College Dystopia

How do you define "dystopia"? OK, it's the opposite of utopia. What if some of the people living in it think it is utopia, perfect as far as they're concerned.

What would American colleges look like in a dystopian model? Like this:

Elite students are jetted around the country by colleges and given luxury living while enrolled…

(The Guardian posted an article about that very thing. All students are equal, but some students are more equal than others, as Orwell would have put it.)

Meanwhile professors work at adjunct level and live on public assistance...

(SLATE posted a story today describing how many working professors and instructors at college level, college graduates in other words, with degrees and abilities, are actually living in poverty.)

A few decades ago such a picture would have made us sick. But we just file it with all of the other stories about the dystopia America has become.

There are many ironies here. The most profound irony is that the party that hates elites has dedicated itself to creating them and insulating them. That would be the Republican Party. Irony evolved into hypocrisy some time ago.

"Leadership" Is The Answer To Everything (or maybe not)

The Atlantic posted an interesting piece about the obsessive focus on "Leadership" at colleges and universities. As a talisman, a holy grail, the one true quality sought in all applicants and sold in brochures and seminars.

My feeling about this? (Thanks for asking.)

I think colleges' obsession with "leadership" has a lot to do with the class of people colleges cultivate for cash donations. At some point the accumulated advantages enjoyed by fewer and fewer people shift respect into reverence and then worship.

We're As Bad As Greece

While the crisis persists in Greece, rich Greeks aren't worried. It's not their problem. The rich float above the crises that impoverish and destroy working people. They benefit from the conditions that ruin the broader economy.

This article in the Guardian explains the Greek problem, and it's the same as the problem here in the U.S.: rich parasites. In both countries the rich are overpaid and immune to taxation. Meanwhile they benefit the most from the government spending they refuse to fund. Our tax financed military protects their trade. Our roads move their products. Our government funded research invents their patents. Our government cleans up their messes. Our safety net takes care of the workers they throw away. These three paragraphs from the Guardian are especially telling:

"Greek shipowners, who have gained from their profits being tax-free and who control at least 15% of the world's merchant freight, have also remained low-key. With their wealth offshore and highly secretive, the estimated 900 families who run the sector have the largest fleet in the world. As Athens' biggest foreign currency earner after tourism, the industry remitted more than $175bn (£112bn) to the country in untaxed earnings over the past decade. Greece's debt currently stands at €280bn.

"As ordinary Greeks have been thrown into ever greater poverty by wage and pension cuts and a seemingly endless array of new and higher taxes, their wealthy compatriots have been busy either whisking their money out of Greece or snapping up prime real estate abroad.

"An estimated €8bn flowed out of the Greek banking system in May as speculation over the country's possible exit from the eurozone mounted. Another €4bn was reported to have been withdrawn in the last two weeks – on top of an estimated €20bn since the start of the crisis in late 2009. Stories of rich Greeks sending their wives and best friends on "shopping missions" to remove secret hoards kept in banks in Switzerland and Cyprus are legion."

These three paragraphs might as well be about the U.S. and its lucky one percenters, the carefree rich––like the Romneys, who happily deduct twice the national median annual income every year for their horse expenses. It must be nice to have an expensive tax-deductible hobby like dressage. Why are our tax dollars subsidizing Mrs. Romney's playtime?

The Romney candidacy is all about making the rich less obligated to pay their way. It's about giving themselves and their friends a free ride while working Americans work harder and longer for less. President Romney would shift even more of the tax burden off people who live off wealth and onto people who work to survive. That is the Greek model, and it doesn't work. Rich Greeks are abandoning Greece, taking their wealth with them, just as Romney has most of his wealth in Switzerland and the Caymans.

Rich People Are Not Job Creators Sez Business Week

Taxes on the rich stimulate economies. If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe a non-communist billionaire entrepreneur who's started several successful companies, writing in the certifiably non-socialist magazine Bloomberg Business Week.

Hanauer has this to say: "I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

"That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be."

Not only is the term Job Creators a lie, it is a lie that kills jobs. It protects and rewards the idleness of capital and impoverishes the average consumers who actually do create jobs in their millions by buying stuff and paying for services. Impoverish the average consumer and you put capital to sleep in the pockets and closets and jewelry drawers of the very rich. By lowering the taxes on the rich, especially the rich heirs who've never worked or created a job in their lives, and you incentivize the idleness of wealth and penalize the hiring and paying of workers.

Henry Blodget does a great job of explaining the dynamics of what Hanauer is talking about on the website Business Insider, another non-anarchistic non-socialist business publication.

