THIS BLOG HAS POSTED ON COP CRIMES FOR A DECADE. NOTHING HAS
CHANGED, NOTHING WILL. THE SYSTEM IS ENTIRELY RIGGED TO PROTECT THE CRIMINAL
CLASSES: POLICE, LAWYERS, BANKSTERS, WALL STREET AND THE POLITICIANS WHO SERVE
THEM AND GROVEL AT THEIR FEET FOR THE BRIBES THEY SIPHON OFF TO FAMILY MEMBERS!
“The police function
not as an instrument of racial oppression, but as an instrument of class rule.”
The political
representatives of the ruling class have responded with, on the one hand, brute
force and threats of military repression, and, on the other hand, pledges of
“reform” and “accountability.”
“The police account for
between 20 and 45 percent of discretionary funding in the budgets of major US
cities. Overall, spending on the police stands at $115 billion, up from $42
billion 40 years ago, in inflation-adjusted terms.”
“Thus, if we want to see
the true scale of racial wealth inequality, we need a metric that doesn’t elide
the primary driver of that inequality: The fact that an enormously
disproportionate share of national wealth is concentrated in the hands of a
predominantly white upper class.”
Alas, McDonald’s,
Amazon, Walmart, Nike, Google, Apple, and other companies that have recently
pledged their allegiance to Black Lives Matter aren’t merely silent on the
issue of the racial wealth gap, they are committed to increasing it.
Since the Trump tax
cuts delivered the lion’s share of their benefits to (overwhelmingly white)
corporate shareholders and business owners — thereby increasing capital’s share
of income gains relative to labor — they had the effect of increasing
Black-white economic disparities. As the New York Times has illustrated:
Police violence and class rule
17 June 2020
It is now
just over three weeks since the Memorial Day murder of George Floyd set off
mass protests throughout the United States and around the world. The
political representatives of the ruling class have responded with, on the one
hand, brute force and threats of military repression, and, on the other hand,
pledges of “reform” and “accountability.”
Yesterday,
Trump signed an executive order that would embed more social workers and mental
health professionals with the police, create a national database to track
officers fired or convicted for using excessive force, and ban chokeholds, with
the exception, as the president explained, of “when an officer’s life is at
risk.”
Trump
announced his executive order in an address before police officers filled with
calls for “law and order” and denunciations of protesters. Trump’s caveat on
chokeholds leaves the window wide open for the continued use of the deadly
practice, since police officers routinely claim that they fear for their lives
when they grievously wound or kill someone.
The
Democrats have offered up their own slate of cosmetic changes largely mirroring
Trump’s, including banning chokeholds and creating a national database of
abusive officers, while also explicitly rejecting the demand, popular among
protestors, to “defund” the police. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats'
presumptive presidential nominee, has called for $300 million in additional
federal funding to shore up police departments across the country, while
Senator Bernie Sanders has said that cops need to be paid higher salaries.
Such
measures will amount to less than nothing. They might as well propose to change
the color of police uniforms. Inevitably, “reforms” from these representatives
of the ruling class will end up strengthening the police as an oppressive
apparatus of the state.
The promise
of police reform has repeatedly been offered up by the ruling class as a
supposed solution to excessive violence. In the aftermath of the urban
rebellions of the 1960s, the Democrats claimed that more black police officers
on the beat, more black police chiefs overseeing forces and more black mayors
would solve the problem.
Half a
century later, African Americans account for more than 13 percent of police
officers, an overrepresentation compared to the population as a whole. Black
police chiefs head departments across the country, and cities large and small
have elected black mayors. In the last decade, the introduction of police
vehicle dash cams and body cameras has been offered up as yet another panacea.
And yet
the killing and abuse continue, and indeed have escalated.
What is
absent from all of the media commentary on police violence, let alone the
statements from bourgeois politicians, is any examination of what the police
are and their relationship to capitalist society.
