Below the Buzz, Real Threats Continue Uncomprehended

While the mainstage drama plays out of who's up and who's down, riveting all attention, fundamental challenges to the country and to civilization continue inexorably, under the social media radar.

The newly aggressive attack on humanity's sustaining environment, let alone the neglect of ongoing destruction, continues at a startling pace.  All appearances suggest that the servants (and often former company execs) of fossil fuel corporations now in power in this administration are taking full advantage of the anti-president's total vengeance on the previous President.

It's not clear if opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other areas of the Arctic as well as both coasts of the United States to new oil drilling will actually result in more drilling.  It depends on the economics and the adherence to market forces by these companies, but we may have passed--or nearly passed--the point at which alternative energy is cheap enough to speak for itself.  That's probably what's behind Monday's conspicuous failure of the administration to privilege fossil fuels.

Still, as the effects of global heating continue to show up in extreme weather around the world, the health of the oceans is a deep concern.  The extreme depletion of oxygen alone threatens marine life, which in turn threatens human existence. But that's not all--half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean.  Spaceship Earth may be running out of air.  (Here's the latest report, and a summary.)

Meanwhile our society is threatened by another continuing phenomenon that is equally invisible, even though (like "climate change") it's well known as a buzzy combination of words: "income inequality."

What that really means is that the proportion of people able to make a living gets smaller continuously.  For millions of people it is a daily crisis, and for millions of others, it's coming.  The replacement of full time work in one category after another is one conspicuous reason, as described in this dramatic Politico report, "The Real Future of Work."

Medical transcriptionists in Pittsburgh learn they've been
outsourced--the incident that begins the Politico report on
threatening trends in the jobs future--and present.

Despite glowing unemployment numbers, the crisis is expressed in other numbers, such as: "The percentage of families with more debt than savings is higher now than at any point since 1962, while the median American family’s net worth is lower than it’s been in nearly a quarter-century."

But statistics aren't really necessary.  Anyone who did any socializing over the holidays is likely to have heard stories and looked into the faces the stories are about: entire professions and job categories are dying as full time, well-paid occupations (thanks in part to the Internet and failure to respond to this growing crisis) while those whose jobs have not yet been made obsolete are working harder, for longer hours and less pay.

Here's where the anger should be (one place anyway), and it probably is, however diverted and distracted.  It's certainly one place the fear is.

Post-Capitalist Ecotopia?

There are many built-in aspects of what we call capitalism that are massively destructive and ultimately self-destructive.  For example, capitalism has yet to prove it can work without slavery.  By its nature unrestricted capitalism is an ultimate predator, eventually functioning like the vacuum cleaner monster in Yellow Submarine that sucks up everything, including its environment and then itself.

So by its nature, capitalism uses up all available resources as long as they are cheap enough.  And today it makes the most expensive resources cheap enough by ignoring their costs completely.  For instance, the effects on the environment, ecology and biosphere.  In other words, it will happily destroy the Earth and everything it sustains (including capitalists) in pursuit of immediate profit.

This is one reason Kim Stanley Robinson believes that the climate crisis will never be successfully addressed under capitalism.  KSR is a science-fiction writer who is to me is emerging as America's foremost public intellectual.  He is deeply versed in technology, environmental issues and now in areas of economics.

This video is from 2015.  He is speaking at UC Santa Cruz, beginning with the work and context of Callenbach's Ecotopia, a best-seller of the 1970s, and moving through a brilliant capsule conceptual history of the 60s and 70s to today.

He sees the end of the Cold War and the persistent and now more widely recognized problems of inequality and climate degradation as shifting the "window of acceptable discourse" to include questioning capitalism itself.  He notes that Bernie Sanders at that point was polling well even though calling himself a socialist.

(He suggests that the window has moved to include more of the left, but might also include more of the right.  It's interesting in this context to speculate on a certain panic among fossil capitalists leading to support for extreme right wingers, as at least a contributor to the current apocalyptic situation.)

Anyway, in this talk he has some fascinating and provocative analyses and ideas on how capitalism could be essentially done away with fairly quickly, and in the near future.  In fact, it could be triggered deliberately by an act of (legal) civil rebellion.  He does warn however that fully realizing this post-capitalist economy is the work of generations, a step process, that requires lifelong commitment.

He describes a contemporary Ecotopia novel that posits post-capitalism and how to get there. I suspect his new novel, New York 2140, coming out next month, will flesh out these ideas.

This is the most hopeful set of ideas I've heard in years.  It's a future I'd want to live in.  This is the "Dreaming Up" this place is supposed to be about.  

He begins at about 11:25 of this video.  And then it's a breathtaking run (for about 30 minutes, minus the intro and questions afterwards, although the questions and answers are interesting.)  Currently on YouTube it's had just 302 views.  Maybe we can add a few more here.

Spread the word.

It also occurs to me that Callenbach's Ecotopia is set pretty much where I'm living.  So I'm going to have to go back and read it again.

A Republican American Tragedy

Update 1/28: Further evidence of GOP government cynicism: the state gov provided bottled water for state employees in Flint beginning at least a year ago.

The tragedy of Flint illustrates the major features of the current Republican destruction of the American political process.

First, the demi-fascist takeover of cities by the Michigan state government, who appoint an "emergency manager."  Nearly all of the white representatives of the Republican politico-corporate complex rule over minority majority cities,  industrial ruins made more ruinous by racism.

Then the refusal to believe any reality that runs counter to rabid right ideology.  Then the incompetence bred by contempt for government, resulting in political appointees or corporate stooges.  Then the deflection of responsibility to others while the high priced ass-covering goes droning on for years.

