Lettin' It Get Ugly

It's important to remember that correlation is not proof - it doesn't necessarily mean that one part of the correlation is the cause of the other part(s).

Keep that in mind.

NYT editorial by SAMUEL BOWLES and ARJUN JAYADEV

Another dubious first for America: We now employ as many private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in 1980.

And that’s just a small fraction of what we call “guard labor.” In addition to private security guards, that means police officers, members of the armed forces, prison and court officials, civilian employees of the military, and those producing weapons: a total of 5.2 million workers in 2011. That is a far larger number than we have of teachers at all levels.

What is happening in America today is both unprecedented in our history, and virtually unique among Western democratic nations. The share of our labor force devoted to guard labor has risen fivefold since 1890 — a year when, in case you were wondering, the homicide rate was much higher than today.

5.2 million of us - it means that more than 1.5% of our total population is fully engaged in "protecting" the wealth of some Americans from other Americans.

Shit Doesn't Just Happen

Mr Tim Wise on Privilege

I've posted this before in one iteration or another, but it's generally a good idea to repeat the important lessons.  So just think of it as being part of our Continuing Education requirements.



I tend to check on certain things.  And when somebody sounds like he knows what he's talking about, it's even more important to see if he really knows what he says he knows.

That's Pretty Fucked Up, Right There

And the binary thinking "on the right" means that if you're talking about Wealth Inequality, then what you're really after is to upset the natural order of things and to turn USAmerica Incorporated into a Bolshevik nightmare and make Jesus cry.  Cuz everybody knows Capitalism is god's way of separating the good smart people from the poor stupid people.

Uh - no, actually.  We're talking about not returning to the glory days of the 18th century, when the king could do no wrong; when the noble class owned everything and collected rent from anybody who worked for a living, and "justice" was all about the aristocracy keeping the commoners in line by meting out punishment that included branding, whipping and partial hanging.

In this country today, tell me how it's fair and equitable to fill the prisons to overflowing with people making minimum wage while the real crooks on Wall Street and the Rentiers in the executives suites can buy their way out of any jam at all because they have the money and the connections.

Are We All Indians Now?

Nope - sorry - this isn't going to be a rant blasting The Lone Ranger.  I've heard lotsa bad things about it, and maybe I'll get to have some fun with it later, but right now I just  don't care much about some dumb movie.

This is about what's happened to the economic boom in India.  You remember - the one that Lil Tommy Friedman told us was the very model of this new fabulous economic system in which everybody becomes a plucky entrepreneur and go on to reap the riches of Croesus as we all thrill in "the race for the top" blah blah fucking blah.

From William Dalrymple at New Statesman, about a new book dealing with what's gone wrong:

...The economic boom, which began in 1991 and took off in the late 1990s, provoked a miniboom of New India books, some far better than others. First off the blocks was Gurcharan Das, a former CEO of Procter & Gamble, whose India Unbound in 2001 became an international bestseller and made a convincing case that the future was India’s: all that was needed was further deregulation and a stripping away of the economic coils – the “licence Raj” – that were tethering the Indian elephant to the ground and the country’s future as an economic superpower was assured.

You caught that, right?  Deregulation.  Git da gubmint out da way.

But of course, The Mustache of Understanding wasn't at all alone in his thinking.  And btw: these guys are never alone in their thinking - the herd is everything for these guys - as long as they're all wrong together, they never have to admit they have their heads all the way up their wealthy benefactors' asses.

Anyway, the thing goes on at length about how everybody was totes agog over the prospects of China and India overtaking the US as the world's economic superpower by mid 21st century.

But guess what?

Their thesis is simple: India’s failure to equal the success of China’s hyper-development is due in large part to the failure of the state to provide “essential public services – a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth”:

Inequality is high in both countries, but China has done far more than India to raise life expectancy, expand general education and secure health care for its people. India has elite schools of varying degrees of excellence for the privileged, but among all Indians seven or older, nearly one in every five males and one in every three females are illiterate . . . India’s health-care system is an unregulated mess. The poor have to rely on low-quality – and sometimes exploitative – private medical care, because there isn’t enough decent public care. While China devotes 2.7 per cent of its gross domestic product to government spending on health care, India allots 1.2 per cent.

