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“Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” These lines from schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind open Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, which satirized the quantitative ethics of 19th century utilitarians. The simple premise of utilitarianism pioneered by Jeremy Bentham was that an action or policy should be judged by a single criterion: whether or not it contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It can feel, living in the early 21st century, that our leaders are operating on a principle of anti-utility, seeking the greatest happiness of the numerical few. The Washington establishment would dispute the truth of this claim, but then, as three examples will suggest, elites answer to a separate reality. To paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, let me tell you about the very rich. Their facts are different from yours and mine.
The C-Suite and Main Street
Earlier this month, March job figures coughed up a slim volume of 85,000 new jobs, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 7.6 percent from 7.7 percent in February. As happens every month in this comical pantomime, the facts are shotgunned into the public consciousness by venerable propagandists like The New York Times and Washington Post, and the semi-articulate cable networks. The State Department then steps forward to impart a few rosy sentiments, although providing the necessary cautionary language lest our optimism overwhelm us.
The positivity of the official interpretation of the jobs report was belied by the 663,000 more citizen-consumers who slipped behind the black curtain of idle despair (47 percent of them women), not even bothering to seek work. According to Mike Gimbel, an analyst for socialist weekly Workers World, adding the decrease in the active labor force to the number of workers with insufficient part-time work, the unemployment rates skyrockets north of 20 percent. Nearly 90 million American adults are now out of the labor market, a new threshold of despair. (That’s nine times the number of unemployed at the height of the Great Depression, when there were only 123 million people in the country.) The jobs report complemented the specter of the sequester or a grand bargain still swirling overhead, promising to slice four trillion dollars from the economy over the next decade.
Yet a recent Financial Times survey of 400 global senior executives reports new optimism among business leaders, who project economic and industry improvements in the next six months. This peculiar optimism of corporate leadership, even amid the collapsing scenery of American society, is revealing on two levels. First, it evinces the degree to which Fortune 500s have uncoupled themselves from the American consumer market. The United States may be sliding toward Third World conditions, but expanding segments of Brazil and China are racing toward First World abundance. These markets, not ours, have laid claim to the attentions of corporate profiteers. What does it matter to the multinational if median income in the U.S. has climbed a mere $59 since 1966, when Brazil’s per capita income has nearly doubled since 1999? One salient example: Nearly seventy percent of Coca-Cola’s revenue comes from outside the U.S. In the first quarter of 2013, its international sales volume grew three times as fast as its American volume. Over the next five years, Coke plans to spend $30 billion on international expansion in China, India, Russian, and the Middle East. So long as one continent is in the ascendant, the fall of another is of little interest.
Second, the survey elicits the degree to which Wall Street financial markets have untethered themselves from Main Street industry. Industrial manufacturing has been in heavy decline as a percentage of American GDP, from a peak of 34 percent in the fifties to about 11 percent now. Perhaps as corollary, the GDP share held by the financial sector is on a steady uptick, now over eight percent and rising, while the total turnover of financial markets is many times our GDP. Derivatives, exempted from tepid Dodd Frank controls, are being purchased in bulk every month by the Fed, which is also holding interest rates at zero, ensuring banks can borrow for nothing, swivel on a dime and fleece credit card desperados at 18% a month. Why should corporate leaders care that it is slowly gaining a huge reserve army of American labor, to use Karl Marx’s term, which it can one day play off against some arriviste working class in a BRIC country?
Madison Ave and the 90 Million
Much like the heady delirium in the boardroom, these shadow facts too infrequently penetrate the optimistic consciousness of our vast marketing industry. As oil pipelines hemorrhage and radioactive waters sieve into the soil, we are admonished by a new nationally broadcast ad for the Acura RXL: “You wake up in your luxury bed and slide out of your luxury sheets. You get into your luxury shower and dry off with your luxury towel. You put on your luxury suit and your luxury watch. You grab your luxury coffee from your luxury coffee maker, and add some luxury sugar. You step out of your luxury house and step into your luxury car…which makes everything else seem ordinary.” Another class of commercials trots out sonorous-voiced actors like Tommy Lee Jones to lean on farm fences and talk about retirement planning, while Matt Damon’s soothing voice reminds how “common sense” is all we need to build a halcyon tomorrow. It always seems a healthy number of the wide-grinned retirees portrayed zooming down the California coast are minorities, often the African-Americans who lost half their wealth during the housing collapse.
