Tag Archives: Working Class

This holiday season, American workers have little to celebrate

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By Danny Haiphong

Source: Intrepid Report

Every year, much of the U.S. population celebrates Thanksgiving and Christmas to show appreciation for their families and friends. Thanksgiving normalizes the colonial origins of the United States and erases the brutality of the English settlers who massacred indigenous people to prepare the land for capitalist accumulation. Christmas is the annual holiday of big business. On no other day are workers more encouraged to spend their wages on the latest consumer product to gift to their loved ones. The holidays bring with them a deep pressure to be merry. Yet on this holiday season, workers have little to celebrate.

A new study by Brookings Institution provides a snapshot into the devastation wrought on the working class by American capitalism. Forty-four percent of all workers between the ages of 18-64 are employed in low-wage sectors and earn an average of $16 or less per hour. The study excluded workers who logged over 98 hours per week over the last year as well as certain sections of the college-educated population such as those living in dormitories and attending graduate school. Had these groups of workers been counted, the percentage of low-wage workers out of the total population would likely be even higher. This verifies prior datasets which proved that around half of the U.S. population makes less $30,000 per year.

The growing poverty of the American worker is a major contributor to the growth of toxic stress and mental illness. Half of all U.S. adults will develop a mental illness over the course of their life. Serious mental health conditions afflict nearly ten million people in the United States and over a quarter of these individuals live below the official poverty line. Suicide rates are at a thirty-year high. An obvious connection exists between rising poverty and the worsening mental health of the American worker.

Workers in the United States see no future under the current stage of capitalism. They struggle to afford rent in a nation where the federal minimum wage cannot pay for a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. They indebt themselves in the trillions to attend college and obtain healthcare. They work in redundant, service sector jobs where hours are long and mistreatment, abuse, and injury are all too common. The American worker is increasingly alienated from themselves and each other. Union density rates in the U.S. have fallen to just ten percent of all workers since World War II.

The shrinking labor movement has followed a larger trend in U.S. society. Privatization has decimated the public sector. Workers have few places to socially convene independent of the machinations of consumer capitalism. Workers are competing for fewer jobs, most of which are not worth competing for at all. Homelessness, mass incarceration, and endless war remind workers that they can easily be turned into cannon fodder if they step out of line. In such an environment, addiction and self-destruction is encouraged while organizing for justice is discouraged.

Economic insecurity and alienation place more pressure on families to make up for stagnant wages and exorbitant amounts of debt. More young workers are living with their parents than at any other time in the last one hundred years. Older workers are not only forestalling retirement but also finding themselves without family or community support as siblings and adult children chase the highest paying jobs and the lowest rents and property values. Couples feel compelled to remain in toxic relationships for economic reasons. A strong link exists between domestic violence and poverty.

Contrary to the messages in Hallmark cards or the corporate media, the holidays are far from a time of celebration. Many workers view the holiday season as a harsh reminder of the loss, alienation, and despair that they’ve experienced over the course of their lives. Holidays place added pressure on workers to dismiss the ills of capitalism and the personal stressors associated with them. It should come as no surprise that most workers already struggling with mental health conditions report that the holidays only worsen their symptoms. Instead of embracing humanity, the holidays encourage workers to embrace rampant commercialism and the nuclear family.

To break from a culture steeped in the profit motive, workers will need to create their own traditions based upon solidarity and social transformation. Not everything about the holidays needs to be thrown out in the process. Spending time with family and friends during a day off from work can and should be rewarding to the psyche and to society. The conditions of capitalism prevent the holidays from serving a social purpose. Holidays under capitalism breed despair but brand themselves as moments of pure joy.

While workers may have little to celebrate this holiday season, there are reasons for the working class to be optimistic in the years to come. Teachers in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles have won key gains in 2019 by using the most powerful weapon at the disposal of organized labor: the strike. At the beginning of the year, the Los Angeles Teachers won smaller class sizes and more support staff. The Chicago Teachers Union massively increased the number of nurses in the school district by forcing the city to hire nurses rather than continue the inefficient and harmful practice of hiring private contractors. The UAW’s strike of General Motors (GM) earlier this Fall made global headlines even if it was unable to win every demand that the workers put forth. These strikes reflect a growth of class consciousness in the United States. The continued growth of class consciousness will be critical toward building the kind of struggle capable of bringing about massive political and economic change for the working class.

Furthermore, workers around the world are leading the way in the struggle against class inequality and foreign-sponsored wars. Massive protests in Haiti, Chile, Honduras, and Algeria are just a few of many occurring around the globe. The protests have mainly targeted repressive U.S.-backed governments and their neoliberal economic agenda. China is leading the world in poverty reduction. Cuba is the most sustainably developed nation in the world. A vast majority of workers around the world want to see an end of the miseries imposed by global capital and are actively fighting to make their demands a reality.

