Taking the Risk Out of Democracy

Posted on July 16, 2015 by camelotkidd

Ever wonder why corporations spend billions on business friendly propaganda each and every year?

Because it works, that’s why. Corporate propaganda has succeeded in convincing a majority of Americans that their interests lie with corporations–the business of America is business–and any attempt to ameliorate this state of affairs is tantamount to socialism, and as such is un-American.

The United States is nominally a representative democracy, however corporate interests have an outsized influence on the policies we enact. These corporations spend enormous amounts of money to get the American people to identify free enterprise (meaning state subsidized private power with no infringement of managerial prerogatives) as the American way. In addition to the day in and day out pro-business advertising and PR, corporations have waged intensified propaganda campaigns, deploying the term free enterprise as a means of gaining support for corporate policies.

I was reminded of the power of this business propaganda when I read the account of a tour guide at a historical slave plantation.

“One theme that came up with some regularity was that folks would assume that since so-and-so was very wealthy, he was probably pretty good as a slaveholder to work for. The angle that they were coming from — and I think this is something that they were taught, not that they came up with — was that if a person had the means to “care” well for enslaved people, then that’s what they would use that money for. In some ways, that’s such a sweet, naive thing to think, right?

The rich slave owner as a benevolent patron is this stereotype that people have been taught without realizing it. It’s so weird to think that a rich slave owner would be nicer to work for. If you think about the bigger companies today, they’re usually the worst to their employees. It’s so backwards. It’s almost tantamount to saying that rich people are nicer, and then, the converse, that poor people are meaner. It’s such a weird thing.”

Except it’s not a weird thing at all from a corporate point of view.

It’s money well spent.

Alex Carey wrote a book about business propaganda, entitled Taking the Risk Out of Democracy. Carey argued that the 20th Century has seen three related developments; ‘the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism uses Carey’s Taking the Risk Out Of Democracy to contrast a New York Times article about why Americans don’t take vacations, and makes some interesting and salient points about the effectiveness of corporate propaganda.

“I’ve been in what little spare time I have reading history, particularly on propaganda. One must read book is by Alex Carey. Carey taught psychology in Australia, and he depicts the US as the breeding ground for the modern art of what is sometimes more politely called the engineering of consent…Anyone who has studied the history of public relations in the US will not only tell you it works, but also will be able to provide numerous examples, starting with the Creel Committee in World War I, which turned a pacifist US into rabid German-haters in a mere 18 months. But Fischer would rather appeal to Americans’ vanity and exceptionalism. Carey, by contrast, documents the intensity of messaging efforts, the channels used, and tracks how polls and headlines changed. And contra Fischer, he finds Americans to be particularly susceptible to propaganda (by contrast, Australians’ native skepticism of authority, keen sense of irony, and strong community orientation gives them a wee bit of resistance, although Carey described how they were being worn down too).”

One of the most pernicious falsehoods promulgated has been the idea that only the government is capable of oppression, while ignoring the potential for corporate tyranny. Looking around at our corporate controlled world this is obviously not the case.  The real question is who rules, to what degree, and to whose benefit? Conservatives and neoliberals want to eliminate government as much as possible, to let the market rule. But we’ve seen the result of that. America, today, is much closer to a plutocracy than a democracy. Corporations write our laws, buy our elections, and control the political focus.

We’ve had a sea change in the way we Americans view the world thanks to this ever present corporate propaganda, most visibly in the embrace of neoliberalism by economists and policy makers. The idea that governments should protect citizens against the excesses of free enterprise has been replaced with the idea that government should protect business activities against the excesses of democratic regulation. Thus, corporations have succeeded in taking the risk out of democracy, in that we the people pose no danger to their agenda.

It’s their world. We just live in it

 

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We’re All Greeks Now

Posted on July 9, 2015 by camelotkidd

Who needs an army when you have economists and central bankers? This is the reality we face in an era where debt and austerity are the weapons wielded by modern imperialism.

In the aftermath of the Greek referendum rejecting austerity, an odious debt still hangs over the Greeks like a sword. In a real “free market” the banks that loaned Greece the money would take a huge loss, their managers would be fired and the banks shareholders would have taken a beating. But these day the bankers are sacrosanct and it’s the debtors who end up paying.

Democracy and the individual lives of citizens must be sacrificed to the demands of the banks.

The world elite are united in their belief that the bankers must have control over democratic states. Democracy is fine as long as it conforms to capitalist diktats. If it doesn’t, well, ask the Greeks what it’s like to suffer for the last 5 years.

Even the IMF has admitted that Greece needs a debt write down. This debt, owed largely to French and German banks, is un-payable and should never have been forced on the Greek citizens.

The Greeks had the gall to elect a left-wing government to end the brutal austerity that has ruined their economy and left them with a larger debt than before. Syriza came to power with a democratic mandate to defy the austerity imposed by the “troika” – composed of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. So for that the Greeks must suffer for thinking that they could avoid their proper punishment through democratic politics.

Here’s economist Paul Krugman summing up the medieval treatment of the Greeks by the European Central Bank.

“The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.”

Nevertheless, the Greeks are derided as lazy and shiftless by the corporate media. It’s all a fucking economic morality play.

Economist Michael Hudson has been on a tear in graphically depicting how the Greeks are being forced to to pay for the sins of the bankers who loaned Greece the money that was lent to Greece but went right through Greece to pay the French banks and the German banks, and to enable the American Wall Street banks to make a killing.

“What they want is the same thing that warfare wants. They want the land, and they want a tribute in the form of interest. Basically, the Eurozone went to Greece and said: look, we’re going to–as in case Spain’s Podemos party or other countries who want to not pay their debts–we’re going to use you as an example and we’re going to wreck you. Financial technocrats were put in place to serve the domestic oligarchy and foreign bondholders. Greece was under financial attack just as deadly as a military attack. Finance is war.”

Debt and austerity are like warfare without the tanks and dive bombers. It’s an attempt by our financial overlords to trump democratic control and make the market the master.

We’ve witnessed the same sort of  neoliberal policies here in the US in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash with austerity and cutbacks leading to privatization of essential public infrastructure and seizure of land and property by the banks. Exhibit-A is Detroit, a once large vibrant manufacturing metropolis that’s been transformed into a hellhole. This quest for control is also visible in trade policies like the TPP, TTIP and TISA that essentially represent a corporate coup d’état.

