This morning's paper carried an Associated Press article titled "Palin Says 'little guy' Key in Vote." "Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said Friday that the country needs to elect business-minded candidates who will not sell out their principles for the sake of bipartisanship." Oh. And the "regular" Republicans these past two years have been models of the infection of bipartisanship?
She went on, "This election is about the little guy, the common man, independence, and the middle class--those forgotten and ignored for too long, and now they're fighting back." The Tea Party of late and Big Conservatism in general for the past 40 years have done one of the best jobs of ironically effective misdirection of angst in modern times. Notice how she knits together a list of identifiers that describe the majority of society and links it to disaffection and defensive umbrage--yes, she's talking about me, and look how abused we are--and then continues with, "We want those business-oriented folks in Washington not to be there singing 'Kumbaya' with the people who caused the problems in the first place."
And what problems are those, that affect the little guy of the middle class so strongly? First would be the Wall Street meltdown and foreclosure crisis, caused by the reckless unregulated practices of big business. Next would be the jobs crisis, caused by big business outsourcing all those middle class jobs overseas. Third might be an opportunity crisis, characterized by such things as the college cost crunch, public school deterioration and infrastructure decline, fueled by the success of big business and the wealthy at getting their tax burdens reduced so that more and more has to be borne by "little guys" who cannot afford it. Now in the wake of the Citizens United court ruling, $50 million in secret contributions from big business is pouring into the election campaign on behalf of the Republican cause. No doubt we are expected to believe their largess is donated not to further GOP support for corporate interests but due to the multinationals' concern for the 'little guy.'
Disaffection in the white working and lower middle class is real and understandable. Their standard of living has been getting inexorably squeezed for the past thirty years. The Koch brothers, Coors family, Rupert Murdoch and a handful of like-minded rightist billionaires have been working assiduously for at least that long to misdirect the chain of causation for that away from themselves for even longer. All the poor, aggrieved little guy has to do is turn ever more authority over to the tycoons who have rigged the system against him and require less and less of a societal contribution from those who have been driving him to desperation and all will be well. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragically sad.
Showing posts with label Class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Class. Show all posts
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Saturday, January 31, 2009
A Sickening Sense of Entitlement
The former CEO of Merrill Lynch spends $1.22 million of the corporation's money on decorating his office, then on his way out dishes out $3 to $4 billion of federal bailout money in bonuses to upper management--despite the fact they had led the firm to a $15 billion dollar loss and absorption by Bank of America. AIG gets $85 billion in bailout money and sends the bigwigs to a swanky California seaside resort a week later at a cost of $440,000 for the weekend. The crash of Citigroup would probably implode the stock market. It gets $45 billion of federal rescue money. The next thing you know, they are signing up for a $50 million corporate jet.
What is wrong with these people? It would never even occur to me to ask my employer to shell out money to decorate my office, particularly in dire times for the bottom line. In ten years I have asked for one paint job and to replace a ceiling tile discolored by a leak in the roof. I hesitate to use too many of the district's pens and markers. How about you? Don't you try to watch the company's pennies too? Why are these clowns so different? Simple. It's because they are not like you and me. Their lives may as well have been lived in a parallel universe compared to ours.
Most of the top management at firms like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, Morgan Stanley Chase and so forth come from a tiny sliver of society whose lives are as far out of the norm as the Tsar's was to his serfs. These are the children of millionaires and billionaires. They went to private boarding schools and got into Ivy League business schools as legacies. I know plenty of scholarship students who saw their type at prestigious schools. They had $1,000 a week clothing allowances, scarcely went to class and somehow muddled through with a minimum of effort. They stepped into mid-upper management right out of school based on the extensive social and business network of their fellow aristocrats. They were immediately admitted to the most exclusive clubs and associations in the Big Apple and other major financial centers.
These people have no clue what it is like to actually have to work hard, save money, land a job or keep one based on their merits. John Thain left Goldman Sachs with $300 million in stock. Merrill hired him at $83 million a year. He couldn't afford to spruce up his own office? It likely never crossed his mind. Everything is an entitlement to people like him. In one of life's supreme ironies, the wealthiest are the class most apt to get practically everything in life gratis. Connections, many decades of gaming the system to cater to their whims and address their every interest, and a casually sickening sense of entitlement make it all so common and all so easy. Warren Buffett, a self-made billionaire, is one who recognizes the incongruity for what it is, complaining of the injustice of his paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.