Amy Davidson at the New Yorker has the basic story. To save some money, the Flint manager stopped getting water from Lake Huron that had been clean and safe for years, and tapped into the highly polluted local river in Flint.  Not even copious chlorine could sanitize it, and either from gross incompetence, contempt for the non-white non-rich of Flint (Davidson's emphasis) or another attempt to save money--likely some combination of all three--they failed to add an anti-corrosion agent to the water.  It was flowing through lead pipes, and the lead began to corrode and crumble into the water.  The citizens of Flint--including the most vulnerable, growing children--were being poisoned.

And the state government headed by new GOPer darling Rick Snyder insisted it wasn't happening, the water was fine, just a bunch of lazy whiners in Flint, as per GOPer mythology--sorry, GOPer Gospel.

 Meanwhile their supposed environmental people were doing a heckava job trying to support their governor's contention with bad or downright fraudulent testing.  Because polluted lead-infested water is a liberal hoax, like global warming.  Just a lamestream media fantasy.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Flint were getting hit with exorbitant bills to pay for the water that was poisoning their children and possibly killing them.

The regional branch of the federal EPA was not blameless either, and it took citizen agitation and the independent research of a whistle-blowing professor who had previously exposed danger in the DC water system during the GW Bush administration. But eventually even a GOPer darling governor had to face the poisonous reality.  Though some heads rolled, the state investigations illustrate another facet of corrupt GOPer governance: investigation of state actions under GOPer control by GOPer state officials, in this case directed by an attorney general who both defends and investigates the state government he hopes to lead (pronounced "leed") by running for governor in the next election.

Meanwhile, starve-the-government conservative Gov. Snyder is complaining that the federal government isn't giving him enough money to pay for all the damage done as a consequence of his style of non-governance.   Flint is reconnected to the Lake Huron water now, but the pipes may carry lead poison until they are replaced.  Which in Flint may mean never.  It hasn't gotten any less black or poor, after all.

Reality has consequences, and this will for years, not only feeding layers of lawyers and investigators for years, but the illnesses and conditions and stunted growth and disabilities that well may accrue.  Not to mention that it's all going to turn out to be much more expensive, further hobbling the economic future of Flint.  (And let's not forget the folks in  the auto companies and their industrial satellites that polluted those waters and the pols who refused to deal with that reality.)

Yet the GOP is so invested in its increasingly insular and detached from reality gospel that the likelihood that they learn anything from this approaches zero.

It's an American tragedy, different from the Greek.  In classical tragedy, the leader's hubris brings him down.  In American tragedy, the people pay for the leader's hubris, with their lives.  The leader may have to learn to survive on speaking fees and corporate board handouts.

Honoring MLK with Action

He is revered for his moral campaign against racial segregation, but the Rev. Martin Luther King also led protests for economic justice and living wages, especially in what turned out to be the last part of his life.  It was at the time one of those protests that he was assassinated.

On Martin Luther King Day 2016, Black Lives Matter protested in San Francisco, and several prominent black film artists announced they would boycott the Oscars, protesting the zero nominations for the second year in a row.  But below the radar, so to speak, there were protests at several US airports that were also in the spirit of Martin Luther King.

They were by airport workers protesting low wages, and advocating the $15 an hour federal minimum wage that President Obama has proposed.  The protests were held at 10 or more airports, including Miami, Chicago, Boston (where there were arrests), Newark, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle.

The wealth of a larger number of wealthy is extreme, especially in comparison to MLK's lifetime.  There is perhaps less dire poverty in America than in the 1960s.  But the relentless struggles of a large number of working poor form a scandal of our time.  Masked by economic indicators that usually only indicate how well the rich are doing, this is our prime area of invisible plight.

These protests shine a light. As time goes on without action, they should grow.  Is there any doubt that Martin Luther King would be saying so?  

Labor Day 2015

The Sunday Doonesbury, even more appropriate for Labor Day.  Not much of an exaggeration in academia, but it pertains even more broadly.  Like writers, for instance.

Roosevelt & Hopkins: Every Day

I'm about to let go and take this book back to its home in the library.  It's a first edition of Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History.  It's not everybody's idea of a great read, not at more than 950 pages with notes.  And it basically covers only the years of World War II, though there's biographical material and material about the Depression early on.  Although a playwright, Sherwood was also a writer and adviser for FDR, and he witnessed this history in the White House.  He had access to documents, to actual notes in the hand of FDR and Churchill, etc.  So there is a lot of detail.  The book was published in 1948, but both of his subjects-FDR and Hopkins--were several years dead.  It's clear from this book that they'd given their lives for their country.

I suspect not a lot of people have read this book, let alone re-read parts of it, but some have. One of the things I love about old library books is the Date Due sticker, and this one shows that at least one or a few people have taken it out every decade, beginning in April 1948 and ending so far with me in 2014.  I do worry that the library will get rid of it, as they have so many books (all the better to give more space for computers.)  But I think I've saved it for awhile--they tend to go after books that haven't been taken out for 10 years.  There is something special about this very book being a first edition, the feel of the paper and the typeface as well as the language and punctuation all shouting 1940s.  (This photo of the spine seems to be of the first edition; the HSU library edition is red and black, and this spine title is worn to almost illegible. The cover above appears to be a later edition.)

But I'm not bidding farewell to all that just yet.  I've typed out a number of especially interesting passages, especially those that still pertain.  I'm going to reproduce them here now and again.

In my first post I'll give my favorite Harry Hopkins quote, and one of my favorite quotes of all time.  It probably came directly from this book.  But before then...a little background.