What can the Greeks do in the face of this financial terrorism?

Here’s what Naked Capitalism writer and financial analyst Wolf Richter advises.

Instead of stewing in their own misery, Greeks need to repatriate their money into Greek banks, all of their money. They need to clean out their bank accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and London, and deposit this money into Greek banks. Hundreds of billions of euros. That would immediately solve the bank-run crisis.

They need to pay taxes on this money. And they need to pay their taxes for the last 20 years, all of their taxes, including penalties. They need to do so pronto, and with a smile. This is about Greece after all, the country they’re so proud of, and that needs them in this hour of duress. Knowing this, they’ll gladly stop cheating on their taxes from now on, at all levels, from the fruit seller on the street or the doctor that takes cash for her services or even the oligarch. Budget crisis solved!

We can do the same thing by investing our money in local markets and credit unions. Our economy doesn’t need to be run by and for the too big to fail banksters. An economy that works for all Americans makes things and provides services that we need. The US has a sovereign currency where we can create money ourselves rather that giving this power to bankers. Also, we don’t really need these sorts of global corporate trade treaties like the TPP. The US all by itself is an enormous market that we the people could participate in rather than watching our jobs depart for low wage, no regulation Third World countries.

It’s up to us. We can create an economy that works for us or we can await the fate of the Greeks.

Update:

According to investigative journalist Greg Palast, what’s happening to Greece is a bug not a feature. Palast managed to interview the economist who designed the Euro who confirms some of my longtime suspicions about the European Union.

“The imposition of the euro had one true goal: To end the European welfare state. For Mundell and the politicians who seized on his currency concept, the euro itself would be the vector infecting the European body politic with supply-side Reaganomics. Mundell saw a euro’d Europe as free of trade unions and government regulations; a Europe in which the votes of parliaments were meaningless. Each Eurozone nation, unable to control neither the value of its own currency, nor its own budget, nor its own fiscal policy, could only compete for business by slashing regulations and taxes. Mundell said, “[The euro] puts monetary policy out of the reach of politicians… Without fiscal policy, the only way nations can keep jobs is by the competitive reduction of rules on business.”

 

 

 

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Crisis in Democracy

Posted on June 25, 2015 by camelotkidd

Our elite are busy consolidating the gains from their 30 year embrace of neoliberalism while deploying their bought and paid for government to make certain there’s nothing we can do about it. In a perverse bit of projection they describe periods where American citizens have participated in the political arena in an attempt to bring about progressive change as a “crisis in democracy.”

This state of affairs where the rich and the corporations they own make all the important economic decisions, while citizens are relegated to voting for two candidates that offer the same limited choices is what we’ve come to describe as democracy. This is our milieu, where the power of our elite is more important than democracy itself, and any attempt to alter this rigid hierarchy is met with massive resistance.

This explains President Obama and corporate legislators rush to pass fast-track legislation to ensure passage of the TPP and other so-called trade treaties that grant corporations enormous power while taking away sovereignty from we the people. The Trans-Pacific-Partnership is the economic aspect of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia, in an attempt to lock in the power of multi-national corporations against a rising China.

“The Obama administration is essentially prostituting the American consumer to foreign corporations to usher in a deal that would impose one-size-fits all international rules that even limit the US government’s right to regulate foreign investment and the appropriation of natural resources, solidifying a long-discussed model of finance capital-backed global governance.”

The TPP would mandate that signatory countries maintain a privatized banking system. Author Ellen Brown, explains that our financial overlords want to ensure there is no going back to a regulated financial system.

“And that could help explain the desperate rush to “fast track” not only the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA would nip attempts to implement public banking and other monetary reforms in the bud.”

Brown asks some questions about the power that the banking and financial system has over our lives.

“If money is just an IOU, why are we delivering the exclusive power to create it to an unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent private banking monopoly? Why are we buying into the notion that the government is broke – that it must sell off public assets and slash public services in order to pay off its debts? The government could pay its debts in the same way private banks pay them, simply with accounting entries on its books. What will happen when a critical mass of the populace realizes that we’ve been vassals of a parasitic banking system based on a fraud – that we the people could be creating money as credit ourselves, through publicly-owned banks that returned the profits to the people?”

I’ve written before about this mistaken view of money, debt and fiat currency in a post entitled Out of Thin Air. The important point to remember is that the creation of money and credit are political rather than economic decisions. We have choices, no matter how hard our elite try to deny this reality.

Neoliberals insist that there is no alternative, and are busy employing government to ensure that all aspects of our lives are subsumed to the market.

In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, political theorist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Wendy Brown, argues that neoliberalism reduces all affairs to the market and thus directly undermines democracy.

“Even more than the extreme inequalities and empowerment of capital that neoliberalism brings about, it’s the casting of every sphere of existence and every phenomenon as a market — and human beings as nothing other than market actors — that undoes democracy.”

Maybe that’s the whole point of neoliberalism.

“That project is to free up the entire globe for the profit-making activities of a few gigantic corporations and their billionaire owners, with minimal interference from governments or any other social institution.”

And, what happens to those who view neoliberalism for what it is–looting?

“The neoliberal project has always had a special place for disciplining the proles. Prison, parole, draconian court systems, all are directed at keeping the proles from interfering with the ability of the rich and their corporations to make lots of money.”

The bifurcated legal system we maintain in the US is not an accident. According to our neoliberal intellectuals the legal system is working exactly as it should. Here’s Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge, Richard Posner explaining that the rich are to be disciplined by tort law, after the fact court enforcement of laws, but the poor, having nothing, need jail for discipline.

The major function of criminal law in a capitalist society is to prevent people from bypassing the system of voluntary, compensated exchange — the “market,” explicit or implicit — in situations where, because transaction costs are low, the market is a more efficient method of allocating resources than forced exchange. Market bypassing in such situations is inefficient — in the sense in which economists equate efficiency with wealth maximization — no matter how much utility it may confer on the offender. … (P. 1195, footnote omitted)

We do have a crisis in democracy just not the one our elite imagine. No, our crisis is that we effectively have de-jour democracy and de-facto plutocracy.

This crisis of democracy is where we are now. Do we the people want to control our government and use it to better our lives or are we content to sit back and be amused while our elite deploy the government to force us to participate in a savage world where we’re all reduced to marketable entities?

