Our Banana Republic
In 2002, I taught the Argentine film La hora de los hornos (it was a media and narrative class–I wasn’t just proselytizing radical leftist ideology). The second most famous scene from the movie starts at 3:14, but it is very disturbing.
I thought the film would get students to think about the degree to which our visual culture prevented us from seeing the reality of everyday life.
But many of the students simply dismissed the film as irrelevant. Notably, they dismissed the many stats about inequality in Latin America and Argentina as unimaginable–impossible. In the US, the film didn’t have the same power. One student–who I think fancied herself quite worldly due to her family trip to Patagonia once (perhaps not incidentally, she was gunning for a Fox News internship at the time)–said something like, “if I lived in a country where 5% of the country had 40% of the wealth, maybe I’d be that angry, too. But I don’t.”
Of course, she does.
Or close to it anyway: in 2002, the top 10% of earners took 40-some % of earnings, and that number has neared 50% in 2006. Here’s how the proportion earned by the top 1% in 2005. And we’ve now tied Argentina in that measure of income inequality.
As Tim Noah notes in his great series on income inequality, we increasingly match the income inequality of Latin America.
All my life I’ve heard Latin America described as a failed society (or collection of failed societies) because of its grotesque maldistribution of wealth. Peasants in rags beg for food outside the high walls of opulent villas, and so on. But according to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar.
The moment when my students dismissed this kind of gross inequality as something only Latin American countries experience was a striking realization for me (no, my students didn’t believe me when I told them we were beginning to rival Argentina for income inequality, but I admit I was so shaken by their dismissal of the mere possibility that I didn’t do a good job proving it).
We’re Americans. We can dismiss such possibilities as nonsense, right?
In his first installment, Noah explores why Americans tend to ignore the inequality in front of them.
Why don’t Americans pay more attention to growing income disparity? One reason may be our enduring belief in social mobility. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. In a survey of 27 nations conducted from 1998 to 2001, the country where the highest proportion agreed with the statement “people are rewarded for intelligence and skill” was, of course, the United States. (69 percent). But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.
But that’s a slightly different thing than refusing to believe the statistics that show we are a banana republic, at least with regards to income inequality.
I suspect–based largely on the reaction of these students, but also the reaction of coastal elites who can’t imagine the plight of real Americans–that we as a culture neither see the reality such income inequality portrays (we geographically separate the poor from the rich in this country, as Noah points out) nor is it routinely shown to us. Films like La hora de los hornos are still considered heavy-handed propaganda, if technically brilliant.
Tim Noah’s piece is one of the closest things we get instead: lots of images, some attempt to contextualize our inequality for skeptical readers.
But thus far, at least, little explanation for how we willingly adopted the ways of a banana republic.
Way to keep me on my toes EW — I saw the title and had thought it would be musings following up on the 9th Circuit abandoning the rule of law. Perhaps we have gone to the monkeys in more ways than one ; )
Next time you see darkblack, put in a request for an American flag where the stars have been replaced with Chiquita bananas ; )
Even the top 10% won’t be safe from a double-dip…systemic failure gets everyone.
EW,
I have had similar experiences in my occasional forays into teaching sociology. American students are horrified whenever it is suggested that our society is socio-economically stratified into classes. Oh yes, they’ll talk freely about the “middle class,” but just about everyone in America thinks that they are middle class. Hardly anyone is willing to admit to being “Lower Class;” the closest most will allow is to admit to being a “blue-collar” worker. Similarly, most rich people think of themselves as upper middle class.
Sociologists do talk about an “underclass” (Marx’s lumpenproletariat), but few people will admit to belonging to it, and politicians almost never talk about it. But they’re going to have to think of a way to talk about it, because they are fast becoming a huge voting block– although many of them don’t bother to vote. Of course this group has been stigmatized by a number of labels, including Reagan’s “Welfare Queens”. Welfare recipients became so stigmatized that Clinton tried to make the problem go away by “ending welfare as we know it.”
Of course, Republicans assume that the underclass will vote Democratic, so they engage in various tactics to discourage them from voting (is the new “literacy test” requirement for voters the demand to provide identification?) I think one of these tactics is the cynical tactic of telling voters that there’s really no choice and your vote is meaningless anyway, so why bother? You’ve all heard stories about long lines at polling stations in low income neighborhoods, and inadequate numbers of voting machines, etc., whereas in nice neighborhoods there are seldom any waiting lines and there always seem to be enough voting machines.
Democrats sometimes seek to use GOTV campaigns to get underclass voters to vote, but I don’t know a lot about this. But I do know this: the underclass is growing larger, and is disproportionately minority, and will potentially be increasingly significant. How to appeal to these voters will make a difference in many races.
Bob in AZ
Couple things.
First, Drew Westen says that the term “working class” has become acceptable again: people are increasingly defining themselves as such.
Second, one of the points that Noah makes is that the underclass is NOT getting increasingly minority. Even putting aside Asian success, the relatively lower success of Latinos and African Americans has remained fairly constant (though I do wonder whether this accounts for the Great Recession).
Thanks for your reply, EW.
I agree. But “working class” has a lot of the same ambiguity as “middle class.” Like middle class, it is an honorable label that people can identify with. News sources now sometimes use the label “working poor” to cover part of what would otherwise be called “Lower Class”.