So here's one take-away:  We were perfectly content to do fuckloads of business with China, even though we needed to be reminded to "hate" the Chinese government because of all the free stuff they kept giving their citizens under their dirty commie regime.  (they definitely have some pretty bad shit coming their way because of some of the fucked up government building projects, but that's a slightly different angle)

Meanwhile, the Indians were far more to our liking because they were doing it according to the Uncle Miltie Friedman formula - plus of course, if they could find jobs in Mumbai, maybe they wouldn't all be over here owning all of our 7-11 stores.

When Government is shut out completely;  when the people who are supposed to be doing the governing in a system of self-governance aren't allowed to do any actual governing, then we're volunteering for nothing less than to wear the chains of an old-style aristocracy from the 18th century that the flag-wavers and chest-thumpers keep telling us we're supposed to be so proud of having thrown off.

What the fuck, Murica!?!

USA - USA - USA

We're number...18?  Aah fuck.

Per Global Wealth DataBook (Credit Suisse):

What happens when a country's middle class takes a hit?  Look around.

Just A Tho't

(sparked by a bit in the Adam Curtis piece I posted yesterday)

"The Invisible Hand" has become the catch-all shield for anybody arguing for austerity and privatization, etc; or against Gubmint and social welfare or whatever evil rotten thing they find moldering in their fevered skulls.

The Invisible Hand (per Wikipedia):

In economics, the invisible hand of the market is a metaphor conceived by Adam Smith to describe the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace.[1] The exact phrase is used just three times in Smith's writings, but has come to capture his important claim that individuals' efforts to maximize their own gains in a free market benefits society, even if the ambitious have no benevolent intentions. Smith came up with the two meanings of the phrase from Richard Cantillon who developed both economic applications in his model of the isolated estate.[2]

From just a quick look at our own relatively brief history, I'm sure we could all come up with some good examples of bad results whenever The Invisible Hand was allowed to rule - the Slave Trade in America comes to my mind.  But maybe what we really need to consider is something a bit more ethereal, even tho' in a weird way it's right there in front of us.

Maybe "The Invisible Hand" is invisible because it isn't fucking there.  Not as a prospectively guiding force anyway.  My main problem with "market-based self-regulation" is that the regulatory function is always retroactive; it's remedial instead of preventative; and so any solutions or corrections always come after the fact, which means the whole mess is way more costly than it'd be if we'd had good regulations in place that were aimed at heading off problems before they become problems.

Looking at it thru the "Fuck Your Buddy" filter, the picture clears up a bit more.

BTW: "Conservatives" adhering to the (increasingly debunked) theories of Milton Friedman and John Nash and Friedrich von Hayek seem to be insisting that all the bad shit that seems always to happen with unregulated capitalism hasn't actually happened.  And that's all part of the revisionist bullshit theme that runs very strong in "Conservative" politics - start with your desired outcome, and then do whatever is necessary to fix the facts around that outcome.  (see Downing Street Memo for an excellent example)

Friedman's shock therapy gets applied in Chile and Argentina and Iraq and Greece and and and - and it's mostly pretty much all fucked up.

Nash's Game Theory gets played out with the secretaries at Rand Corp, and what happens?  The subjects insisted on cooperating with each other instead of fucking each other over all the time, so the experiment was a complete flop.  And of course, it wasn't because there were serious problems with the theory - it had to be because those stupid secretaries weren't behaving in the "appropriately rational manner".  So the theory didn't fail, those idiot biddies failed the theory.  Sound familiar?

Here's a little experiment we can try: whenever you hear somebody use the phrase "The Invisible Hand", substitute "the will of god", or "god's mysterious plan".  Now tell me if anything else that person says makes any real sense from the standpoint of what a "fully rational, pragmatic adult" might say - about economics or politics or actual human-type people.

If it's bullshit, then you're not being rude when you call it bullshit.