Update: This sucker just might pass thanks to weasel corporate Democrats.

“So: these ‘trade’ deals will not directly and overtly block any increase in the regulations of food-safety, the environment, drug-safety, worker-safety, workers’ wages, medical care, education, or any of the many other things that governments must regulate in order for the public to be protected, and served. Instead, this legislative blockage will be indirect, and covert. But it will be just as real, and just as effective, as if it were an outright legal prohibition. The individual nations will be forced to yield to the ‘higher’ rights (the real sovereignty) of the top international investors.”

 

 

 

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The Threat of a Good Example

Posted on June 6, 2015 by camelotkidd

The political and economic elite in the US is threatened by an alternative model for organizing society. This is the perverse flip side to Margaret Thatchers admonishment–“there is no alternative.” However, the constant repetition of the this free market dogma in recent years is not a sign of strength as much as desperation. You might have noticed this desperation in some of the recent statements by financial leaders equating taxing capital gains with Hitler invading Poland.

The United States maintained this hostility towards any alternative to capitalism throughout the Cold War. Back then it was all part of opposing the Soviet Union and its, supposed, world-wide expansionist agenda. There was a term for it–containment. Examining declassified documents of the Cold War reveals that it was actually the threat of a good example that had US planners scared shitless. By this idea of a good example, I mean any country that freely chooses socialism through elections and then pursues economic and foreign policies independent of the US. Here’s Henry Kissinger perfectly expressing this fear our elite had that people in another country would chose an economic system different than the Washington Consensus.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” 

Noam Chomsky examined this elite fear of a good example in Deterring Democracy.

“In the book, Chomsky explores the idea that the US is the only remaining world superpower that works to maintain its dominance, even ruthlessly employing violence such as outright invasions and overthrowing governments pursuing independent economic policies. He also discusses the large difference between public opinion on the Cold War, establishment American educated opinion and reality.

What’s important to note is that when the Soviet Union ceased to be, US foreign policy didn’t change. This calls into question the rational for US behavior during the Cold War. Supposedly we had to do all this horrible things and support all those murderous dictators in Third-World countries or else the Soviets would take over the world.

Cuba is the best example of how far US planners were willing to go to prevent the threat of a good example–60 years of sanctions, terrorist attacks and attempted assassinations–all to demonstrate the folly of pursuing policies that Uncle Sam found threatening. These policies have spanned more than five decades, from the launching of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, to the numerous U.S.-organized assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, to the blowing up of a jetliner and other terrorist attacks from Cuban exiles operating out of the United States.

This hostility to an alternative to US controlled corporate capitalism has intensified since the demise of the USSR. During the Cold War, the US had to at least pretend to value nonaligned countries in the Third World. The US also maintained domestic policies that benefitted the majority of working and middle class Americans as a counter to Soviet propaganda that depicted capitalism as only benefitting the wealthy.

Almost makes one pine for the good old days of the Cold War.

Many Americans are starting to realize that they are now viewed as the enemy. Under  neoliberalism, policies carried out against Third World countries have been imported, while vital government social programs are shredded.

This segues into economic and foreign policies where there’s the same hostility to the threat of a good example. Want to pursue policies that benefit the majority rather than the 1%? Too bad. Want to use the Fed to enact fiscal policies that put Americans back to work rather than austerity? Too bad. Want to spend less on war and more on education and public health?

You know the answer.

You see this fear of a good example domestically with the portrayal of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as some sort of bomb throwing anarchists that yearn to create a communist gulag. This nascent attempt to transform the Democratic party back to an entity that represents middle and working class Americans rather than another neoliberal party that represents the 1%, is viewed with hysteria.

“With Washington already broken, the last thing we need is a left-wing version of the tea party,” Delaney wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published online Thursday evening. “But I am worried about where some of the loudest voices in the room could take the Democratic Party.”

Suddenly, everyone is freaking out about modest efforts by progressive Democrats to take their party back from the neoliberals. Again, any threat of an alternative is to be ruthlessly smashed. For an example, see this editorial in the New York Times. (One can only imagine what the Wall Street Journal is saying.)

“…it is important to note that Wehner seems to look back no further than our current era of neoliberalism, which started in the ’70s. This is very convenient for someone who wants to argue that the Democrats have gone too far to the left, but it is intellectually dishonest. If we were to include the preceding New Deal period, from FDR up until the early seventies, contemporary Democrats would suddenly seem rather centrist, and Clinton Democrats would be center-right on many issues. Bernie Sanders implied this much the other day, bringing up the top marginal tax rate of 90 percent under the “radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Looking back over the past century, it is quite clear that the Democrats have not suddenly become radically left, but that American politics as a whole have gone further to the right.”

These domestic policies favoring the 1%, pursued by both parties, are changing our country in a rather dramatic fashion, creating sub-classes of peoples with diminished rights. Here’s Bill Fletcher commenting on how neoliberalism creates winners and losers, with the losers increasingly viewed as superfluous.

“Neo-liberal capitalism, therefore, does not pretend to offer an idealistic vision of the future. There is no further sense of satisfying a collective future in which we are all in this together. Neither is there a sense that one can expect, even as a citizen, that one’s living standard will continue to exist, let alone improve. The elite, the common citizen, and the sub-citizen have all been in the process of being trained to measure and modify their expectations of life.”

This milieu is what I’ve taken to referring to as neofeudalism. Other writers have noticed it as well.

“America has fallen into neo-feudalism: A wealthy capital-owning class exists behind a servile class with no assets, and only a life of drudgery ahead of them. The master-servant relationship will only further degrade social trust and civic values. Americans can’t see themselves as equals in the political sphere when large portions are consigned to wait upon the whims of new aristocracy. Conservative politics relies on the middle class making a devil’s bargain, believing they have more in common with the rich than the poor. It won’t be long before that facade crumbles.”

Americans are starting to realize what a savage and unequal world the neoliberals have created. However, they’re also coming to realize that the chains that have been surreptitiously emplaced have precluded the possibility of a different world, an alternative to neoliberal capitalism, where people can be free to organize to make their lives better.

This threat of a good example must be destroyed at all costs.

Faced with the threat of a political uprising the ruling class would prefer that the unemployed dutifully remain on the job treadmill, keep their nose to the grindstone, and stay with the program. Because in doing so workers offer tacit acquiescence to existing political, economic, and social arrangements. To do otherwise might give the unwashed masses a chance to organize and consider alternatives. For the moneyed gentry of the 0.1% that could be truly dangerous.

