Conservatism means more for the wealthy

A few weeks ago Harold Meyerson wrote about corporate America's chokehold on wages .  For Wisconsinites today is the day after the big recall elections.  If you woke up happy this morning, it probably means you're a republican and you support the ever widening gap between the rich and poor.

It's essential to understand that the conservative agenda has been very clearly spelled out.  They represent the wealthy because it is the wealthy who create jobs.  Obviously this is not an outright lie.  But it is not entirely true either.  The majority of large corporations in America are sitting on piles of cash.  They have no interest in hiring.

Apple's cash hoard is well known and the financial maneuvering of GE is also well known.  But less known are the entitlements garnered by Ron Johnson and Herb Kohl.  There is a very good reason why Sen Kohl remained in the Senate for as long as he did.  Likewise, there is a very good reason for Sen. Johnson to run for office.  The reason is simply greed for power and the right to bargain their own clout for business interests.

It is a sickness that turns people into dollar signs and government into a business.  We are living in the age of sickness that is being spread by the hordes of religious fundamentalists (conservatives).  It is a dangerous combination that mixes religion (vehemence) and politics (aggression).   Examples of the results of the wickedness of people who have mixed politics and religion are myriad (think Inquisition, Iran, Saudi Arabia, KKK).  It is precisely why the authors of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence argued for the separation of church and state.

GW Bush offered us an eight-year look at what a religious government might look like (two wars, special ops spread throughout the world).  Another religious lunatic in office could prove fatal.  It is not overly dramatic to envision a wacko christian (Texas' Perry, M. Bachmann) leading us headlong into WWIII on religious conviction alone.  (Lest we forget that Mr. Bush often spoke with god.  Anyone holding conversations with internal voices might find him/herself in a sanitarium.  But he/she would be quickly released as soon as the voice was identified as "God".)

It seems that there are very good indications that the religious right have matured to a refined state of insanity.  While they preach the word of god, they covet only for their self worth.

Yesterday was a perfect example.  The Darling - Pasch race was decided by the results in Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha counties.  The commonality is obvious.  Money.  They voted overwhelmingly for Darling for one reason.  The people of those communities believe they should pay less in taxes.

It is the finest commentary on the avarice running rampant in a broken capitalist society.  The people of Wisconsin have appointed selfish egomaniacs as representatives with the dire hope that these representatives will provide less services for the least among us.

Everything that has happened in Wisconsin this year indicates that we are moving toward a more privatized individualistic society built on paranoia and fear and designed to punish those born, by utter chance, into poverty.  On a personal level, it boils down to greed.  On macro level, it is sheer wickedness.

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Another indicator of our completely mucked up system is the health insurance costs that the average worker faces.  In one local company, 90% of the employee's cost is covered.  Dependents are not included.  United Health Care provides coverage.  Family coverage (the employee, spouse, child(ren)) costs $500 per pay period.  There are 26 pay periods in the year.  So, with only health coverage, not including dental, or co-pays, or the deductible, family coverage costs $13,000.  Add to that $50 per pay period for dental coverage ($14,300), and a $3000 deductible, which means that for a year's worth of family coverage would cost the employee $17,300.  Does that seem sane?  It's insane to think that this is what we have to pay for health coverage while Stephen Hemsley earns $20M a year.  

But for republicans and conservatives, Hemsley needs that money to create jobs.  Hemsley needs that money to buy a yacht and vacation in the Bahamas.  That's sick.

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Evidently any juror can be removed from a jury based on his/her profession.  Inside Higher Times reported that a professor in Nevada was removed from the jury by the DA because he was a professor and professors are liberal.

"Professors are notoriously liberal," the prosecutor said, according to the Supreme Court ruling, adding that "I just don’t like them on my juries, period."

Not surprisingly in these conservative times the Nevada Supreme Court upheld the appellate court's ruling that no unfair treatment was committed.

The precipice that Tony Judt writes about in "Ill Fares the Land" right before us and we are heading in.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
                                                   Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)

Judt's introduction is mindbogglingly brilliant:

Something is wrong with the way we live today.  For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.  We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.  We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good?  Is it fair?  Is it just?  Is it right?  Will it bring about a better society or a better world?  Those used to be the  political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.  We must learn once again to pose them.

And so here it is 2011 and the US dangles in the air suspended between the obstinate tea party and conspicuous consumption, while the bottom plunges deeper under.  Conservatives offer no solutions except privatization.  Liberals have no answers to the fundamentalist claims of ineptitude in big government.  As America careens into oblivion, shamed by China over our debt debate, look toward Canada, Germany, Finland, Norway, etc. as they recover from the global recession and we flounder in political deadlock.

As John Donne wrote,

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

Competition and Capitalism

I remember as a child watching the Wild America series seeing three female lions hunt a Wildebeest.  After they killed it, a male lion approached, scared the lionesses away, and started eating their kill.  In both instances, the killing and the stealing, the narrator intoned it was an example of the survival of the fittest.  The footage left an indelible picture in my mind of the fierce competition that exists in the world.