The question is whether workers in the United States can decisively break from the despair, the racism, and the extreme alienation shaping their current condition. Being determines consciousness. At this moment, the neoliberal race to the bottom has rendered most workers too fearful, disorganized, and full of self-blame to fight back. However, millions of workers have rallied behind the political campaign of Bernie Sanders. Labor unrest is likely to continue as neither political party appears interested in implementing Bernie Sanders’ social democratic agenda. Workers in the United States are in desperate need of a revived labor movement to quench their thirst for a better life. Putting our energies into building this movement will go a long way toward shaking the Holiday Blues and giving workers something to really celebrate: a society run by workers, in the interests of workers.

Neo-Liberalism and the Retreat of Democracy

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By David Schultz

Source: CounterPunch

Democracy across the world is under siege. This according to the latest Freedom House report documenting that for 2017, “democracy faced its most serous crisis in decades” as seventy-one countries experienced declines in freedom or fair government, including the United States, and only thirty-five an improvement. This was the twelfth consecutive year of decline in democracy world-wide.

The question is why? Why has confidence in democracy retreated? Freedom House does not provide an answer, but there is a reason. It is democracy’s marriage to neo-liberal capitalism has fostered the conditions leading to its own undoing, similar to the way Karl Marx once described in the Communist Manifesto the “gravedigger thesis” (What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers”) where capitalism would produce the conditions that would undermine its own existence.

From the 1960s until the early 1990s democracy was in the upswing internationally. African de-colonization produced initially popularly elected governments. In South America the demise of strongmen led to a wave of democratic regimes. And the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the break up of the USSR in 1991 produced the dismantling of communist authoritarian or totalitarian governments that made it possible for Francis Fukuyama to proclaim that democracy had won and emerged as the last grand global political meta-narrative.

Yet several problems upset this rosy picture. Most prominently, it was the marriage of these new emerging democracies with free market capitalism and the victory of neo-liberalism. Internationally as post-colonial and post-communist countries emerged, international organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF forced them to adopt market reforms, often pushing them into what was then called “shock therapy.” Shock therapy involved rapid privatization of state owned enterprises and rapid dismantling of welfare states. This shock therapy was often accompanied by significant corruption as a few rich oligarchs emerged who came to own these newly privatized state enterprises.

Simultaneously, emerging democracies were rapidly pushed into what sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein would call the world-capitalist system. This system turned politically to right in the 1970s and 1980s as Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States pushed neo-liberalism or market fundamentalism as an alternative to the Keynesian welfare state that had dominated the west since the 1930s. It was adopted both for ideological reasons and because of what political economist James O’Connor would call the fiscal crisis of the state tht affect economics across the world in the 1970s. This was a crisis of declining profit among private businesses and therefore declining revenue for states to fund welfare programs. Something had to give, and it was the welfare state.

Neo-liberalism is a political economic theory of the state committed to the laissez-faire market fundamentalism ideology that traces back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It includes a belief in comparative advantage, a minimalist state, and market freedom, and is, as articulated in the 1990s and 2000s, driven by finance capital. At the state level, neo-liberalism defines a theory of public administration. If neo-liberalism includes a commitment to market fundamentalism, then that also means that it is dedicated to a politics of limited government. This includes privatization, deregulation, and a scaling back of many traditional functions that capitalist and communist states had performed since at least World War II. But neo-liberalism as a theory transcends the state, providing also an international economic theory committed to free trade and globalism.

This emergence of neo-liberalism in the 1970s and its linkage to democracy is central to the crisis affecting the latter. As neo-liberalism retrenched the welfare state and pushed globalism it was accompanied by a dramatic increase in economic inequality in the world, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out. This occurred in the US and much of the western world. But it also impacted newly emerging democracies in Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America. Pressures for shock therapy market reforms, austerity, and open borders meant export of jobs to other countries, dismantling of social safety nets, and other economic pressures placed on governments and ruling parties.

Politically voters turned on globalism and free trade. This happened here with Trump voters in 2016, but also in Brexit in the UK. But many voters also blamed immigrants for the loss of jobs or social unrest in places ranging from France, to Italy, to Hungary. The increasing economic gap between rich and poor and, more importantly, the erosion of the economic conditions of the working class soured them on democracy. This paved the way for the emergence of strongmen as political leaders, the rise of far-right nationalist parties, and disenchantment with democracy and democratic structures to deliver the economic goods.

What we see today then in terms of the decline in support for democracy across the world is a product of its marriage to neo-liberalism. Capitalism and democracy always had an uneasy co-existence, but the neo-liberal democracy variant demonstrates the powerful contradictions in them. Either their linkage is producing outright rejection of democracy or a populist, rightist version that is merely democracy in form but not in substance.