What must the mass unemployed think as the television drones forth with this condescending drivel? The Boston Globe reports on a study by the Urban Institute that claims Generation X and Y—the two generations following the Boomers—have saved less than their parents did in their early adulthood: “Stagnant wages, diminishing job opportunities, and lost home values are behind the issue and have kept young Americans from saving even as the economy doubled from the early 1980s, the study found.”
The drear state of the economy is compound by what the young do to counteract it—take out loans. The Globe story notes, ‘’‘People in my generation are of the opinion that it’s OK to take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans,’’ said Young, who graduated in May 2012. ‘‘That puts them in debt right away.’’’ The article concludes that, with no savings, Gen X and Y will rely more on the social safety net, the very programs millionaires Barack Obama and John Boehner are so anxious to cut. But millionaires can afford to be utopian, hence the blandishments about the road to a stronger America.
If the actor in the Acura commercial were a genuine luxury guy living a genuine luxury life, and his address were placed on a title screen at the end of the ad, I suspect a large mob drawn from the 90 million unemployed would soon descend on his luxury house. As Obama rather imperiously told a frightened assembly of derivatives kingpins during the collapse, “I’m the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” Of course, the commercial is just another tawdry piece of condescension foisted on the masses from Madison Avenue, but it artlessly demonstrates the second disconnect in our storyline—between the media and the masses. The Acura RXL lists at $48,450. Average per capita debt is $47,500.
The White House and the Poor House
It was Freud who said that if you wanted to know human nature, simply reverse its clearest moral injunctions. If we are forbidden to steal, it is because we are thieves. If adultery is verboten, it is because we are covetous. By that measure, perhaps we can discern the aims of Washington by reversing the desires of the American public. (Much like we can find countries that receive the most American aid by seeking out the nations with the most egregious human rights abuses.)
Testing Freud’s formula bears some interesting results. According to relentlessly consistent polling numbers, we oppose cuts to social spending such as education and Social Security and favor national health insurance provided by the government. Yet the policies we receive from either wing of the Business Party are healthcare reform that will leave millions still uninsured (but usefully fined), higher defense spending, lower education spending, and aggressive interventions across the planet. Far less than half of Americans want to prioritize immigration and gun control, but these topics dominate media coverage. We want jobs and a strong economy before a level deficit. Yet we get an austerity package designed to slow the economy and job growth. Even though our paychecks have flatlined for forty years, and our schools are growing poorer and our prescriptions dearer. Even though sixty percent of the jobs created by the stimulus were part time, and the piddling median wage in 2011 was $26,965.
At a macro level, the Freudian formula works the same. The Journal of the Academy of Arts & Sciences recently reported on the disparity between public opinion and policy. In polling, large majorities have favored federal policies to cut greenhouse emissions, even supporting tax breaks for corporations that reduce emissions—a stance that reflects global consensus on the reality of climate change and the need to do something about it. In fact, 118 countries have set national targets for renewable energy (RET). As the formula predicts, the U.S. has no national renewable energy target, placing it on the regressive right of the global political spectrum.
While nearly two thirds of Americans favorable developing renewables over oil, gas, and coal, we churn ahead with oil, gas, and coal exploration and encourage states to draft their own environmental targets. Extraction is keeping the federal government too busy to deal with such peripheral concerns. Substitute your own favorite federal failing and watch the formula work for you. Rather than prosperity, austerity. Rather than due process, solitary confinement. Instead of higher wages for Main Street, higher earnings for Wall Street. In lieu of jobs, offshoring. Instead of substance, rhetoric.