The current administration appears to be getting a little fed up with this state of affairs. Vice President Biden said he wanted to throw such people "in the brig." President Obama called such a lack of responsibility "shameful." It might just be that some much tighter regulations will be attached to the second half of the TARP bailout money, the half under Obama's control. There is talk of salary limits, requirements for using the money and paying it back, and so forth. The word is that much of it will go this time to help mortgage payers rather than profligate and ungrateful financial houses, anyway.
It all just goes to show that these scions of the domestic noble class cannot be trusted to take care of the national or even their own corporate interest without the most stringent regulation. This is the real "good ole boy" network writ large. They have led lives of incredible privilege, having everything handed to them. In their experience, the rest of the human race exists to provide for their every whim. They are, in short, spoiled brats. Giving them free reign has wrecked property values, retirement prospects, and the housing, stock and job markets for untold millions. Enough. Either we take control of them or they will have control of us. If it is handled right, the economic crisis caused by their overreach may prove a blessing if it shocks the public out of compliant accession to their steady accretion of power and gives Obama the political wherewithal to act.
What is wrong with these people? It would never even occur to me to ask my employer to shell out money to decorate my office, particularly in dire times for the bottom line. In ten years I have asked for one paint job and to replace a ceiling tile discolored by a leak in the roof. I hesitate to use too many of the district's pens and markers. How about you? Don't you try to watch the company's pennies too? Why are these clowns so different? Simple. It's because they are not like you and me. Their lives may as well have been lived in a parallel universe compared to ours.
Most of the top management at firms like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, Morgan Stanley Chase and so forth come from a tiny sliver of society whose lives are as far out of the norm as the Tsar's was to his serfs. These are the children of millionaires and billionaires. They went to private boarding schools and got into Ivy League business schools as legacies. I know plenty of scholarship students who saw their type at prestigious schools. They had $1,000 a week clothing allowances, scarcely went to class and somehow muddled through with a minimum of effort. They stepped into mid-upper management right out of school based on the extensive social and business network of their fellow aristocrats. They were immediately admitted to the most exclusive clubs and associations in the Big Apple and other major financial centers.
These people have no clue what it is like to actually have to work hard, save money, land a job or keep one based on their merits. John Thain left Goldman Sachs with $300 million in stock. Merrill hired him at $83 million a year. He couldn't afford to spruce up his own office? It likely never crossed his mind. Everything is an entitlement to people like him. In one of life's supreme ironies, the wealthiest are the class most apt to get practically everything in life gratis. Connections, many decades of gaming the system to cater to their whims and address their every interest, and a casually sickening sense of entitlement make it all so common and all so easy. Warren Buffett, a self-made billionaire, is one who recognizes the incongruity for what it is, complaining of the injustice of his paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.
The current administration appears to be getting a little fed up with this state of affairs. Vice President Biden said he wanted to throw such people "in the brig." President Obama called such a lack of responsibility "shameful." It might just be that some much tighter regulations will be attached to the second half of the TARP bailout money, the half under Obama's control. There is talk of salary limits, requirements for using the money and paying it back, and so forth. The word is that much of it will go this time to help mortgage payers rather than profligate and ungrateful financial houses, anyway.
It all just goes to show that these scions of the domestic noble class cannot be trusted to take care of the national or even their own corporate interest without the most stringent regulation. This is the real "good ole boy" network writ large. They have led lives of incredible privilege, having everything handed to them. In their experience, the rest of the human race exists to provide for their every whim. They are, in short, spoiled brats. Giving them free reign has wrecked property values, retirement prospects, and the housing, stock and job markets for untold millions. Enough. Either we take control of them or they will have control of us. If it is handled right, the economic crisis caused by their overreach may prove a blessing if it shocks the public out of compliant accession to their steady accretion of power and gives Obama the political wherewithal to act.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Class: The Other Taboo
The candidacy of Barack Obama has inevitably raised the issue of race. It is a topic most Americans would rather not talk about. Yet there is another issue that remains if anything an even greater taboo, and that is class.