The Seeds of Anti-Capitalist Revolt Found in Everyday Resistance: A Review of Guerrillas of Desire – Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible by Kevin Van Meter (AK Press, 2017)

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By Scott Campbell

Source: Institute for Anarchist Studies

Back when I first began selling my labor for a wage in the wasteland of suburbia’s strip malls, I can recall the tedium of stocking shelves, summoning up insincere courtesy in the face of entitled customers and obnoxious bosses, comparing the stacks of money counted at the end of the day with the totals on our paychecks, and feigning adherence to whatever motivational façade management cooked up to mask the reality of our exploitation.

Yet I also remember, much more vividly and fondly, the latent and occasionally eruptive defiance among my co-workers. This included the constant collective complaining about the job, taking more and longer-than-approved breaks, working as little as possible, fudging time sheets, stealing, and the intermittent screaming matches with the boss in the middle of the store. Underpinning all these actions was an unspoken but broadly understood code of silence when it came to such transgressions and, when appropriate, expressions of support for them.

At the time, I didn’t think much about this, it was just how things happened and I’ve encountered similar experiences to varying degrees in every workplace since. Our actions weren’t guided by a political framework nor was there any attempt to organize them in a directed manner. It was more a spontaneous, innate reaction to experiencing the coercion of capitalism. I had cause to reflect upon this anew while reading Kevin Van Meter’s new book, Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible, published by AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

In the preface, Van Meter observes that the question motivating him is not “What is to be done?” but “How do people become what they are?” Throughout the course of the book he seeks to provide an answer by locating power in the resistance of workers, apart from any political ideology or organization. Whether and how that inherently anti-capitalist refusal of work develops into revolt or rebellion are the questions he compellingly urges us to reflect and act upon.

To reach that point, Guerrillas of Desire ambitiously takes on multiple tasks that feed into and build on one another. Van Meter initiates a dialogue between anarchism and Autonomist Marxism that leads to a reconceptualization of the working class, bolstered in part by a historical accounting of workplace actions such as the ones I recounted. He labels these “everyday resistance,” committed by “guerrillas of desire,” and proposes a focus on those deeds as the entry point for organizing revolutionary resistance to capitalism. The impetus for this initiative, concisely carried out in under 160 pages, is his proposal that the current approach to organizing is conceptually flawed and therefore destined to fail. “Guerrillas of Desire offers a contentious hypothesis: the fundamental assumption underlying Left and radical organizing, including many strains of anarchism, is wrong. I do not mean organizationally dishonest, ideologically inappropriate, or immoral. I mean empirically incorrect” (13). The incorrect basis for current organizing is the assumption that the poor and working classes are unorganized and passive and that it therefore rests upon activists and organizations to educate and mobilize them for their own sakes. Van Meter instead proposes that there is in fact informal organization and resistance occurring, it is just of a sort that does not fit within the Left’s organizing vision and therefore goes unseen, unrecognized, and unincorporated into political theories, analysis, and action.

To provide a political frame for understanding the “everyday resistance” of the working class, Van Meter draws upon anarchism’s mutual aid – the material and emotional cooperation and reciprocal support that exists in societies – with Autonomist Marxism’s self-valorization – autonomous working class action that counters the state and capitalism, primarily the refusal of work in its myriad forms. Combined together and reinforcing one another, mutual aid and the refusal of work comprise the “everyday resistance” of the working class.

These phenomena also give definition to what is meant by “working class,” which Van Meter defines as “autonomous from both capitalism and the official organization of the Left, broadly including all those who work under capitalism, based in relationships between workers rather than as a structural component of the economy or sociological category” (32). Rather than being premised on income, occupation, or union membership, the working class under Van Meter’s formulation is made up of all those who must perform work under capitalism – be it waged or unwaged, in the factory, home, office, bedroom, affective, or social spheres. However, when they are not taking action in response to their subjugation under capitalism, these people are just workers. They become a class through the process of struggling against the conditions imposed upon them by capitalism. This struggle initially takes the form of everyday resistance based on mutual aid and the refusal of work. It is everyday resistance that unites individual workers as a class because such resistance, even when performed by one person, requires at a bare minimum the tacit complicity of co-workers and preferably their active collaboration.These acts and the social relationships they create and depend on lay the groundwork for the broader and overt organizing against capitalism more commonly interpreted as working class struggle. Using this framework as offered by Van Meter, we can understand the working class as composed of the relationships forged among workers actively in resistance against capitalism.Without anti-capitalist struggle, the working class does not exist.