Fair point. The underclass may not be getting *increasingly* minority, but minorities are still over-represented, are they not?
Thanks,
Bob in AZ
Absolutely. I was just trying to point to Noah’s interim conclusions that racism, per se, is not causing this, and immigration is only doing so to a limited degree.
In this age of high unemployment many would love to move up to working-class status.
Obama got elected by the underclass then proceeded to rule as the member of the overclass and now wonders why nobody can get worked up about Democratic candidates. It isn’t just Republican disinformation that has disenchanted many voters, far from it the realization and firm confirmation of two years of Democratic rule that has been a continual confirmation that there is no difference between the parties.
i’ve said all along, there’s nothing incompetent or unintentional about what’s happening in the united states…
ismael hossein-zadeh in counterpunch via alternet…
those of us steeped in the mythology of the united states have this extraordinarily naive notion that we are somehow above all the ills that plague other countries… sure, we have the occasional miscreant, the government official or corporate titan “gone bad,” but, for the most part, we nourish the delusion that the majority of our leaders have our best interests at heart, proudly leading the “shining city on the hill”… we can’t seem to grasp that while, yes, we do have some wonderful and remarkable people in our midst, we also have some truly evil types, hell-bent on extorting as much money and power from the soiled, ragged masses as humanly possible, just like – GASP – every other country… and it is THOSE putrid excrescences who, just like in every other country, tend to gravitate to positions where they can pursue their greedy megalomania even if thousands of people have to die to help them achieve their dark aims…
i would ask just exactly when my country became the bought and paid-for property of our super-rich elites but that would be seriously disingenuous on my part… it’s been going on for the better part of my nearly 63 years… sadly, it’s taken me well over 2/3 of that time for me to see it for what it is…
And, yes, I DO take it personally
Yes, profmarcus, class warfare is a concept that many have trouble accepting (too violent sounding, or smacking of “conspiracy theory”, or vulgar Marxism), but if you read the Financial Times, WSJ, and other business papers, as well as listen to the pronouncements of proponents of the super-rich and elites, you realize that they are on the whole much more honest about it, and openly wage it.
Like bobschacht says, I think part of the reason is that many don’t want to admit to being part of the underclass, as it is demoralizing, and so they (we) push it to the back of their (our) minds. But to think the vast income divide is somehow a law of nature that is not driven by conscious policy is obviously absurd.
Daniel Henninger in the WSJ :
…not everyone can spend 40 years pouring concrete or driving a city bus.
Yeah, the elite in the developed world is using this “Crisis” to do what Latin American and other elites in developing countries have done for years: strip out the wealth and stick it someplace the people won’t be able to get to it, while leaving the people to pay the debt incurred for stripping out all that money.
I think they’re doing so bc the stop-gap measures they’ve used to stay in power since the early 70s–largely globalization–no longer work now that China begins to rival their “advanced” skills.
So you have to find some way–other than the consumer goods bribery of the people–to stay in power. I’ve been saying for a long time that the elite seems to be deliberately pursuing a kind of neo-feudalism.
It may only be a coincidence that the US had privately-owned commercial radio and TV for two generations before other developed (primarily European) countries permitted it. Perhaps the US society was a useful laboratory experiment. It’s inarguable that TV and radio expanded consumer demand; your timeline’s beginning in the early 1970’s coincides with two significant developments in American society: cable TV and shopping malls. Both made it possible and, with near-universal credit, easy for the society’s wealth to be siphoned off.
When cable TV became distributed via satellite (Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based Superstation, followed by Chicago’s WGN) the same merchandise or service could be advertised to every community. Soon, malls began leasing stores to national (and international) companies instead of to the local merchants. By the 1980’s, all shopping malls were alike if not identical as far as the brands of stores they contained, aka franchises or outlets. By the 1990’s, the number of local merchants at the malls was statistically insignificant. It was relatively impossible before the 1990’s for an independent merchant to have a MasterCard (the Master Charge), Visa (formerly BankAmericard), American Express, or Discover account because those accounts required revenues in the millions of dollars.
But the national stores showed billions in revenue, and in the 1990’s banks were created to issue credit cards to virtually everyone, and free of charge (no annual fee). What followed is truly wonderful to behold, very similar to how the fertile lands of North Africa turned into the vast Sahara Desert. The 1987 market crash led to unprecedented consolidation (monopolization of ‘choice’) as the independent or family-owned companies fell away. In our ‘personal’ lives, we started to see one-size-fits all: From four sizes of toothpaste in 1980 we found one size in 1990.
You go to the mall, a 10 or 15 minute drive, you ‘buy’ something there for $100 and swipe your credit card. The merchant at that franchise, i.e., the national or international company, ‘deposits’ your receipt in its account. In that deposit transaction, the credit-card bank gets anywhere from $2.00 to $4.00, sales taxes go to the appropriate governments, and the parent company gets about $90-$95. You get a tchotchkeh, which you don’t have to pay the bank for until the bank sends you its bill. From the bank’s perspective, the bank loaned you $100 for a month. You’re supposed to think you borrowed that $100 interest-free. You’re not supposed to think that you’re paying $100 for something that ‘really’ costs about $90.
