Blaming the Victim Makes Headway

As economic recovery inches slowly along with Republicans ideologically opposed to anything that would alleviate it and Democrats struggling to keep a majority together to act, a movement to set up a new class of scapegoats is gathering steam. This new group against whom animosity and envy are now being directed are public employees. I saw a CNN report on Saturday that discussed the nationwide protests March 4 against drastic cuts and rising tuition. Here in California, for instance, tuition at the Cal State schools has gone up 68% and at the University of California 61% over the past five years.

I was most distressed to hear the anchor ask a guest "expert" for commentary about the situation. His take was that the protesting students should look at the teachers next to them in the protest line for the blame on service cuts and tuition hikes. If they would simply accept a pay freeze, he stated, none of these budget-balancing steps would be necessary. This kind of talk is absurd. No one is getting pay increases as it is now. At Fresno State, faculty is taking 18 "furlough" days per year, resulting in a 9.23% pay cut. Los Angeles Unified laid off 4,000 personnel in 2009, more than half of them teachers. Its Board voted last week to ready another 5,200 layoffs this year, including another 2,300 teachers.

Consider how the dialogue is changing. Until a few months ago, the primary blame for the Great Recession focused on selfish and short-sighted mortgage practices and derivatives brokering. Most public anger was directed at the banks and investment firms that inflated and then crashed the housing and credit markets, took public bailout money and then used it to reward themselves with billions of dollars in bonuses.

Now that large cuts to public services are underway thanks to declining earnings and thus revenues, much attention seems to be zeroing in on workers who have managed to secure half-decent wages and respectable pensions. The idea seems to be to take these away and relegate the middle class to third world status. They spread resentment that a higher percentage of public sector workers are unionized, rather than encouraging more private-sector workers to organize and improve their conditions. They seek to divide the middle class against itself rather than point out that CEO's who used to earn 30 times what their workforce averaged now earn 344 times as much. And these upper earners do so at tax rates that are half what they were in the 1970's.

Rather than calls to return to the compensation and tax ratios, particularly for the super-rich, and the stricter regulation and levels of public expenditure and unionization that were producing good schools, expanding infrastructure and widespread middle class prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s there is more and more "race to the bottom" talk about cutting more from the middle and bottom--the approach that has been followed since 1980 and that has led to the current situation. It is easy to see whose interest this line serves. For a chart of historical top marginal income tax rates click here. You might find yourself amazed.