After laying this theoretical groundwork, the bulk of the book traces the various forms of resistance by slaves, peasants, and workers in the industrial and social factories (the expansion of capitalist logic from the factory into society at large, in particular in service, immaterial, and reproductive work), creating a lineage and legacy of working class resistance against the various formations of capitalism that spans centuries. “Viewing the working class broadly to include slaves and peasants as well as students, homemakers, immigrants, and factory and office workers reveals the breadth of struggle and generalized revolt against work that continues to be imposed” (128). In doing so, Van Meter further builds the framework of the working class as being formed through its self-activity against the demands and deprivations of capitalism.

The historical survey brings the discussion into the present, where Van Meter offers a proposal to address his initial hypothesis that the Left is carrying out its organizing work in an incorrect way. His suggestion is for the organizers of today and in the future to begin their work by “reading the struggles” already underway in the form of everyday resistance. Through investigation and documentation by organizers, new relationships may be fostered with guerillas of desire that allow everyday resistance to expand into larger and more overt forms of autonomous anti-capitalist struggle. He proposes that the seeds of the new, liberatory worlds sought by anarchism and Autonomist Marxism are to be found in the everyday resistances that are already occurring rather than in the latest organizing manual or official Left strategy document..

While impressed after reading through this formulation, I was left with lingering questions. It remained unclear how, for instance, everyday resistance morphed into more overt, organized resistance and the part organizers positioning themselves as readers of struggle played in such a development. The personal anecdotes he provided on stepping back from ideological assumptions and reorienting towards the collective experiences of communities during his work in Long Island were helpful. It brought to mind the story of Marxist-Leninist intellectuals heading off to the Chiapan jungle with grand plans of starting a peasant guerrilla force. Only when they arrived, they found the population had no time or interest in their grandiose ideology. It was only when they dropped their assumptions and worked within the community to understand its needs, concerns and own history of resistance that the Zapatistas emerged. That, however, is a rather specific and exceptional example. I feel Van Meter’s proposal to begin organizing from within everyday resistance based on the notion that it will lead to more overt resistance could benefit from further articulation and direction.

Similarly, the focus on work as existing solely within the capitalist sphere left me curious as to his vision of the place of non-leisure activity under capitalism or even after capitalism. The refusal of the work that maintains capitalism is indispensable. Yet I would not advocate the refusal of work that maintains communal and personal well-being or builds autonomous organization, or writes books reviews in spare time, for example. Certainly, Van Meter would not advocate that either, but it remains a matter necessitating clarification and one that I believe extends beyond an issue of semantics.

Despite those questions, Guerrillas of Desire is aspirational in its scope and contains ideas and proposals worthy of consideration by radicals reflecting on how to engage in the current moment. In a time when mobilizing and organizing around class has fallen off the radar of many, it is a welcome reminder of the importance of paying attention to the working class and the integral role working class struggle plays in resistance to capitalism, alongside the currently more prevalent resistances to capitalist white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, colonization, environmental destruction and more.

Van Meter assists in this advocacy by accessibly presenting an updated Autonomist Marxist perspective of the working class, expanding it, breathing life into, and imbuing it with its own power, separate from both capitalism and the official Left. As such, he allows readers who may toil in a variety of ways under capitalism to see themselves within the working class, conceptualize their activities as part of a broader resistance with a rich history, and inspire them to build on that legacy.

 

Scott Campbell is a radical writer and translator based in California. He is part of the collectives that publish the websites El Enemigo Común and It’s Going Down. His personal site is fallingintoincandescence.com

Guerrillas of Desire is available here!

 

The Democrats “Russia Hacking” Campaign is Political Suicide

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By Mike Whitney

Source: CounterPunch

The Democratic Party is doing incalculable damage to itself by shapeshifting into the party of baseless conspiracy theories, groundless accusations, and sour grapes. Hillary Clinton was already the most distrusted presidential candidate in party history. Now she’s become the de facto flag-bearer for the nutso-clique of aspiring propagandists at the CIA, the New York Times and Bezo’s Military Digest. How is that going to improve the party’s prospects for the long term?

It won’t, because the vast majority of Americans do not want to align themselves with a party of buck-passing juveniles that have no vision for the future but want to devote all their energy to kooky witch-hunts that further prove they are unfit for high office.

The reason Hillary Clinton lost the election is because she is a polarizing, untrustworthy warmonger. Period. Putin had nothing to do with it.

And the same rule applies to the major media that has attached itself leech-like to this pathetic fairytale. Here’s a clip from the Times headline story connecting FSB-agent Trump with the evil Kremlin:

“American intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee. …

The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation…

Clinton campaign officials have suggested that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could be trying to tilt the election to Mr. Trump, who has expressed admiration for the Russian leader.” (Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians, New York Times)

If there was a Pulitzer Prize for fearmongering innuendo or spurious accusations, the Times would win it hands-down. As it happens, readers have to delve much deeper into the article to find this shocking disclaimer:

“But the campaign officials acknowledge that they have no evidence. The Trump campaign has dismissed the accusations about Russia as a deliberate distraction…..”