Harry Hopkins, born in Iowa (small town, lower middle class), graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa (member of the Midwest Conference with my Illinois alma mater Knox College), he had a few jobs in New York City administering programs for the poor, worked for the Red Cross in New Orleans, returned to Manhattan and caught the eye of then Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt by his efficient administration of a state relief program in 1931.  FDR brought him to Washington to run New Deal programs including public works.

Though he also helped organize the American Association of Social Workers, he loved the Manhattan night life, and knew a lot of celebs.  He had a talent for friendships, which eventually included Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and even, to a degree, Joseph Stalin.

 People liked him because he was trustworthy, direct and to the point. (One of the reasons he was also vilified by political opponents.) Sherwood writes that Churchill teased him with the prospect of a royal title to be conferred after the war.  He said it had already been picked out: Lord Root of the Matter. (p.5)

Harry, Sherwood wrote, "could slip now and then into skepticism but...always returned to a state of passionate hopefulness." [15]

Now a story with that quote from Hopkins very early in the New Deal. Hopkins boss was Harold Ickes, Secretary of Interior.  But his real boss was FDR.  When public works projects weren't getting started fast enough for FDR, he made a change by establishing the Civil Works Administration.  (Now I quote directly from Sherwood, p. 52.  The only changes I'm making are dividing the text into shorter paragraphs, placing FDR's words in italic and adding my own emphases in bold.)

 “...Civil Works Administration which put four million people to work in the first thirty days of its existence and, in less than four months, inaugurated 180,000 work projects and spent over $933 million. It was the parent of W.P.A. and marked the real establishment of the princple of the right to work from which there could be no retreat.

Of the formation of C.W.A. Roosevelt wrote:

‘The Public Works Administration (P.W.A.) had not been able by that time to commence a very extensive program of large public works because of the unavoidable time consuming process of planning, design and reviewing projects, clearing up legal matters, advertising for bids and letting contracts.’

This was Roosevelt’s tactful means of explaining why he took nearly a billion dollars away from Ickes and entrusted the spending of it to Hopkins at that time (he eventually did the same with many times the sum.)

Ickes was a very careful, deliberate administrator, who took pains to examine personally every detail of every project and the disposition of every nickel that it cost, whether it be a village post office or a Triborough Bridge. This is hardly to his discredit for it was the approach to each problem of a hardheaded businessman as well as a conscientious public servant.

 Ickes was concerned about the return on the taxpayers’ investment. Hopkins did not give a damn about the return; his approach was that of a social worker who was interested only in getting relief to the miserable and getting it there quickly. His ultimate argument was “Hunger is not debatable.”

 Ickes thought primarily of the finished job—Hopkins of the numbers of unemployed who could be put on the job. As an instance of Hopkins’ impatience: someone came to him with an idea for a project which would take a lot of time to prepare in detail but which, Hopkins was assured, “will work out in the long run,” and his exasperated comment on this was, “People don’t eat in the long run—they eat every day.” [end of excerpt]

Long range planning is important, as is envisioning the future.  But we must always remember that people eat every day--the present, especially for people at the edge of need, can be more important.  Reconciling the two is the art of policy.  But the point Hopkins made is about not forgetting the most important and urgent task (Lord Root of the Matter, remember?) in the fog of planning.

The debate over spending money to meet infrastructure needs as well as for social good continues in our time along some of the same lines.  However we've even further behind that debate in acknowledging the real problems.  Jonathan Chiat today writes about a "debate" over poverty ostensibly between NY Times columnists David Brooks and Paul Krugman.  Krugman alludes to "some people" who insist people in America are poor because of moral failings and wrong values.  Krugman, sounding a little like Hopkins, writes: "The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher minimum wages.”

But even this debate pales against the stark realities that Hopkins recognized by addressing them directly.  And by building the public infrastructure that is still the foundation of economic as well as public and personal life in America.  Including infrastructure now crumbing dangerously, more than 80 years later.  Which our elected representatives ignore.

How To Create More Inequality Part 2

1.  After buying enough lawmakers, feel free to consolidate major products and services on which people depend into as few corporations as possible.

2. Severely reduce the workforce by automation and outsourcing to slave wage countries.  Reduce actual physical presence in places where people use your products and services so that they won't expect you to service or repair anything, and instead of paying people to spend time providing services, make customers spend their time trying to deal with automated responses on the telephone, and if they happen to survive long enough to get an actual person on the phone, make sure that person is very far away, and badly trained as well as, of course, poorly paid.

All this means fewer people in US communities have good paying jobs, everyone is enslaved to a few corporations that have as their sole aim to cut costs, drive up the artificial short-term stock valuation, and reward their executives with larger and larger shares of the profits.  

3. Without meaningful choices in the matter, people will have to put up with all this.  They are also more likely now to buy a new product rather than try to have their present one serviced or repaired.  They must spend whatever these corporations charge in fees as well as prices, with the money going straight to the top.

How to Create More Inequality

1. Elect a Republican governor and legislature.  In many states that should know better, this is already a done deal.

2.  Governor announces lower taxes on the rich, which he promises will spur business investment and fill the state coffers with abundance.

3. Tax revenues fall and a big budget deficit results.

4.  Governor blames excessive pensions paid by state government, especially teacher pensions.

5.  Instead of being arrested for fraud or theft or whatever criminal statutes apply to people who abrogate contracts that one party has fulfilled, governor and legislature succeed in "reforming" pensions so that retirees get less.  Combine with other efforts to shrink public education, health and welfare, because the state can't "afford" them anymore.  So retirees and middle class teachers, government employees etc. make less or are fired.  Redistribute saved income upwards!