The uniform explanation of police violence as a
manifestation of racism fails to explain anything. Of course, there is racism
in the police. Fascistic sentiments are ubiquitous among the layers recruited
into the police forces. However, the victims of police violence are the poor
and oppressed of all races. Even as the protests are unfolding, the killing
goes on—including of Rayshard Brooks in
Atlanta, Georgia, who was black, and Hannah Fizer in
Sedalia, Missouri, who was white.
The
police function not as an instrument of racial oppression, but as an instrument
of class rule. Since Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, it is worth recalling the
role of the police 86 years ago in beating strikers participating in the
Minneapolis general strike of 1934.
This is only
one example of many. In every major class battle and social conflict in
America, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Haymarket Massacre of
1886 to the historic Arizona Phelps Dodge strike of copper miners in 1983-85,
workers have confronted in the police the instrument for enforcing the
“legality” of the ruling class. A fresh upsurge of strike activity will certainly
see cops playing their classic role, i.e., attacking picket lines. And in
another historic example of the traditional function of police in upholding
capitalist law, protesters, who have recently had the opportunity to witness
cops in action, should recall the infamous Chicago police riot of 1968.
Thousands of anti-Vietnam War protesters were brutally beaten as they
demonstrated outside the Democratic National Convention.
Heavily armed Arizona
state police open fire with teargas and rubber bullets on Phelps Dodge strikers
in September 1984 [Photo credit: David North]
As social
inequality and class tensions have grown over the past four decades, the size
and budgets of the police have grown proportionately. The police account for
between 20 and 45 percent of discretionary funding in the budgets of major US
cities. Overall, spending on the police stands at $115 billion, up from $42
billion 40 years ago, in inflation-adjusted terms.
Federal
police funding, including for the FBI and for grants to state and local police
agencies, has increased more than five-fold during the same period. In 1980,
total spending on police and related institutions rose from one percent of
national income to two percent, while spending on welfare programs fell from
one percent to 0.8 percent.
Police
forces, moreover, are increasingly integrated with the military, the instrument
of American imperialist domination abroad. Some $7 billion in military
equipment has been transferred to local police forces over the past two
decades. When Trump calls protesters “domestic terrorists,” he is merely extending
the logic of the “war on terror” to opposition within the United States. The
scenes of paramilitary SWAT teams toting assault rifles and driving in armored
vehicles to confront protesters have all the hallmarks of an occupying force.
While the
scale of police killings in the US is unique among the advanced economies,
police brutality is a universal phenomenon.
Brazil,
where corrupt police rampage through the country’s impoverished favelas,
routinely leads the world in police brutality, killing several thousand every
year. In the Philippines, thousands of poor workers have fallen victim to
fascist president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.”
In France,
the full force of the state has been unleashed on the predominantly white
“Yellow Vest” protestors, as well as African immigrants protesting for
equality. Further east, police in Hungary are the subject of nearly 1,000
complaints of excessive force every year, without any significant consequences
for the offending officers.
Sizeable
protests against police violence and in solidarity with George Floyd have
broken out in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, countries where the
police forces are notoriously brutal. Hundreds are killed every year by state
security forces in each country. One report from BBC News in April notes that
“security forces kill more Nigerians than COVID-19:”
At least 1,476 people
were killed by state actors in the country over the past year, says the Council
on Foreign Relations. In its report about Nigeria's coronavirus lockdown
period, the NHRC, a government agency, said it had found “8 separate incidents
of extrajudicial killings leading to 18 deaths.”
How is this
to be explained by racism? The international character of police violence—along
with the proliferation of such violence in cities overseen by black police
chiefs and black mayors—refutes the racialist narrative--the claim that what is
involved in the US is the oppression of “black America” by “white America.”
Police
violence is bound up with the character of capitalist society. The particular
brutality of the police in the United States is to be explained by the
particular brutality of class relations in America, the land of inequality and
the home of the financial oligarchy.
In his Origins of the Family, Private
Property, and the State, written in 1884, Friedrich Engels provided the
classic Marxist explanation of the state. The state, he wrote, is “by no means
a power forced on society from without…”
Rather, it is a product
of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this
society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it
has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel.