The KrugMan Speaks

Paul Krugman tells about Taxing The Rich:

First, over the past three decades we’ve seen a soaring share of income going to the very top of the income distribution (right scale) even as tax rates on high incomes have fallen sharply, with the recent Obama increases clawing back only a fraction of the previous cuts:

Second, there is now a lot of hard empirical work on the incentive effects of high top tax rates. None of it shows the kind of huge negative effects that figure so prominently in right-wing rhetoric. In particular, none of it suggests that we are anywhere close to the point where raising taxes on the rich would reduce revenue as opposed to increasing it.

Here're the bullet points from the article at Economic Policy Institute:

The top U.S. income tax rate is currently well below best estimates of the optimal rate for revenue maximization.

Recent research implies a revenue-maximizing top effective federal income tax rate of roughly 68.7 percent. This is nearly twice the top 35 percent effective marginal ordinary income tax rate that prevailed at the end of 2012, and 27.5 percentage points higher than the 41.2 percent rate in 2013.2 This would mean a top statutory income tax rate of 66.1 percent, 26.5 percentage points above the prevailing 39.6 percent top statutory rate.

Tax reform that broadens the tax base and minimizes tax avoidance opportunities actuallyincreases the revenue-maximizing top marginal tax rate.

This means that base-broadening tax reform and higher marginal rates should be seen as complements, not substitutes. Analyses of top tax rate changes since World War II show that higher rates have no statistically significant impact on factors driving economic growth—private saving, investment levels, labor participation rates, and labor productivity—nor on overall economic growth rates.

Both short-run demand-side and long-run supply-side growth effects stemming from top tax rate changes are extremely modest. Thus, related “dynamic” revenue “leakages” stemming from reduced economic activity following top rate increases are small as well. Indeed, the net revenue feedback of the 2001–2004 tax cuts was recently estimated at recouping just 1 percent of their scored cost.

Historically, decreases in top marginal tax rates have widened inequality of both pre- and post-tax income. This has been interpreted by some economists as marginal rate reductions providing a higher payoff to rent-seeking (i.e., using influence to “bargain” a higher share of income at the expense of other workers).

Today’s economic context of a depressed U.S. economy, political pressure to prematurely reduce near-term budget deficits, and ever-widening income inequality actually strengthens the case for raising top marginal tax rates. There remains substantial scope for further raising top rates toward the revenue-maximizing levels estimated by the best economic research.

I'm all for letting your Freak Fly.  You feel a deep driving need to get rich? Go for it. It's mostly a lotta fun to watch, and you should get to hang onto the bulk of it.  But let's make sure the things that need to be taken care of are getting taken care of - 'cuz those are the things that everybody's responsible for; the things you get the biggest benefits from; and the things that make it possible for you to continue making your zillions.  But mostly, let's make sure the disparity and inequalities are kept to reasonable levels - 'cuz that's what keeps the wait staff from takin' a giant shit in your punch bowl.

Last Night On Bill Maher

Sometimes the best comedy isn't very funny.

If There Was A Class War

...my class won. --Warren Buffet

“A petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant politics has come to dominate and paralyze our government,” says Bill, “while millions of people keep falling through the gaping hole that has turned us into the United States of Inequality.”

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

The Krugman Speaks

..for a good long time, and says a lot of great stuff.



I guess a coupla main points for me are these:

• We have to stop allowing ourselves to be made to believe that Democracy and Capitalism are interchangeable terms.
• We have to understand just how close we're coming to letting the Bain-type Vultures pull off a corporate takeover of our government. (Don't think so?  Think about the assets owned by the USA, and then try not to think about that fat and juicy Pension Fund we've got, just layin' there ready for some smart buzzards to swoop in and pick it clean.  What's happening now - what's been happening for 25 years - is classic Bain Capital / Henry Kravitz leveraged buyout bullshit.)

Inequalities

An unfair advantage is not necessarily a bad thing (I've probably posted about that before, but I really don't remember).  If I can take the same resources that're available to everybody else and build a race car that's faster than yours, then I have the classic unfair advantage.  And if you can't keep up with me, that's your problem not mine.  But that assumes there are no artificial advantages that impede you while not impeding me.

