Yesterday, in my diary, "What the elites are trying to steal from us, and why", I quoted from economist Dean Baker's recent article, "When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules", including the following two crucial paragraphs:
No progressive movement will make any progress until we understand the battle we are fighting. Our income is a cost to the rich. They will look to cut it wherever they can, whether this is wages for private sector workers, pensions for public employees, or Social Security for retirees. That is their target.
We have to fight back using the same logic. Their income is our cost -- the multimillion dollar bonuses for the Wall Street wizards is a direct drain on the economy. So are the bloated paychecks of top executives and their lackey boards. Progressives must be prepared to use all the same tactics to bring down the income of the rich and powerful that they have used to reduce the income of everyone else.
Regarding the bolded passage, I then wrote:
Keep that passage in front of you at all times, and you'll save yourself enormous amounts of grief.
Not least of all, it will help you recognize when someone's trying to distract you by pitting you against some other poor soul who's in exactly the same sort lose/lose negative sum situation that you are. Pitting one generation against another? Workers and/or taxpayers from one state against another? Employed against unemployed? Insured against uninsured? Oil rig workers against fishermen? (Especially when both are one and the same workers!) All these and more just different forms of the same class war game, the oldest one in the book: Let's you and him fight.
Oaktown Girl later wrote a comment picking up on this, along with a comment by VLaszlo quoting from a similarly themed piece by Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford.
She wrote:
Regarding different types of workers being pitted against one another: What's most upsetting to me is the "war" between workers with decent wages and benefits against those without. More and more, people without the fair wages and benefits see those who have them as overly privileged. So instead of saying, "Hey! We want those good wages and benefits too!", they're saying,"Hey! How come they get those sweet wages and benefits when the rest of us don't? The rest of us don't get that, so why should they?"
There are, of course, multiple casualties for this attitude which has steadily gained steam in post-Reagan era, and which seems to get stronger every year. But regardless of what's to blame, it's clear that not only have people forgotten how to fight for something better, or that they even can fight for something better, worst of all they've forgotten that they even deserve something better - and that "something" is a key part of what used to be seen as the basic social contract of this "great" country of ours.
This is a very important point, and well worth devoting another diary to. I can think of a number of different examples of when the the right wing has actively worked to pit one group of workers against another like this. The first was their attack on the United Auto Workers, when conservatives were actively advocating for the destruction of the American auto industry. The second was a lot less high profile, but it's more long-lasting attack on public employees. And the third is the more recent attack on the unemployed, particularly those who decline to take jobs that pay so little they will lead to inevitable banksuptcy. Let's take a more detailed look at what this conservative strategy looks like in action....
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| The Attack On Autoworkers
Regarding the attack on the autoworkers, I wrote a three-part series. In "GOP vs. UAW, USA", I focused on the difference of the logic that characterized the New Deal era, when automaking was key industry, versus the post 1973 era, when cutthroat retailer Wal-Mart became the low-price trend-setter:
The logic of the auto industry had been a unified one: good jobs meant good pay that drove demand for all sorts of other goods, all sorts of other good jobs, in turn driving more demand for more automobiles. Not only were production, wages, buying power and consumption all connected in a "virtuous circle", so too were taxes and public services, including quality education that allowed newly middle-class blue collar workers to send their children to college.
The logic of Wal-Mart, and others like it, was just the opposite-a vicious circle in which everything was driven downhill. High wages were nowhere to be found in its equation. And so the focus was on cutting consumer prices. Everything was sacrificed for that end. But cutting prices inevitably meant that everything else would be cut as well, either sooner or later. As long as some folks remained well-paid, this worked out very well for them. But the longer the pattern played out, the fewer and fewer well-paid workers (and thus, well-paid consumers) there were. And it wasn't just fewer and fewer well-paid workers, but fewer and fewer independent business, too. And more and more tax subsidies chasing a few large businesses who played off different cities, counties and states against one another, further reducing the quality of services as well
In "GOP vs. UAW, USA-Part II"m I quoted extensively from a Washington Post Op-Ed by Harold Meyerson, "Destroying What the UAW Built", which reviewed some of the ways in which the UAW has been crucial to building both the American middle class, and the broader range of progressive American politics. It also presented list of various public subsidies for foreign automakers over the past 28 years, totaling over $3.5 billion dollars-nearly $4.7 billion, adjusted for inflation.