A central
distinguishing feature of the state, Engels continued, is the establishment of
a “public power,” which “consists not merely of armed men but also of material
adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds… It [the public
power] grows stronger… in proportion as class antagonisms within the state
become more acute, and as adjacent states become larger and more populous.”
That is, the
state is not a neutral arbiter. It, and with it, the “institutions of coercion
of all kinds” are political instruments of the ruling class, which arise
because of the irreconcilability of class interests.
We stand for
the abolition of the police. But the abolition of the police is bound up with
the abolition of class society. Nothing will be changed with the skin color of
the cops or the racial background of city authorities, nor with this or that
token reform.
An end to
police violence and the defense of democratic rights require the mobilization
of the working class, in the United States and internationally, to abolish the
capitalist state, expropriate the ruling oligarchs and establish democratic
control over economic life on the basis of social need and not private profit.
That is, it requires a socialist revolution.
Corporate America Loves
Increasing Racial Inequality…. It’s profitable and we know Wall Street has and
will sell us all out for PROFIT!
At some indiscernible
point in the recent past, uptight, lily-white corporate America left its
segregated suburb for a liberal arts college, made one Black friend, read
exactly five pages of The New Jim Crow, and returned wrapped in kente cloth.
Our nation’s top
consumer-facing firms have been “woke” for a while now. But over the past
three weeks of anti-racist protest, our brands have taken their allyship to the
next level. Now, McDonald’s is cutting checks to the Urban League, Jeff
Bezos is castigating white-supremacist Amazon customers over
Instagram, and the Walton family is on the cusp of rebranding as the vanguard
of the Third Reconstruction.
For some, the only thing
more tiresome than the anti-racist gestures of tax-evading, union-busting
corporations may be columns alerting the public to the shocking fact that those
gestures are somewhat hypocritical. But calling attention to such hypocrisy has
its social utility; the fact that these firms feel compelled to profess values
that contradict their practices creates opportunities for changing the latter
through pressure campaigns. If McDonald’s wants to align itself with the
increasingly forceful and hegemonic progressivism of America’s most coveted
consumer bloc (urban-dwelling young adults), then perhaps it will need to pay its workers a living wage or diversify its boardrooms.
Modest improvements in
internal corporate governance are probably the best we can hope to extract from
these companies. So it makes some sense to focus critiques of “woke capital” on
firm-level hypocrisies. But it’s also worth noting that if we want to build an
America that’s free of gargantuan racial inequalities, there is no alternative
to radically rebalancing the distribution of wealth and income in our society.
And our enlightened megabrands aren’t just uninterested in reducing our
economy’s racial inequalities — they are enthusiastic advocates of policies
that increase those inequalities.
America owes its
Black residents a large and growing debt.
For most of U.S. history,
the majority of African-Americans were effectively barred from accruing wealth.
For centuries, the fruits of their forced labor were commandeered by southern
slave masters and allied northern interests. Then Jim Crow laws, segregated
labor markets, white-supremacist plunder, and discriminatory housing policy locked the
bulk of the Black population out of the world-historic wealth-building
opportunity that was America’s postwar boom. In the half century since the
Civil Rights Act’s passage, we’ve made significant progress in eroding the
ideology that undergirded this injustice. But we’ve made little headway on the
injustice itself; in fact, for decades, we’ve been moving backward. Since the early 1980s, the
Black-white wealth gap has grown larger.
This shouldn’t be
surprising. In a capitalist society, wealth begets wealth; compound interest
compounds initial inequalities in asset ownership. Thus, if you concentrate a
nation’s capital into white hands for four centuries or so, merely preventing the
racial wealth gap from growing, year upon year, will require a great
deal of income redistribution — specifically, from those who own a lot of
capital to those who own little.
The racial wealth gap is
conventionally represented by the disparity between the net worths of the
median white household and the median Black one. And this discrepancy is
eye-popping. According to the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the median
white family was worth $162,800 in 2016, while the median Black family was
worth $16,600. Other analyses suggest the actual gap is even
larger.
