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.

Citizen Pocan and the Truth

Citizen Pocan is lucky he didn’t have to take the test you have to pass to become a naturalized citizen. He would have got at least one question wrong.

The only powers the United States can constitutionally exercise are those specifically enumerated powers delegated by the several states and through them by the people. The power to guarantee the right to vote was not so delegated. It’s not that the United State does not guarantee the right to vote; it’s that it cannot. Only the states can. They retained, they did not delegate, that power. And it seems to me that for the most part, they use it; they do guarantee the right in question. The negative guarantees Constitutional amendments give to former slaves, women, and persons aged 18 or older are the result of fresh delegations of power by the legislatures of three fourths of the states.

The constitutional lawyers the PolitiFact investigators of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel engaged to confirm Mr. Representative Pocan’s claim of course know this is its explanation. That does not render the claim itself true. It is rather an obnoxious piece of ignorance, and as such quite completely false. Publishing it as true is a disservice to a public already superstitious about such matters.

It is more difficult to explain why the claim is misleading and false than just to make it. But the explanation is not something contemporary readers of the Federalist Papers – lay citizens – would likely have misunderstood. And the difficulty does not afford an excuse either to Mr. Pocan for making the claim, or to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for rating it true.

What’s Mine is Mine

A few side notes to the previous post.

Weren’t Godfrey & Kahn the firm the Republicans used to redistrict the state legislature  in secret? Well, it just shows how effective they can be when the interests of their clients are at stake.

And didn’t the Bad River band run into a little trouble themselves? over wastewater treatment? Now the paper says Cline’s hands – I should say lands – are not the cleanest either. But prior bad acts are not the issue here; they may not even be admissible in court.

Of course the band would have to prove the likelihood of violations or other harm before construction of the mine could be blocked. But nobody really knows what’s in the body of ore except Gogebic. Are there sulfides or not? It’s a closely guarded secret about which the legislature appears to have been irresponsibly incurious. My hunch is, if there were none, Gogebic would be only too happy to prove it so. No worries! But no proof either.

Here’s something for the general public to do and see.

I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in Dickinson County, site of the long-shuttered Groveland Mine. They made taconite pellets there as well. I guess they remediated the site too – more or less – according to the requirements of the times.

But it sure doesn’t look like it on Google. A plume of tailings is invading what seems to be a retention pond that drains into the Pine Creek. The water flows from there into the Sturgeon and Menominee Rivers (Google has them mislabeled the Iron River; I filed a report of error) and finally Green Bay. Nothing seems to be growing on the lands where the tailings were dumped – it’s now at least 30 years since the mining stopped – unless the vegetation is grey.

Google Groveland Mine, Felch, Michigan. You’ll see an oval body of water (the mine pit) surrounded by fields of tailings, access roads, etc. A bit south of the biggest such fields are irregularly shaped retention ponds, the easternmost of which clearly shows the plume. Pine Creek runs away south and east from there, while the West Branch of the Sturgeon runs alongside Highway 69 north of the mine site. They seem to have kept the tailings out of that stream, but I can’t say for sure what the smaller roundish shapes just north of the mine pit represent.

Local note: North of Highway 69 not far from the mine is North Dickinson High School, new when I was a kid and built no doubt with property taxes on the mine and the homes the fathers and grandfathers of the current students could afford when the mine was in operation. But where will the current students go to work? That’s just the way mines are. Fortunately, trees are still growing…except not on the site of the mine.

It’s pretty ugly from outer space. People who are unsympathetic to the Chippewa ought to look at it before they settle their judgments.

That’s another thing. Suppose the band does block the mine, or that litigation drags on. Who are the shiftless unemployed individuals who inhabit the taverns and hunting shacks of the North Woods going to blame? Not their shiftless selves. Racial violence has erupted from less potent causes.

But that’s mere speculation. It doesn’t constitute a reason supporting either side of the argument. Yet the band has proven to be well organized to carry out what used to be called demonstrations, and before that agitation, but now has the character and name of public relations. And maybe that will be the field of combat until the permitting process is done.

We’ll see which side is compelled to litigate at that point. Meanwhile it’s amusing to consider that a bill designed to accelerate permitting is so deeply flawed on the point of Native American rights that it will only delay it. It’s just as well; the lawyers were already rich.

Good Lawyers Get Good Results

It’s good to have legally recognized rights, but it’s even better to have good lawyers too.

I never doubted that the Bad River Chippewa had the right to decide what’s not in the water that flows through their reservation from upstream. But I have lately wondered whether they have lawyers with the skills and resources necessary to defend that right.

Now I see they will be represented by a specialized, expert team within Godfrey & Kahn. Attorney Pierson’s editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this week shows he and his people thoroughly understand the legal ground of the right. His argument based on land cession treaties is already convincing, and he didn’t even mention the EPA’s grant of additional rights over water quality to Native American tribes so situated.

The upshot is, the mine will never be built without the consent of the Bad River band.