Blodget: "For a specific example, Hanauer points out that his family owns 3 cars, not the 3,000 that might be bought if his $9+ million were taken home by a few thousand families.

"If that $9+ million had gone to 9,000 families instead of Hanauer, it would almost certainly have been pumped right back into the economy via consumption (i.e., demand). And, in so doing, it would have created more jobs.

"Hanauer estimates that, if most American families were taking home the same share of the national income that they were taking home 30 years ago, every family would have another $10,000 of disposable income to spend.

"That, Hanauer points out, would have a huge impact on demand — and, thereby job creation."

As I've pointed out before a multi-millionaire CEO who justifies his raises by lowering his employees' pay and benefits doesn't take his five million or hundred million dollar paycheck and buy a thousand refrigerators or a hundred cars as his employees would do. He buys another company and makes it leaner and meaner, or he buys his wife or mistress a $50,000 tennis bracelet. Tax cuts to rich people do not create jobs because lower taxes disincentivizes investment in the factory or the employees. Rewarding up and taxing down kills economies. It rewards rich people pocketing their gains, what I prefer to call hoarding. It certainly ain't job creating.

If you prefer, I first heard Hanauer's story on NPR. Consider this, if taxes are lowered on rich people they have less incentive to give money to public radio.

A Different Kind of Strike

From Thomas Frank, writing in Harper's.

"A series of psychological studies appeared recently showing that the rich are quantitatively less nice than others. My object in the latest issue of Harper's Magazine, is to ask how that might be remedied, how the rich might be made nicer. My answer:

"Let us consider a different sort of strike, one that might help the emotionally arrested rich in their time of need. I propose a twenty-four-hour refusal to fawn. A servility strike. A day without deference..."

Let's Worship the "Job Creators"

(What jobs?)

I read in the New York Times today how the very rich are spending their money. (No recession there.)

Is this how "job creators" "create jobs"?

(I'd love to know which premium PR consultant the GOP hired to rebrand the filthy rich.)

So instead of taxing rich people we tax the middle class and the working poor. What jobs are created? Jewelers? Couturiers? Expensive pedicurists?

And there is this worrisome article from Reuters about how cuts in infrastructure spending is hurting us. Instead of needed infrastructure spending (which would employ a lot of people, who would pay taxes) we get spending on $9000 sequinned tweed outfits and $50,000 tennis bracelets.

Instead of repairing roads that are falling apart and bridges that are falling down, we can comfort ourselves that a few very rich people are able to buy more fabulous new outfits and expensive foreign cars. To add to the closets and garages-full they already own. What jobs? No jobs. They don't need jobs.

Goodbye American Dream

MarketWatch is reporting that paychecks account for the lowest percentage of GDP in history, and corporate profits are taking the largest percentage ever.

So why are we shifting taxes off of corporations, their shareholders and CEOs and onto workers?

Because the Republican Party represents people who own, not people who work. And because of this work means less today, it pays less. Owners are the gods in this new America. They can hold the nation to ransom. Ordinary taxpayers pay taxes corporations used to pay. We pay their legal fees when they break the law. We pay their fines and penalties. We pay for their mistakes by bailing them out when they fail.

TooMuchOnline is reporting that top management consultants like Booz & Co. are telling American businesses to pay their employees less than they are worth so they can keep all the money themselves. That is the expert advice of the Harvard Business School. Stiff the worker. But obscenely overpaying executives is OK.

(What makes this relevant today is how it affects the budget deficit. The vast majority of average earners, those whose incomes have flattened or disappeared, are the ones who pay taxes. The individuals and corporations who have reaped the greatest income hikes are the ones who have had the biggest tax cuts. This is where the budget deficit comes from.)

If you look at the pay graph over the past four decades, they've already accomplished this––the pay of average employees has been level for that long. (see Lane Kenworthy's economics blog.) There've been no increases for the American worker at any level (except the very very top) since Reagan declared Morning in America. It was a very cold morning, and an end to the American Dream.

Who does the American Dream belong to now? Look at the numbers. The most favored Americans are those who don't work at all.

This economy, this dead economy––for millions of Americans––and insecure at best for most, is out-of-this-world rewarding for the top top people, the ones with the enormous Republican tax cuts, the ones with Boehner and Cantor and McConnell slugging for them. The ones who own instead of working.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the income gap between the middle class and the extreme upper class has tripled.

The Washington Post reports on what this new exclusiveness creates: an insulation from the society that supports them, the society they live off of. As they earn more they care less about the people whose work creates their wealth.

