Time Bomb Ticking

The Phenomenon. President-elect Trump has introduced a new element into the Republican party: white, working class people, many of them male, but all lacking higher education. They find themselves alongside two other already disparate elements: social conservatives, whose religious or moral scruples drove them into the party’s embrace; and fiscal conservatives, the Republican Establishment, who have long steered the party’s ideology and legislative agenda in favor of the monied interests.

The new Republicans may share some attitudes and beliefs with the social conservatives. But if they share the ideology of Establishment Republicans, it’s by accident and not in their class interest.

The Theory. Dialectical materialism holds that, when an entity contains two elements with antithetical class interests, movement towards a new synthesis, in which the antitheses are dissolved, begins. Internal contradictions tend to resolve themselves by any means possible. To the extent that these new Republicans are really working class, that is, proletarian, and the Establishment is bourgeois, which no-one denies, here is an antithesis as old as capitalism itself.

The Contradiction. Maybe a story can show how this is a contradiction.

Let’s say you are a small-time contractor, in roofing or siding or any number of things. How do you make a living? You can’t mark up the materials much, otherwise your customers will get their own roofing or siding at retail. So you mark up your labor instead. If your proposal has a line item for hours of work, the hourly rate is more than what you pay your workers. Or the markup on labor is just included in the bottom line.

What do you do with the money you don’t have to pay your workers? You buy another ladder, a compression nailer, a truck; you build a website, rent a storefront – whatever will increase your ability to put more labor to work. That is, you increase your capital. So now the contractor, who may have started working for himself or alongside his employees, has become a capitalist, more precisely petit bourgeois. And the labor of his workers is being exploited in an amount roughly equal to the difference between what they are willing to accept as a wage and what the contractor is able to charge his customers.

Even so the contractor and his employees may share many of the same beliefs and attitudes. They may agree that government takes too much of their money in taxes, that borrowing to spend is even worse, that climate change is a hoax – even that unions are dangerous to free labor. But when the question is whether the boss should provide and fund a health care plan, or whether employees should have an ownership interest in the profits of the enterprise, class interests obtrude.

Multiply this by a hundred- or a thousand-fold in employees, by a thousand- or a million-fold in revenue. Instead of a small business enterprise, think of the United States auto industry. The capitalist is now a big bourgeois responsible only to stockholders, while the worker is that much more likely to take proletarian class interests to heart.

There’s contradiction: a clash of class interests leading to historical movement – the bigger the entity, the more dialectically necessary the movement.  

The Bomb. Now transfer the contradiction to the midst of the Republication party – a rather big entity in history. The new Republicans know they have to work for a living or fall into the subclasses they despise, but they’re not sensible of class conflicts with Establishment Republicans yet. Fortunately – and this is not asserted dialectically but rather as a judgment – these contradictions will come out through the person of the President-elect. His rhetoric drew them into the party; he created them. His government will have to address them.

Just one example. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that in Northwoods Vilas County people are signing up for Obamacare at a rate 2 ½ times that of the average for the whole state. But Trump’s electoral margin there was 26%. Many other red counties in Wisconsin have above average rates of Obamacare signups. Even nationally signups are ahead of the expected pace. This puts the interests of health care consumers who were Trump voters at odds with the interests of Establishment Republicans in control of the health care industry and the capital it generates.

Naturally, it doesn’t end there. The reader will be able to conceive his or her own examples of similar contradictions. And the time bomb will be ticking….

The Economics of Envy: A blind spot? Or the dog whistle of the bourgeoisie?

At Marquette University’s On the Issues forum last Monday, Mike Gousha, without throwing a hardball, asked Congressman Ryan to explain, and maybe defend, his comments on the “economics of envy.” And a very peculiar defense he made.

The first thing he said is clearly wrong: the “envious” classes do not drive and did not invent class conflict – and the latter certainly not lately. Class conflict is an historical feature of every civil society, from the time when class structures were primarily social, though modern times, when they became primarily economic. Only primitive societies have social roles without having stratified social classes. Naturally, people being what they are, conflict has run unabated during that whole time, though it is less noticeable in times of prosperity or national emergency. But it takes two to tangle: no one class started it.