I don’t like where this is headed. John F. Kennedy famously stated that: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

 

 

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What Are They Good For?

Posted on May 29, 2015 by camelotkidd

What’s the point of having two political parties that both represent corporations and the wealthy? 

My first post at Camelotkidd was entitled TINA,—“There is no Alternative,” proclaimed by Margaret Thatcher about the superiority of neoliberal capitalism. This phrase, uttered with such smug assurance always pissed me off. I wasn’t very old or sophisticated but I knew it was bullshit. I mean fuck! There are lots of alternatives. We’re talking about economics, which concerns people, who have been known to do things differently.

In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan introduced neoliberalism to the world. This economic system of unfettered markets was supposed to lead to freedom, prosperity and economic growth through deregulation, privatization and globalization. Since then there’s been a parallel media campaign informing us just how wonderful our market based life is, while at the same time insisting at the top of their lungs that there is no alternative to neoliberalism, and no alternative is needed.

Looking around at our world it’s clear that this promise has only been achieved for the very wealthy 1% and the corporations they control.

What Reagan and Thatcher did that was worse than their policies, which were horrible, was to move the opposition party rightward as well. Look at the Labor party in Britain and the Democratic party here. They become neoliberal and moved rightward, aping their conservative rivals. Even conservative pundit George Will grasped this essential shift in party dynamics saying–“This represents a transfer of wealth from labor to capital unprecedented in Americans history…If a Democrat can’t make something of that, what are Democrats for.”

The reality of two corporate parties means that vast segments of the American population have become effectively disenfranchised, with little or no say in critical economic and foreign policies. We’ve now had 30 years of these policies carried out by Republicans and Democrats, with the practical effect of the US becoming an oligarchy, with a fig leaf of democracy. And, even this small bit of democracy is under assault.

“I’m talking about the myriad ways that the super-rich control the political process — and in controlling the political process, both make themselves richer and give themselves even more control over the political process. Purging voter rolls. Cutting polling place hours. Cutting back on early voting — especially in poor districts. Voter ID laws. Roadblocks to voter registration — noticeably aimed at people likely to vote progressive. Questionable-at-best voter fraud detection software, which — by some wild coincidence — tends to flag names that are common among minorities. Eliminating Election Day registration. Restricting voter registration drives. Gerrymandering — creating voting districts with the purpose of skewing elections in your favor.”

About this disenfranchisement. The salient point in all this is the fact that the so-called party of the people–the Democrats–are seemingly cool with the loss of their traditional supporters. I wonder why that is?  Maybe, it’s because the Democrats increasingly are funded by the same corporate and financial interests as are Republicans. The policies that both parties have recently embraced give a clue to their priorities. Here’s an example: Since the Wall-Street crash both parties have embraced fiscal conservatism because that’s what the rich people and corporations who fund their campaigns want.

Unfortunately, for us, here’s what you get with fiscal conservatism.

“The reality of fiscal conservatism in the United States is not cautious, evidence-based attention to which government programs do and don’t work. If that were ever true in some misty nostalgic past, it hasn’t been true for a long, long time. The reality of fiscal conservatism in the United States means slashing government programs, even when they’ve been shown to work. The reality means decimating government regulations, even when they’ve been shown to improve people’s lives. The reality means cutting the safety net to ribbons, and letting big businesses do pretty much whatever they want.” 

Here’s one of my favorite writers–Ian Welsh–making some basic organizational points about opposition parties. Ian says that to win from the left don’t offer up Republican-lite. Offer a real alternative to neo-liberalism.

“Therefore your job, as a left-winger, right-winger, or whatever, is to keep control of that party. This takes precedence over winning the most immediate election.  Winning by becoming a lite version of the other ideology does not serve you. Having the second (or every) party be neo-liberal is not in the interests of anyone but neo-liberals.”

Going forward, progressives either need to take over the Democratic party, or kill it and form a political party that offers an alternative to neoliberalism.

Update: Bernie Sanders is running for President as an avowed socialist, but the language he’s using is how Democrats used to speak.

“Sanders’ language is important here. You’ll note that he does not actually use the term “redistribution” of wealth. That’s because the term “redistribution” implies that the status quo, in which wealth is stacked at the top, is the natural order of things. The status quo is simply one of various possible distributions of wealth as determined by the current set of laws governing the country. Prior to Reagan, there was a different set of policies that led to a different distribution of wealth — strong labor rights, higher, more prohibitive marginal tax rates on the very wealthy, and so forth. As Sanders says, it’s not about “redistributing” wealth — it’s about recalibrating the distribution to one that was better. His challenge in appealing to voters will be decades of free-market agitprop that’s conditioned lower- and middle-income people to believe that policy directly challenging the super-wealthy’s right to be super-wealthy would mark the end of human civilization, and the death of God.”

 

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Blood On Their Hands

Posted on May 22, 2015 by camelotkidd

Republicans who voted to cut funding to Amtrak in the wake of the fatal crash have blood on their hands. These types of train crashes happen because cuts to funding translate into cuts to maintenance, leading to accidents that kill people. It’s just inevitable. Not if but when.

“The death toll from Tuesday’s Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia is now at seven and is expected to rise. About a dozen passengers are still missing. Authorities now say the train was traveling at about 106 miles per hour, more than double the speed limit, as it headed into a steep curve. National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said the accident would have been preventable if Amtrak had installed positive train control technology on that section of track. Just hours after the crash, the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee rejected a Democratic amendment to offer $825 million to speed up positive train control implementation. In addition, the committee voted to cut Amtrak’s budget by $250 million.” 

I’ve been writing about public infrastructures importance since forever, a lonely voice in the wilderness arguing against privatization of the commons and touting the importance of government spending on public infrastructure in the effort to create a new green economy. Judging by the vote on train safety, instead of moving forward on infrastructure, we’re falling backwards. In fact, this could be part of a cynical plan to underfund Amtrak with the ultimate aim of privatization.

Many of our legislators are captured by corporate interests, who provide them with bountiful campaign contributions. In other countries, they call that sort of thing bribery, but here it’s just free speech.

