04.18.14

PBS and libertarian poison

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 2:54 pm by George Smith

If you ever gave money to PBS, you should read this and consider stopping.

One of its stories was featured in the Google News tab a day or so ago. I read it, did a slow burn, but figured it wasn’t worth saying anything about. That was until a reader posted and a Crooks and Liars piece on the Kochs hit my virtual windshield.

In essence, it’s a comment rescue, beginning now.

Going in, you must understand that the business news shots on PBS are called by a reporter/editor named Paul Solman. Solman is someone whose belief system in the economy has been blown to hell by the proof that Keynsian thought and modeling on the current economic crisis for everyone but the wealthy is still valid.

So, Solman is an asshole American libertarian. And none of that tribe accepts any of the work of serious macroeconomics experts who have been studying and writing about the Great Recession.

And so, early in the week, PBS dug up David Graeber, an Occupy Wall Street activist, so that he might react to the idea of a universal wage for all Americans.

And it is something that almost sounds reasonable, for a moment. Only almost, though.

The only part of it worth reproducing is the tell — the first paragraph, and it’s not Graeber’s doing.

Written by Paul Solman, here it is:

Editor’s Note: Conservative proponents of the guaranteed income want a lump sum payment (Charles Murray suggests about $11,000 to all adults) to replace existing social welfare programs and downsize American bureaucracy. But some leftists oppose those government welfare agencies, too, London School of Economics professor David Graeber says. The leftist critique of private and public bureaucracies, Graeber explains, is that they “employ thousands of people to make us feel bad about ourselves??? …

With a basic income, everyone would have access to the market. Workers (including those government paper-pushers) could pursue the work they want, while society as a whole would benefit from their scientific breakthroughs and artistic talents.

There are so many things wrong with this straight off, it’s difficult to know where to begin.

So I’ll start with the bigot.

You’ll see the name Charles Murray cited.

Murray is a quack sociologist/writer very popular on the hard right because he’s written books about how not-white people don’t work hard enough, have inferior culture/family values, and that is why they are poor.

Recently he came up with the idea of a universal credit, pinched from the Tories in the United Kingdom. This, so the welfare bureaucracy can be dismantled.

This invention was quickly adopted by our favorite, Paul Ryan, and I’ve spoken of it previously.

The reason the extremist GOP loves it is because it puts all social welfare programs in one package. And they can then be killed in one stroke.

That first paragraph also mentions it as a base survival payment of $11,000 a year.

This is laughable in many parts of America where, annoyingly, many millions of people live. Here in SoCal, $11,000 doesn’t even cover a year of rent, let alone food, clothing, electricity, water, gas and, optionally, a car, which is very hard but not impossible to get along without.

So in the very first part of the story, the PBS editor has tossed a debunked white supremacist (he has a file at the Southern Poverty Law Center) at the audience.

So we have the contrived economic ideas of the bigot and a basic
universal payment that doesn’t cover the cost of basic living in the country. And this is delivered to the PBS audience as something reasonable, as something “leftists” might even be able to accept.

Just so everything else can be thrown out for a hard right every-man-for-himself libertarian paradise.

Why? Crooks and Liars has an idea and it’s because plutocrat and all-around-reviled-person David Koch is on the board of WNET, the “flagship” station of PBS.

At C&L:

The truly insidious feature of this report isn’t Murray, per se. It is the way they present the idea as being something the left can sign onto. This is the new libertarian strategy: Find wedge issues that they presume they can dupe liberals into agreement, then use those dupes to recruit more followers.

As for me, I just think it’s because Paul Solman is, to repeat, a standard American libertarian asshole. The problem would be solved if he moved on to the Ludwig von Mises or Cato Institutes or Reason magazine.

But maybe Crooks & Liars is right. In that case, David Graeber was the dupe.

And that’s because it’s difficult to understand how Graeber, advertised as an Occupy activist, got twisted up in it. Occupy, after all, was one of the arch enemies of the tribe of hard right libertarian/GOP/Tea Party/Kochs.

In any case, the conversation goes from very bad to very bad as well as ludicrous. By the end, it seems like a bad drug trip.

Friedrich Hayek gets mentioned, another libertarian touchstone.

Then comes another wonderful rationalization, just tossed out for consideration as something called the “John Lennon argument:” That moment when Brit pop rock went to pot because the art student dole, a type of base income, was thrown out for workfare in the UK.

In the entire thing there isn’t one mention that all Americans can’t be expected to become entrepreneurs for themselves in “the market.”

And that millions and millions of them wouldn’t even want to be part of a system like that, anyway. Rather, they wish jobs in which they work for others at a living wage, not all craving to be small businessmen, artists, deep thinker/philosophers like Jacques Derrida (go ahead, read all of it, they actually mention him), writers and John Lennons in waiting.

The word “parasites??? is also referenced twice, once directly and once indirectly.

There are always some people who will want to be parasites, the audience must always be informed.

“Parasites??? needs a definition.

Is it everyone who isn’t wealthy?

Or everyone working a job that still needs social assistance to survive?

Or is it everyone who gets social assistance and still can’t survive?

Not the dead, though. They’ve stopped being parasites.

Permalink