Next, why ascribe bad emotions to the class thus singled out as driving the conflict? If you wanted to use a loaded e-word, you could call it the “economics of exploitation” instead. And if you wanted to better express the emotion the working poor feel, you would call it the “economics of oppression,” not envy.  

That’s because people who work for a living don’t necessarily envy, to use Mr. Ryan’s example, Craig Culver. They don’t want that kind of responsibility; they know their own limitations. For the most part, they just want to work for a fair wage and go home to their families at the end of the day. You don’t have to use an emotionally loaded word at all; you can use a morally loaded word and call it the economics of injustice. A living minimum wage, that enables workers to help pay for their children’s college education and save for their own retirement, is an issue of social justice, not bad emotions.

Finally, I’m not suggesting that equality of opportunity is not a good thing or that it does not, in large measure, exist in our society. What people like the working poor, and those who sympathize with them, are saying, is that by itself it’s not enough.

This is Mr. Ryan’s blind spot. Plainly he’s out of sympathy with a class of society he can bad-mouth so plausibly. It goes with the Republican territory. Likewise, to use one of columnist Eugene Kane’s expressions, the term “economics of envy” is a dog whistle audible only to the bourgeoisie. It causes them to think of people who really are shiftless, and lump those people with people who do want to work and will work for almost any wage they are forced to accept. That makes it easier to ignore injustices to the latter.

Class Myth: “We’re taking back this country…!”

…from whom? the old? the sick? the poor?

I could be blunter, but that would be politically incorrect even as a form of criticism. Is that really the subtext of this expression? Or in the language of punditry rather than academe, who are the We that the “dog whistle” is calling? to taking what from whom?

I don’t know that the country was ever owned by anyone other than a group of folks who are mostly white and mostly male. So are We wanting to take it back from Ourselves?

Maybe, if We already own it, We’re wanting to take back something else. There isn’t much to take back from the sick, the poor, the old; all they have is pitiful remnants of entitlements left over when the people who really own the country are done taking what they can get. And even then they (the true owners) make the middle class pay for most of it.

Maybe We ought to take back the country from them. But that would involve raising somebody’s taxes. And that is one of the things they’re afraid of.

Then again, maybe all We want is to take back control of the country. That looks to be a close run thing, doesn’t it? But if We’re wanting to take back control from the poor, the old, the sick, what will We do with it? disadvantage them? Again, it’s slim pickins’. And as I’ve argued before, We – at least some of Us, the ones to whom this slogan is designed to appeal – are only going to be robbing Ourselves.

Maybe the goal is to take back the country from them, so they can’t tax Us so much, because We’re “taxed enough already.” Well, same answer: the other “them” are the true owners. There’s little or nothing to be had from the old, the sick, the poor. If you don’t consider the remnants “pitiful,” try living on them, and them alone. Not everybody gets poor. But only the lucky never get sick. And everybody gets old.

The confusions over the actual interests at stake in American political and economic life are so rich that it’s impossible to believe the big bourgeoisie really conceived, bought, and paid for them all. With some, all they had to do was amplify the emotional content of beliefs that were already very much, if by accident, in their interests.

We the dogs hear the whistle abundantly well. But wait…now I can hear it too. The We aren’t taking the country back from them, they’re taking it back from him!

Now I understand. Completely.

Do you hear it too?

Class Math: The Mythmakers

What about those people who paid for, among others, the “Job creators” myth, the ones for whom political influence is an element of profit?

I realize I can scarcely post to this blog without making reference to the “lies” and “manipulations” of certain classes of people, or to their ability to buy “impressions” that serve as a substitute for the truth. Yet, absent some kind of explanation, people might think that I am making things up, that I have embraced some sort of conspiracy theory, and that I, not they, am guilty of lies and manipulations.

But while it’s still a conspiracy, it’s not a theory any more. The steps in the process are all more or less in the open now. You don’t have to use your imagination to supply missing ones, or substitute passion for understanding, any more.