“The chief sponsor of the bipartisan bill delaying the safety technology mandate, Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, has accepted more than $290,000 in campaign contributions from the railroad industry during his career — the fifth-highest tally in the Senate, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a campaign finance watchdog group. The Association of American Railroads — which counts private railroad companies and Amtrak as members — backed Blunt’s legislation to delay the mandate.”

Money is only part of the equation. Ideology drives much of the antipathy towards public mass transportation. Most lawmakers come from rural or suburban districts where the car is king and roads are sacrosanct. Mass transportation is viewed as something that urban residents (you know, those people) use rather than real Americans who drive automobiles. This ideology is backed up with cold hard cash that’s used to fund think tanks which provide intellectual justification for the present carbon based economy, including a car based transportation system.

“In an editorial titled “How Two Billionaires Are Destroying High Speed Rail in America,” Mike Vainisi observes that the push against public mass transit is being led by a think tank called the Reason Foundation, which is funded by the notorious Koch brothers.The Koch brothers’ $44 billion fortune comes largely from Koch Industries, an oil and gas conglomerate.That means they have a vested interest in those gas-guzzling single-rider vehicles that are mass transit’s competitors, the cars and trucks that use the roads that are heavily subsidized by the federal government.”

This conflict over transportation choices goes to the heart of the so-called red state–blue state conflict. I believe that the true divide is a rural vs urban one rather than a state vs state divide. The battle over infrastructure spending also reflects an unspoken economic argument between a green participatory economy that could work for the majority of Americans vs a old carbon economy that works for a few powerful oligarchs and is destroying our world.

To do this it’s important to not only maintain our infrastructure, but to build new infrastructure to move into a 21st century economy. The US spends a pittance on infrastructure compared to the rest of the developed world. We wonder endlessly why China is outpacing the US in GNP, but examining spending on infrastructure provides a clue. The US spends 2.5 % on infrastructure, while China spends 9%.

The US economy is captured by special interests, like the Koch brothers, who want to wring every dollar out of the old carbon based economy. Witness our energy and transportation policies. Supporting coal, oil and natural gas but not solar and wind and funding cars and roads but not rail and bike paths.

Once again the old carbon economy trumps a modern green one.

This goes to the heart of political-economy. Who gets what, and who pays the costs for these decisions.

Examining transportation policies exposes our deeply dysfunctional political system. For when we propose spending on infrastructure we run into the familiar argument of government as useless and the deep seated belief that private business can do anything the government can, only better. We’ve now endured a generation of these politicians waging an cynical  war on the common good by defunding and sabotaging government while at the same time decrying it as useless. And our timorous media, so fearful of being described as liberal, has repeatedly failed to sound the alarm at this epic act of vandalism. There’s also the decades long tax revolt of America’s wealthy and their allies–an entire cohort of conservative lawmakers whose entire purpose is cutting the taxes of rich people–full stop.

Again, and I can’t say this often enough, our elite don’t care about our infrastructure because that would mean taxing them.

And, so more of us must die.

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Hearts and Minds

Posted on May 16, 2015 by camelotkidd

At a party the other day a male relative repeated a familiar sentiment–“Government is the problem. We don’t need any government except the military.” Everyone around him kind of nodded and the party continued. Meanwhile, I wanted to bang my head against the door frame, repeatedly. The fact that this lazy libertarian meme has gained such acceptance is deeply disheartening.

Conservatives have won the battle of the hearts and minds with this simple idea of government as the problem. The role the federal government plays is extremely complicated and it depends on which part of the government they’re describing, so it’s impossible to counter argue this without going into extensive detail.  Meanwhile, peoples eyes glaze over and the conservative argument has triumphed again.

This libertarian/conservative narrative that government is the enemy has been years in the making, a triumph of business propaganda. It used to be conventional wisdom that federal government and its social programs helped the average American. Not anymore. Meanwhile, the federal government has changed dramatically in ways not really understood by the same average American. During the long post war economic boom a strong federal government helped ensure a more equal contest between workers and corporations. This concept has been turned on its head. Instead of serving the interests of the vast majority, the federal government has increasingly been subverted into serving corporate interests and their wealthy shareholders.

Libertarians/conservatives claim to hate a vast bureaucratic federal government and to pine for small simple state, however conservatives are only against some parts of the government. As the guy at the party articulated, they are firmly behind the neoconservative imperial project, with unlimited military spending. And, as the comments following the uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson demonstrate, conservatives really, really like the police. Conservatives are, after all, authoritarian and reactionary. The modern conservative project in the US has essentially been about reducing taxes of rich people. They basically hate any government regulation that gets in the way of profits, with an almost pathological hatred of taxes levied against their heroic job creators.

So what factors besides business propaganda changed the attitudes of Americans about the role that the federal government played in their lives? Examining modern US history it’s clear that what changed this was the Civil Right Act of 1964. White people were cool with the federal government taxing and spending on programs that benefitted them. However, once African-Americans became the beneficiary of this federal largess, there was a backlash that was expertly harnessed to pursue conservative policies.

1964 was a pivotal year for the rise of modern conservatism. This was, of course, when the Civil Rights Act passed, and outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and ended the racial segregation that had existed for so long in the South. To southerners, this was an enormous betrayal by the Democratic party, especially from President Lyndon Johnson, who was himself a Southern Democrat. The federal government had overstepped in many minds, and this was an opening for the small government conservatives to once again capture the minds of common working class people.

In a truly opportunistic fashion, the Republican Party decided to exploit the racial fears and prejudices of much of the populace, and the Southern Strategy was born. State’s rights had been trampled on by the federal government, so the thinking went, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater ran an election based on anti-New Deal and states’ rights policies. His coded racism was successful, and it earned the votes from five southern states and his own, though he lost every other state to Johnson. Though not as aggressively conservative as Goldwater, Richard Nixon pursued a similar strategy 1968, and won all of the former confederate states, turning the south into the solid Republican territory that it remains today.”

My friend Rick Perlstein has written eloquently about this divide and rule strategy pursued by our shameless conservative leaders, including Ronald Reagan, who opened his campaign for president in 1980 at the Neshoba County Fair, near where 3 civil rights activists were murdered in 1964. This opportunistic racism that has been used to encourage working class whites to vote against their own self interests.