From The Firebrand
(btw - try to resist the knee-jerk rejection to which you may be inclined due to the name of the author and his references to Marx et al):

‘All men are created equal‘ declared by Thomas Jefferson seems to be, at first glance, an utmost agreeable proposition. But a quick examination reveals this to be fundamentally untrue, at least in practice, on many specific levels. The gender inequality is a hot topic in the recent months, with Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock (along with their colleagues Iowa representative Steve King, Pennsylvania Senate candidate Tom Smith and Wisconsin state representative Roger Rivard) trying to convince women never to vote for the GOP again. Of all inequalities between people the most prominently discussed is the economic inequality, most commonly associated with the distribution of wealth. The observed concentration of capital was predicted by Marx in Das Kapital, and believed to be one of the main reasons for an inevitable crisis, with a select few wealthy capitalists confronted by vast, poor masses. The concentration of capital is believed to be the most important factor in the overall inequality, but I think that this may be an incorrect assumption, as the inequalities may be a function of another one, in my view deeper in its nature: information inequality. Neither the debates nor the public discourse at large is taking a look at information inequality, despite it being a foundational problem, greater than most of the topics discussed.

These relatively simple premises are what Conflict Theory and Critical Race Theory are all about - ie: the basic fact that the existing structure of any society tends to perpetuate (and over time, to amplify) artificial impediments that serve to widen the gap between the classes (delivering more power into fewer hands) and to push more people out of positions of power and towards poverty.

So while disparity can be a good tool for promoting healthy competition, I can also use it as a weapon to subjugate people who by right should be my peers.

Lying For The Lord

Google that - "lying for the lord".

Read thru a few of the hits and after you make the easy connection to Willard being a lying sack of shit, tell me it has nothing to do with the basics of what we know about a "ruling elite" (ala Leo Strauss) and the sense of entitlement engendered by a system of intergenerational wealth transfer.

Then ask the questions.

Does Meghan McCain get to where she is without mommy's money and daddy's connections?

What about Luke Russert?

GW Bush can trace his lineage back to Franklin Pierce.

If this is to be the meritocracy we like to believe it should be, then we have to re-establish rules that require the Idiot Offspring of The Nobles to start at the same place as everybody else, and to meet the same criteria as everybody else, and to do the work everybody else is required to do.

If you're in favor of "Equal Opportunity and not Equal Outcomes", then stop supporting a system that practically guaranties inequality.

Doing The Laundry

From Rolling Stone Magazine, by Tim Dickinson:

Are Romney's tax dodges legal? It's impossible to say for sure, given how little he has disclosed. But tax experts note that there are plenty of red flags, including an investigation by New York prosecutors into tax abuses at Bain Capital that began on Romney's watch. "He aggressively exploits every loophole he can find," says Victor Fleischer, a professor of tax law at the University of Colorado. "He's pushing the limits of tax law beyond what many think is reasonable." Indeed, a look at Romney's finances reveals just how skilled he is at hiding his wealth – and paying a fraction of his fair share in taxes.

 The more I learn about this guy, the smaller he looks.

Disparity Sucks

The usual way of things is for fewer and fewer people to gather more and more of the available power and wealth; while more and more people have less and less.  Eventually, the "lower classes" are left with nothing more to lose, which is when they turn into the mob and simply show up inside your gated communities to take what they want.

It's the "natural order"; Darwinian principles at work; that's just the way it is.  'Twas ever thus, and ever thus 'twill be.

Everywhere else in the whole world, and for as long as there's been even the barest hint of social structure, we've seen the same pattern play out over and over and over again.

But not here.  We're supposed to be the exception.

From The National Journal, via US Uncut:

Income inequality in America has reached levels not seen since the Gilded Age. As Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, noted in June, “America has the highest level of inequality of any of the advanced countries — and its gap with the rest has been widening.”

Today's Civics Assignment

Moyers has rehabbed himself in pretty good shape in the last 45 years.  For me, he stands among the last of the straight news guys.


Moyers & Company 101: On Winner Take All Politics from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

And Jesus Wept