Here’s a notion: give the Penokee Hills back to the Chippewa – if not to the Bad River band, to the whole Ojibwe nation. The nation has reservations; for purposes of treaties they are a nation pretty much like the United States is. So they’ll be there forever. And so will the iron…

…that is, until the Ojibwe decide when and how to remove it. Same amount of ore, same amount of jobs, same amount of wealth creation, moreover the same duration of the mining operations and hence the jobs, and no legal obstacles – assuming only and reasonably that the Ojibwe would impose even stricter environmental safeguards than those Gogebic Taconite and billionaire Cline, through their friends in the legislature, chose to accept.

What were they thinking? Did they think they could steamroller the band once they got the enabling legislation? They wrote the bill to impose the greatest expense for environmental safeguards they would profitably accept, at the least actual level of environmental protection their friends in the legislature could politically accept. A nice balance! – all in active disregard of the band’s interests and rights.

An organization as grasping and arrogant as this is not the right organization to operate the mine. Anyway, they’ll have their hands full with Godfrey & Kahn.

The Self-Styled Republican “Party”

We in Wisconsin have seen any number of assaults by the Republican Party on people and organizations opposed to their political aims, indeed on the fundamental rights of those people. Not satisfied with the passage of constitutionally infirm legislation requiring the poor, the feeble, the old to present official pictures of themselves in order to be permitted to vote, they’d like to relieve a merely fanciful burden on poll workers by outlawing same-day registration. Apparently they consider this worth the money it would cost to implement, but the Governor does not. It just shows who is willing to pay what to disenfranchise poor folks and young folks who move around a lot and tend to vote democratic. And without the law the Governor would have had one fewer vote last fall, that of his son.

But that’s old news. Late news is that the Democrats had 53% of the legislative vote in that election, but won only 39% of the seats. Thanks to a really ingenious (it must be admitted) plan of redistricting that Republicans paid their lawyers handsomely to devise in secret.

It’s been a theme, really the main argument, of this blog to show why most of the people who vote Republican do so against their own objective economic interests, to try to understand why they do it, and to give them reasons to stop doing it. Just as the class analysis indicates the Republicans ought to be a minority based on the class interests it endeavors to protect and the number of people who actually belong to those classes, so it is a minority party by every measure except the occupancy of the seats of power. At least in Wisconsin. I assume without knowing that similar stories could be told about at least some of the majority of states where the Republicans control the legislatures.

So they just don’t represent that many people. Then how do they get so many votes? They can’t do it solely and only by making it harder for their opponents to vote. They can’t do it solely and only by frightening people about their class interests and fooling them about which class they belong with. They have to give people who don’t share, or who merely imagine they share, the class interests they represent some other kind of reason to vote for them.

That’s how the Republication party became the home of a bizarre collection of minority beliefs collectively labeled “social conservatism,” but the whole of which virtually no Republication – no one living citizen – accepts.

What’s in the collection? In no particular order:

·         That the Founding Fathers meant this to be a Xian nation.

·         That the mainstream media are part of a liberal conspiracy to deceive the public about etc., etc.

·         That abstinence is the only morally acceptable form of sex education and birth control.

·         That the moral obloquy of fetal stem cell research outweighs its benefits for medical science and the sufferers of disease, and the entire legislative agenda of NRLC.

·         That the planet is not getting warmer and that the scientists who say so are part of the liberal conspiracy.

·         That good people with guns is the only constitutional answer to bad people with guns.

·         That any and all advocates of gun control really just want to take away “my guns,” and the entire legislative agenda of the NRA.

·         That homosexuality is a curable moral condition.

·         That marijuana is dangerous because it leads users to become addicted to even more dangerous drugs.

·         That tithing is a religious duty.

·         That the world was created with the fossils already in it.

·         That homo sapiens is not a primate by origin, and the entire biblical account of creation.

·         That marriage must always and only be a union between a male and a female.

·         Ditto sex acts.

Social conservatives believe something obnoxious about conception too, but it’s difficult to express in a way that makes what is obnoxious about it transparent.

See how many moral judgments they make in order to defeat their political enemies? It’s not even nearly a complete list. Mind you, I’m not even trying to include in the list beliefs that range from covertly to unconsciously openly racist, etc., etc.

The point is, then, even if only two or three percent of the people feel strongly enough about any one item on the list to let it decide their vote – I’ll do the math. Ten items at 3% per item is 30% of the vote. What percent of the people are self-described social conservatives? What proportion of them shares the class interests of the electorate Republicanism serves, that is, the Few? Almost all the social conservatives are additive because the real Republications are, let’s just say for the sake of argument, better educated than that. They learned tolerance in college and money afterwards.

Or to do the math again: embracing social conservatism alone is still not enough to win elections because all the positions are minority positions. But take the 3% who may be expected based on objective economic interests to be and vote Republican, and add the 15-20% whom they’re frightened or fooled into voting with them on policy grounds. And then you add 30% more who are equally frightened or fooled, and who also happen to hold one or more of those noxious minority beliefs. How far have they gotten? To return to the original argument, the Republicans have to game the elections and the laws regulating the right to and manner of voting. If that effectively subtracts or neutralizes 2-5% of the vote, and social conservatism adds 30%, the 15-20% of the people who normally vote Republican might elect their candidates.