Follow the money. From the mall, 90 percent goes to mega-corporations, 10 percent to banks. From the mega-corporations and the banks it gets ‘invested’. The amount of your $100 (and the millions of shoppers like yourself) that stays in the ‘community’ or neighborhood is statistically insignificant. It pays local people who act as ‘Managers’, ‘Assistant Managers’, and ‘sales associates’, plus some supporting workers.
That kind of ‘balance transfer’ isn’t sustainable, for a host of reasons, but it served to feed the beast for two generations. It was always fragile and always ready to self-destruct.
The current ‘crisis’ started when hurricane Katrina caused a gas shortage and a huge spike in fuel prices, which lasted for a few months. Another huge spike in fuel prices happened a few years later. During those two periods, consumers (and delivery merchants) used their credit cards to buy gas they really couldn’t afford. In a few months’ time, many found themselves in serious debt. ‘Lucky’ for them, they could ‘buy’ their home again. And you know the rest.
Incidentally, there was a paper delivered at a conference which C-SPAN covered, sometime in the early 1990’s about health, welfare, and wealth in California. The paper reported on longitudinal studies of birth and morbidity rates. The healthiest infants were born to Hispanic mothers. Those infants had higher birth weights and the lowest mortality for the first year, among all California ethnic groups and across all income and educational levels.
Obama’s economic policies are shrinking this group quite quickly.
profmarcus is right. This is part of the myth of American Exceptionalism.
Bob in AZ
Me, too. My dad worked two shifts a day on the ships during the war; we were poor, but we didn’t consider ourselves miserable, and we had good educational facilities and good public services. People like me would have no chance to day. I find it hard to contain my anger.
Thanks EW.
This book Reinforces your points.
What a great title and a local writer to boot
At the Altar of the Bottom Line by Tom Juravich
Amherst Massachusetts. A new book by Tom Juravich At the Altar of the Bottom Line Tom Juravich takes us behind the statistics of the economic collapse and into the work and lives of Americans who feel stressed, exploited, exhausted and abandoned.
“From what I was seeing around me and hearing from my friends and neighbors I had a strong sense that the work in American was deteriorating very quickly,” tells Juravich speaking about why he began the project. “And I knew I wasn’t going to be able to understand it from looking at statistics or from searching the internet in my office at the university.” Over six years Juravich conducted 85 in-depth interviews in four different occupations. “The interviews were so compelling,” he recalls, “in some ways the hardest thing I had to do is call it quits.”
Juravich puts workers voices front and center is this examination of the degradation of work in the 21st century. He takes us to a Verizon call center where call center reps are forced to use narrow scripts, monitored through the day by their supervisors, required to raise the hands if they need to use the bathroom and forced to work massive amounts of mandatory overtime. “This was not the way work was supposed to be at a Fortune 500 firm in the 21st Century,” tells Juravich.
In the fish houses in New Bedford, the conditions that undocumented Guatemalan workers suffer in the fish house are right out of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Juravich had been working in the community several years when the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showed up with over 600 agents for massive raid. “The inhumanity of the raid was unfathomable in a country like the U. S.” Juravich suggests. “It had a cruel impact on immigrant families and drove workers down further into the underground economy where conditions were even worse.”
In the operating rooms at the Boston Medical Center, Juravich found nurses, “who were exhausted to the bone.” Since a merger the hospital has been pushing elective surgery to generate more revenue without staffing up the operating rooms with more nurses. Juravich tells how “the nurses continue to be so committed to their patients and to each other but their compassion can’t make up for a staffing situation that is out of control.”
The final case study explores the closing of the Jones Beloit in Dalton, Massachusetts. Highly skilled workers making high quality machinery used all over the world was abruptly shut down when their CEO recklessly pursued a dubious foreign investment which placed the entire firm in jeopardy. “These were workers who gave their lives to this firm and in the end they were simply abandoned,” Juravich describes.
perhaps now is the right time to rise up with fists–military is over-burdened and surely the remainder is full of the underclass as well and young and so cannot have as staunch a loyalty to “country” in the form of the government as they might have to country represented by family.
perhaps now is the time to make “we the people” mean those of us who are the underclass–85% of us–the time to write our own preamble and Declaration.
perhaps it’s time to be clear that a government beholden on all levels to the wealthiest (the Koch’s, etc) and their corporations (plantations) is not a government of, for or by the “people”.
perhaps it’s time to realize that a court stacked with members of the upper class will interpret the Constitution in ways that create precedent that will no longer protect the underclass (this has already happened of course)–and we’ll realize the true nature of the banana republic is writ clearest in our court system.
we are an empty shell of electronic distractions, no longer people but rather marketable impulses distributed through computers. How do we appeal to that kind of citizen?
Our Society has now mixed both Orwell and Huxley–we have Big Brother and we have our “soma”. We are certainly not the land of the free nor the home of anyone brave.
Neil Postman always held that Huxley’s society, not Orwell’s, was where we were headed — and that Huxley’s dystopia was more dangerous.
Earlier this morning, I was looking at the Wikipedia entries for:
* Brave New World by Huxley
* Player Piano by Vonnegut
* The Space Merchants by Kornbluth and Pohl.