Here lies our third disconnect, between government and the people. Like the Wall Street and Madison Avenue realities, individuals in the highest echelons of federal power are wildly prosperous, moving seamlessly between the precincts of the state and the serene towers of global enterprise. They are showered with the patronage of both while employed by either, such that the distinctions between the two become opaque and nominal. The goals are common—dominion. The profits are shared—the costs socialized. And the media continually rehabilitates the profile of power like the Soviets rehabbed victims of the gulag—ex post facto. The facts of life for the obscenely rich are not like the facts for the majority. They are doing fabulously. Witness the outpouring of mawkishness in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death. In her first decade in power, she cut taxes on the wealthy by half while the income of the poor plummeted by forty percent. Who penned those lavish encomiums to sit atop Thatcher’s grave? Who but the survivors?
Interesting that the quote from Fitzgerald, about the rich being different from the rest of us, was from a set of short stories called All the Sad Young Men, largely about the rich and the shimmering anomie of the world they inhabited. Yet if the surveys, media, and policies on offer are any indication, all the sad young men have shed their survivor’s guilt and moved on. Life is a fairy tale waiting to be bought. Darker realities, like the distant wail of an ambulance, hardly register anymore.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, strategist, and 17-year veteran of the communications industry. He lives and works in New York City and can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/30/divided-we-fall-a-tale-of-two-economic-realities/
This past week of economic news reveals both the ruthlessness of big finance capitalism on people and the planet and that people are working for alternative, more just and sustainable, solutions.
At the top of the list is more research on austerity. The Reinhart and Rogoff study relied on by advocates of austerity was proven to be false, so now we know that austerity does not work in practice or in theory. Furthermore, new research shows something even worse – austerity is killing people in the US and Europe. For example, HIV/AIDS has increased by 200% in Greece since 2011. There are also malaria outbreaks, shortages of essential medicines, loss of access to healthcare (5 million people in the US), an epidemic of drug abuse, one million cases of depression and 10,000 suicides since the recession.
Though Congress members are providing more money to end the flight delays that affect them and other wealthy travelers, they are not doing anything about lost unemployment, closure of Head Start programs, people lacking housing assistance and healthcare or cuts to meals on wheels. These choices are being made by the political elites that run the country for the elites of the country.
We also see the heartlessness of finance capitalism in the workplace. Americans are 270 times more likely to die in a workplace accident than from a terrorist attack, yet the Department of Homeland Security’s budget in 2012 was $47 billion, while OSHA’s budget was only $588 million.
The massive fertilizer plant explosion in Texas exposed the impact of these mistaken budget priorities. OSHA had not inspected the plant since 1985 when it found seven violations, five of them serious. The plant received a measly $30 fine and was not inspected again. The fertilizer company told the EPA that the risk of explosion was minimal. If the EPA had inspected, they would have found the company had no alarms, no sprinklers, no automatic shut-off valves and no firewall to isolate stockpiles of highly combustible materials. They also would have found immense amounts of explosive material. The Oklahoma City bomber used 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate to blow up the Federal Building. Compare that to the 540,000 pounds in storage in West, Texas. Inadequate funding resulted in lost lives and hundreds of injuries.
The decline of unions adds to this problem as evidenced in this report that found 73% of NYC construction deaths are at non-union worksites.
We also witnessed the impact of low-wage labor caused by the current global trade system that puts profits before people. The devastating building collapse in Bangladesh, where workers were pressured to work long hours and forced to enter the building in which exits were blocked, caused over 120 deaths, as these vivid pictures show.
Of course, low wage labor is a problem in the US as well. Les Leopold points out that ten hedge fund managers make us much as 196,000 nurses; and that one hour of work by a Wall Streeter takes 21 years of work for the rest of us. And, we saw this week how little Congress members care about the plight of US workers when only one member showed up at a congressional hearing on the long-term unemployed; and even when the embarrassing photo was tweeted, only a few more of the 19-member Joint Economic Committee joined the hearing.