Here’s how it works, step-by-step. Keep in mind that this is all in addition to directly supporting the candidates the mythmakers favor, and therefore is not determined by any candidate’s views, policies, opinions, or publicly-held positions.

Buying the Impressions:

1.       The Few – really the big bourgeoisie, but generally speaking the Few – have interests to advance or protect.

2.       It’s easy – it’s natural – to formulate opinions expressing such interests, both directly and as a guide to public policy.

3.       The opinions constitute a message one would like to share.

4.       It’s lawful to promulgate, publish, broadcast such messages…

5.       …and to do so under some name or form other than, as I do, in one’s own proper person.

6.       The message requires a medium.

7.       The medium must be paid for.

8.       So form an organization.

9.       Give it the money. (Who gives it is still the great secret.)

10.   Get your similarly situated friends to give it money.

11.   Package the message. The organization designs the packaging; the buyers, naturally, approve it.

12.   Buy impressions. There are plenty of vendors in the market and vanishingly few have any scruples about it.

13.   Measure the effect and adjust the package as necessary.

For example, whence these distorted advertisements about right-to-work legislation in Wisconsin? That’s a 20^th century issue – from before the Big War. Why is it coming up now? Well, because the unions, weak as they are, are about the only entities the big bourgeoisie have to fear, and they would like to make them weaker. For another example, just today there is a report that Mr. Romney has had to repudiate advertisements funded by a Mr. Billionaire Ricketts.

Next: Why are the messages, like the ones in my examples, always and in principle lies and manipulations?

Making up Lies

1.       The message couldn’t start off any truer than an opinion. The Few are not philosophers, nor are philosophers among the Few.

2.       Is the opinion thus ever anything more than a more or less direct expression of self-interest?

3.       If it weren’t, why the anonymity of an organization? All those names are either tautological or fraudulent in themselves. All Americans are “for prosperity” – with a small “p.” The question is: whose? Why not use personal names? That would be unmistakable and truthful. As it is, we don’t know quite exactly whose interests are being served, and only by inference what class of people they belong to.

4.       The message is bent and spun. The Few would like to take the hopes and fears of the many, and match them up with their own exaggerated ambitions. And they have running dogs to help them. But the interests don’t really match. They don’t match at all: that’s the point. So now it begins to look like manipulations…

5.       …and finally passes to lies. When a string of manipulations and half-truths achieves a certain level of intensity, and something is needed to top it off, where else can you go? And it’s not just getting carried away or getting careless; it’s open, conscious, purposeful lies.

We’ve all seen political advertisements we don’t believe. Why believe any of them? Just think about where they come from – who pays – and then decide what to believe.

There’s another way, metaphorical for now, of looking at this. False opinions are sticky. Hold one and others will stick to it. Pretty soon you’ve got a whole view of the world that is irretrievably false – and a following besides. Think Rush Limbaugh. Jefferson Davis. Adolf Hitler. Sensible people proceed quite differently, as I’d be happy to explain in another place and time.

Class Myth: The Job Creators…

…never create jobs unless they stand to gain from it. Job creation is not a charity. Making them heroes is a myth. Who are these people? They are very few indeed. And the Republican Party would like to take the shackles off certain of these individuals or entities as might in return do the many the favor of giving them jobs.

It’s useful to boil the Republican jobs program down to one proposition: let’s find ways to make it more profitable to create a job. In general, this is to be done by sacrificing some other public interest, not to the creation of the job, but to the profit of the creator. Tax incentives are one such, possibly the least abusive, form of public sacrifice.

It’s just mathematics, isn’t it? At the margin, the public gets another job, but has to give up something from a different margin of their own. Why not rather insist that the job creators be good at what they do, and then make shift themselves to gather an adequate profit? Those who insist they can’t create a job because of, say, a regulated use of public lands, either lack ideas or energy  for other kinds of efficiencies, or want to make a killing out of public assets that cost them nothing.

And so there are already two kinds of job “creators,” maybe three. Some, the real ones, are entrepreneurs who can deliver products or services better, faster, cheaper (according to the old business saw, pick two of the three). These people rely on their own ideas to make a buck, and as necessary to that end, they create a job. They may be rich, but not wealthy yet. The only way they’ll ever become wealthy is to create jobs; this kind of job creation is real, not mythical.