They seem to have accurately predicted the dystopia we’ve fallen into. The ruling class no longer needs most of us. They’ve got computers and off-shore labor.
An off-shore customers in the billions.
Feudalism. It worked so well for so long. Our Republic was just an aberration. Any bets on when the term “noblesse oblige” comes back into fashion again?
Isn’t “noblesse oblige” what happens when, rather than fixing the structural inequities of our economy, the richest men in our country try to get their peers to donate their wealth?
That is when the “guilt”(?hah!) soaks in?
The conviction arises, eventually, that excess must be shown to have “merit”. Besides, what other games of “competition” may the filthy rich aspire to when it is all so tiresome and, well, common …
It is all a part of doing Gawd’s work, by way of appreciating the “invisible hand” what strokes ’em what deserve.
We have long agreed on the elite’s “goal” of, as you term it, “neo feudalism”.
The elites have long controlled the economic “system”, and as your posts have long instructed, the elites now control the legal system.
Both “systems” are corrupt and cannot be salvaged or “fixed”.
They must be remade.
When will the people give themselves “permission” to rebuild these systems in a fashion more amenable to a civil and sustainable society?
When will people think well enough of themselves, to begin?
DW
Not until droit de seigneur has been “played” to the hilt, it is a form of “evolution” … excess after excess.
One step at a time.
DW
Back in ’06 when I was ringing the bell; being tiresomely “political”, someone actually said to me ” It can’t happen here”. but, of course it was already happening.
And what she said is the title of a Sinclair Lewis book about fascism coming to America!
I lost alot of friends talking about this stuff ( or trying to)and I still have to be careful.
I now realize that only some people can rock their world enough to pay attention, and I don’t mean that a elitist. It’s a damn fact that until it affect them directly, everything’s A-OK.
Look at what somebody posted (HP) in response to Obama getting secret rendition privileges granted by an appeals court:
The Wikipedia’s “List of Countries by Income Equality” has a table of countries and their rankings on five different indices of wealth distribution. I sorted the table on the CIA’s Gini index, which is a well-respected measure of income distribution.
The U.S. ranks in the bottom third (94th out of 135) of the countries ranked. All countries ranked below us are considered to be third-world, as are many ranked above us. The only OECD country below us is Mexico.
Country “CIA Gini”
Sweden 23
Norway 25
Austria 26
“Czech Republic” 26
Luxembourg 26
Malta 26
Serbia 26
Slovakia 26
Albania 26.7
Germany 27
Belarus 27.9
Belgium 28
Hungary 28
Iceland 28
Slovenia 28.4
Kazakhstan 28.8
Croatia 29
Cyprus 29
Denmark 29
Finland 29.5
Bulgaria 29.8
Ethiopia 30
Montenegro 30
Kyrgyzstan 30.3
Australia 30.5
Pakistan 30.6
Ireland 30.7
Netherlands 30.9
“European Union” 31
Ukraine 31
“South Korea” 31.3
Italy 32
Romania 32
Spain 32
Canada 32.1
France 32.7
Mongolia 32.8
Tajikistan 32.8
Greece 33
“Taiwan (ROC)” 33
Bangladesh 33.2
Moldova 33.2
Switzerland 33.7
Estonia 34
“United Kingdom” 34
Egypt 34.4
Laos 34.6
Tanzania 34.6
Poland 34.9
Algeria 35.3
Latvia 36
Lithuania 36
“New Zealand” 36.2
Azerbaijan 36.5
Benin 36.5
India 36.8
Uzbekistan 36.8
Armenia 37
Vietnam 37
Yemen 37.7
Timor-Leste 38
Guinea 38.1
Japan 38.1
Portugal 38.5
Macedonia 39
Malawi 39
Mauritania 39
Mauritius 39
Israel 39.2
Ghana 39.4
Indonesia 39.4
“Burkina Faso” 39.5
Jordan 39.7
Tunisia 40
Mali 40.1
Georgia 40.8
Turkmenistan 40.8
Morocco 40.9
Turkey 41
Venezuela 41
Senegal 41.3
“China (PRC)” 41.5
Russia 42.3
Burundi 42.4
Kenya 42.5
Cambodia 43
Thailand 43
Nicaragua 43.1
Guyana 43.2
Nigeria 43.7
Iran 44.5
Cameroon 44.6
“Côte d’Ivoire” 44.6
“United States” 45
Uruguay 45.2
Jamaica 45.5
Argentina 45.7
Uganda 45.7
Philippines 45.8
Malaysia 46.1
Rwanda 46.8
Nepal 47.2
Mozambique 47.3
Madagascar 47.5
Ecuador 47.9
“Costa Rica” 48
Singapore 48.1
Mexico 48.2
“Sri Lanka” 49
“Dominican Republic” 49.9
Zimbabwe 50.1
“The Gambia” 50.2
Swaziland 50.4
Niger 50.5
Zambia 50.8
“Papua New Guinea” 50.9
Peru 52
“El Salvador” 52.4
Paraguay 53.2
“Hong Kong” 53.3
Honduras 53.8
Chile 54.9
Guatemala 55.1
Panama 56.1
“Bosnia and Herzegovina” 56.2
Brazil 56.7
Colombia 58.5
Bolivia 59.2
Haiti 59.2
“Central African Republic” 61.3
“Sierra Leone” 62.9
Botswana 63
Lesotho 63.2
“South Africa” 65
Namibia 70.