All of this unfairness in the economy is pushing more and more people to look at worker owned coops. To assist those who are interested in co-ops, American Coop developed worker co-op start-up guides.
The dangers of big finance-based capitalism are also on display when it comes to our health. A report this week showed that the most widely used herbicide in the world, glyphosate or (Roundup), is linked to Parkinson’s, infertility and cancers. But, that is one of many examples of toxins in the air and water, in the walls of our homes and in our furniture. Poisons are in widespread use throughout our lives. In fact, this book shows that we are essentially guinea pigs for corporations that put profit over health. As more people become aware, across the country they are organizing to protect their health from unhealthy foods.
President Obama may not have realized it, but at a memorial service in West, Texas for the victims of the explosion, he showed how a health care system that puts profits ahead of health is a national tragedy when he said: “America needs towns that holds fundraisers to help folks pay the medical bills. . ..” Of course, if he merely improved and expanded Medicare to cover everyone, fundraisers would not be needed.
Already, our health has become even worse under Obama’s leadership. Research shows that austerity is hurting our health. In fact, cancer clinics are turning away patients and some are even closingbecause of the sequester. In addition, rising health care costs are keeping 43% of America’s working-age adults from going to the doctor. Health care has become so ugly in the United States that some describe it as sadism. As ObamaCare is implemented, things will get worse. Spending will increase for insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, but don’t worry because Congress is on it. They are holding secret bi-partisan meetings to exempt lawmakers and their staff from the requirements of ObamaCare. On The Real News Network we explain how ObamaCare will continue to lead to bankruptcies, un-insurance, under-insurance and increasing costs.
One of the greatest examples of profits over the health of people and the planet is the continued carbon-nuclear energy economy. Investors and the political elite are virtually rejoicing at the possibility of the US becoming the ‘United States of Arabia’ because of non-traditional oil and gas, e.g. tar sands, hydro-fracking and methane hydrate (methane gas from the oceans). Most predict there will be more renewable energy in our future, but there will continue to be a dominance of carbon fuels, especially methane gas (don’t fall for calling it “natural” gas). The environmental and health effects of methane gasare not being reported.
Last quarter Exxon’s profits rose, but the company so far has avoided paying for any of the damages caused by the massive oil pipeline spill in Arkansas because of a technicality. The12,000 barrels of the more dangerous tar sands crude oil, diluted bitumen, that were leaked are not classified as oil, and companies transporting bitumen in pipelines are not required to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.
Of course, a prized option on the corporate duopoly’s table is creating a carbon market for big finance, but a report this week shows cap and trade schemes don’t work. And, when countries try to do the right thing – switch to clean sustainable energy and create a green new deal, like India, which is working to create 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022 as well as local jobs – US business interests and the government use trade laws to try and stop them.
As the truth comes out, more people are taking action to create clean and sustainable energy. Ten cities are joining the fossil fuel divestment campaign and are taking their money out of carbon fuel stocks.Los Angles has announced it will end the use of coal by 2025 (unfortunately doing so in part by relying on methane gas). And, we have more good news. A report found that the US could end reliance on oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy by 2050 and become an economy based solely on solar, wind and other clean, sustainable energies. Other studies have found that a carbon-free/nuclear-free energy economy could be accomplished by 2030.
We know what the problems are, and that solutions to them exist. We must continue to stay informed so that we are not fooled by corporate media. And we must continue to work in our communities on real alternatives that are based on our values. This week on Clearing the FOG, we spoke to people who are doing just that. Jeff Dicken, Paul Glover and Edgar Cahn shared their work on alternative currencies and economies that redefine work and build resilient communities.
Kevin Zeese JD and Margaret Flowers MD co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC and on Economic Democracy Media, co-direct It’s Our Economy and are organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC. Their twitters are @KBZeese and @MFlowers8.
This article is based on a weekly newsletter for ItsOurEconomy.us. To sign up for the free newsletter, click here.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/01/putting-people-and-the-planet-before-profits/
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