So it was that many of us were introduced to the ostensibly inherent presence of competition.  From the beginning of life, many of us, especially in the US, are taught that the key to success is to win at all costs.  As most Americans head off to school around the age of five, and quickly find that out competition is embedded in every activity from answering questions in class to being first in line.

This idea of competition stands as the centerpiece of the American capitalist machine that ingrains its mantra of rugged individualism and ambition as the certain path to success.  Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that competition is the result of self-interested individuals vying with other equally self-motivated individuals for accumulation.  Smith argues that the result of open competition will be the production of the goods that society wants, in the quantity society wants, and at the prices that society is able to pay.  For Smith, it was competition that controlled rampant greed and self-interest.  The reason one ambitious person won't get all of the wealth is that there are others who are competing with him/her.  As long as there is competition then the society functions healthily.

According to Smith's theory, the struggle to accumulate wealth keeps production growing and keeps the labor force working.  The natural downfall of the system is when the the capitalists run out of their means to produce, namely the laborers.  In order to combat the loss of laborers, Smith introduced the law of population.  As long as the population grows, there will be more and more laborers to produce. 

In Karl Marx's critique of capitalism, Das Kapital, he paints the picture of a perfect capitalist system that must keep producing so that capitalists can keep accumulating. As Robert Heilbroner wrote, "he [the capitalist] must strive for accumulation, for in the competitive environment in which he operates, one accumulates or one gets accumulated."  In other words, if you aren't taking advantage of someone else, someone else is taking advantage of you.

The flaw in this logic, as Marx illustrates, is that if all of us endeavor to be entrepreneurs and successful capitalists, everyone will strive to accumulate, wages of the labor force will rise, rising wages leads to no profit.  The entrepreneur must introduce time-saving and labor-saving machinery in order to continue earning profits.  This is of course an overtly simplified summary of Marx's criticisms of capitalism.  But what Marx describes as the result of the competition between capitalists is "That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralization of capital."  In other words, fewer people have the ability to accumulate the wealth in the system.  Competition effectively eliminates competitors and monopolies rule.  As fewer people obtain more of the wealth and control the commodities, so "grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation."

American capitalists will argue that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the victory of capitalism. (It should be pointed out that again the capitalist is winning or losing a competition.)   But capitalists fail to realize that not every system requires competition in order to operate successfully.  Unlike the basic tenet of capitalism, a socialist society is not naturally promoting competition amongst its participants.  On the contrary, a socialist society is more concerned with the collaborative efforts of the whole versus the singular accomplishments of the few. 

A capitalist might argue that without competition, there is no innovation or motivation to create.  Is it possible for a socialist society to encourage innovation?  On smaller scales, there are communities, companies, and villages in the United States that function this way.  Additionally there are countries that function more communally than does the United States.  Japan, Korea, and Finland are just a few countries in which society is more concerned about the whole versus the individual yet offer remarkable innovation.  One of the healthiest countries to be born in is Finland.  In each of these systems, capitalism is at work but it is highly regulated by a central government.  The result is far more cooperation and collaboration and far less income, education, health, and legal disparity.

Looking more closely at Japan provides a good example.  First is Toyota's CEO who earned $900,000 in 2009.  Japan ties the earnings of CEOs to a percentage of the average workers' salary.  Second, in schools, the beginning teacher does not teach full time.  For the first few years, a beginning teacher spends time planning, observing other more experienced teachers teach, and receiving myriad feedback on the effectiveness of his/her teaching.  The focus in the school just as it is in the corporation is how the individual effects the functioning of the whole.  Third, health insurance is far more efficient and reliable than the US system.  When the Japanese establish their health care system, they analyzed many different systems and purposely chose not to follow the US model.

In contrast, in the US in 2009 Rick Wagoner the CEO of GM earned some disproportionate amount of money in the 10 to 20 million dollar range.  In American schools, beginning teachers get thrown into a classroom, told to make sure no students get hurt, receive less books than students, no resources, and get little if any support.  If that teacher seeks help, he/she is placed under scrutiny and suspicion of being an inadequate teacher.   Is it at all surprising to learn that the average beginning teacher today lasts about 4 or 5 years before burnout sets in?  In health care, there was an attempt to establish a national health care service that was denied by conservatives who believe in privatizing the health insurance industry.  The belief being that competition will bring prices down.  It hasn't and it won't.

The differences are startling.  In Japan the community comes together not in a competitive or malicious manner, but in a much more constructive and collaborative manner.  Every citizen has affordable health care coverage.  In the US, the teacher and CEO are thrown into the fire and expected to thrive on his/her own or face replacement, although the CEO is compensated disproportionally, and thousands have gone bankrupt unable to pay for the costs of their own health care.

In Korea, the same illustrations can be drawn.  However, there are indications that the capitalist effect is taking root in Seoul.  Recently protests erupted over concerns about corruption in the government, about some people gathering more wealth at a faster pace compared to the average workers.  The Gini index indicates that income disparity is a growing global trend, even in Finland and Japan and Korea.  The trend will continue as the capitalism thrives on cheap labor.  As the wages of global labor rise, however, corporations will rely on more and more drastic measures in order to accumulate.