Wall Street and the too-big-to-fail financial institutions, who taxpayers bailed out with trillions, reward themselves with billions apiece and handsome bonuses. But will they "loan money"? Will they hire? Will they get the economy going again? Why should they?

This bum economy is exactly the economy the bankers and Wall Street and Big Oil and their Republican operatives wanted.

Feed the Rich

Where did all the tax cut money go? It went into very few pockets and from there to emerging markets where it is busy creating low-wage jobs and a future of non-American economic power. Why would those tax cuts create jobs here when the big plan was to ship the work somewhere cheaper, someplace without the nuisance safety regulations, and workers' rights and benefits? In another era this strategy would have been called UnAmerican, but it's hard to call a party unAmerican when they are wrapped in the flag.

You can read Krugman every week, or Joseph Stiglitz every once in a while, to get a sharp mature assessment of the GOP bullshit. But sometimes it's interesting to go at the b.s. one talking point at a time, like economist Brad DeLong does, and see how quickly the right wing arguments fall apart. And they do. Sadly, it takes a brain and a bit of patient thought to see how fragile the GOP material is.

The GOP arguments fall apart because they are saying one thing while carefully planning something completely different. At moments of contradiction you will usually see John Boehner burst into tears, which is a helpful distraction. The Republicans have their game plan and it doesn't do most of us any good. It wasn't meant to.

Their strategy is to make sure the economy screws most of us over and hands the fruits of that screwing over to the handful of people up top. The plan is to streamline the narrowest possible delivery of wealth. Efficiency for the very few. This is the economy they want. This is the economy they planned. An overseas economy of underpaid, eager, frightened people with no rights. A Dickensian economy, a Scrooge economy. If it makes Americans angry the Republicans are assuming that most will blame Obama. To make sure of that, there is talk radio and Fox"News".

Who is Happy With This Economy?

Do you ever wonder if the Republicans actually want the economy to fail? There's been a lot of conversation about it. The signs are pretty clear. But the media are too polite to bring that discussion into the open. Here are a few links. Not much pops up in newspapers or television news.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/playing_a_game_of_chicken_with029667.php

http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79739/washington-gop-opposition-quantitative-easing

http://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-is-being-grilled-about-muni-debt-because-republicans-want-the-states-to-collapse-2011-1

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/01/the-failure-caucus.html

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/06/24/republicans_want_america_to_fail

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/block-heads-by-digby-so-republicans-are.html

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/02/dire_news.php

http://gawker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy#!5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy

When they are honest Republicans actually say it themselves:

Another economic meltdown would do Republicans a lot of good.

An economy that doesn't recover (except for the very very rich) hurts Obama's chances of re-election.

It would spread the blame for the collapse of 2008 and make the Bush administration look less inept.

Republican clients like having an insecure, underpaid workforce that's grateful to work for less.

Republican clients are doing fine. They were bailed out. Their stocks (which many of them scooped up at the bottom of the market) rebounded. They paid themselves bonuses for this. And the less for us, the more for them. What working people don't earn, the rich get to keep. It's called a Plutonomy.

I love how the Wall Street Journal equates lavish personal spending and heavy lifting. (Some of their spending is lavished on shapers of public opinion.)

A weaker economy makes tax revenues drop. Republican clients want lower revenues because a weaker government can't regulate them.

(Just as an aside, here are some suggestions for the anti-government crowd, to help them avoid hypocrisy. A little list of the things they should do without.)

Thing is, the Republicans want government NOT to work. Democracy is a nuisance. They want to get elected to government... so they can make it NOT work.

They (in the famous words of Grover Norquist) want to drown our form of representative government in the bathtub. Goodbye democracy.

To help kill our government they are happy to run up an enormous debt and not pay for it.

And in the interests of putting fewer, richer people in charge, they'd like it if fewer people voted. They'd like a small elite deciding what a vast uninformed and poorly paid population does.

Are you following this so far?

A government that can't function is less popular with average people. This is the Republican goal. When government doesn't have the funds to function properly it makes people mad, not at the Republicans who made it not work, but at government itself, which has always been reliable. It helps to have a public that doesn't pay attention or is easily misled.

Republicans like it when government doesn't work. They've been saying this for decades. They've finally delivered and this is what we are experiencing every time we hit a pothole, every time class sizes increase, every time our tuition rates go up. Wait till our fire departments can't get to us. Wait till the government can't respond to the next flood or the next wave of violent storms. Wait till the government can't shore up the financial system or starts selling the national parks.

This bad economy can't support a decent, functioning government, and that is exactly what the Republicans want.