Consumed, nickel and dimed in the land that is their land

April 4th, 2009

There is no room at the mall.

The hope and expectation was that this mass consumption would be the way to deliver many long-sought American goals of greater equality, more democracy, if all Americans prospered and were on a similar footing as middle-class citizens, we would create a postwar American society of equals, of people who could participate in the political system as full players. The egalitarian ideals of the postwar period gave way to a reality in which prosperity was not distributed equally.

Most of us tend to think of market capitalism as an essential contributor to liberty and democracy, both because it’s an engine of material prosperity and because it underpins freedom of choice. Daniel Barber argues persuasively that this positive relationship between capitalism and democracy did exist when capitalism was about producing goods that met human needs. But those days are long gone. Now, “needs” must be created: Producers and marketers of goods and services have to convince those with money to buy them. Viagra and Botox become readily available here while drugs to combat life-threatening malaria and diarrhea are not in developing countries. At a great human cost.

Capitalists, are capitalism’s worst enemy – and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years. Wrote John Kay in The Truth about Markets.

Thomas Frank in One Market under God has named our problem, not capitalism but “extreme capitalism”: the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market.

birth is now destiny… Parental income predicts who will run the investment banks and who will clean their floors.

stock markets aren’t the engine of economic growth. Market economies are necessarily embedded in social, political, and economic institutions — and cannot work unless they are. Market economies draw their strength and legitimacy from their context.

What does Britain look like from the stratosphere? Polly Toynbee assembles some City bankers and lawyers in the top 0.1 per cent of earnings and present them with the facts. The bankers (indoor pirates) gasp to discover that 90 per cent of British people live on less than £40,000 a year. One thinks he is on average income at £200,000. Asked what constitutes poverty, they suggest £22,000 a year – which would mean a majority of British people are in poverty. “I have no idea how they survive on the incomes they have,” one banker says. But when it is suggested they pay taxes to start putting this right, they dismiss the proposals as “all kinds of bullshit crap.”

Like Thomas Jefferson (A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry”) educating the American people is the main thing to be done, and love of the people is fundamental.

Nickel and Dimed

To find out whether people can actually survive on a wage of $7 an hour, as millions of Americans must, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich spent months doing unskilled labour, telling bosses she was a divorced housewife returning to employment, and renting the cheapest accommodation she could find.

In Key West, Florida, she worked as a waitress and couldn’t even afford to live on a caravan site: “It is a shock to realise that ‘trailer trash’ has become, for me, a demographic to aspire to,” she writes. She soon discovered that one wage wouldn’t cover her bills and took a second job, as an estimated 7.8m others do in the US, getting by on caffeine and ibuprofen. Ultimately she walked out in tears. She went on to toil as a cleaner and a shop assistant at Wal-Mart, where she found she couldn’t even afford to buy discounted clothes from the store she worked in.

There is only one place where people are offered health insurance for their animals – even by their employers – while their children go without medical care from any source, and that place is the United States of America. A sample of the insanity is that a child who died for a lack of $80 dollars to pay a dentist to remove an infected tooth cannot legally see a veterinarian who regularly performs similar surgery on household pets at a lower cost as a last resort to save his life.

When historians begin to analyze what brought about the decline and fall of the most-powerful and affluent empire in the history of Earth, they will turn to the works of Barbara Ehrenreich as much as to Xenophon, Vegetius, and Gibbon.

As this lower-to-middle economic class no longer has much in the way of assets to acquire, Ehrenreich notes that George W. Bush has since utilized the beachheads established by Reagan to the point that the “uberrich” have begun their own version of Operation Barbarossa on the “merely rich.” This can be seen in the billion-dollar bonuses “awarded” to a few hedge fund managers last December while their “merely rich” clients were losing their investment portfolios in the likes of Countrywide and Bear Sterns. A few of these are becoming as destitute as the mere peasants they formerly disdained while they gleefully fleeced the lowly out of retirements and even homes to provide the means for taking a huge bonus out of company coffers.

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