That's it, in five easy steps.  Oh, and the sixth---

6. Elect one of these governors as President of the U.S. so the same procedure can be applied nationally, and even more income transferred from middle class and poor people to rich and richer people.  It worked for Reagan, it can work again.  (Ask Scott Walker.)

Bonus: though this hurts some white people, it's predominantly old white people that it benefits  Everybody else loses.  In fact, everybody loses.

Into the Gap Pours Fear Part II

[Part I is the post below this one.]

That 2014 was the hottest year on record, contradicting the latest claims of climate crisis deniers? (More on that in a post to come.) That there's yet another painful example (the state of Kansas) proving that supply side economics doesn't work?  Or growing evidence that Obamacare is working better than even its supporters predicted?  So what? The facts--new or accruing old--don't matter, writes Paul Krugman.  Not to the true unbelievers.

"And the list goes on. On issues that range from monetary policy to the control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk. If you’ve gotten involved in any of these debates, you know that these people aren’t happy warriors; they’re red-faced angry, with special rage directed at know-it-alls who snootily point out that the facts don’t support their position.

 The question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together.. Well, it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest." 

"And why this hatred of government in the public interest? Well, the political scientist Corey Robin argues that most self-proclaimed conservatives are actually reactionaries. That is, they’re defenders of traditional hierarchy — the kind of hierarchy that is threatened by any expansion of government, even (or perhaps especially) when that expansion makes the lives of ordinary citizens better and more secure."

Krugman links to this Corey Robin essay from 2012.  It's a political science piece that gets into group psychology, asserting that the support of political or corporate hierarchy often begins with a sense of preserving family hierarchy, or more broadly, the traditional lines of family, gender and racial power.

 I'm not sure Robin says this, but this easily extends to class, although it often means supporting a class structure in which you personally are relatively powerless and exploited.  It's one of several ways that this formulation supports the sometimes mysterious conjunction of lower middle class (white) conservatives with the interests of billionaires to keep things as they are, so they can keep making their billions in the same way.

Robin doesn't give much supporting evidence for his claims on the private-to-public support for hierarchy, but clearly there are ongoing changes in America that conservatives believe are wrong, and that includes most of those changes.  It's clearer in some areas than others--immigration for example--that people feel threatened, when the trends are against them anyway (ironically, to the benefit of the billionaires who fund their politics which first and foremost supports the billionaires' interests.)

But Robin seems on more certain ground when he suggests the reasons for the rabid quality of the right these days:

"There's a fairly simple reason for the embrace of radicalism on the right, and it has to do with the reactionary imperative that lies at the core of conservative doctrine. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver's seat since, depending on who's counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation. If he is to preserve what he values, the conservative must declare war against the culture as it is. Though the spirit of militant opposition pervades the entirety of conservative discourse, Dinesh D'Souza has put the case most clearly:

Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But ... what if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must ... be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical."

And this is where the rabid right and the fundamentalist religious right meet.  In religious terms, today's family-hierarchy-destroying, etc. society is terminally sinful, and nothing will save us but a total return to their prescriptive righteousness as interpreted by particular preachers who cherrypick the Bible to support their political agenda.  As apostate fundamentalist Frank Schaeffer wrote:

"The leaders of the new religious right were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we were wrong about God only wanting to bless “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly? And if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?"

There's another element that Christian fundamentalist leaders have in common with rabid right political leaders (as Schaeffer also notes): anger is good for fundraising.

Fundamentally, rabid right ideologues feel terminally threatened by a range of societal changes, some of them (like climate) emphasized or added to the mix for the benefit of certain billionaires in particular.  Each of these issues has an additional set of fears associated with it, particularly climate, which seems to threaten ways of life built around fossil fuels.  But basically these changes are threatening, and the response is fear translated into anger, which is fed and rationalized by ideology.

All of these are related to what's called income inequality, but for most people means less money to support lives that cost more every year, regardless of what the inflation numbers say.  When you see elements of your life slipping away, you fiercely protect what's left.  You don't want to risk losing even more.

  But nothing is just one thing.  Racial feelings related to status, regional and family history, local culture, all kinds of things play into the formation and expression of this resistance to admitting that there are problems that need new solutions, and not just some hazy and inconsistent return to an old order, or at least the parts of it you'd like to revive.

Whether there's any way to reach these people, or it's best to just write them off as a lost cause and endless energy sink, while devoting all efforts to building political power for supporters of these issues and occasionally contending for the hearts and minds of the muddled middle, are questions for later noodling.

Into the Gap Pours Fear

In his brief time in the public spotlight, Martin Luther King championed at least three interrelated causes.  The first of course is racial justice in America.  That aspect has been the focus of protests today related to the wanton killings of black men by police.

But King's concerns did not end with Selma or the March on Washington.  His persistence and eloquence advocating the end of racial injustice has become the least controversial of his public commitments, though it takes an unhealthy dose of hypocrisy for most conservatives to claim common cause.

He also became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, which roiled his reputation at the time.  But his most controversial concentration that remains a flashpoint (and therefore most ignored) is poverty and more broadly, economic injustice and inequality.  That's one reason I led the day with a quote from him on that subject.

It happened that his holiday saw the release of the latest and probably most detailed report on growing "income inequality," this time on a global scale.  The report from Oxfam made some headlines, since it found that by next year, the world's top 1% will control more wealth than the other 99% combined.

To be more specific, it's the combined wealth of 80 billionaires versus everybody else on planet Earth combined--all 3.8 billion.  This is a change from 2010, when it took 388 billionaires to balance out the rest of the global population.  And when the 1% had just 48% of the world's wealth.  The incomes of these 80 doubled since 2009.  Did yours?

