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 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.
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
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.
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.
A merica 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.
Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the
Decline of the American Dream
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.
T oward 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 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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