Tag Archives: America

Which Side Are You On?

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Journalist Edward McClelland lays it on the line at Salon in “The ‘Middle Class’ Myth: Here’s Why Wages Are Really So Low Today”.

Some key points:

In the relatively recent past, an “unskilled” worker straight out of high school could get a union job and earn enough to buy a car and rent an apartment.

Workers aren’t simply paid according to their skills. They’re paid based on how much they can get from their employers.

The anti-union movement’s biggest victory hasn’t been the elimination of existing union jobs. It’s been preventing the unionization of other jobs.

Companies claim that low-paid jobs were never meant to support a family or lead to a career, but that’s simply a way to justify paying low wages. And they can do that because they don’t have to deal with unions.

Today’s workers have to stop thinking of themselves as middle-class, just because they don’t work in a factory or they went to college: “Unless you own the business, you’re working class”.

“The smartest people I ever met were guys who ran cranes in the mill…They were smart enough, at least, to get their fair share of the company’s profits.”

It’s an excellent article and not very long. 

While we’re on the subject, Pete Seeger sings “Which Side Are You On?”, written in 1931 by Florence Reece, the wife of a union organizer, during Kentucky’s Harlan County War.

PS – Wikipedia says Florence Reece took the melody from a Baptist hymn. Pete Seeger was only 12 in 1931.

No Wonder The Foreign Bastards Hate Us

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Some foreigners may hate us for “our freedoms”, as Bush the Younger once said. But many surely hate us, justifiably, for our willingness to kill recklessly and with minimal regret.

It hardly made the news here, but a few days ago our government attacked a “wedding convoy” in Yemen, murdering 14 people and maiming 22. At least three more have since died. Meanwhile, our government (including the Democrat in the White House) hasn’t commented.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf asks how we would react if something similar happened here:

Can you imagine the wall-to-wall press coverage, the outrage, and the empathy for the victims that would follow if an American wedding were attacked in this fashion? Or how you’d feel about a foreign power that attacked your wedding in this fashion? …  and all for the sake of five people suspected of ties to al-Qaeda.

We might as well be broadcasting a message worldwide on Voice of America: “We don’t give a shit about you foreign bastards”.

The whole article, which is brief, is worth reading, especially if you’re still proud to be an American. 

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell

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Paul Fussell’s best-known book is The Great War and Modern Memory. In that book, he wrote about the effect of World War I, especially trench warfare, on British writers. Wartime is Fussell’s similar book about World War II. This one isn’t mainly concerned with the war’s effect on writers, however. It has a much broader scope. There are discussions, for example, of the myth of “precision” bombing; the frequency of military foul-ups; rumors; rationing; stereotypes; accentuating the positive; casualty rates; popular songs; swearing; hunger; and sexual frustration. There is even a whole chapter devoted to “chickenshit” – the petty crap that superiors inflict on subordinates.

Fussell wrote from experience. He was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart as an infantry officer in France. His goal in Wartime was to capture the reality of World War II as it was endured by American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen, especially those who actually saw combat (a small minority of those who served). He often does this by contrasting military reality with the sanitized version presented to the people back home. If you were in the service but not in combat, your main emotions were boredom and anger. If you were in combat, it was fear and horror.

According to Fussell, the authorities eventually realized that engaging in more than 240 days of combat (not consecutive days, but total days) would drive anyone insane. That sums up World War II for the men who did the actual fighting.

Moe Should Have Watched “The Wire”

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David Simon, the creator of The Wire, spoke recently at a conference in Australia. The Guardian has an edited transcript of his talk here. Some selected paragraphs:

You know if you’ve read Capital or if you’ve got the Cliff Notes, you know that [Marx’s] imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.

That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.

From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.

Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It’s a great tool to have in your toolbox if you’re trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn’t want to go forward at this point without it. But it’s not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.

And that’s what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.

Moe really should have watched The Wire.

One Reason Our Democracy Is In Trouble

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A recent paper by three political scientists argues that American voters don’t nicely divide between liberals and conservatives. There are also populists and libertarians. In order to understand the American electorate, therefore, we need two dimensions, not one. This observation isn’t new, but it’s worth keeping in mind when thinking about our dysfunctional political system.

Instead of the standard left/right dimension, we need a left/right social dimension and a left/right economic dimension. Polling data indicates that the electorate is rather evenly distributed between four ideological tendencies:

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At the lower left, liberals are liberal on both social and economic issues. That’s the official Democratic party position. At the upper right, conservatives are conservative on both social and economic issues. That’s the official Republican position (although “conservative” is a misnomer for today’s Republican Party).

Meanwhile, populists are liberal on economic issues and conservative on social issues, while libertarians are the opposite of populists, being conservative on economic issues and liberal on social ones.

On a social issue like gay marriage, for example, liberals and libertarians tend to be in favor of it. I mean, who cares if gay people get married? Well, populists (say, a truck driver who belongs to the Teamsters) and the conservatives at the Republican National Committee aren’t happy about it.

On an economic issue like the minimum wage, however, liberals and populists like the idea that people with jobs should have a relatively decent standard of living. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, think it’s wrong to force business owners to pay their employees an artificially high wage.

The authors of the article identify a fifth group, the moderates in the middle, whose ideology isn’t especially liberal or conservative. They represent some of the infamous “swing” voters who don’t know who to vote for (Obama, Romney, who can decide?).

What the diagram shows, however, is that the populists and libertarians will also tend to swing between the two major parties, since their views don’t match up nicely with either the liberal/liberal Democratic candidates or the conservative/conservative Republican ones.

It may also be the case that the moderates, populists and libertarians will tend to avoid voting altogether, since the major candidates don’t fully represent their views.

Would it be better if there were four major parties instead of two? That might result in more people voting, which is supposedly a good thing in a democracy. But that would seem to require making our political system more representative, for example, by moving away from winner-take-all and allowing minority parties to gain more power. The authors of the paper don’t expect much to change any time soon:

There is no great mystery as to why American political parties can’t get beyond the left-right divide. Parties are by nature risk-adverse organizations … tightly moored to the status quo. Only under the most extreme circumstances—for parties, that means repeated losses at the polls—do they adopt changes in their electoral strategy. Thus, as long as both parties can plausibly convince themselves that their ideological appeals are not responsible for their electoral defeats, they will avoid making any fundamental changes in their basic strategies.

At the same time, … neither Republicans nor Democrats will be able cultivate a majority by only focusing on their core ideological supporters. There are simply not enough additional conservative and liberal votes to be harvested to produce an electoral majority. So, for the time being, both parties are caught in fundamental dilemma—they lack the incentive to move beyond their ideological anchors and yet they cannot become a majority party by becoming more closely tied to these anchors. They are thus set adrift in a sea of future uncertainty.

I read about this paper in an article in the New York Times. The author of the Times article is mainly interested in the idea of a middle-of-the-road third party. I think a middle-of-the-road third party might satisfy fewer people than the two we already have.