They’re not permanently petit bourgeois, and they’re not yet big bourgeoisie either. Even if they’re already among the Few, they’re too busy to try to influence public policy – at least not directly, and not just to generate profit. Instead they vote, and they may contribute to the candidates of their choice. But they (the ones I’m thinking of) rely more on industry associations and the like, and not on their own dollars, for political influence. At the margin, they’d rather invest that dollar in, for example, creating a job, than in contributing to a PAC with a specific policy change agenda and a known record of…we’ll see. For one thing, the profit on the job is tangible, immediate, calculable, and under their own control. The profit in political manipulations is none of those things, so to these people it’s not worth the risk.

They are entitled, it seems to me, to vote Republican if they like. But there aren’t enough of them to elect one, and the people who work for them do not have to vote with them to keep their jobs. They can and should vote in their own interests.

Next, what about all that cash money on the books of the largest corporations? If somebody wanted to create jobs, why not use that money? But they don’t, as we’ve seen, unless the new worker will bring profit. Otherwise it’s just wages down the drain – which makes the worker bee who doesn’t have a chance to earn them, metaphorically, a “drain.”

So the money is used instead to buy back stock, to acquire businesses that actually are creating jobs, to pay dividends – in short, for things that make the balance sheet and stock price look good – but not for things that in themselves create jobs.

No: institutional investors and boards of directors are not job creators either. They’re profit takers, profit creators, not job creators. In fact that, not job creation, is their fiduciary duty, not their self-interest only. I suppose if you’re a small investor like me, to whom this fiduciary duty is owed, you might want to vote Republican, just to help ensure your retirement is comfortable.  But I’ll take a pass. I’d rather vote to help ensure the working poor can take care of themselves when they retire.

Which brings me back to those other people, the people who purchased the “job creators” myth, and several others, the ones for whom political influence is an element of profit. It’s always something for nothing with them, isn’t it? We’ll tell you lies and you give us votes. And with your votes, we’ll loose the bonds on the public values we covet, and tear off the shackles on our…greed.

But all this require further explanation, otherwise it might look like a conspiracy theory. And so…coming soon: The Mythmakers.

Class Math: Voting for “the man…”

…and not the party. I’m happy to say I’ve never done that. I’ve been terribly impressed with Mr. Clinton’s genius for policy sometimes, and with Mr. Obama’s wisdom. I had great hopes for Mr. Carter. I even forgave Mr. Reagan a little for the regressive things he did when I saw that he had been able to end the Cold War favorably to us as a people and to the world as a whole. Even though that was a relief, it doesn’t mean I would change my votes against him.

I regret that my party hadn’t better candidates than the ones who lost, but that didn’t make me think twice about whether to vote for them.

So I have to wonder about people who let considerations merely personal to the candidates involved decide their votes. For one thing, people are better judges of their interests than of character – more precisely, they are less easily deceived about the former than about the latter (though to be sure, it’s not impossible to deceive people about their interests).

The principles of the Democratic party have not changed since the days of Jefferson and Jackson: we are the party of the many. The principles of the Republican party, on the contrary, have changed since the days of Lincoln, maybe since the days of Eisenhower: at some point they became the party of the Few, or at best simply their willing accomplice.

Do your interests change from one election to the next? Maybe you got a job. Is that enough reason to vote Republican? Maybe you earned enough to begin to hope that some day you might become one of the Few. Maybe you actually became one of the Few. That last might be a good reason from the standpoint of class interest to switch parties. But that doesn’t happen to many of us; by definition it only happens to a few. So why would you vote for a democrat in one cycle, and a republican in the next, and then back again? Does your life, do your interests, really change that much?

While the principles of an individual might be more or less nuanced, while they might be unique – not to say peculiar – to that unique individual, while they might be formed by accident of birth or any number of other accidents, the principles of party are by comparison simple, straightforward, well known, generally shared, and formed under the experience of history. A party is like a culture that, being formed by a common set of influences, shares a common set of attitudes – which by the way is the original meaning of common sense.