At the same time, conservatives have changed the way that the federal government operates with their pathological insistence on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. This has led to the cutting of popular programs, and a shift of the tax burden onto the middle-class, causing more anger at the federal government, leading to more calls for tax cuts. Wash, rinse, repeat. Meanwhile, other changes in policies and especially in federal tax code have encouraged the offshoring of well paying jobs to third world countries with no regulations and cut rate labor costs, by US corporations who fund our legislators. These very same legislators then turn around and preach austerity and cutbacks for the rest of us.

No wonder the average American looks at the federal government with horror.

Meanwhile, conservatives have insisted that to bring about widespread prosperity the government just needs to get out of the way of heroic businessmen and their corporations, who will then create millions of jobs.

However, it’s been 40 years attempting this theory of “trickle down” and the results are in.

“Beneficiaries of low taxes and deregulation desperately want to believe that “trickle-down” works, or at least to convince middle America that it works. They want to believe, against all logic, that lower taxes mean more tax revenue. 

All this in the face of mountains of data disproving their supply-side ideas. As far back as1984 the Treasury Department concluded that most tax cuts lose revenue. More recent studies by Saez et al. and by the Economic Policy Institute found no connection between tax rates and economic growth, and Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva determined that the optimal tax rate could be over 80 percent. 

There is also hard evidence that cutting taxes on the rich fails to stimulate job creation, and that raising taxes on the rich has the opposite, beneficial effect. The facts come from Kansas and Minnesota. Despite early optimism by trickle-down adherents, tax cuts in Kansas have been disastrous, leading to revenue losses, cutbacks in education and health care, and sluggish job growth. In Minnesota, on the other hand, tax increases on the rich have led to higher wages, low unemployment, and rapid business growth. “

This debate about what role the federal government should play is ongoing. Not just between the liberals and conservatives and Democrats and Republicans, but also between factions within the Democrat Party as the argument over the TPP between President Obama and Senator Warren illustrates. A huge unspoken component of the argument between the Democrats is due to the fact that the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party has embraced the same sort of trickle-down economic theory as the Republicans, where policies are crafted to benefit corporations with the idea that this will also benefit workers.

That these polices only benefit corporate CEO’s and the wealthy shareholders is never mentioned. Both parties exist to service the 1% with the policies they pursue, with the Republicans more upfront about it. So, for instance, with President Obama and the neoliberal Democrats we get platitudes about how great for workers and the environment these new and improved trade treaties will be. In fact, the TPP isn’t really a trade agreement as much as the formalization of corporate power through supranational tribunals and patent protections. The TPP will be also be horrible for workers and the environment.

We desperately need to birth a new political-economy that puts Americans back to work. An activist federal government could aid this effort immensely. Building out a public infrastructure, breaking up monopolies, taxing billionaires and vast family fortunes, subsidizing renewable energy, providing free health care and education are all good and noble projects a government that worked for us rather than for corporations could undertake.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has recently outlined a progressive manifesto. but this is just the beginnings of a long and arduous task ahead of us. Our present rulers will not go without a fight.

In the meantime, I remembered some simple counter arguments to this idea that government is evil. Next time someone repeats this argument just ask them if they like clean water, or clean air, or healthy food. Or if they enjoy driving on well maintained roads, etc. You get the idea. Even in its captured state of subservience to corporate interests the federal government still manages to make our lives better.

Update: Here’s a great example of some horrible bipartisan federal policy that will make our lives worse.

“The Trade Adjustment Assistance Act, sponsored by Rep. David Reichert (R-Wash.), would rely on $700 million in reduced Medicare spending in 2024 to pay for [sic] healthcare coverage and other benefits for workers who lose coverage because of any agreements negotiated under fast-track trade authority sought by President Barack Obama.”

 

 

 

 

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Let’s Get Ready to Rumble

Posted on April 30, 2015 by camelotkidd

We saw Jane Goodall the other night as part of a university lecture series. Her visit was controversial because she wanted to talk about the danger of GMO’s as well as her signature topic of chimpanzees. Goodall has been touring with Stephen Drucker, author of Altered Genes, Twisted Truth, a book detailing how GMO corporations have, “subverted science, corrupted government and systematically deceived the public.” Dr. Goodall wrote the forward to the book, describing it as one of the most important works of the last 50 years.

Altered Genes, Twisted Truth is the result of more than 15 years of intensive research and investigation by Druker, who came to prominence for initiating a lawsuit against the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that forced it to divulge its files on GM foods. Those files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 only because the FDA:

• Covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers.
• Lied about the facts.
• And then violated federal food safety law by permitting these foods to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing.

I was planning on writing about GMO’s and how the corporations pushing them have followed a familiar template to bring dangerous products to market. However, the battle between the two factions of the Democratic party over the TPP is far more pertinent. Besides, the two stories are related as you will see.

The fight between President Obama and Senator Warren involves the debate over the TPP (Trans-Pacific-Partnership). Obama is pushing Congress to grant him fast track authority to negotiate this treaty. Senator Elizabeth Warren is opposing the TPP. She wrote in the Washington Post that the TPP, “would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court.”

Scores of such cases already have been brought under the another so-called trade treaty–the WTO. Senator Warren explained that

“recent cases include a French company that sued Egypt because Egypt raised its minimum wage, a Swedish company that sued Germany because Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, and a Dutch company that sued the Czech Republic because the Czechs didn’t bail out a bank that the company partially owned… Philip Morris is trying to use ISDS to stop Uruguay from implementing new tobacco regulations intended to cut smoking rates.”

ISDS is an acronym that means Investor-State Dispute Settlements. It would create a system of private, international tribunals through which corporations (i.e., “investors”) could sue our sovereign governments to overturn laws that might reduce the level of corporate profits that they expect to make. These corporate tribunals are a big part of the TPP and why there is such resistance to it by those such as Senator Warren.

The ISDS aspect of the TPP really exemplifies the undemocratic nature of these so-called trade treaties. In fact, rather than a trade treaty, we should view the TPP as what it truly is–a corporate coup.

And, here’s where we double back to the original story about the dangers of GMO’s. The Trans-Pacific-Partnership and its evil step-sister, the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) would force European and Asian nations that have resisted GMO’s to allow them or else face the corporate tribunals of the ISDS.

Somewhere George Orwell is taking notes.

The fight over the TPP and TTIP represents a larger narrative. There is a battle going on for the soul of the Democratic party. Since President Clinton, the neoliberal, corporate Democrats have been ascendant, but with the middle-class in limbo, corporate profits and CEO compensation sky high and wages stagnating, there is a feeling out there that something is desperately wrong and moreover that change is required.