“No evidence”???

They got nothing. NOTHING!

All they have is a few anonymous agents who refuse to identify themselves speculating on alleged hacking incidents that (they surmise) were the work of Vladimir P. Strangelove in his remote Soviet Cyber-war bunker. That’s not even enough material for a decent spy thriller.

But, of course, all this bunkum about “Fancy Bear” and  “Russian military intelligence” and the “high confidence” of (unnamed) US intelligence agents is enough to scare the hell out of many readers and leave them with the impression that the Kremlin is up to its old Cold War tricks again.  The Times editors are wise enough to know that it’s quite easy to tap into 40-years of anti-Soviet brainwashing and convince the gullible sheeple that Washington and Moscow are still mortal enemies. It would have been helpful if the Times had given the story a bit of context, that is, pointed out that the US has relentlessly expanded NATO eastward establishing military bases in all of the former Soviet satellite states, toppled the Moscow-friendly regime in Ukraine, and built nuclear weapons sites in east Europe just a few hundred miles from Moscow.

The Times writers might have also noted that this latest propaganda campaign against Russia could very well be the result of Moscow’s triumph over US-backed militants in Syria that are facing a decisive defeat due in large part to Russian involvement. In other words, the Times and the other US propaganda organs are functioning as they always do, whipping up public sentiment against the “evildoers” so Washington can drag the country into another imperial war of expansion. The whole “hacking” mantra fits perfectly with the Pentagon’s hybrid war strategy which manipulates information in order to shape public perceptions and gain support for another round of genocidal violence in some far-flung location. (Raqqa, perhaps?)

Do you think that bloodthirsty Hillary would be on-board with such a plan?

Of course she would. Hillary never met a war she didn’t like.

But let’s cut to the chase: Putin didn’t lose the election for Hillary. Obama did. People wanted change, and they didn’t get it, so they moved on to Door Number 2: Donald Trump. Take a look at these three short clips from a recent survey from PEW Research and you’ll get a feel for what really happened in the election:

“The Republican Party made deep inroads into America’s middle-class communities in 2016. Although many middle-class areas voted for Barack Obama in 2008, they overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump in 2016, a shift that was a key to his victory…..In 2016, Trump successfully defended all 27 middle-class areas won by Republicans in 2008. In a dramatic shift, however, Hillary Clinton lost in 18 of the 30 middle-class areas won by Democrats in 2008…

Overall, Democrats experienced widespread erosion in support from 2008 to 2016. Their share of the vote fell in 196 of the 221 metropolitan areas examined. The loss in support was sufficiently large to move 37 areas from the Democratic column to the Republican column…

Not coincidentally, Democrats also were more likely to have lost ground in manufacturing-dependent areas. Of the 56 communities with a relatively large share of manufacturing jobs, Trump picked up victories in 15 metro areas that had supported Obama in 2008 and held onto another 29, leaving only 12 communities in the Democrats’ column.” (GOP gained ground in middle-class communities in 2016, Pew Research)

Get it? The Dems lost ground everywhere because Obama didn’t deliver the goods. That’s reason number one. Second, Hillary didn’t address the issues that ordinary working people really care about. And what they care about is the economy. Money, security, jobs. Is that hard to understand?

People are afraid because things are getting worse not better. Their standards of living are slipping, they’re worried about their retirement, their jobs, their health care, and the pile of debt their kids have accumulated to go to college. They’ve lost confidence in the media, the congress, the courts and the president who promised change but never lifted a finger for working people his entire time in office.

That’s why Hillary lost, just look at the research.

The Democrats have no vision for the future, and without vision, the party will disintegrate which is precisely what’s happening. The Democratic Party is disintegrating before our very eyes. This latest “Russian hacking” diversion is just speeding along the process.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

Dead, White, and Blue

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Supporters hold signs as Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Norcross, Georgia, USA, 10 October 2015. The visit, attended by thousands, is Trump's first rally in metro Atlanta since he joined the race. (EPA/ERIK S. LESSER)

The Great Die-Off of America’s Blue Collar Whites 

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Source: TomDispatch.com

The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”

This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to health care, safer neighborhoods, and of course freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker-skinned. There has also been a major racial gap in longevity — 5.3 years between white and black men and 3.8 years between white and black women — though, hardly noticed, it has been narrowing for the last two decades. Only whites, however, are now dying off in unexpectedly large numbers in middle age, their excess deaths accounted for by suicide, alcoholism, and drug (usually opiate) addiction.

There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun-owners, and white men favor gunshots as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting in part on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opiate painkillers to whites than to people of color. (I’ve been offered enough oxycodone prescriptions over the years to stock a small illegal business.)