This is the math part. What really happens is that the Few buy enough impressions to put in front of the public so that voters begin to think they constitute a form of truth about the candidate. They think they are voting for “the man,” when they are really voting for the impressions of the man that someone else could afford to put before them. Or, worse yet, voting against impressions of the other man or woman that were also bought and paid for.

Yes, it’s true, there have been great presidents and there have been, it’s not unfair to say, disastrous ones. Can you tell the difference? in advance? It’s by far a surer thing to vote for party. Even the failings and mistakes of an individual can be carried forward by the commitment to progress the Democratic party represents and by the party as a whole. Progress would be better and surer without party rancor, just because conflicting interests would be more likely to reach salutary adjustment. Who can change this if the voters do not select individuals, of either party, more moderate at least in their forms of expression?

So by all means, vote for that if you cannot bring yourself to vote for a democrat.

Class Math: Public Money for Public Purposes

Certain people of limited outlook have long been able to score a debating point – at least with other people of limited understanding – by saying the government ought to be run like a business. It’s a valid point so long as it means only that expenditure of public money ought to be administered efficiently, and that vendors of goods and services to the government ought to be chosen through a competitive process, a real marketplace absent of corruption.

The further, really intended claim, that the people would get a better value if the service governments provide were provided instead by private, for-profit entities, goes too far. Along the way, it distorts or obliterates the notion of public purposes.

The reason government performs certain social functions is that the whole society has interests in the outcomes. Education and road-building are good examples.

Take roads. There was a day long ago when highways were like railroads still are today – privately owned and operated for profit – except they were made of wooden planks rather than iron rails. Is anybody saying we ought to go back to that situation? Maybe some people should if they want to be consistent.

Now streets and highways are one and all, of course, owned by the public. This is so obviously true it’s odd to think, why so? Well, every segment of the public and very nearly every public activity make use of them. Everybody has an interest in how they are built and maintained. Collectively these interests may be referred to as the public purpose of streets and highways.

Or again, they’re not just built so the big bourgeoisie can receive their components and distribute their products. They’re not just built so the proletarians can get to the places where they hand over their surplus labor. Nor so that petit bourgeois mom and dad can take the kids to, say, Wisconsin Dells.

All these interests have to be accommodated. The only way to do it is through a process accountable to be public, that is, a political process.

Of course, that’s not how you build highways. That function is bid out to an entity that is operated from the top down. There’s a difference.

Next take education. There’s a difference between training and education. The former develops skills required by and to be used for private purposes. The latter imparts the knowledge a child requires to function as a citizen: paying taxes, voting, understanding the laws and making a prudent decision about which ones to obey. As Vico observed about the Latin etymology of the word, education leads the citizen out from the child. That is, it serves public purposes.

The people generally are very sound on this. They understand that education creates potential and opens up opportunity. Only after they become adults and have a job do they submit to training. So nobody suggests that educational systems funded by public money ought to be training systems designed to serve private purposes – not even the big bourgeoisie.

But we do have privately owned and operated charter schools, funded at least in part by public money. And some of them meet the public purposes of education reasonably well.

Finally, those functions explicitly reserved to the branches of government by the Constitution and state constitutions, making laws, carrying out laws, and deciding cases at law, are one and all (at least in theory) performed exclusively for public purposes and in the interests of the people as a whole.

Now, if the notion of public purposes is well enough understood, the thoughtful reader will also admit that it nearly entirely – except in the senses already mentioned – negatives the notion that government should be run like a business, and the corollary that the people would be better off if businessmen ran the government.

The latter would of course be undemocratic. In business, the executive is informed and then decides, sets goals and policies, chooses subordinates and delegates at will, overhauls the whole organization or any part of it that is not meeting his objectives – in short, is in a position of command, responsible only to the shareholders, and that only in the limited and non-moral sense that they expect a return on their money.

Business has rather the structure of military authority than of public office. Only by obedience to order, without debate, can an army hope to move, fight, and gain its objectives. That is so, almost to the same extent, in business, though the urgency is not the life or death of the nation or its vital interests. It’s not so in politics, which must consult all public and private interests, with deliberate speed, before proceeding.