This contest will be between the traditional Democratic constituents–labor, environmental groups, consumer advocates, minorities, gays and lesbians–and the Wall Street and high tech elites the party has been tapping lately to fund their campaigns. It’s also largely about neoliberalism–the new religion of Democratic elites. Bill Clinton was a neoliberal, so is Obama and Hillary. Neoliberal’s believe that globalization is inevitable and benign and that the revolution in information technology is fast democratizing commerce and politics. On that note, neoliberal’s love free trade, privatization and deregulation. They also claim that the US is just like a household and must balance its budget through austerity.

Recently this wing of neoliberal Democrats has been challenged by Senator Warren on several fronts. She is joined by Senator Brown and Sanders, and the Democratic Progressive caucus, including Alan Grayson.

I’m with the progressives in this fight. The Democratic party as represented by the Clinton’s and President Obama is not much different than traditional Republicans of yore. We desperately need a political party to articulate an alternative to the type of race to the bottom, neoliberal capitalism that’s destroying our world. We need an economy that is smaller, more democratic and participatory, and especially more sustainable. We need a commons that isn’t privatized but one that is managed for all as to reduce costs for small businesses. We need to reclaim our small-d democracy, where we are citizens with rights rather than consumers with needs. We need a civic renewal where there is a sense that we’re all in this together rather than the feeling that only rich people matter.

Right now the rules are rigged against workers and the middle-class in favor of corporations and the wealthy. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich describes this reality, and how so called trade agreements like the TPP exasperate this dynamic.

“Workers worried about keeping their jobs have been compelled to accept this transformation without fully understanding its political roots. For example, some of their economic insecurity has been the direct consequence of trade agreements that have encouraged American companies to outsource jobs abroad. Since all nations’ markets reflect political decisions about how they are organized, so-called “free trade” agreements entail complex negotiations about how different market systems are to be integrated. The most important aspects of such negotiations concern intellectual property, financial assets, and labor. The first two of these interests have gained stronger protection in such agreements, at the insistence of big U.S. corporations and Wall Street. The latter—the interests of average working Americans in protecting the value of their labor—have gained less protection, because the voices of working people have been muted.” 

This fundamental disparity in political power is the elephant in the room. Along with labor unions, the Democratic party used to represent average Americans in the undeclared class war between labor and capital. No longer. The Democrats have become the other party of capital. Professor Reich describes what this has meant for the average American worker.

“The more basic problem is that the market itself has become tilted ever more in the direction of moneyed interests that have exerted disproportionate influence over it, while average workers have steadily lost bargaining power—both economic and political—to receive as large a portion of the economy’s gains as they commanded in the first three decades after World War II. As a result, their means have not kept up with what the economy could otherwise provide them. To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the “free market” is to disregard the power of large corporations and the financial sector, which have received a steadily larger share of economic gains as a result of that power. As their gains have continued to accumulate, so has their power to accumulate even more.”

Obama has been described as a socialist by the Republicans, but he’s quite conservative. In fact progressives who wonder why the Republican party has become so deranged need to look at their own history. When President Bill Clinton moved to the right and appropriated many conservative policies the Republicans moved even further to the right as a response. Now they’re way out in crazy land.

The fight over the TPP addresses Obama’s legacy. The more dependent politicians become on their financial backers, the greater is the willingness of such politicians and their appointees to reorganize the market to the benefit of these moneyed interests. Obama wants the Clinton treatment when he retires. And to get that he has to get some important things done that the billionaires and corporations funding his retirement and historical museum want.

Obama, by this decision to fight like a wildcat for the TPP is showing his true colors.

“According to the generally progressive Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio (who, along with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders is one of the Senate’s three leading opponents of Mr. Obama’s proposed international-trade treaties), President Obama has been lobbying Senators more insistently and more intensely on getting them to grant him “Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority” to ram these treaties through, than on any other single issue since Obama first became President in 2009. No issue, not even Obamacare nor any other, has been as important to Obama as is his getting signed into law the TPP and TTIP. It would certainly be the culmination of his Presidency if he succeeds. It would be his crowning achievement. He and his heirs will be amply rewarded if he succeeds; and that’s apparently what he really cares about.”

The brawl over the TPP will have huge implications for the Democratic party and the country going forward.

So, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to rumble.

 

 

 

 

 

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Stupid Rich

Posted on April 24, 2015 by camelotkidd

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the Great Gatsby, in 1925, describing in lurid detail the tail end of America’s first Gilded Age. It was a cautionary tale of vast wealth, and the excess and decadence that came with it. Set in the 1920’s before the stock market crash, the story, for me, has always been a warning of what happens when a society hands the keys over to the stupid rich, who promptly drive it straight into the ditch.

It’s not a good thing when the stupid rich manage a countries affairs. Examining past empires bears this out. Not all rich people are stupid, of course, but when you pursue short term policies that benefit the wealthy above all else, like cutting taxes, public investment and much-needed services, all in accordance with conservative economic dogma, you get ruinous results for everyone else.

It has become common wisdom since Reagan that cutting the taxes of our heroic job creators will bring about a plethora of jobs for the rest of us lucky duckies. The evidence is in and the avalanche of jobs has failed to materialize. It turns out that cutting taxes on the rich only allows them to buy up our political system, ensuring more of the same policies. In fact, maybe the whole purpose of this decades long economic con was simply to cut taxes on the wealthy, full stop.

Mission accomplished, as they say.

The relentless crusade against taxes paid by the rich has led directly to the policies of austerity, including cuts to government programs that benefit the poor and the middle class, leaving them faced with decreased services and more expenses.

Want an example of stupid rich policies? Take a look at Kansas, the wholly owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers. Governor Sam Brownback followed the conservative, trickle down economic playbook to the letter, in slashing state income taxes on the wealthiest state citizens–a move supported by supply-side icon Arthur Laffer. What were the results?

“Justly dubbed a “failed experiment” for the massive deficits it has generated, the experiment also produced only lackluster job growth.”

Meanwhile, Brownback is attempting to balance his state’s budget by slashing programs that benefit the most needy residents. Salon writer Brittney Cooper, absolutely kills it in describing the results of these punitive state policies.