Back in July, I posted this information and links to some articles here.
Thanks for that wigwam.
That is eye-opening “perspective”, wigwam, thank you.
A “list” of “ranking” that should be beheld by many.
DW
Not really relivent, but interesting.
If you add the wealth of the top 10 richest people in Sweden ($67.3B) and divy up their wealth to everyone else in the country (pop. 9,219,000), each person would get $7400. Not bad.
Now if we take the wealth from the top 10 in the US ($227.2B), (pop. 307,000,000), each person would get $730.
It’s amazing what large denominators will do.
Try redoing this calculation using the top .01% in each country.
Alan, that’s interesting, but not relevant, whereas wigwam’s list is exactly the thing the article is addressing.
Achieving a greater degree of income equality does not at all entail taking money from the wealthy and giving it to everyone else. It’s about adjusting a totally skewed system that’s setup to favor the already wealthy. It seems to me that the Swedes, as a group, are wealthier than we are. We could redistribute the wealth here, and just like you point out, we’d still be poorer. That’s because the system here is broken from the point of view of view of benefiting everyone fairly.
Now you’ve done it, dick c, you have outright suggested that an economic system CAN be premised on the notion of “benefiting everyone fairly.”
Why not?
“Economic Systems” are, to be brutal about it, merely “games” that people “play”.
That is to say that people, not God or some “unseen” portion of some deity, make the “rules” …
Therefore PEOPLE can change the rules and fashion a better game.
A game’s “seriousness” may be determined by measuring a nation or a society’s willingness to kill … other human beings in the “playing” of that “game”.
Politics is a “game”.
So is the “legal system”.
DW
Exactly!
Definitely not relevant because there are roughly 40 Americans for every Swede, i.e., their population is something like 8 million and ours 310 million.
If you want to make a fair comparison that has some mathematical integrity, either sum up all the wealth of the 400 richest Americans and divide it by 310 million (more accurate), or just multiply by 40 the number you present (derived from the wealth of the richest 10) (somewhat less accurate). In either event, you’ll come up with something a lot larger than the Swedish number. Using the second of my models, you get something like $29,200= $730 * 40.
To keep things in scale (propotionate), you’d have to divvy up the wealth of the top 300 in the U.S., since the top ten in Sweden are the top one-millionth of their population.
The Wikipedia has a good explanation of the GINI index which is a much more sophisticated measure of the distribution of income. (And not that it is income, not wealth, that we are talking about here.)
I’m struck by the disconnect between actual and felt income distribution among the so-called middle class kids who go to the better colleges and universities. Most of them are in the top 2 to 5 percentile of the income distribution, but consider themselves more in the top 40th to 25th. I look at my income, which is about average for a senior professor in a major university and I find myself in the top 1 to 2 percent. Yet I still think I am just above average, even though my income is about two and a half times the median income.
Why is that? I think Robert Frank captured a major reason (at least for the US) in Falling Behind. Most of us in the professions have friends who make a lot more than us. We share the same culture, but they drive fancier cars, take more expensive vacations, send their kids to better private schools, and live in more luxurious houses. They are the top half percent, say. So compared to them, I feel middle class. I don’t compare myself to ordinary people in the suburbs living on incomes that are less than half mine, but they are the vast majority.
The media and our politicians are even worse, because the same relation is working for them higher up on the income scale. They associate with multi-millionaires, and not just millionaires, and they think that, while they are doing o.k., and that’s really good, other people no more talented than they are are doing a lot better, and so they, too, must be middle class.
We talk about the middle class being defined downward — that working people consider themselves (or are trained to consider themselves) middle class. But the same phenomenon works in the opposite direction. People who by any measure are very well-off also consider themselves in the middle.
That’s an excellent point. It reminds me a bit of being a kid and looking up to the older kids. I knew a lot more of the kids in the two or three grades ahead of me than in the grades below. I was trying to catch up with them. I couldn’t grow up fast enough : )
I suspect that sort of thing continues throughout our lives, always striving to measure up to those we look up to (whether on the basis of income or professional accomplishment, or civic participation, or what ever motivates you in life).
As a result, our views become distorted in terms of what is average, above average, below average. And if there is one thing that Americans are deeply uncomfortable with it is the notion of being average. We see this in schools from K-through-grad school, the constant pressure for grade inflation. No one wants to be average, because average in our minds reflects failure.
It’s no wonder we cannot acknowledge the clear evidence before us, we cannot bear the prospect of being average and worse being permanently trapped there.
I was just trying to express something along that line, but you did it better. It seems to be our natural tendency to be optimistic and keep looking toward the life we want to have.
Many years ago I happened to have dinner with a German scientist who was visiting Johns Hopkins for a year. I had only been out of grad school a couple of years and still trying to get a toe hold in my career. He asked me what I did. I responded by telling him what I planned to do. He smiled and said, “you Americans always do that, it’s never about the present, always about the future”.