Manual labor — from waitressing to construction work — tends to wear the body down quickly, from knees to back and rotator cuffs, and when Tylenol fails, the doctor may opt for an opiate just to get you through the day.

The Wages of Despair

But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working class people of any color.

I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back — and better yet, a strong union — could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.

White privilege was never, however, simply a matter of economic advantage. As the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1935, “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.”

Some of the elements of this invisible wage sound almost quaint today, like Du Bois’s assertion that white working class people were “admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.” Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent — mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.

For most of American history, government could be counted on to maintain white power and privilege by enforcing slavery and later segregation. When the federal government finally weighed in on the side of desegregation, working class whites were left to defend their own diminishing privilege by moving rightward toward the likes of Alabama Governor (and later presidential candidate) George Wallace and his many white pseudo-populist successors down to Donald Trump.

At the same time, the day-to-day task of upholding white power devolved from the federal government to the state and then local level, specifically to local police forces, which, as we know, have taken it up with such enthusiasm as to become both a national and international scandal. The Guardian, for instance, now keeps a running tally of the number of Americans (mostly black) killed by cops (as of this moment, 1,209 for 2015), while black protest, in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and a wave of on-campus demonstrations, has largely recaptured the moral high ground formerly occupied by the civil rights movement.

The culture, too, has been inching bit by bit toward racial equality, if not, in some limited areas, black ascendency. If the stock image of the early twentieth century “Negro” was the minstrel, the role of rural simpleton in popular culture has been taken over in this century by the characters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. At least in the entertainment world, working class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart, and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to maintain the usual sense of white superiority when parts of the media are squeezing laughs from the contrast between savvy blacks and rural white bumpkins, as in the Tina Fey comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. White, presumably upper-middle class people generally conceive of these characters and plot lines, which, to a child of white working class parents like myself, sting with condescension.

Of course, there was also the election of the first black president. White, native-born Americans began to talk of “taking our country back.” The more affluent ones formed the Tea Party; less affluent ones often contented themselves with affixing Confederate flag decals to their trucks.

On the American Downward Slope

All of this means that the maintenance of white privilege, especially among the least privileged whites, has become more difficult and so, for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.

If the government, especially at the federal level, is no longer as reliable an enforcer of white privilege, then it’s grassroots initiatives by individuals and small groups that are helping to fill the gap — perpetrating the micro-aggressions that roil college campuses, the racial slurs yelled from pickup trucks, or, at a deadly extreme, the shooting up of a black church renowned for its efforts in the Civil Rights era. Dylann Roof, the Charleston killer who did just that, was a jobless high school dropout and reportedly a heavy user of alcohol and opiates. Even without a death sentence hanging over him, Roof was surely headed toward an early demise.

Acts of racial aggression may provide their white perpetrators with a fleeting sense of triumph, but they also take a special kind of effort. It takes effort, for instance, to target a black runner and swerve over to insult her from your truck; it takes such effort — and a strong stomach — to paint a racial slur in excrement on a dormitory bathroom wall. College students may do such things in part out of a sense of economic vulnerability, the knowledge that as soon as school is over their college-debt payments will come due. No matter the effort expended, however, it is especially hard to maintain a feeling of racial superiority while struggling to hold onto one’s own place near the bottom of an undependable economy.

While there is no medical evidence that racism is toxic to those who express it — after all, generations of wealthy slave owners survived quite nicely — the combination of downward mobility and racial resentment may be a potent invitation to the kind of despair that leads to suicide in one form or another, whether by gunshots or drugs. You can’t break a glass ceiling if you’re standing on ice.

It’s easy for the liberal intelligentsia to feel righteous in their disgust for lower-class white racism, but the college-educated elite that produces the intelligentsia is in trouble, too, with diminishing prospects and an ever-slipperier slope for the young. Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.

Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular and founding editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword) and most recently the autobiographical Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything.

The Dying Americans

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By Chad Hill

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

I’ve often used the term “the final solution for the working class,” in reference to the current American policy towards its vast intercoastal peasantry who, for reasons of circumstance or inclination, do not subject themselves to the decade or so of wildly expensive education that qualifies them for the remaining jobs on offer. It may be a reflection of my readership that I haven’t received any pushback. As someone who is in that same working class, I can clearly see what is happening around me, and I’m not alone. David J. Blacker, in his book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, also broached the subject of eliminationism, going so far as to study the German holocaust literature of the 1930’s which calmly and rationally discussed how to deal with the problem of getting rid of the millions of excess people whom the elites determined were “undesirable” in the brave new world they were creating.