And yet, as socialist
wonk Matt Bruenig has noted, there’s something odd — and
inherently misleading — about defining the racial wealth gap as the discrepancy
between the holdings of the median white and Black household. After all, the
vast majority of wealth in the U.S. isn’t owned by middling families but by
rich ones. White households who occupy the median quintile of U.S. wealth
distribution lay claim to just 3.7 percent of all white-owned wealth (for the
median quintile of Black households, that figure is 2.8 percent). Thus, if we want to see
the true scale of racial wealth inequality, we need a metric that doesn’t elide
the primary driver of that inequality: The fact that an enormously
disproportionate share of national wealth is concentrated in the hands of a
predominantly white upper class.
One way to do this to
calculate the average (or mean) wealth of each racial group. Under this accounting,
using SCF data, the wealth gap isn’t $146,200 but $760,000.
Graphic:
Survey of Consumer Finances/People’s Policy Project
As of 2016, closing the
gap between the median white and Black households would have required a
transfer of $456 billion. But equalizing the per capita wealth of America’s
Black and white populations would require a transfer of $15.2 trillion.
In other words,
conventionally measured, the wealth gap between white and Black America is
large; accurately measured, it is gargantuan.
Most of the brands that
pledged solidarity with Black Lives Matter this week studiously avoided
condemning racial inequality, preferring instead to decry racial “injustice”
and “inequity.” But money is power. And gargantuan, ever-growing disparities in
power that are rooted in centuries of slavery and discrimination are
straightforwardly unjust and inequitable. Furthermore, the kinds of racial inequities
that corporate America is comfortable decrying — Black-white disparities in
incarceration, victimization by police, and employment in coveted managerial
positions — are inextricable from the wealth gap.
To be sure, we can (and
should) make our society less racially unjust even if massive economic
redistribution remains off the table.
BLOG EDITOR: ‘HIRING’ IN MANY SECTORS IS ONLY ‘CHEAP’ LABOR
ILLEGALS. IT’S NOT BY ACCIDENT WE HAVE OPEN BORDERS!
Straightforward
anti-Black discrimination in housing and hiring remains prevalent in the U.S. We
don’t need to become a social democracy to prosecute killer cops with greater
frequency, or wait until the passage of reparations to reduce needlessly
punitive and discriminatory criminal sentencing. Diversifying corporate
boardrooms and legislative bodies is a poor horizon for progressive politics.
But it’s better than nothing.
Unless one tackles racial
inequality at its material root, however, progress on many of these fronts is
liable to be limited.
To make C-suites
more diverse, try making the economy less unequal.
It will be hard to fully
redress the underrepresentation of African-Americans in elite corporate roles
without increasing social mobility in the U.S.; and it is all-but impossible to
significantly increase social mobility without reducing wealth inequality. Most
research on social mobility measures changes in wealth or educational
attainment between parents and children. For example, a 2014 study by economists at Harvard and
Berkeley found fewer than 10 percent of those born into the bottom fifth of the
wealth distribution make it into the top fifth. The middle class fared only
slightly better — roughly 20 percent of those born into the middle fifth
reached the top fifth by the end of their lives. (African-Americans are
overrepresented on the bottom rungs of the wealth ladder, accounting for about
13 percent of the U.S. population, but 23.5 percent of the lowest wealth
quintile.)
But those grim statistics
actually overestimate the level of social mobility in American society. As
Northwestern University’s Joseph Ferrie has argued, one must look at changes in
class status over multiple generations to get a true sense of a society’s
economic fluidity, “because there can be these one-generation blips that
obscure the total amount of generational mobility.”
