Being Drunk Makes People Lean Conservative

The GOP’s chief tool is learned helplessness, carefully trained helplessness, leading to hopelessness. Once they have you there they can play on your anger and humiliation like a violin. They’ve been using this tool for several decades, while they’ve gradually stolen the incomes and security of the working classes. They’ve gotten us where they want us.

Here's an article about that from Salon.

From the New Yorker, another interesting psychological study demonstrates that the more drunk people are the more they will bow down to an authoritarian master, more likely to choose conservative over liberal ideas and choices.

Is America drunk––or punch drunk? And who has delivered the beating? We’ve lived through three decades dominated by Big Money and Reaganomics, which were a gift from the GOP. That's what has beaten us down. It's bludgeoned millions of Americans into this submissive mindset. And the irony is they talk and think this way while parroting the lines they've been taught by their masters. Lines like "freedom" when they're not free, and "independence" when their independence has been taken from them.

I've written before about the addled thinking of Trump supporters.

They pray for a leader who will hurt people, because they have been hurt, but they assume this leader will not hurt them.

They pray for a dictator who will do "what needs to be done" but they assume those things that will be done will be things they want done––they assume this dictator will take dictation from them personally. This isn't magical thinking. This is drunk thinking. This is fear talking, too. Scientists have also shown how making people fearful makes them choose conservative options.

There is a psychological difference between conservatives and liberals.

From Scientific American.

From Mother Jones.

Ever wondered who this Mother Jones was that they named a magazine after her? She was a tough old woman who inspired mineworkers to stand up to their bosses and throw off the burden of poor pay, unsafe working conditions, awful living conditions and a predatory pay and credit system that ruled company owned towns. They achieved this by organizing. A good place to learn about this story is on PBS, where you can watch this excellent documentary about that battle from a century ago.

The High-Low On The American Economy

Here’s what Robert Reich had to say this morning about exorbitant executive pay in America:

"Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex W. Tillerson is delivering bad news to shareholders: Profits were down 63 percent in the first quarter financial results, announced yesterday. They were down by half in 2015. Low petroleum prices have forced Exxon Mobil to cut spending, reduce capital outlays, and borrow to meet dividend payments. This week Standard & Poor’s downgraded the corporation’s credit rating.

"But don’t cry for Tillerson. He’s scheduled to retire next March with a nest egg of $218 million in Exxon stock plus a pension plan worth $69.5 million. His salary this year alone is about 500 times the median U.S. household income.

"Even when big corporations and their shareholders lose, their CEOs seem always to come out winners. Isn’t it time CEO pay was capped at, say, 100 times the income of the median household? Shareholders should set this standard, and the government shouldn’t allow a company to deduct any executive pay in excess of $1 million. Alternatively, as I've suggested before, tax corporations in proportion to the ratio of their CEO pay to the typical U.S. worker's pay."

The Washington Post reports on how the CEO of EXXON earns many millions whether the company has a good year or a bad year. How fair is that?

The departing CEO of Yahoo! (is that company still around?) is being paid $55 million to go away.

How we got to where we are now: The Washington Post reports on how "high finance" thinking has warped our values and our policies.

What makes it worse is how our policies are shaped by Big Money and their lobbyists and superPACs. These forces are far more powerful than organized labor, which is shrinking every year, more powerful than the Republican controlled Congress, which the lobbyists carry around in their pocket. Bloomberg reports on how hard the US Chamber of Commerce has pushed our tax policies to the extreme.

This disparity in power is more significant than the disparity in pay. Americans have bought into the myth of Rugged Individualism, that each of us is better alone than as a part of a group. (Because groups are communist…unless it’s the American Legion or the Rotary or the Chamber of Commerce.)

This is a distortion of American tradition. The tradition of barn raising and helping your neighbor, of standing together the way the original colonists did, despite their differences. This idea of individualism has helped the 1% reduce the voice of the rest of us to nothing. It has persuaded millions of working Americans to rush to get the anti-union bargains at Walmart. It has organized the workers to break up the unions that won their parents a middle class life.

Salon explains the rise of individualism and the decline of America's sense of teamwork.

Meanwhile, at the high end of the economy the members of the owning class are paid more in an day than ordinary workers are paid in a year. Some are paid that much every hour.

The Wall Street Journal reports that CEOs now make 373 times what average workers do.

If you wonder why healthcare keeps costing you more, look at the multi-millions their CEOs are paid each year.

At the low end, working people get next to nothing. Millions of low end jobs don’t pay a living wage, so people have to work two jobs, and the workers are subject to rampant wage theft. Still, Republicans block every proposal to raise the minimum wage.

The Wall Street Journal, the favorite newspaper of America's 1%, published a story blaming the sluggish growth in the U.S. economy on the refusal to raise working people's wages. After 30 years of suppressed wages and nothing growing but CEO salaries and investment bubbles you'd think it would be clear that economic energy doesn't come from the people who spend at Cartier and the local Jaguar dealership, it comes from the broad spending of ordinary working people...when they have enough money to spend.

Even the middle class is feeling insecure, a story told in this month's Atlantic.

But the working poor and the unemployed have it much worse.

Why not do what the Republican gods Hayek and Friedman both proposed: have a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans? Why not? Because people who earn money from their money, who own for a living, dislike anything that shares their luck with other less fortunate people. The people who own for a living don’t want to give anything to the people who work for a living. VOX explains the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and how it would work.

The rich are always discussing how they wish the poor were better people. Who really needs to fix that problem? The rich do. They are extremely lucky but they believe luck had nothing to do with it. If they were reminded where their fortunes came from they might be less arrogant and less greedy. They might become better people, to the benefit of all of us. Robert Frank (author of the new book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy) discusses this at VOX.

The West Virginia mining country is our ugly past and our ugly future

Poverty hasn’t come back in West Virginia because the War on Poverty failed. It’s back because the Republican Party worked for the past 30 years to repeal everything FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and yes even Nixon put in place to make lives better for working people in America. The Republican Party decided their sole clients were the very rich. Oh they paid lip service to the white racist vote, but most of the Republican policies were directed at depriving and disempowering all working people, white, black, Hispanic, everyone who worked for a paycheck. The Republican Party has diminished the lives and reduced the power of everyone who works for a living and enhanced and protected the wealth and the power of people who own for a living.

Here's an article from today's New York Times that discusses how hopeless lives are in West Virginia.

This is what the bad old days looked like before the progressives (Republicans and Democrats both) wrote workers’ rights into law. An ugly violent world of private corporate armies that prevented workers from organizing or demanding their rights. Few Americans have ever heard of the Ludlow massacre.

Why? Mostly because textbook companies don't dare offend the wealthy who perpetrated this horrible crime. Life was awful for working people a hundred years ago.

The mining companies owned not only the jobs but the houses miners lived in and the stores they were forced to shop in. When miners in Colorado tried to unionize the mining billionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr. sent in hired thugs who burned the miners out of their camp and then mowed them down with machine guns when they tried to escape the flames. It changed how Americans saw the working poor.

This is the future the 1% want. This is the future that the Republican Party is determined to give us. Rich and poor divided, with very few living a middle class life.

The Day the Middle Class Died

Today's must-read is from Michael Moore. Sometimes he's a bit annoying. Sometimes he's a blowhard. Sometimes he goes too far (endorsing Nader over Gore). Sometimes he's right. He's right about this.