“The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering,” Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, said in a statement. “Despite the issue shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

A summary of this study, with graphs and pie charts, can be found at the end of this article that begins by noting that a lot of these billionaires along with business and political leaders are going to be in Davros, Switzerland this week, talking about all this.

There are a number of even less appetizing details in the study, such as the fact that many of the top billionaires made their money from healthcare and pharma.  In other words, they became obscenely wealthy by taking advantage of the sick and dying, their pain and their fear.

It's already been widely reported that in his State of the Union on Tuesday President Obama will again talk about income and economic inequality, and barriers to fairness and opportunity in the U.S., and that he will propose new tax revenues from the very rich and tax breaks for the middle class, and that they have no chance of passing Congress.

But the situation remains, the proposed solutions are clearly inadequate (absolutely no one of prominence I know of is talking about anything like a guaranteed income, as King did) and even these paltry proposals are unlikely to be instituted. People are increasingly afraid.  You can tell because they aren't talking about it.

Tech Deception, Digital Slavery

In a New York Times oped, George Mason University economics professor, Tyler Cowen claims that the answer to income inequality in America might well be more and better computer technology.

Applying technology in smarter ways could bring down the costs of education and medical care. "We can easily imagine medical diagnosis by online artificial intelligence, greater use of online competitive procurement for health care services, more transparency in pricing and thus more competition, and much cheaper online education for many students, to cite just a few possibilities. In such a world, many wage gains would come from new and cheaper services, rather than from being able to cut a better deal with the boss at work."

Income gains, he suggests, are limited now by lack of computer skills. "Not everyone can work fruitfully with computers now. There is a generation gap when it comes to manipulating electronic devices, and many relevant tasks require knowledge of programming or, more ambitiously, the entrepreneurial skill of creating a start-up. That, in a nutshell, is how our dynamic sector has concentrated its gains among a relatively small number of employees, thus leading to more income inequality."

But simpler "human-computer interfaces" such as computers that respond to spoken commands will open up new job opportunities, such as supervising smart robots on the factory floor.  Income inequality could also lessen as emerging nations like China and India begin to innovate products that are now expensive and make them cheaper.

Cowen's argument in general is that income inequality is not structural, as Thomas Piketty famously wrote, but a product of an application lag in technology and the ability of many people to use this technology.  His conclusion: "growing inequality is highly contingent on particular technologies and the global conditions of the moment. Movements toward greater inequality often set countervailing forces in motion, even if those forces take a long time to come to fruition. From this perspective, rather than seeking to beat down capital, our attention should be directed to leaving open the future possibilities for innovation, change and dynamism. Even if income inequality continues to increase in the short run, as I believe is likely, there exists a plausible and more distant future in which we are mostly much better off and more equal. The history of technology suggests that new opportunities for better living and higher wages are being created, just not as quickly as we might like."

This analysis, hardly reassuring to begin with, and clotted with all its meaningless buzzwords, is wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin, as should be obvious to anyone who lives in the actual world rather than the economics world.  But for a cogent blast of cold water, there's Jacob Silverman in The Baffler which exposes the actual dark side of the computerization of everyday life, including the rise of digital slavery.

I don't mean digital addiction, I mean working for nothing, or next to nothing, which Silverman describes in detail.  We know about the digital sweatshops but most of those are abroad.  He writes about digital slavery in America:

"Increasing numbers of people receive their instructions from, and report back to, software and smartphones. Whether operating a bin selector in an Amazon warehouse or freelancing from a coffee shop, many Americans work long days without having contact with other human beings—neither coworkers nor supervisors. (There are no subordinates for this class of workers.) Everything they do is tracked, because efficiency is the sine qua non. Some of them work for online labor markets like Elance, oDesk, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which offer micro-jobs that can be done remotely, with little to no training. They complete surveys, tag photos, and transcribe interviews, for pay of a few dollars per hour or at a piecework rate of little more than a few cents per task...These labor markets depend on a kind of internalized offshoring."

Contrary to Cowen, computer literacy isn't confined to well-paid professionals.  It is the structure of the market, as well as the devious propaganda of the tech giants, that enslaves people and keeps their incomes down.  And it's all done automatically, without apparent human intervention, as so much in the world as wired now is:

"The software facilitating this transaction acts as the ultimate mediator; the employee and the employer never have to deal with one another directly. Payment can be unreliable and is wholly contingent on the employer accepting the laborer’s product. If the former doesn’t like what he receives, he can simply reject it and not pay the worker for his time. Contract employees have no chance, in this setup, to appeal or to revise their work."

According to Silverman, this is the real meaning of "crowdsourcing." Moreover, it is building into the market an increase in income disparity, by paying a lot of people a little, and forcing them to compete with each other, forever:

Companies begin to think in terms of short-term spending rather than long-term investment, as borrowing and hiring both atrophy. More and more of us are forced to be contingent laborers, freelancers, crowdsourced volunteers, or “permalancers” always on the lookout for more opportunities, always advertising ourselves through social media and public networks, knowing—with a sense of generalized suspicion—that our public utterances on social media may influence our future job prospects. Risk assessment algorithms may already be parsing our social media profiles, pooling information to be used in a future background check."

A lot of this, Silverman writes, is being sold to people as a libertarian ideal, when it is pretty much the opposite: "Workers, in turn, have more mobility and a semblance of greater control over their working lives. But is any of it worth it when we can’t afford health insurance or don’t know how much the next gig might pay, or when it might come? When an app’s terms of service agreement is the closest thing we have to an employment contract? When work orders come through a smartphone and we know that if we don’t respond immediately, we might not get such an opportunity again? When we can’t even talk to another human being about the task at hand and we must work nonstop just to make minimum wage?"