If you want to make any number of predictions about a person's prospects at birth there is no surer way than by learning the income and educational level of his or her parents. This provides a more accurate barometer than race. Life expectancy, income, crime and incarceration figures, even traffic accident prediction are most accurately achieved by applying socioeconomic factors. Auto insurers know this. That is why they base insurance rates so heavily on a customer's zip code.
With race, there is a palpable discomfort level with most people. There are those who see its influence everywhere and others who feel that society is completely past it, that anyone who brings it up is simply whining or making excuses. But with most there is an underlying sense that it still matters, though how much or how little is difficult to determine and to talk about it is to walk on eggs. With class, however, there is usually the blank stare of incomprehension.
Sociology is the discipline that studies how people behave in groups. Put people in poverty and you get a consistent pattern of overall behavior. Overcrowd people and you get another. Expose them to danger or to greater or lesser degrees of opportunity and you get high correlations of definite behavior patterns. These understandings run counter to the propensity of upper and middle class Americans to believe that group factors do not matter; that everything is determined by individual choices for which individuals are personally responsible. They point to poor individuals who have "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" as evidence.
Yet the aggregate numbers are clear. Tulare County, California, where I live, is a good case in point. The county is largely rural. The unemployment level is about triple the national average. The demographics approximate rural Mississippi or rural Appalachia quite closely. They share similar high school dropout rates of around 40%, high teen pregnancy rates, divorce rates, incarceration rates, lower than average life expectancy rates and so on down the line. The economic conditions of poor Mexican-Americans in rural California, poor whites in Appalachia and poor blacks in the rural South lead to similar societal ills.
What worries me is the apparent national abandonment of a consensus to do anything about this problem. Historically, the national calamity of the Great Depression led to a great move toward egalitarianism. Millions from all walks of life got jobs with the CCC or the WPA. In World War II, the draft brought Americans of all sorts into the national service together. The GI Bill that followed it provided a hand up that moved millions into the white collar middle class. Brown v. Topeka and the Civil Rights Act began ending legal segregation. The 1950s and 1960s saw the formation of the greatest middle class society and the greatest widely shared growth of opportunity and prosperity in the nation's, and perhaps in the world's, history.
But the commitment to that vision ebbed and has seemingly been replaced in many places by a return to fear. Gated communities proliferate. More people send their children to private schools, which are no longer segregated by race but by income. Even public schools vary enormously depending on the wealth of their supporting community, and people with means move to where the schools are reputed to be better. There is a vibrant home-schooling movement. Tuition rates at public colleges and universities go up while scholarships are cut. The volunteer military increasingly is bifurcated into an enlisted mass drawn from the lower and lower middle classes and an officer corps drawn from the upper middle and upper classes. The national political, business and media leadership is nearly completely in the hands of people from these upper strata as well. People increasingly get their news from opinionated niche outlets that tell them what they want to hear, reinforce their own world views without contradiction, and demonize those who think differently.
Unlike those earlier eras, there exists very little impetus to recreate the shared experiences that once drew the nation's people closer together. There seem to be few who call for addressing these developments by making a concerted effort to improve life for those at the margins and integrate them into the middle class mainstream; instead that seems to have been relegated to the status of a lost cause for which the only answer is to hunker down behind protective walls to keep the riff raff out.
It seems as though we lived in a different America in 1967. That summer my father took me to a baseball game in Kansas City. During the game he sent me on an errand. I took my game program and a pen about three rows down and a few seats over to get the autograph of Warren Hearns, Governor of Missouri. That the Governor of the state would be sitting in the stands along with everyone else was just how it was. No one thought anything of it. Today a governor would be in a sky box behind glass with other mucky-mucks, shielded there from contact with the hoi polloi by astronomical prices and by security officers whose job it is to refuse entry to that stadium level to those who do not bear a golden ticket.
