit) to help state legislators write legislation.

Well, AmericaBlog points out that it isn't just the corrections industry shaping legislation over at ALEC. Seems it has its nose in the union-busting efforts we're seeing in Wisconsin and Indiana too.

A group composed of Republican state lawmakers and corporate executives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is quietly spreading these proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts as well as suggested legislative language.

They also point us to a well-researched blog showing the actual trail.

[ALEC's] goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.

Okay, there's one part of the problem.

And The Washington Monthly points us to another example of how corporatism has disrupted the legislative process.

When we last checked in with Rep. Mike Pompeo (R) of Kansas, he was trying to kill a consumer-product-safety database, allowing Americans to go online and access free information about the safety records of household products. The measure was easily approved with bipartisan support, but the freshman Republican perceived it as anti-business...

As it turned out, the Koch brothers were the ones who wanted the online consumer-product-safety database scuttled, and Pompeo was happy to do their bidding -- he represents the district where Koch Industries is located, and the Koch brothers and their political action committee were his most generous campaign contributors.

The Washington Post had an interesting piece over the weekend, noting that Pompeo is now also trying to gut an EPA registry of greenhouse-gas polluters -- another Koch Bros' goal -- and has hired a former Koch Industries lawyer as his chief of staff....

Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political science professor, added, "I'm sure he would vigorously dispute this, but it's hard not to characterize him as the congressman from Koch."

That pretty much sums it up. We're talking about a dynamic in which a congressman appears to be an employee of the Koch brothers.

This is the fruit of the Citizens United decision.
We don't have a democratic republic any more. Increasingly, what we have is a corporate oligarchy. We are all doing the bidding of the corporations, and there seems to be no effective way to push back.

Uncivil discourse: from DC to HOA

We're having one of those contentious home owners' association elections in our neighborhood. Unfortunately it has exposed a rift in the community. Partly generational, the younger people would like to make some changes. The older people are resistant. This is normal.

What's not normal is the vehemence with which it's being fought. Instead of reading the different candidates' statements and deciding on the merits of their arguments, supporters of the status quo are walking around the community advocating a vote against the challenger, claiming she'll "do something illegal," and scare-mongering about higher HOA fees, etc. Rather than advocating positively for their own side, they are making threats and false accusations.

The net effect of this is to deepen the rift and entrench the opposition. Instead of finding the compromises that make for a modus vivendi, and mutual government in this shared community, it makes people unhappy and angry and disenfranchised.

It's not unlike Washington. The cynicism of the "scorched earth" policies of the Republicans is breathtaking. There is no longer any pretense of balance or the good of the country: just power, power, power that serves the oligarchs and the elites, facilitated by a compliant judiciary that has sold elections to the highest bidder. The days of actual statesmen in Congress, who compromised each other into the middle to mutual benefit, is eliminated. That shining city on the hill is dark and befouled, and is poised to be even worse after November.

As pointed out in this MUST READ article in the New Yorker, the "activism" of the tea partiers is fueled by the super-rich oil-baron Koch brothers, who have extreme libertarian views that would eliminate all regulation (environmental chief among them), all social safety nets, and of course, taxes for themselves. Indeed, many things that benefit the angry teapartiers, would be eliminated by these shadowy conspirators who hide behind shell organizations and think tanks, and have limitless pockets. The society they want to return to is almost feudal in its abuses, with grim images of Dickensian London coming to mind.

The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement "Anarcho-Totalitarianism."

What's amazing to me is how these teapartiers are persuaded to oppose their own self-interests and support this excrement.

As for our neighborhood? We used to like it. But with this viciousness, we're not as happy any more, and will probably more seriously consider moving.

I don't see the same option nationally.