So far in history, capitalism has been unable to survive without slavery somewhere.  With the slaves of the South and elsewhere, slave labor in South American mines, industrial wage slavery, outsourced and piecework slavery in the digital age. Update: Slavery exists in prison labor; the state of California has officially argued it needs prisoners for their slave labor. That's a problem capitalism doesn't even recognize, so of course it has no solution.

Meanwhile, it consumes the planet like the mindless mechanism it is, when people with minds refuse to see the problem.

American Indeceny

President Kennedy, whose raising of the US minimum
wage in 1961 led to the Super Great Depression of the
1960s and the economic ruin of America.

The US Census Bureau's annual report on income and poverty released this week was covered in the media under a weird diversity of headlines.  Everyone seemed to focus on something different as its most important finding, or at least, its news (or ideological) hook.  In fact, the changes indicated in the report were very small.  But as John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker, that's really its news significance.  And in a longer-term context, it explains a lot about our current political deadlock, its vociferous quality, and in particular a reason President Obama isn't getting the usual credit for an improving economy.

Though some measures of poverty declined and median income was up slightly: "There is a long way to go before ordinary Americans are able to recover the losses that they suffered during the recession. Median household income was eight per cent lower in 2013 than it was in 2007, when the recession began. And the poverty rate in 2013 was two percentage points higher than it was in 2007.

These figures may help to explain why so many Americans refuse to believe that the economy is recovering, and why President Obama’s approval ratings are stuck at near-record lows despite falling unemployment and accelerating G.D.P. growth." 

Yes, most Americans are better off than they were four years ago, or even six.  But not seven.  It's not just the pace of growth that's the problem, Cassidy writes.  It's who has benefited, and who has and has not been benefiting for a long time. "The central message of the Census Bureau figures is that the same trends that have been roiling the American economy for the past twenty-five years—income stagnation and rising inequality—continue to have an impact."

According to Cassidy:  "When spending power is rising broadly, benefitting most social, geographic, and income groups, it is much easier to get rival political parties and factions to coöperate. Consensus politics can thrive, as they did in the postwar era. But when most people’s incomes are stagnating, and have been for decades, politics become darker and more fractious."

While those many who aren't seeing gains and may be slipping back might fight among themselves for what little there is, the few at the top "have a big incentive to get more involved politically," to stifle any policies that in the short term might take any of their disproportionate gains away.

"To oversimplify a bit, income stagnation paired with rising inequality is a recipe for political polarization and, under the American system of divided powers, political gridlock, which is what we have. Based on the latest Census Bureau figures, there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon."

We can see conspicuous effects of this in for example the virulent opposition to even the idea of climate change paid for by fossil fuel gazillionaires.  We also see it in the scandalous opposition to a modest rise in the US minimum wage.

I can recall the same doomsday cant being promulgated in 1961 about President Kennedy's proposal to raise the minimum wage to a horrifying $1.25 an hour as I hear now on the proposal today to raise it from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour.  William Finnegan (again in the New Yorker) chronicles the many times between these two proposals when the minimum wage was raised, and those who opposed it trotted out with a straight face the same dire predictions of economic disaster and worse, that were predicted for previous raises but never happened.  Usually the opposite.

Finnegan quotes the original principles behind the minimum wage as articulated by FDR in language too bold for us some 80 years later: “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country...By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level. I mean the wages of decent living.”

Finnegan checks data that shows how "depressingly modest" the $10.10 proposal actually is--yet Republicans have made it a sacred mission to defeat it.  In what should have been (and may yet turn out to be) congressional Republicans' "49% moment," Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was recorded telling wealthy donors that when the Republicans get the Senate majority, there won't be any minimum wage nonsense in Congress anymore.  Other speakers revived the talk of something in the direction of,  but not really a living wage as a major step to fascism, communism and the rule of Satan.

Even if this federal minimum wage were to become law, it would not be big enough to put much of a dent in rampaging income inequality.  Citing figures from a recent study, Finnegan concludes: "Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would increase the income of at least sixteen million workers. It would not lift anywhere near that many people out of poverty. The proposed hike would ease present hardship, not abolish it. It would be a move in the direction of “the wages of decent living”—a performance, one might say, of decency itself."

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

“The experience of France in the Belle Époque proves, if proof were needed, that no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.”

Thomas Piketty
quoted by Paul Krugman in his New York Review of Books review of Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

The Gap

I don't have explanations or theories about this, nor do I have a plan or even a suggestion to propose.  I only have an observation, and I can't get past how astonishing it is to me.

Let me begin where I started thinking about this lately, with some history that is clearly still relevant.  Since technology began to reshape the workplace after World War II, forward-looking economists and other social thinkers saw that what was soon called automation was probably going to lead to a social crisis.  Machines were going to put humans out of work.  Unemployment would rise, incomes would fall, the economy would suffer with fewer consumers, and poverty would grow, with its attendant social problems as well as human suffering.

In the mid 1960s an approach was developed that came to be called the Guaranteed Income (also called the Guaranteed Minimum Income and Guaranteed Annual Income.)  Economist Robert Theobald edited a book of essays on the subject in 1966 called The Guaranteed Income: Next Step in Economic Evolution? It advocated the idea from economic, political, institutional and psychological points of view. (Psychologist Eric Fromm called it the key to the transition from a pre-human to a fully human society.)  Other books explored the moral dimensions.  We're talking facts and figures, studies and complex arguments.

A guaranteed income was seen as an antidote to job losses through automation, but also as a way to attack poverty and its attendant problems more efficiently. In substituting for a grab bag of inefficient and dehumanizing programs, a guaranteed income would not even cost more than the programs it replaced.  Society would have to bear less financial burden for health, education and other problems that were rooted in poverty, in not having enough money.