President Kennedy said, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Can it be that knowledgeable people are not aware from historical example where the balkanization of a society into class-based enclaves leads? Can we have forgotten Kennedy's words so soon?
If you want to make any number of predictions about a person's prospects at birth there is no surer way than by learning the income and educational level of his or her parents. This provides a more accurate barometer than race. Life expectancy, income, crime and incarceration figures, even traffic accident prediction are most accurately achieved by applying socioeconomic factors. Auto insurers know this. That is why they base insurance rates so heavily on a customer's zip code.
With race, there is a palpable discomfort level with most people. There are those who see its influence everywhere and others who feel that society is completely past it, that anyone who brings it up is simply whining or making excuses. But with most there is an underlying sense that it still matters, though how much or how little is difficult to determine and to talk about it is to walk on eggs. With class, however, there is usually the blank stare of incomprehension.
Sociology is the discipline that studies how people behave in groups. Put people in poverty and you get a consistent pattern of overall behavior. Overcrowd people and you get another. Expose them to danger or to greater or lesser degrees of opportunity and you get high correlations of definite behavior patterns. These understandings run counter to the propensity of upper and middle class Americans to believe that group factors do not matter; that everything is determined by individual choices for which individuals are personally responsible. They point to poor individuals who have "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" as evidence.
Yet the aggregate numbers are clear. Tulare County, California, where I live, is a good case in point. The county is largely rural. The unemployment level is about triple the national average. The demographics approximate rural Mississippi or rural Appalachia quite closely. They share similar high school dropout rates of around 40%, high teen pregnancy rates, divorce rates, incarceration rates, lower than average life expectancy rates and so on down the line. The economic conditions of poor Mexican-Americans in rural California, poor whites in Appalachia and poor blacks in the rural South lead to similar societal ills.
What worries me is the apparent national abandonment of a consensus to do anything about this problem. Historically, the national calamity of the Great Depression led to a great move toward egalitarianism. Millions from all walks of life got jobs with the CCC or the WPA. In World War II, the draft brought Americans of all sorts into the national service together. The GI Bill that followed it provided a hand up that moved millions into the white collar middle class. Brown v. Topeka and the Civil Rights Act began ending legal segregation. The 1950s and 1960s saw the formation of the greatest middle class society and the greatest widely shared growth of opportunity and prosperity in the nation's, and perhaps in the world's, history.
But the commitment to that vision ebbed and has seemingly been replaced in many places by a return to fear. Gated communities proliferate. More people send their children to private schools, which are no longer segregated by race but by income. Even public schools vary enormously depending on the wealth of their supporting community, and people with means move to where the schools are reputed to be better. There is a vibrant home-schooling movement. Tuition rates at public colleges and universities go up while scholarships are cut. The volunteer military increasingly is bifurcated into an enlisted mass drawn from the lower and lower middle classes and an officer corps drawn from the upper middle and upper classes. The national political, business and media leadership is nearly completely in the hands of people from these upper strata as well. People increasingly get their news from opinionated niche outlets that tell them what they want to hear, reinforce their own world views without contradiction, and demonize those who think differently.
Unlike those earlier eras, there exists very little impetus to recreate the shared experiences that once drew the nation's people closer together. There seem to be few who call for addressing these developments by making a concerted effort to improve life for those at the margins and integrate them into the middle class mainstream; instead that seems to have been relegated to the status of a lost cause for which the only answer is to hunker down behind protective walls to keep the riff raff out.
It seems as though we lived in a different America in 1967. That summer my father took me to a baseball game in Kansas City. During the game he sent me on an errand. I took my game program and a pen about three rows down and a few seats over to get the autograph of Warren Hearns, Governor of Missouri. That the Governor of the state would be sitting in the stands along with everyone else was just how it was. No one thought anything of it. Today a governor would be in a sky box behind glass with other mucky-mucks, shielded there from contact with the hoi polloi by astronomical prices and by security officers whose job it is to refuse entry to that stadium level to those who do not bear a golden ticket.
President Kennedy said, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Can it be that knowledgeable people are not aware from historical example where the balkanization of a society into class-based enclaves leads? Can we have forgotten Kennedy's words so soon?
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