I have often thought about that. He’s right. We always do that. I had just never noticed that it could be viewed as unusual. I think it is useful and a generally positive outlook. But I think it can be limiting, too, to neglect what is present for a possibly illusory future…
The future you need to pay attention to is that of Old Geezer. I hear he may play tonight.
Now that there is the exception that proves the rule… The Geezer really needs to get on with fixating on the past ; )
HAPPY FOOTBALL SEASON!!!!!! Who knows, I might even watch the old man totter around the field a bit ; )
There are two very American things that illustrate your point:
* “Keeping up with the Joneses”
* Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.
Average distortion also invades our universities, where the myth that a “C” is an average grade is belied by the statistics. Woe betide any professor who gives students with an average grade a C. They all expect B’s, and will complain in various ways if they don’t get it.
The same thing happens in high schools, where it is called “promotion”: students who fail a grade are promoted to the next grade anyway.
Bob in AZ
Thanks Bob, I almost quoted Garrison myself, I wondered if anyone else would make that connection ; )
Isn’t this one of the folk-wisdom explanations for the reduction in crime over the last 30 years? Freakonomics put forward Roe v. Wade as a crucial factor and I thought that one of the alternatives that was proposed was the movement to keep everyone with their peer group through K1-K12 (that is to say an alternative to Roe v. Wade as the explanation).
Current HuffPo headline:
And to keep up the mirage of the peons getting wealthy, or at least retiring, on stock market winnings:
stock buy-backs. Until the music stops.
Unfortunately, Americans don’t vote their class interest. In fact they don’t even recognize what is and isn’t in their interest, e.g., stuff like NAFTA.
In 1980, I talked with a woman on welfare who voted for Regan, because he was going to get the “welfare queens” off the welfare rolls, and that way there’d be more for people, like her, who really needed welfare. I couldn’t fault her logic. But she was certainly clueless about Reagan’s intensions.
I’m not convinced we “willingly” adopted the ways of the banana republic. As I see it, after the imposition of civil rights legislation and Walter Cronkite destroying the public’s perception of the Viet Nam War by actually reporting it, coupled with the growing peace movement. Powerful forces within our society set about to ensure that kind of civil unrest could never come to America again. I suspect at some Bohemian Grove get together the Koch’s and the Mellon’s and such devised a strategy to control the flow of information to the masses, beginning with management of the media and including the expansion of the “war on drugs”. The word “liberal” began to be associated with traitor, druggie, intrusive government and welfare queen. For 3 or more decades they placed “their” people in government, media and key industry using big donations and endowments to get “young republicans” educated at prestigious universities and then hired by friendly faces. Together they lobbied, lied, bullied and stole the American dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from within, slowly, patiently, one tiny step at a time.
Key landmarks within this “conservative” movement: (not necessarily in order)
-The Bernie Goldberg led Media revolt
-Repeal of the Fairness doctrine
-The default on the Bretton Woods monetary system and move to a floating currency
-Kent State, Bobby Seals, Chicago ’68, Bobby Kennedy/MLK Assassinations
-Expansion of the war on drugs and the ensuing police state
-The introduction of computer technology into the election process
-NAFTA
-the 9/11 tragedy
-The Roberts court
We have been had from within, America was taken down by powerful Americans who’s sole interest is little more than maintaining in cementing their hold on power. They’ve wrapped themselves in the flag and have used their significant resources to mislead the American public, compromise our elections, infiltrate all branches of government at all levels of government and in finance and industry as well.
Glen Beck was actually kind of prescient when he stated that you can’t trust American universities. He was wrong, however in believing it was liberal arts type education you couldn’t trust. It’s the Ivy league institutions that should not be trusted.
Very good points, but another key element in the manipulation of the populace is the rise of the mega-churches, and such “ministries” as Pat Roberson’s 700 Club. I have watched many fundie Xtians transform into robots since the mid-1970s until now. Back in the ’70s most Xtian churches weren’t that “upset” about abortion; the anti-abortion fervor, for ex, had to be ginned up. It’s all part of the process of pitting “us” against “them.”
Yes, this country IS a banana republic, but most citizens emphatically don’t get it and don’t want to admit it. The rightwing media has been very effective at getting conservatives to absolutely hate anything labeled as “liberal” so that any kind of effective “conversation” is off the table. Fox is just fake and, like the Soviets, has become very adept at rewriting history to suit the needs of the oligarchs.
Huxley, Orwell, for that matter Anthony Burgess: pick your poison.
Most in the USA continue to see themselves as middle class, but who knows what that really means anymore?? Almost everyone has to tighten their belts these days. In some ways, that can be a good thing bc I think, as a nation, we got really greedy and glutinous. But it’s not good at all for the underclass who suffers the most but is most villified by our oligarchs and conservatives.
Lately I hear a lot the refrain: “I’m so lucky to have a job, any job.” Yep: they got us right where they want us… by the short & curlies. You ain’t gonna complain if you’re oppressed cuz what are your options??
The oligarchs don’t need us anymore as the good little consumers we once were. You don’t like working for paltry wages in crummy conditions with rotting infrastructure all around you??? Oh well, so what? There’s loads more workers in China, Viet Nam, India, Mexico, Africa, etc etc etc.