These ideas were influential and persuasive enough that they informed proposals for laws and implementation. Martin Luther King (whose federal holiday birthday so many piously and cynically celebrate) supported one version as part of the proposed Freedom Budget. George McGovern was ridiculed for proposing his version in the 1972 presidential election, but something like a minimum income passed the House and almost passed the Senate during the Nixon administration, with White House support.

Today we are living in the world those people were worrying about.  It hasn't played out exactly as any of them foresaw but the basic situation is here: technology combined with other factors has created a permanent surplus work force, either permanently or often unemployed, underemployed or unemployable.

And we continue to have complex and dehumanizing social programs that really nobody likes, and they are insufficient.  So given how long ago these problems were anticipated, you'd think we'd be pretty smart about them now.

Instead, what do we have?  Not only aren't we progressing on this growing problem, we're falling back from where we were in the 1930s.  The U.S. Congress has once again failed to renew unemployment insurance which they let lapse just in time for Christmas.  Unemployment insurance is something that workers have paid into, and so the government took the premiums and refuses the insurance.  Sounds like the health insurance business before Obamacare.

Congress is balking at raising the pitiful minimum wage.  Republicans are busily trying to prevent people from getting health care.  Congress cut food stamps--food stamps! for the poor.  At best, damaging individual and national health and nutrition,  at worst telling poor people to please just starve.  At least, poor people in Democratic states (the cuts targeted 16 states and DC; 15 went Obama twice, 28 of their 32 Senators are Dems.)  

This of course comes at a time when the gap between the very wealthy few and everyone else is as extreme as it has been since at least World War II.  Such a huge proportion of money in the hands of a few helps to cripple the economy by keeping that money out of circulation.  But coupled with this, the public views of the very rich and their minions also have never been so extreme.

This was summed up in a recent dumbfounding story. When Oxfam released its report showing that the 85 richest people in the world hold more wealth than the 3.5 billion poorest (that's the collective wealth of 85 vs. the collective wealth of 3,500, 000, 000), an on-air apologist for the wealthy exclaimed that it was great news.

These extreme views of a handful of very wealthy men and women are so politically powerful that any semblance of democracy is threatened.  Some of these views are so outrageous that they seem surreal, but they aren't just the views of a few cranks (Josh Marshall has some penetrating thoughts on what they are.)

Whatever the psychology involved, it's a clear threat, especially when politics is more and more about money.  When the Koch brothers, through their tax exempt groups, spent more money in the 2012 election than all of the candidates combined in 2000, it's just a matter of time before that investment pays off.

 It clearly is paying off in Congress.  It's becoming clear now that the story isn't a sane Republican business class trying to control and manipulate the Tea Party rabble.  The rabid right as well as the Tea Party is the direct product of some of the wealthiest and most politically active right wing extremists.

Meanwhile the spiral continues downward.  A new report confirms that nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.  These include the new lower middle class, mostly two-parent, two-job families with at least one college education--yet they still struggle.  It seems that everybody sees the growing wealth gap, and can't agree on anything else.

Meanwhile the suffering continues and grows, and so far mostly in silence.  If there isn't a hell I hereby authorize Sister Editha to design one, just for that billionaire who said that he's rich because he works harder than people who aren't rich.  Here's just one story about the lives of people who work harder than that asshole can even imagine, and are still in a world of pain.

It's not completely bleak.  President Obama keeps shining a light on all this, and much to my surprise, there's a Pope now who is more than mouthing platitudes.  Some like Robert Reich call for a new WPA (some guaranteed income proposals call for community service and public works), stating the same basic economic point: "The real job creators are the vast middle class and the poor — when they have enough money in their pockets." There are even corporate leaders who are aware of the dangers of the growing gap.  And even versions of the guaranteed income or negative income tax are being discussed--in Europe.  

 Another variation getting some attention is the "Citizen's Dividend."And as eye-rolling as otherworldly academia can be, it's worth mentioning that in its precincts, the guaranteed income remains alive and well.  Now it's called the Basic Income Guarantee--" an unconditional, government-insured guarantee that all citizens will have enough income to meet their basic needs."  There's a U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network with a website, academic papers and an annual Congress.  The 12th was last May in New York (a joint project of Basic Income Canada Network and the U.S. network.) The 13th joint confab is scheduled for June in Montreal, perhaps to prepare an actual proposal for Canada.

Still, the state of the U.S. political zeitgeist is clear.  At a time when most everyone agrees the income or wealth gap is so extreme (and the numbers clearly show it is), we are at the extreme edge of not dealing with it--of actually penalizing the people who suffer the most instead of coming up with the best ways to help them, and to help this economy and this democracy get better, instead of sliding into decadence and despair.  And it is the most wealthy--the greatest beneficiaries of the political system, including efforts by the Obama administration--who are the most publicly aggrieved.  It seems the gap between political perception and reality is just as enormous.

And it reminds me a little too much of the political zeitgeist in regard to the climate crisis.  You could essentially write the same story.

The Radical King

"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age …. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

By the standards of the time, Martin Luther King was a radical, not only on civil rights but on the war in Vietnam.  Now that aspects of his agenda have been enshrined in law, and he has been enshrined in a holiday, it is well to note that in some other areas he would be considered radical today, especially on the issue of poverty and what today is somewhat confusingly called income inequality.

He was scheduled to march on Washington again in 1968, on the issue of poverty.  He was assassinated before he could.

His passion on the issues of alleviating poverty came from the same source as his passion for ending racial injustice: real human suffering.  An example he noted:

"And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions-no, not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, “The landlord will not repair this place. I’ve been here two years and he hasn’t made a single repair.” She pointed out the walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children."