For example: If a rich
banker’s son becomes a novelist, and then fathers a child who grows up to join
the family business on Wall Street, this progression would register in the data
as a testament to class fluidity. The novelist’s class privilege didn’t prevent
him from earning far less than his parents, while his meager income didn’t
prevent his daughter from ascending to the economy’s commanding heights. But
these intergenerational fluctuations in income would mask a continuity in class
position as measured by familial wealth. This hypothetical daughter likely drew
on inherited resources and connections to move up the ladder, so her ascent
testifies less to the mutability of America’s class hierarchy than its
sturdiness.
Conversely, if a poor but
exceptionally gifted African-American child rises into the upper-middle class,
securing an enviable income and professional reputation, but amassing only
modest wealth once she’s paid off her student loans and provided aid to her
less fortunate family members, then there is a good chance her children may end up falling back down the ladder. After
a single generational blip, her family would have thus resumed its traditional
place in America’s economic order.
When economists and
sociologists measure mobility across three generations, they do indeed find
that there is even less movement between classes than
conventional metrics indicate.
For this reason, if we
want to expand the Black percentage of America’s upper-middle — and/or elite
professional — class in a substantial and durable fashion, we need to, at the
very least, redistribute an enormous amount of income from America’s
(disproportionately white) rich to its (disproportionately Black) poor and
working class.
Redistribution may be
less of an inherent prerequisite for racial inequities in policing and
incarceration. We can reduce sentence lengths and increase police
accountability without reducing economic inequality. That said, in the present
context, the overrepresentation of African-Americans in our prison population
is inextricable from their overrepresentation among the poor. By certain
measures, class disparities in imprisonment are even more profound than racial
ones; in 2017, a white high-school dropout was roughly 15 times more likely to be
incarcerated than a Black college graduate. If one wishes to increase racial
equity in America’s criminal-justice system, then reducing racial inequality in
America’s economy is among your safest bets.
Black lives
matter. But for corporate America, tax cuts matter more.
Alas, McDonald’s,
Amazon, Walmart, Nike, Google, Apple, and other companies that have recently
pledged their allegiance to Black Lives Matter aren’t merely silent on the
issue of the racial wealth gap, they are committed to increasing it.
The most gratuitous
expression of “woke” capital’s bad faith may be its routine patronage of a
political party led by a virulent racist who has publicly championed police brutality as a positive good.
The same year that Nike made Colin Kaepernick its spokesman, the shoemaker gave
the bulk of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates. This
month, Google programmed its Assistant to respond to a
hypothetical white consumer who suggests that “all lives matter” by noting,
“Black lives are at risk in ways others are not.” And yet, in 2016, Google gave a majority of its campaign contributions to
a party whose standard-bearer insisted that the Central Park Five should still be in prison,
DNA evidence be damned.
But the problem here
isn’t just that some “woke” corporations are willing to look past the nakedly
racist aspects of Republican politics. It’s that essentially all such corporations are energetically supportive of Republican
economic policies that deepen racial inequality.
Corporate America sent thousands of lobbyists to D.C. in 2017 to
help tailor the Trump tax cuts and then facilitate their passage. In the years
before that legislation’s enactment, Walmart and Nike helped fund Reforming America’s Taxes
Equitably, an (Orwellian) advocacy organization dedicated to slashing America’s
corporate tax rate.
BLOG EDITOR: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH FROM MIDDLE AMERICA TO
THE RICH OCCURRED UNDER THE BANKSTER REGIME OF BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN.
Since the Trump tax
cuts delivered the lion’s share of their benefits to (overwhelmingly white)
corporate shareholders and business owners — thereby increasing capital’s share
of income gains relative to labor — they had the effect of increasing
Black-white economic disparities. As the New York Times has illustrated:
Graphic:
The New York Times
All of which is to say:
Corporate America’s dogged support for perpetually increasing wealth inequality
through public policy does more to deepen racial inequity in the United States
than any messaging campaign or diversity initiative could ever do to mitigate
it.
OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS:
And it all got much, much worse after 2008,
when the schemes collapsed and, as Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not
aggressively rein in Wall Street as Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the
status quo ante even when it meant ignoring a staggering white-collar crime
spree. RYAN COOPER
The Rise of Wall Street Thievery
How corporations and
their apologists blew up the New Deal order and pillaged the middle class.