After last week, it’s hard to argue that this is hyperbole. The news that America’s white working class between the ages of 45-65 has dramatically falling life expectancy, alone against nearly the entire world, received a surprising (to me) bit of coverage. When I first read it, I assumed it would be just another footnote story that I would write about here, but would be ignored everywhere else. But it received a surprising amount of coverage: even Paul Krugman wrote about it. I suspect a large part of that was due to the fact that it was research by the most recent economics “Nobel” laureate Angus Deaton and his wife, so it was harder to ignore than if it had been from some unknown researcher.

Often times you hear about a “dieoff” due to our situation. I think this study confirms beyond a doubt that the dieoff is already happening. Yet, consider that, before this study became popularized, you would have never heard about it in the mainstream press. Still doubt the collapse is real?

It’s not people dying in the streets, though, unlike some of the more feverish TEOTWAKI peak oil predictions. From the research, elevated levels of suicide and drug abuse are the prime culprits. It’s the million little deaths that go unnoticed in the obituary columns of decaying communities all across this formerly prosperous nation. Someone overdosed in a back alley. Or a meth lab exploded. Or maybe they were killed in a car accident, or decapitated while driving their motorcycle too fast. Or they were shot by police. Or they are dying of liver failure by age 40. Or, increasingly, they are ground down slowly by the many chronic diseases such as diabetes that are symptomatic of the chronic stress and horrid (yet highly profitable) junk food diet of most Americans. It’s a dieoff all right, but it’s never framed as such. You can see it all around you: the overcrowded jails filled with unemployed people, the overcrowded hospitals filled with sick, obese people, the folks standing on the medians and freeway offramps with cardboard signs and living their cars, all while the media just goes on reporting about spectator sports and celebrity gossip as though nothing bad is happening. Ignorance really is bliss.

The obvious analogy here is Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, as many people writing about the study have pointed out: The Dying Russians (New York Review of Books). But there was no “collapse” of the United States. Or was there? Instead, we’re told by the media and politicians that everything in every way is getting better and better for everyone. Just look at the latest iPhone! Television screens are huge! Even the very poor have indoor plumbing! And you can Google anything you like, so what are you complaining about, loser?

Everything is famed as personal failure, thus the dieoff is just a million stories of individual failure with no overall pattern. Nothing to see here, more along. Study and “work hard” (whatever that means), and you’ll be okay. Certainly that fear is behind the epidemic of overwork, presenteeism and grinding hours of unpaid overtime Americans are putting in at work in the hope of not being next. It’s like being the model prisoner in a concentration camp, though. Ask the turkeys this month if being a good turkey had any effect on their ultimate fate. The Parable of the Happy Turkey (Global Guerrillas)

Up until now, Americans have been happy turkeys. Thus, they cannot comprehend what is happening to them. In America it is taken for granted that the ultimate locus of control is on the individual, and that there is no such thing as society. That belief has been heavily promoted over the past thirty years, along with the “create your own reality” and other assorted positive thinking nonsense (thanks Oprah!), and I think we can see why.

And since we see this always as personal failure and are not allowed to see it as systemic failure, the poor and formerly middle classes take it out on themselves instead of the system. After all, America is the land of opportunity; if you don’t “make it’ (whatever that means), you have no one to blame but yourself! Of course it is not true; the musical chairs job market and winner-take-all economy means that only a tiny number of people even have a shot at the middle class anymore, and a lot of that is due to geography, pre-existing social connections and luck.

They don’t have to kill you if they can get you to kill yourself.

And although framed as a tragedy, I wonder if to some extent this behavior on the part of working class males is a logical response to living in the kind of society that the United States has become. In a society that has no use for them anymore and where they have no sense of purpose and no hope for the future, it seems like suicide is a rational response. After a certain age, you realize that you have been sorted to the “losers” pile. If you live in the vast suburban flatland of Middle America, you likely live in a decrepit house somewhere in the anonymous miasma of strip-mall suburbia, buy disposable plastic crap made in China from baleful fluorescent-lit Dollar Stores, drive an older model pickup truck or SUV with a bad muffler and bad brakes over potholed streets and under rusty bridges, while all the jobs around you aside from the hospital and the university (which are mainly female-staffed) are minimum wage, dead-end jobs where you have to smile and wear a uniform. You realize you’re never going to meet the girl of your dreams since hypergamy is still baked into female mating choice, despite what some feminists claim. You realize you will never get that that great job that will allow you to be upwardly mobile and live in relative ease and comfort, and life is a bitter, hard struggle relieved only by the occasional joint and video games. Or you’re divorced and paying child support to your former wife who’s managed to keep herself presentable enough to hook up with one of the few remaining alpha-males, and half your income goes to support the kids you never see. Or your deadbeat loser children have been working multiple McJobs and living in the basement for years with no hope of even affording a one-bedroom apartment, and between them and the wife you never speak to anymore, you can’t even get into your own damn bathroom. You realize that, like most Americans, you will never afford to retire and will have to work your boring, dead-end job under your asshole supervisor until you literally drop dead. So why wait?