“Conservative disdain for the poor has reached new heights with the recent passage of the HOPE Act in Kansas earlier this month. This bill, signed into law by Governor Sam Brownback, prohibits those who receive TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) from using funds to go to movies, to go swimming, to go to theme parks, to gamble, to visit strip clubs or bars.”

Sometimes I have to stop and admire the sheer evil genius of America’s divide and rule overlords, utilizing class and race, when it come time to gin up the stereotyping and hatred of the other in their pursuit of austerity.

Years of media saturation in victim blaming has only conditioned Americans to see themselves as responsible for their lack of economic success in America. But, this blame is always shifted on to someone less powerful. Not only is there a hatred of the poor in America, but there is a sort of quiet desperation among the middle class to keep up appearances. Here, Miss Cooper touches on the details of this insidious pressure.

“Those of us solidly situated in the middle class work harder and harder with less to show for it.  That can only be justified at a psychological level if there are clear demarcations of value. So when we look at the poor, their lives need to look appreciably more difficult than ours, in order for our lives to look like middle-class lives.”

It’s a beautiful, thing for the owners. We’re so busy fighting each other, while they’re making out like bandits. Like I said, pure genius. There was a class war but it’s all over now, and the owners are finishing off the wounded workers.

You lost.

Now might be a good time to learn about the enemy, you know, Sun Tzu and all.

Here’s Yves Smith, at Naked Capitalism doling out more Oriental wisdom about America’s 1%.

“Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom was learning to call things by their proper names. The time is long past to kid ourselves about the nature of the ruling class in America and start describing it accurately, as an oligarchy.”

Much of this new oligarchy involves what economist Simon Johnston calls the “capture” of the state by the wealthy and the corporations they control. Johnson wrote the definitive article on the capture of the US by this home grown oligarchy, called The Quiet Coup.

“Every crisis is different, of course….But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar….Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise…

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again)….But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.”

Just saying.

Update: Here’s Michael Lind with a wee suggestion–

How to demolish the oligarchy in 3 easy steps

 

 

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Manufacturing Acquiescence

Posted on April 17, 2015 by camelotkidd

We live in a second Gilded Age where fabulous wealth and grinding poverty exist uneasily. In this milieu, American elites have largely come to rely on advertising, public relations and propaganda, rather than force, as a means of controlling a restless and sometimes hostile populace. Of course, the power of the state deployed daily through police shootings remains a constant reminder of what could happen if you resist, or if you’re superfluous, or if you’re the wrong color.

I’m reading Steve Fraser’s new book, The Age of Acquiescence, where he asks the provocative question–“Why, until the sudden eruption of ­OWS — a​ flare‑up that died down rather quickly­ — was​ the second Gilded Age one of acquiescence rather than resistance?”

Fraser examines the first Gilded Age and comes to the conclusion that conditions for workers were remarkably different from our present neoliberal order. He makes clear that much of the strife that marked America’s rapid industrialization at the end of the 19th Century was sparked by the sheer alienness of early capitalism. Did capitalism–“so​ deeply disturb traditional ways of life that for several generations it seemed intolerable to many of those violently uprooted by its onrush? Did that shattering experience elicit responses, radical yet proportionate to the life‑or‑death threat to earlier, cherished ways of life and customary beliefs?”

Before the onrush of industrial capitalism in the wake of the Civil War many Americans lived on farms or in small towns within a network of small craftsman and merchants. Many were bitter that capitalism took much of that away. Workers in the first Gilded Age especially chafed at the loss of autonomy, something we confront today with a similar lack of control amidst our market driven society.

Fraser asks if today Americans have become complacent because a market system is all they have ever known. Perhaps this market based system of values has become something that’s just there, like the weather.

The modern division of American workers into their own little units figures prominently in Fraser’s analysis of the differences in the two gilded ages. Think about how Federal-Express requires their drivers to be sub-contrators, for instance. At the onset of the industrial revolution workers labored together in a great mass. There was an obvious working class and a capitalist class. It was also easier to organize into unions to represent workers interests. In fact, Fraser takes great pains to lament the loss of unions in the last 30 years and directly points to this lack of worker representation to help explain the gross inequality so visible in the US today.

There are, however, some other reasons for this modern acquiescence. Since the first Gilded Age, the American elite has spent a lot of time and effort into manufacturing this acquiescence. The effort at softer control began in ernest with the Creel Committee, organized by the Wilson Administration to whip Americans into a war hysteria prior to the US entry into WWI. On April 13, 1917, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to promote the war domestically while publicizing American war aims abroad. Prominent members of the committee included, Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, and Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmond Freud. All went on to play significant roles in the burgeoning industries of advertising and public relations. Berneys even wrote a book entitled Propaganda.

Bernays described propaganda as “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, examine how the American elite are able to employ advertising, public relations and propaganda in order to control the populace. They describe a propaganda model to illustrate how the modern US corporate media operates to control the narrative. It is the media’s function to “amuse, entertain and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.”

This subtle, 24/7 propaganda effort by the corporate media goes a long way in explaining how this idea of a market based system of morality came to be accepted as completely natural. It is, after all, a system of morality that we’re talking about. The American model of capitalism is depicted as the pure embodiment of morality, where every one, rich or poor, gets exactly what they deserve, and any efforts to ameliorate this unequal outcome violates this sacred economic value system.

Advertisers in the US have figured out how to sell any number of products–from soap, to cigarettes, to nuclear power, to GMO’s, to the ultimate accessory item–your very own politician. Above all else, what they’re really selling is acquiescence to the market based value system.

Who doesn’t remember, in the wake of 9/11, President Bush admonishing Americans to be calm and go shopping.

I don’t know about you, but for me, there has to be something more. Being a consumer within a market based value system is different from being a citizen within a democratic republic, a world in which people participate in the political decision-making and in related economic decisions.

The crisis facing America isn’t just economic, it’s political and moral. The American people have become atomized, unable to imagine a collective response. They’ve forgotten their rights and freedoms as citizens and desperately need to reclaim a language that allows them to articulate a moral vision of a world where value isn’t just ascribed to the wealthy. Right now, at every level of our society, there exists the idea that only people with money matter.

This is the notion of neofeudalism that I’ve been raging against, where the wealthy have used the economic system of neoliberalism to largely reestablish the class structure of the first Gilded Age with all the bowing and scraping. After all, it’s not enough for the wealthy in America to have all the money, what they really want is aristocracy, with all the trappings.

I’ve said this before but it needs to be repeated–Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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