So it’s not about the 47% who happen to be entitled o something from the government. It’s about the 47% who happen to have been collected together around a set of minority beliefs and, secondarily, class interests. Reagan didn’t proceed entirely this way because he didn’t have to. The last honest Republican president was Eisenhower, who could have chosen to become the Democratic candidate instead, but decided, let’s say again for the sake of the argument, that the best way he could help his soldiers build a middle class life was to run under Republican principles as they then existed.

Now, Romney, to get the nomination, had to pretend to share most of these beliefs, and then, to win the election, to turn his back on most of them.

Is this the situation of a viable political entity? A bizarre set of ideological minorities that can only be kept together by a consummate liar? Could it now be possible to get rid of the Republican Party and replace it with….? I’m not sure what that new thing would look like so I can’t say what would make it possible. I can say the Republican Party looks about dead to me. If it hadn’t had real principles (A. Lincoln, T. Roosevelt) in its distant past, it would be. 

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 Myth: Who’s Picking Whose Pockets?

Well, it’s actually happening – been happening for some time. The shrinking middle class was in the news last week. It just proves what I’ve been saying: certain current members of the middle class (but not the petit bourgeoisie) are more likely to become one of the working poor than one of the Few. What’s having your pockets picked by people who are already working and poor compared to that? You might want to find some pockets to pick. But then you’d find you’d voted against it, and now that you need it, you’re not entitled to it anymore.

What’s actually happening is illustrated by the graphic in the papers and on the web. The Few are pauperizing whomever they can. Those are the kinds of jobs they “create.” That’s in the news this week too. The people who take them are forced into the underclasses, while the Few absorb to themselves the extra income they used to make.

Your only defense is to have some skill, expertise, specialization, or talent the Few particularly need in order to make their business schemes work. Believe me, I barely qualify. I make a decent living just because I know how to write, even though I’m a better philosopher than I am a writer. They have no use for philosophy and I can’t make a cent in commerce or industry on that account.

Obviously a great many other skills rate higher in the market than writing. They take talent, education, knowledge, and experience to acquire or develop. Then you sell them to the Few, and if you’re lucky or good, you become one of them. There’s other ways of joining, but ask yourself whether any of them are open to you.

Then ask yourself what are the possible ways you could fall in the other direction.

It’s certainly true they can’t pick your pockets if you’re broke. Be glad to have pockets to pick. Or better, when you’ve become working poor, your pockets have already been picked – by the people who pauperized you. Then you get your paycheck and see they’ve been picked again.

It’s a rare man – Gandhi for instance – who pauperizes himself. (Though some do through negligence, criminality, etc.) Therefore if you’re poor, or your forebears were poor, somebody pauperized you or them. Somebody in whose interest it was to pay you less or provide worse benefits then you could legitimately expect. Those people do it because they get to keep the difference. It’s called “profit.”

So now is a good time to remember that the Job Creators only create jobs if the jobs are likely to generate a profit. To which it can certainly be added, that the fewer worker expectations the job has to meet, other things being equal, the more likely it will generate profit.

What’s all this compared to a few shiftless people getting the entitlements the working poor have to settle for when their legitimate expectations are not met? Moreover they’re only entitlements because some elements of society cannot bear to see people who, for example, need and deserve health care do without, and because their employers have already washed their hands of the responsibility.

If you wonder why raising the minimum wage is a good idea, imagine your paycheck if it were your wage. It’s funny to think that, if we did raise it, the dollar menu at McDonald’s might be two dollars. But at that price, McDonald’s volume might suffer. Never mind. They’ll find a price point at which the reduced volume generates the same profit.

Who eats off the dollar menu anyway?...

…you guessed it.

It’s OK, but no better than OK, to be young, working, and poor, so long as you have prospects. I’m talking about working adults who, say, have children whose health is endangered, but are not insured. Or who’ve worked all their lives, who have nothing to retire on, and who’ll just have to keep on working as long as they can.

Politicians can talk about the middle class, or what’s left of it. I’m talking about social justice. You’ll see the justice of it – if you happen to become the next victim of the tendencies of this economy.

So please, by all means vote your interests, even if that means taking counsel of your fears. You might want to vote with the Few because you hope – vainly and thus irrationally in all but a few cases – to become one of them. (Might they create a job for you? That’s another story.) You might want to vote against the underclasses because, equally irrationally, you’re afraid of them. I’ve tried to explain this strange phenomenon elsewhere.

But I’m asking you to vote with the working poor prudentially and therefore rationally.

The best thing about this line of argument is that you don’t have to be a bleeding heart to accept it. You don’t have to feel guilty about already having more than you need. You don’t have to feel sorry for the working poor to see the need for fairness, justice, and equality in the workplace. Just imagine yourself in their shoes, and think about how sorry you’d feel for yourself.