Too bad but most US citizens prefer to live with their heads in the sand, and like Kassandra sez: I have to be very cautious about how I talk to people bc they are so defensive and resistant to the notion about how bad things really are. Citizens really want to cling to outdated jingoistic notions about American exceptionalism, which no longer applies to us anymore.
Thanks for the post and various informative comments. Too true, I’m afraid.
Thanks, I don’t want to focus on “faith” per se though. Rather the social and procedural tools that were used to bring us here, to this point. The GoP loves to point out that it was their party that ended slavery. The Dems love to point out that it was their party that ended civil rights abuses.
That argument is meaningless.
What IS meaningful is that the parties offended by each significant civil rights movement have shifted allegiance from liberal to conservative and form the deciding voting block in many elections since each shift.
The Southern strategy worked brilliantly. But the rise of the severely misinformed tea party (predominately Christian conservatives) demonstrates how little control either party actually has over the blind bigotry associated with this voting block.
It would be very hard to explain the basic history as well as you have, in fewer words.
Thank you.
If I was going to try, I’d say the broad, but shallow left has been resting on its laurels, and coasting slowly to a standstill since Nixon’s resignation, while the narrow but very deep right has been inexorably executing its revenge.
Since the early seventies the right has been going medieval on us, and we have barely noticed until just lately.
So now we’re trying to close the barn door, but not only are the horses gone, the barn’s on fire.
I think the comparison of the U.S. to certain Latin American oligarchies is apt not least of all because of the racial component of right wing politics we’re seeing right now. We’ve moved beyond our native, codified segregationist regime to something more free and tolerant, but there’s still a white ruling class kept in place by the increasingly militant white masses supporting them.
Top American universities, e.g., the Univ. of Chicago, have been at the forefront of the ascendance of neoliberalism, especially in their economics and business departments/schools. And, even in the humanities, nobody is “Marxist” any more; now they’re all “postmodern,” whatever that means.
Wake up, America. The old days are gone. The world doesn’t owe you a living. Your days of working a mindless job in return for economic security are over. You need to turn your brain on, look around you, see what opportunities exist and get to work on them.
Stop dissing the rich, it’ll do no good. First, money isn’t everything. Scale back, and enjoy the fact that the best things in life are free. Then make an effort to learn what those rich folks need, and provide it to them at a profit. Tax service? Travel? Fresh fruits and veggies? Cleaning?
Assess your self. What are you good at and what do you enjoy? Then go out and do it. Read Thoreau’s Walden — it should be your primer for a more meaningful life. Stop griping and get to work making lemonade out of lemons.
They infiltrate the blogosphere too.
What we really need to wake up to is how we’re repeatedly lied to by those we trust. In government, in industry and in the media. Indeed, the vibrant middle class is a thing of the past, but, understanding that it was stolen from you through manipulation, intimidation and coercion will go a long way towards helping undo that which can be undone.
Thanks for making us look on the sunny side. I’m all a-patter trying to think up what else we can provide for those swell rich folk: Sexual services? Organs?
All of the King’s horses and all of his men will not save the rich from their appointment with the destiny they so richly deserve.
Don very funny, but the greatest Irony in your spoof is that the Rich are thinking about the future at all, which i hold, that they arent. If you walked by a bank and saw some guys in suits and ties carrying sacks of money out and putting it in the trunk of a car would you say, hey they are robbing the bank or would you say hey thats not a responsible way to run a bank i wish we could get a law passed about that there? the second response seems to be normal and they are robbing the banks. in fact you might say that the eunuchs are looting the palace storerooms and grabbing everything they can get there hands on before it all burns.
That’s right donbacon: there are plenty of bootstraps all around.
As long as you can keep regular folks focused on muslims, mosques, immigrants, rich unionized layabouts, and “taking their country back,” you can pick their (our) pockets with impunity.
Republicans via Fox news and multimillion dollar think-tank PR shops raise up phony issues, get people jazzed up about them, pose as saviors, and collect votes in order to KEEP picking peoples’ (our) pockets.
But I also think all this ceaseless PR and Reagan deification from powerful rightist media voices have changed citizens’ perceptions of what we’re responsible for: “noblesse oblige” (by which I guess I mean the charitable impulses of the better-off toward the lesser-off, regardless of income class) seems to be a thing of the past, and “blaming the victim” (again supported and reinforced by rightist media) is the order of the day, as if there were no other truth than “You got yourself into trouble, now get yourself out.”
I think that’s a characterological sea-change, and I’m not sure what to do about it.
I would, however, like to recommend my own favorite treatise on American exceptionalism: Wallace Shawn’s “The Fever,” a long monologue on the advantaged vs the disadvantaged, that I think deserves much more exposure than it ever got. Funny (sad, really) how it continues to be relevant, too.
How many Billionaires are there in your country?
1-USA 359
2-Germany 54
3-Russia 32
4-China 28
5-UK 25
6-India 24
7-Canada 20
8-Hong Kong 19
9-Japan 17
10-Saudi Arabia 14
12-Brazil 13
11-Turkey 13
13-Italy 12
14-Spain 12
15-Australia 10
16-France 10
17-Israel 10
19-Mexico 9
20-Sweden 9
18-Switzerland 9
21-Malaysia 6
22-United Arab Emirates 6
23-Indonesia 5
24-Ireland 5
25-Taiwan 5
26-Austria 4
27-Kuwait 4
28-Norway 4
Is it possible that we have income disparity because we’re too rich, not too poor.