Does anyone believe this doesn't go on right now in America, almost a half century later?

More to come here on the topic of poverty and the income divide.

American Exceptionalism

The United States has arguably been declining and falling for years, but occasionally there are new markers.  Apart from internal measures--decline in relation to principles and ideals, decline in relation to the past--there are comparisons with other countries.  Some of these are discounted, thanks to the collapse of the economic power of Japan, the country that scared America in the 70s and 80s.  But discounting everything is perilous.

We note this week that there is a new robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, and it is from China.  There was an apparently successful orbit of a living being and safe return, conducted by Iran.  At least some of the space activity these days is due in part to the U.S. outsourcing its own technology, and others quickly adapting it.  That technological and intellectual capital is being spent, and may not be renewed.

May not if trends in U.S. education continue.  There have been scary headlines and warnings for years, so what's new about the latest?  For one thing, the U.S. had fallen behind in average math achievement, but our best were still among the best.  No more.  Our best students languish "in the middle of the pack" internationally.  They can't keep up.

Add this to other downward trends, if not spirals: infant mortality, longevity, and above all, the enormous gulf between rich and everybody else--very likely the source of much of the rest, along with the retrenchment of governmental resources.  With even the modest advance in healthcare coverage in the Affordable Care Act under intense political fire, our healthcare system remains near the bottom of the industrialized world.   Instead the U.S. leads the world in gun violence and captial punishment--with no fear of relinquishing that dominance.

Despite this country's residual strengths and the advances in less quantifiable qualities, this all has the distinct aroma of decadence.  America is exceptional in its self-satisfied paralysis, its furious conflicts that stalemate action or even enough of a common diagnosis to proceed.

From the  New York Times editorial on Sunday:

In a post-smokestack age, there is only one way for the United States to avoid a declining standard of living, and that is through innovation. Advancements in science and engineering have extended life, employed millions and accounted for more than half of American economic growth since World War II, but they are slowing. The nation has to enlarge its pool of the best and brightest science and math students and encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive. 

But that isn’t happening. Not only do average American students perform poorly compared with those in other countries, but so do the best students, languishing in the middle of the pack as measured by the two leading tests used in international comparisons.... 

On the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment test, the most recent, 34 of 65 countries and school systems had a higher percentage of 15-year-olds scoring at the advanced levels in mathematics than the United States did. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland all had at least twice the proportion of mathematically advanced students as the United States, and many Asian countries had far more than that.

Other tests have shown that America’s younger students fare better in global comparisons than its older students do, which suggests a disturbing failure of educators to nurture good students as they progress to higher grades. Over all, the United States is largely holding still while foreign competitors are improving rapidly."

Meanwhile, the Chinese are talking softly about their rover on the Moon (the peaceful exploration of space) which they are conducting methodically, with plenty of resources committed to it.  But their longer range plans may be more complex.  This BBC story says they are looking at future potential for the Moon's minerals. This is not really a new or necessarily sinister idea, unless the fact that the Bush administration expressed interest in the same thing tilts the balance for you.  But it shows that while these days the only Americans thinking that far ahead are science fiction writers, the Chinese aren't just wondering, they're exploring.

President Obama running away from Obamacare

President Obama spoke about the growing income divide and deterioration of the middle class in America on Thursday.  He ended his remarks talking about the economic and other effects of Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act.

"  Of course, for decades, there was one yawning gap in the safety net that did more than anything else to expose working families to the insecurities of today’s economy -- namely, our broken health care system. That’s why we fought for the Affordable Care Act --  because 14,000 Americans lost their health insurance every single day, and even more died each year because they didn’t have health insurance at all. We did it because millions of families who thought they had coverage were driven into bankruptcy by out-of-pocket costs that they didn't realize would be there. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens couldn’t get any coverage at all. And Dr. King once said, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

Well, not anymore. (Applause.) Because in the three years since we passed this law, the share of Americans with insurance is up, the growth of health care costs are down to their slowest rate in 50 years. More people have insurance, and more have new benefits and protections -- 100 million Americans who have gained the right for free preventive care like mammograms and contraception; the more than 7 million Americans who have saved an average of $1,200 on their prescription medicine; every American who won’t go broke when they get sick because their insurance can’t limit their care anymore.

More people without insurance have gained insurance -- more than 3 million young Americans who have been able to stay on their parents’ plan, the more than half a million Americans and counting who are poised to get covered starting on January 1st, some for the very first time.

And it is these numbers -- not the ones in any poll -- that will ultimately determine the fate of this law. (Applause.) It's the measurable outcomes in reduced bankruptcies and reduced hours that have been lost because somebody couldn't make it to work, and healthier kids with better performance in schools, and young entrepreneurs who have the freedom to go out there and try a new idea -- those are the things that will ultimately reduce a major source of inequality and help ensure more Americans get the start that they need to succeed in the future.

I have acknowledged more than once that we didn’t roll out parts of this law as well as we should have. But the law is already working in major ways that benefit millions of Americans right now, even as we’ve begun to slow the rise in health care costs, which is good for family budgets, good for federal and state budgets, and good for the budgets of businesses small and large. So this law is going to work. And for the sake of our economic security, it needs to work. (Applause.)

And as people in states as different as California and Kentucky sign up every single day for health insurance, signing up in droves, they’re proving they want that economic security. If the Senate Republican leader still thinks he is going to be able to repeal this someday, he might want to check with the more than 60,000 people in his home state who are already set to finally have coverage that frees them from the fear of financial ruin, and lets them afford to take their kids to see a doctor."