So it consequently is that businessmen have no special qualification to serve in public office, and on the contrary, that people with talent and experience serving - and negotiating, accommodating, compromising - conflicting public interests are in fact better qualified to so serve.

Unfortunately, my examples reveal a problem. It’s grounded in the ambiguity of the phrase “run [something] like a business.” Clearly decisions about public purposes aren’t business-like, and for the reasons given, ought not to be. But carrying out decisions, such as building a road, can be and sometimes should be run that way. Remember that, when we do this, we are giving public interests over to the private profit-taking interest. Prudence is required. This part of the problem may have to be solved on a case-by-case basis. It would probably be just as disastrous to turn over major projects of road-building (as opposed to minor repairs, which are done badly enough) to crews of public employees, as it would be to turn over foreign wars to armies of mercenaries.

A list follows of purposes and interests that might or might not be considered public. Inevitably this line of thought leads from purposes that the whole public shares, to purposes only some of us do, to purposes of which the connection to the public has become tenuous, to purposes you don’t want the government to be picking your pockets over. Along this path, the shared purposes of all gradually begin to look like the private purposes of some. You decide where to draw the line, and vote accordingly, keeping in mind you also have to consider what kind of entity ought to be doing any related work that comes up.

·         The national defense, in some configuration. And the first line of defense is always foreign policy – cheap at twice the price.

·         Health care, for certain protected classes. But which classes? The elderly, the disabled, to be sure. The poor? You can distribute that burden either through the public entitlement system at the expenses of the whole tax-paying population, or through the private insurance system, at the expense of people who are already insured. But then….

·         Heath insurance. Who gets to be insured? And for what? There’s more to be said, naturally, about this.

·         Financial security. Is one thing for workers, and another thing for the petit bourgeois. Even though Social Security is next to nothing by itself, at least the working poor are already accustomed to the level of finances – not to say security – it provides. On the other hand, it is possible to be financially secure without being among the Few. Maybe those people’s interests are served by voting Republican.

·         The public debt. It’s also true that everyone has a measureable interest, greater or smaller, and whether they know it or not, in the full faith and credit of the United States. Even the bean counters at Standard & Poor’s. So we have to pay the interest on the debt.

The question of party, class, or private interest becomes more vexed at just this point

·         Housing. Maybe you can’t afford it at all (working poor), or maybe you just can’t afford your mortgage anymore (petit bourgeois).

·         Regulation in general. In particular:

o   Of the greed of corporations

o   Of the quality of the environment

o   Of the quality of food and drugs

o   Of the uses of land (mostly by state and local governments)

I guess you would like to pick and choose, depending on whether you are more likely to be harmed by the lack (consumers and workers) or existence (the Few and their wannabes) of regulation.

·         Subsidies. For housing? Agriculture? Education, through grants and loans? It seems to depend on the interests – and influence – of the buyers and sellers.

·         Basic research. They have a lot of fun with this, don’t they? Back to the days of Senator Bill Proxmire. But it’s not profitable for business to do it, and academe – well, that is their business.

·         Quality of life. The arts? Public television? Some people think protecting the environment is a quality of life issue – the lives of the individuals of the endangered species.

·         Transportation – other than roads. It’s probably in everybody’s interest to have alternatives to $5.00 a gallon gas. Waiting to provide them until everybody realizes they need them only hastens the day of need.

·         Forests, Parks, Reservations. Public lands hold many kinds of valuable assets and tribal lands hold…casinos. All in all, this could be on the revenue side of the ledger, were there not so much potential for abuse.

It’s not impossible to find the public purposes in all these budget items. People whose private interests coincide to a degree ought to be willing to do their part to provide the revenue – at least to the same degree. You can’t begrudge money that creates public goods you yourself make use of. Certain deeply cynical people who already have more than they can even enjoy frequently prefer to spend some of the excess creating false resentments on this score. I guess it’s cheaper than paying their fair share of taxes.

Class Math will continue, visiting a few of these manipulations, and revisiting some of these budget items.