America has long had a
suspicious streak toward business, from the Populists and trustbusters to
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It’s a tendency that has increased over
the last few decades. In 1973, 36 percent of respondents told Gallup they had
only “some” confidence in big business, while 20 percent had “very little.” But
in 2019, those numbers were 41 and 32 percent—near the highs registered during
the financial crisis.
Clearly, something has
happened to make us sour on the American corporation. What was once a stable
source of long-term employment and at least a modicum of paternalistic benefits
has become an unstable, predatory engine of inequality. Exactly what went
wrong is well documented in Nicholas Lemann’s excellent new book, Transaction
Man. The title is a reference to The Organization Man, an
influential 1956 book on the corporate culture and management of that era.
Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and Columbia journalism
professor (as well as a Washington Monthly contributing
editor), details the development of the “Organization” style through the career
of Adolf Berle, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust. Berle argued
convincingly that despite most of the nation’s capital being represented by the
biggest 200 or so corporations, the ostensible owners of these firms—that is,
their shareholders—had little to no influence on their daily operations.
Control resided instead with corporate managers and executives.
Berle
was alarmed by the wealth of these mega-corporations and the political power it
generated, but also believed that bigness was a necessary concomitant of
economic progress. He thus argued that corporations should be tamed, not broken
up. The key was to harness the corporate monstrosities, putting them to work on
behalf of the citizenry.
Berle
exerted major influence on the New Deal political economy, but he did not get
his way every time. He was a fervent supporter of the National Industrial
Recovery Act, an effort to directly control corporate prices and production,
which mostly flopped before it was declared unconstitutional. Felix
Frankfurter, an FDR adviser and a disciple of the great anti-monopolist Louis
Brandeis, used that opportunity to build significant Brandeisian elements into
New Deal structures. The New Deal social contract thus ended up being a
somewhat incoherent mash-up of Brandeis’s and Berle’s ideas. On the one hand,
antitrust did get a major focus; on the other, corporations were expected to
play a major role delivering basic public goods like health insurance and
pensions.
Lemann
then turns to his major subject, the rise and fall of the Transaction Man. The
New Deal order inspired furious resistance from the start. Conservative
businessmen and ideologues argued for a return to 1920s policies and provided
major funding for a new ideological project spearheaded by economists like
Milton Friedman, who famously wrote an article titled “The Social
Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Lemann focuses on a
lesser-known economist named Michael Jensen, whose 1976 article “Theory of the
Firm,” he writes, “prepared the ground for blowing up that [New Deal] social
order.”
Jensen
and his colleagues embodied that particular brand of jaw-droppingly stupid that
only intelligent people can achieve. Only a few decades removed from a crisis
of unregulated capitalism that had sparked the worst war in history and nearly
destroyed the United States, they argued that all the careful New Deal
regulations that had prevented financial crises for decades and underpinned the
greatest economic boom in U.S. history should be burned to the ground. They
were outraged by the lack of control shareholders had over the firms they
supposedly owned, and argued for greater market discipline to remove this
“principal-agent problem”—econ-speak for businesses spending too much on
irrelevant luxuries like worker pay and investment instead of dividends and
share buybacks. When that argument unleashed hell, they doubled down: “To
Jensen the answer was clear: make the market for corporate control even more
active, powerful, and all-encompassing,” Lemann writes.
The
best part of the book is the connection Lemann draws between Washington
policymaking and the on-the-ground effects of those decisions. There was much
to criticize about the New Deal social contract—especially its relative
blindness to racism—but it underpinned a functioning society that delivered a
tolerable level of inequality and a decent standard of living to a critical
mass of citizens. Lemann tells this story through the lens of a thriving
close-knit neighborhood called Chicago Lawn. Despite how much of its culture
“was intensely provincial and based on personal, family, and ethnic ties,” he
writes, Chicago Lawn “worked because it was connected to the big organizations
that dominated American culture.” In other words, it was a functioning
democratic political economy.
