04.08.13
Immoral distortions, moral breakdowns
I suggest reading Paul Krugman’s The Aged of Diminished Expectations but it was done way before he was famous.
“The problem with poverty is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public,??? he wrote.
That was in 1992, the book’s fifth printing, and things were lousy but not 2013 lousy. Krugman spent some time discussing inequality and the explosion in the poverty level.
“[Any] systemic initiative to raise the incomes of the poor seems unlikely for many years … The growing gap between the rich and poor was arguably the central fact about economic life in America in the 1980s. But no policy changes now under discussion seem likely to narrow the gap significantly.???
Indeed, nothing changed. Everything got worse.
There is another factor that has been at work as a kind of salve groupthink, as long as I can remember.
It’s an obvious social trope, an American shibboleth: Poverty is a condition that exists for you as a matter of moral choice, a personal deficiency. Basically — sin. You are unclean, deficient, bad, of low character, if you are poor in America.
Poverty is defined for almost half, maybe more than half the people in this country, as a personal choice, an evil one. And therefore nothing should be done about it because to do so is to aid in evil. The growth in poverty, the need for more food stamp subsidization, then, only means that more and more people are forsaking character, rectitude and natural godly American ways, mores and traditions.
Books become bestsellers, repugnant nobodies are transformed into celebrities and wisemen, politicians made into warrior kings on it.
It doesn’t matter what the statistic show. If corporate profits have risen to astronomical levels while wiping out everyone else, it is of no consequence.
Facts don’t matter, only the twisted pseudo-morality of alleged right thinking.
Hand in hand with this has been a decades long corruption of language for the express purpose of embedding the idea that wealth and poverty are personal choices. And woe to those who choose badly because all the information is out there, perhaps in career training, or advice from a column, or if you’re really lucky, a lecture from the wealthy, for you to attain great success.
To this end the Microsoft Network and Yahoo, and everyone else — run weekly pieces, paid for by career services and such, on what jobs pay the most, and which careers to avoid.
These are all about filling corporate America’s immediate term needs. Period. You read “top 5? paying jobs columns for a few weeks and they’re always the same.
There’s a reptilian and repellent nature present and one quickly comes to detest the nobody writers and editors who are responsible.
Underlying it all is the phony ethos — and ethos is not a good word, it doesn’t get at the inner poison — that one is primarily defined by one’s job, the circumstance of always having a job, and how much that jobs earns.
Which dovetails with the entrenched belief that to have a low-paying job that leaves one in poverty, again, is a personal choice.
For instance, take the reconfiguration of the old word “equity??? in America. It meansquality of being just or fair in a system. But now the usage is commonly set to what a billionaire’s stake is in whatever he owns. (Indeed, if you just use the word “equity” in Google, all that comes back is the secondary business meaning, corporate American media has so corroded it. Investopedia’s definition, of all things, is the third ranked by the search engine. You’d think the word was coined just for the billionaire class in the US.)
Two weeks ago I read one of these careers and jobs columns and the author had come up with five things the really wealthy are said to understand better than the proles.
Number one was equity.
Equity is not something one just goes out to pick up.
Yet that is what the piece indicated. Equity, it implied, was maybe something you could acquire, like an education, or experience, only with much more effort, and maybe not at all if you weren’t or aren’t smart enough.
Those not-billionaires who did not understand equity, as a consequence, could never be truly that successful.
In reality, you have to buy it, or be contracted into it, as by inheritance. And it’s millionaire/billionaire expensive.
Who do you know, in their jobs, or anything else, have ever been in a position to get equity?
So here is a deep perversion of language, made so for the benefit of an intrinsically unfair system, the exact opposite of its original meaning.
In the new American usage, but not the dictionary’s first usage, equity also equals virtue.
Equity was the very essence of the rotting heart of Mitt Romney, which he and the billionaires who supported him interpreted as virtue. Romney was born into equity.
Even though the public demonstrably didn’t see the virtue in it, this astonished the man and his family.
Equity has come to mean the ability to ruin a vast holding and everyone under the top tier involved in that holding for the sake of getting more, for attaining equal or even more equity in something else. Then rinse and repeat.
Equity is what you count on, or counted on at Facebook, to make you an instant multi-millionaire in an inflated IPO.
Equity is an essential part of the rigged economic game, something that the 1 percent has, not something large numbers of Americans have access to. Equity means nothing to people whose 401k’s have taken a beating and ruined plans for retirement.
Equity means one thing for the topmost, quite another for everyone else.
Wouldn’t we all like to have equity?!
Again, choosing again from Paul Krugman’s 1992 work, The Age of Diminished Expectations:
Why does unemployment matter? Partly because high unemployment means that potential productive workers are not being used … because high unemployment brings persistent poverty. Beyond this, however, the availability of jobs plays a key role in how our society hangs together. A society in which young people can routinely expect to get jobs on leaving school, and to remain gainfully employed except for occasional spells for their adult lives, is going to be a very different place from one in which work is a privilege that is unavailable to many people — even if the welfare state is generous to the unemployed …
And this, because it is such an unpleasant description of where we are now — America is definitely a society that no longer holds together at all — has made it attractive for many to cling to the idea that being down is a personal matter, a sinful one.
Since my graduation from Lehigh, this condition has been the norm. Recessions, business fluctuations beyond control and always diminishing job prospects. Inequality increasing, compensation decreasing, much of the time without being noticed or remarked upon except with the usual condemnations that someone has had it coming because they’ve lived high on the hog for too long and they’ll have to learn the hard way it’s time to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Last week’s job statistics showed more people just leaving the workforce, on which Barbara Ehrenreich commented on her Facebook page:
The bright side of today’s unemployment stats: The labor force participation rate is declining, meaning that fewer people are falling for the old “job” scam, you know– show up every morning, work your butt off and every couple of weeks we’ll make a contribution toward your bus fare and lunch money.
Corporate profits versus ours. Something’s burning up the charts and it’s not you.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm where I worked some of this out of my system in advance.