The growing disparity in America and internationally indicates that Marx's criticisms of capitalism carry more weight, and perhaps more accuracy, than can be quickly denied.  Trends indicate that the income gap is in no way closing.  Conversely, poverty in America is on the rise while the population of the working (or as in the case of Milwaukee, non-working) class (the proletariat) is growing.  There is some hope that the situations for most of the world's poor may be improving (see Fareed Zakaria) even while income inequality rises.  But America will be judged on how it tends to the welfare of its people.  Smith also recognized this responsibility and noted that "no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable." 

Is this happening in the US?  Are the greater part of the population poor and miserable?  Examples abound, e.g. Detroit, Milwaukee, etc.  It will be interesting to see how the cities hit by the disastrous storms this week rebound from the devastation.  Is this the next Katrina recovery, which has not been handled admirably?

Reflecting on the scene of the lions, what I failed to recognize was the coordinated hunt of the lionesses.  What turns out to be a more accurate observation of nature is not the sense of competition but that animals display a large variety of collaboration and cooperation techniques.  Although life is a struggle, it more often than not turns out to be survival of the most adaptable and the most cooperative. "Despite the depiction of nature "red in tooth and claw," cooperation is actually widespread in the animal kingdom."

Who will adapt to the changing climates of the world markets?

Will America be able to compete in the face of growing disparity and amidst the rise of the conservative base that seems determined not to negotiate and collaborate? 

What will America look like in 50 years?  Will many of the cities be abandoned because of the reckless decisions of current legislators who gave up on public education, public transport, went all in on privatization, and left the poor in the cold?

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Read more about Marxism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
Read more about the debate between Socialism and Capitalism: http://www.idebate.org/debatabase/topic_details.php?topicID=400
Read about the defense of Socialism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/bax/1898/12/defsoc.htm
Read more about Socialism: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~dmcm/
Read about economics: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/hi/resources/
Read about political science and animal behavior: http://politicalscience.stanford.edu/faculty/weingast/BiologicalInstitutionsManuscript1.pdf
Read more about Capitalism and Competition: http://jparnell.com/blog/?p=254
http://cameroneconomics.com/capitalism.pdf
Alfie Kohn's book on competition: http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm

Voices from the past

History is cyclical.  It seems that all around the United States, we currently find ourselves residing in a place in time that belongs almost entirely to provide to the whims of the wealthy while the numbers of poor increase.  In America, the disparity between the richest among us and the poorest has grown exponentially since the end of World War II. 

Now at this same time, in places around the world, in Egypt, the people are rising up to better their position in reference to the money mongers and power brokers.  In Libya, the oppressed have risen to fight out against their oppressors. 

In the United States, people have made the excuse that we are luckier than most of the people in the world.  And yet those in power trample our constitutional and statutory rights. Our poor do not live in filth and squalor, they say.  Our poor have access to food and shelter, they say.  Our poor can seek charity and find it, they say.  Our poor have the opportunity to succeed, they say.  Who says these things?  The wealthy business owners and land owners, the hedge fund managers and politicians who for the most part have never had to go a day without food.  They are wrong that the poor in this country are not suffering.

In a way the fact that so many people in this great country are suffering is worse than the fact that poor are suffering in third world nations.  This country should be one that takes care of its citizens, and new arrivals. 

But as has so often been the case throughout history, avarice and greed have taken over the heart of this country.  Politicians spew divisive rhetoric; people bicker among themselves about petty issues; and all the while the richest among us gloat and goad us to continue quibbling over issues that matter naught; to throttle each other with ideological rhetoric meant to keep us from uniting against our common foe, while tax cuts and tax credits are awarded to them.

More and more prisons house more and more prisoners.  I declare that these are prisoners of war.  War has been declared long ago against the working people of this country.  We are nearing a time when war must be waged against the malevolent forces that have initiated this war;  those that strive to grind the working person down.

John Brown said at his trial, " . . . I believe to have interfered as I have done, . . . in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done." 

Nothing has changed.  As I write today there are hundreds of young men and women being held in jails around the country who have never had a hearing, have never been to trial, have never been proven guilty, and yet they sit in jail.  They sit because they cannot afford representation that isn't overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people who need representation. Would any one of them be sitting imprisoned against their will if they had the means to pay?

This divide is getting worse each day.  Politicians act as the mouth pieces for the wealthy and money and greed have tainted justice.

"The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible.  Here is a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them," wrote Michael Harrington.

The time has come for the people to rise up against the new form of indentured servitude.  The poor in this country have laid low for too long.  The poor in this country have been invisible too long.  Let the CEOs and bankers, politicians and lobbyists know that you are here.  You do count.  We count.  You do matter.  We matter.  People matter.  Together we can bring the necessary change to make this country the great country it should be for all not the select fortunate few.