Talking about totally irrelevant. People working two jobs with no hope of economic security are supposed to take comfort in the fact that we’ve got a shit-pile of billionaires? Alan, like you pointed out earlier, if we simply redistribute wealth in this country we’re not all that better off. Even with all those billionaires. To me, that says we’re a poorer country.
I don’t disagree with you at all.
But this is why I like FDL so much. Someone brings up a topic that I don’t know all that much about, and it makes me want to research the issue to determine how I feel about it.
In 1995, the USA had 129 billionaires. In 2010, according to Forbes magazine there are around 400. I wonder whether any other countries had a similar growth rate in billionaires. Maybe some the countries that became privatized? — Russia?
I think your comment might be developed into a longer and more in-depth post. Just sayin…
My whole point I guess is that we did not get here willingly.
We were lied to, bullied, beaten and killed, manipulated and used by the people we were told to trust.
Getting 300 million people to believe and accept THAT will be a monumental task.
The new Robert Scheer book should be a MUST READ for the entire country.
“http://www.amazon.com/Great-American-Stickup-Republicans-Democrats/dp/1568584342/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1284043938&sr=8-1”>
Hello, Marcy,
We believe in social mobility as quintessential American opportunity, and then get outraged when we find it’s a game and it’s rigged. That’s a major piece of my fury with cannabis prohibition – as per Michelle Alexander and The New Jim Crow”
Rats my code didn’t work;
Michelle Alexander and The New Jim Crow
Argentina is a good choice for comparison to the US. They are a post colonial state, about 84% European ethnicity including much German, Russian, Polish. Italian. They have a very white middle class which had a Bourgeois revolution in the distant past which they are very proud of.Most of the Country has a temperate climate and the western part of the country looks like eastern Colorado and they have cowboys there. So, In other words a country that resmbles the US or Canada very closely in some important ways at first look
Indeed, EW, illegal immigration has always been with us. But it’s only when the economy’s in the tank that the xenophobia takes off.
Exactly. Many Americans don’t think about class divisions, and have no idea about how unequal income and wealth are in this country. As Bill Moyers said, “plutocracy and democracy don’t mix.” But the plutocrats and neo-feudalists seem to be grabbing more power all the time, and it affects almost every issue (certainly media coverage of almost every issue). It’s heartening to see Tim Noah provide a good overview.
Thanks for the film clip – I hadn’t seen that one. It reminds me of a short film called “Adonis XIV” made by a Soviet film student. He used documentary footage to make a political allegory, and apparently those higher-up were not amused. I wonder if he saw this La hora de los hornos.
Per the AP, the U.S. has now dropped to #4 in terms of “competitiveness,” behind Switzerland, Sweden, and Singapore. But we still have the lowest tax rate on the wealthy.
They have infiltrated the media, they have an agenda and their agenda could give two shits about the American middle class/working class and especially the American poor. Fuck the rule of law or the constitution and so be it if one of theirs is caught, just blame the non existent liberal media.
It is power for the sake of power.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/09/fox-host-politicized-libby/
Thanks for the provocative post and film clip, EW. I’ve long felt that, as a poster above suggests, the US and Argentina mirror each other quite closely in many ways.
I wonder whether the director Charles Burnett ever saw Solana’s movie? The evidence of Burnett’s own Killer of Sheep practically screams “Of course!”
There are differences in his method and um, diction from Solana’s however. They would make an interesting comparative study. Case in point: Paul Robeson singing “Going Home” (to the familiar Dvorak tune) in KoS, versus the Bach vocalise in La hora. Similar, yet different.
Actually, one of the Bush clan twits used the term Noblesse Oblige yesterday in a New York Times interview about his start-up Medical Billing service company. Of course he’s angry about reform and he takes a few snide swipes at all of us who might have need of government sponsored programs rather than a family trust fund. I was really struck by the shockingly arrogant tone of his responses. This man really does not see himself as an equal member of this society, but as something different and better than the rest of us. Just like his Aunt Bar.
EW, how would you define “income inequality”?
What does “income equality” look like?
Why is “income equality” desirable?
Too much wealth concentrated in very few people at the very top.
More wealth spread out among the entire population, especially a large and stable middle class.
Because it creates the greatest stability and platform for economic growth and prosperity, as demonstrated conclusively by the post WWII era, which yielded decades of relative economic stability.
I’m not EW, but let me take a crack at your questions. My take will be similar to bmaz, but will differ on some details.
Bmaz’ answer: “Too much wealth concentrated in very few people at the very top.” My amplification: Mathematically, this looks like a Poisson distribution, with a small number of very wealthy people, and a very large number of very poor people. Or, to be more precise, a small number of people with very high incomes, and a very large number of people with no income or very small incomes. It is “inequality” because income distribution is very unequal.
Incomes would be distributed in a “normal” curve, with most people having a near-average income, and an equally small number of people with high incomes and low incomes (an none or very few with no income).
Because it is congruent with the American values of fairness, and social mobility (the Horatio Alger legend is achievable), i.e., success is available to anyone who works hard within the rules. And what bmaz wrote.
Bob in AZ