In my initial summary of Meyerson's op-ed, I wrote:
Meyerson's op-ed makes three major points. First, that the UAW, from as far back as 1942, has long been far more visionary than the auto companies and their over-priced executives. Second, that the UAW played an invaluable role in creating the modern American working class. Third, that the UAW played an invaluable role in creating modern American liberalism, including the Civil Rights Movement that made Obama's presidency possible in the first place. Let's take these in order.
Just taking one selection that I quoted from the op-ed, here's an indication of how visionary the UAW had been:
In 1949, a pamphlet was published that argued that the American auto industry should pursue a different direction. Titled "A Small Car Named Desire," the pamphlet suggested that Detroit not put all its bets on bigness, that a substantial share of American consumers would welcome smaller cars that cost less and burned fuel more efficiently.
The pamphlet's author was the research department of the United Auto Workers.
By the standards of the postwar UAW, there was nothing exceptional about "A Small Car Named Desire." In its glory days, under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the UAW was the most farsighted institution -- not just the most farsighted union -- in America. "We are the architects of America's future," Reuther told the delegates at the union's 1947 convention, where his supporters won control of what was already the nation's leading union.
In "GOP vs. UAW, USA--Part III", one of my main thrusts was on "Repurposing The Auto Industry To Help Solve Multiple Long-Term Problems". This is the sort of thinking that can help raise up all workers, but that is absolutely out of the question if other workers are blinded by the sort of resentment that Oaktown Girl wrote about. Here's what I wrote:
Here is an initial set of suggestions:
(1) Diversify from auto-making into a full spectrum of transportation manufacture. Instead of competing against mass transit, for example, the companies would work to build the optimal mix of individual and mass transit, including a full spectrum mix of options that could be configured into multi-modal transportation systems, combining autos, bicycles, buses, trains, etc.
(2) Build-in long-term strategies for increased efficiency and transition to renewable energy as part of the corporate charter.
(3) Further expand the chartered purpose to include clean, renewable energy infrastructure-such as manufacturing wind turbines, solar heating systems, etc.
(4) Include the option of more general purpose infrastructure retrofitting to increase energy efficiency at any level of scale, from single-family dwellings to comprehensive infrastructure redesign and replacement for an entire metropolitan area.
In short, the repurposing of the auto industry should be an integral part of solving our long-term energy needs, curtailing global warming, and reducing a broader range of negative environmental/health impacts that cost us tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars per year. By combining all these problems and solutions into one integrated package, we can get much, much more bang for the buck.
The point here would not be to prevent other participants in solving these other problems. But it would be to get a running start in the quickest period of time, and to set new standards for how this can be done by internalizing social values into all manner of for-profit corporations.
Clearly, the GOP attack on the UAW was an initial attack that helped set the tone for the relentless attack on hope, change and possibility that they have waged continually ever since.
The Attack On Public Employees
Much of what I've written about the attack on public employees has been in the context of the stimulus and failure to fund state and local governments, or in writing directly about public education. But to address the specific kind of resentment-building that Oaktown Girl wrote about, I'd like to write about something I noticed, but never had the right chance to write about before....
Early this year a report was released, showing that unemployement was heavily concentrated at the bottom of the income scale. I'm sure you heard of it. It had the short, spiffy titled, "Labor Underutilization Problems of U.S. Workers Across Household Income Groups at the End of the Great Recession: A Truly Great Depression Among the Nation's Low Income Workers Amidst Full Employment Among the Most Affluent".
The concentration of unemployment was truly staggering, and had gotten even worse as the recession went on:
Well, even if you didn't hear of it, NYT op-ed columnist Bob Herbert did:
The Worst of the Pain
BOB HERBERT
Published: February 8, 2010
There is a great tendency in this country to refuse to see what is right in front of everybody's eyes.
While there is now, finally, a great deal of talk among the politicians and in the news media about unemployment, there is still almost a willful refusal to focus on just who is suffering the most from joblessness and underemployment.
When it comes to employment, there are roughly three broad categories in the United States. The folks in the upper-income group are not suffering much, if at all, from the profound reversals in employment brought about by the Great Recession. Those in the middle have been hit hard. The job losses there have been severe and long-lasting. But for those in the lower-income groups, the scale of the employment crisis has been mind-boggling.
That pretty much explains why it's a big deal: pain that doesn't register with the political class just isn't real in today's America.