Then
came the 1980s. Lemann paints a visceral picture of what it was like at street
level as Wall Street buccaneers were freed from the chains of regulation and
proceeded to tear up the New Deal social contract. Cities hemorrhaged
population and tax revenue as their factories were shipped overseas. Whole
businesses were eviscerated or even destroyed by huge debt loads from hostile
takeovers. Jobs vanished by the hundreds of thousands.
And
it all got much, much worse after 2008, when the schemes collapsed and, as
Lemann points out, Barack Obama did not aggressively rein in Wall Street as
Roosevelt had done, instead restoring the status quo ante even when it meant
ignoring a staggering white-collar crime spree. Neighborhoods drowned
under waves of foreclosures and crime as far-off financial derivatives
imploded. Car dealerships that had sheltered under the General Motors umbrella
for decades were abruptly cut loose. Bewildered Chicago Lawn residents
desperately mobilized to defend themselves, but with little success. “What they
were struggling against was a set of conditions that had been made by faraway
government officials—not one that had sprung up naturally,” Lemann writes.
Toward the end of the
book, however, Lemann starts to run out of steam. He investigates a possible
rising “Network Man” in the form of top Silicon Valley executives, who have
largely maintained control over their companies instead of serving as a sort of
esophagus for disgorging their companies’ bank accounts into the Wall Street
maw. But they turn out to be, at bottom, the same combination of blinkered
and predatory as the Transaction Men. Google and Facebook, for instance, have
grown over the last few years by devouring virtually the entire online ad
market, strangling the journalism industry as a result. And they directly
employ far too few people to serve as the kind of broad social anchor that the
car industry once did.
In
his final chapter, Lemann argues for a return to “pluralism,” a “messy,
contentious system that can’t be subordinated to one conception of the common
good. It refuses to designate good guys and bad guys. It distributes, rather
than concentrates, economic and political power.”
This
is a peculiar conclusion for someone who has just finished Lemann’s book, which
is full to bursting with profoundly bad people—men and women
who knowingly harmed their fellow citizens by the millions for their own
private profit. In his day, Roosevelt was not shy about lambasting rich people
who “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere
appendage to their own affairs,” as he put it in a 1936 speech in which he also
declared, “We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous
as government by organized mob.”
If
concentrated economic power is a bad thing, then the corporate form is simply a
poor basis for a truly strong and equal society. Placing it as one of the
social foundation stones makes its workers dependent on the unreliable goodwill
and business acumen of management on the one hand and the broader marketplace
on the other. All it takes is a few ruthless Transaction Men to undermine the
entire corporate social model by outcompeting the more generous businesses. And
even at the high tide of the New Deal, far too many people were left out,
especially African Americans.
Lemann
writes that in the 1940s the United States “chose not to become a full-dress
welfare state on the European model.” But there is actually great variation
among the European welfare states. States like Germany and Switzerland went
much farther on the corporatist road than the U.S. ever did, but they do
considerably worse on metrics like inequality, poverty, and political
polarization than the Nordic social democracies, the real welfare kings.
Conversely,
for how threadbare it is, the U.S. welfare state still delivers a great deal of
vital income to the American people. The analyst Matt Bruenig recently
calculated that American welfare eliminates two-thirds of the “poverty gap,”
which is how far families are below the poverty line before government
transfers are factored in. (This happens mainly through Social Security.)
Imagine how much worse this country would be without those programs! And though
it proved rather easy for Wall Street pirates to torch the New Deal corporatist
social model without many people noticing, attempts to cut welfare are
typically very obvious, and hence unpopular.
Still,
Lemann’s book is more than worth the price of admission for the perceptive
history and excellent writing. It’s a splendid and beautifully written
illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives
of ordinary people.
Ryan Cooper
Ryan Cooper is a
national correspondent at the Week. His work has appeared in the Washington
Post, the New Republic, and the Nation. He was an editor at the Washington
Monthly from 2012 to 2014.
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