But at NRO's "The Corner", Veronique de Rugy called it a "False Debate":
This data is supposed to help us refocus our attention on what matters: Poor vs Rich.The researchers conclude that "what has been missing from the public debate over the labor market crisis is an honest and detailed analysis of which American workers have been most adversely affected by the deep deterioration in labor markets.
I disagree. The real debate that is missing so far is not that low-skill workers are vulnerable to recessions (duh) but that public-sector employees still have jobs and private employees don't.
Look at the data: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to the end of December, private industry has suffered a net loss of 2,610,000 employees (or 2.3 percent of total private employment), while the government has only lost 46,000 employees from its payroll (or 0.2 percent of total government employment). In other words, most of the job losses occurred in the private sector rather than in the public sector. This means that on average, the number of private jobs lost for every private job created is far greater than six.
Oh and by the way, public-sector employees are also the ones benefiting from the stimulus funding, not the private-sector employees. The job-creation data reveals that most of the jobs were "created or saved" in the public sector. Based on data from Recovery.gov, we find that of the 640,000 jobs the administration claims to have created with stimulus funds, only some 140,765 of them were private jobs.
So, with tens of millions out of work, the real problem is that we haven't fired not enough government employees! Let's hate on them for a while!
Who needs teachers, firemen, police?
The Attack On The Unemployed
Although this has been mounting for some time, it reached its peak of nastiness thanks to Newt Gingrich just a few weeks ago, promptine me to write "Blaming the victim for market failure". Here's how that diary began:
| A long-term unemployed mechanic demonized by Newt Gingrich is actually suffering the same fate as entire advanced industries over the past two centuries, from railroads to airlines to computers: The presence of significant fixed costs means that competitive prices set by the market lead directly to financial ruin. Some Insights gleaned from Michael Perelman's Railroading Economic
Prelude: A Typical Demonized Victim of Circumstances
Last week, Kieth Olbermann had 52-year-old mechanic Michael Hatchell on his show, along with his wife, Sarah. After months of blaming the anonymous unemployed for their plight, Hatchell had surfaced as the first named individual for conservatives to pounce on, in a WSJ article, and pounce Newt Gingrich did:
"The article also quotes an engineer who admits he turned down more than a dozen offers because the salary would have been less than he made on welfare."
But, of course, Hatchell wasn't on welfare. He was on unemployment insurance, insurance that he had paid into for decades. And why didn't he take just any old job? For the same reason that Ford won't sell its cars for just any old price: He wants to earn enough to survive.
Here's part of the transcript, with added emphasis courtesy of Think Progress:
OLBERMANN: You're a 52 years old now former law enforcement officer, used to have your own business as a mechanic, you were employed for 59 weeks [...] and Mr. Gingrich suggests you got used to being unproductive. If that's not true why did you turn down so many job offers?
HATCHELL: Keith, it's really hard for someone like Mr. Gingrich to understand the fact that when you have a mortgage, you have a family to support, car payments, insurance everything else [...] if you're going out to look for a job, jobs that were going to pay half of what I was making, when they were offering me these jobs and [...] this is going to be a situation where we're going to start you out at the entry level wage, I've got 32 years of experience, in the automotive business, it's kinda hard for me to do that. Even at 40 hours at 7.75 an hour [...] With a mortgage and everything else, yes I was drawing unemployment 475 dollars a week, I paid into since I was a young man, 35 years I actually paid into it. It's unemployment insurance, not welfare that Mr. Gingrich has spoken about. Until such time I can get a gainful job that will let me keep my house, keep my family fed, not necessarily anything expensive, I wasn't going to take any other job.
OLBERMANN: He seemed to leave out the idea that it is insurance and you did pay into it. Pay now and don't get it later! If you had taken those lower paying jobs your family would be consiederably worse now than it actually is.
HATCHELL: Yes sir, with the mortgage payments, if you don't pay your mortgage, you'll be out on the street [...] When I did find a situation where I did have it better off, I took it.
Imagine that! He wants to keep his house! The nerve! |
Conclusion
So, there you have it folks. That's what Oaktown Girl was talking about. And those were just three of the most blatant examples. The reality is far more pervasive, an attitude that permeates the air we breathe. But if we can see it in large-scale examples like these, then we can start to get a handle on it in its less visible, more sinister forms as well. |
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