I mean, who wouldn’t kill themselves or anesthetize themselves with drugs and booze in an environment like this?

I once read an online commenter say that the rich are the beta testers for the lifestyles we will all be living in the future (and thus no restraints must be put on their wealth accumulation if we are to experience that future). But that commenter had it wrong. Rather, it is the poor–those living on less than a few dollars a day; those who live in ghettos marred by gangs and drug abuse; those with their heat, water, and streetlights turned off, who are the beta testers for the lifestyles that most of us will be “enjoying” in the near future. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.

Given the above, I can’t help but think of the “Rat Park” experiment. Rats in a cage, when given  a choice between water and drugs, would overdose themselves to death on the drugs, neglecting even basic self-maintenance. But a cage is a boring, repetitive, stressful environment for a rat, so you might expect the animals to anesthetize themselves with whatever was on offer. But rats living in an environment specifically designed to be pleasant and give the rats what they needed to thrive did not overdose themselves to death; they preferred healthier behaviors instead. It’s worth noting that most of the drugs we use today have been known for hundreds or even thousands of years, but were not abused by the native peoples who discovered them. That is reserved for modern, “advanced” societies. The Rat Park experiment (io9)

I once wrote that if you wanted to intentionally design a social environment to drive a primate insane, you would develop something pretty much identical to modern-day America (advertising, chronic stress, inequality, separation from nature and each other, boring, repetitive work, constant surveillance, and on and on…). It’s pretty obvious how Rat Park parallels life in twenty-first century America with its ubiquitous television, concentration-camp schools complete with metal detectors, freeways and cul-de-sacs and landscapes of Applebees™ and Walmarts; along with a steady diet of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. It’s hardly an environment designed for human flourishing, is it? Rather, it is designed to maximize “economic growth” at all costs. The results of that experiment are as plain to see as they are predictable.

Most people who are still relatively comfortable are content to write off the people who are living in deprived circumstances among them right now, especially in the United States where so many of those poor are African-American. But more and more, whites are experiencing what they had previously dismissed as “black problems” due to their racist attitudes: the hopelessness and despair, the unemployment, the sociological pathologies; the drug abuse, divorces, domestic violence, youth gangs and so on. It’s not race, it’s environment, as Rat Park showed. Given a certain environment, an animal–any animal–will behave a certain way. Its totally predictable. We know this, but why do we pretend it is not true? Instead we reliably chalk it all up to “the Cult of Personal Failure.”

But this leads to an even larger question, one that gets to the heart of our modern predicament. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of society are we creating where so many people see death as preferable to living in such a society? In what kind of a society do people see life as so miserable that they prefer to kill themsleves, either slowly or immediately?  That is, why is this the end result of hundreds of years of supposed “progress?”

Fundamentally, how do you feel about this society? Do you feel good about this society? Do you feel good about the school-to-prison pipeline? Do you feel good that there are more prisoners than small yeoman farmers? Do you feel good that it is a felony to show us how our food is produced? Do you feel good about students mortgaging their future for jobs that won’t exist by the time the bill comes due? Do you feel good about hospitals treating chronic diseases taking the place of farming and making things as basis of the America’s rural economies? Do you feel good about police armed with body armor and and tear gas? Do you feel good about wall-to-wall advertising preying on our weakness and insecurities? Do you feel good about the atmosphere of incessant adversarial competition against everyone else for the shrinking pool of jobs on offer which pay enough to afford rent?

If so, why?

This puts a crimp on the Panglossian “everything in every way is getting better for everyone,” rhetoric that you hear so often in the media. What I find amusing is that this rhetoric used to come from the Left–that the welfare state would eliminate poverty, racism, that everything was under control and circles of cooperation would get larger and larger, and so on. But now, I mostly hear the Panglossian rhetoric coming primarily from the Right, whose preferred God is the unregulated “free” market. It’s in the Right-wing propaganda now that I constantly hear how wonderful everything is, and that those who are complaining are either delusional misfits or just jealous. Here is a prime example from the Right-wing National Review:

Good news abroad, and good news at home: In 1990, there were 2,245 murders in New York City. That number has fallen by 85 percent. Murders are down, often dramatically, in cities across the country. The overall rate of violent crime has fallen by about half in recent decades. U.S. manufacturing output per worker trebled from 1975 to 2005, and our total manufacturing output continues to climb. Despite the no-knowthings [sic] who go around complaining that “we don’t make things here anymore,” the United States continues to make the very best of almost everything and, thanks to our relatively free-trading ways, to consume the best of everything, too. General-price inflation, the bane of the U.S. economy for some decades, is hardly to be seen. Flexible and effective institutions helped ensure that we weathered one of the worst financial crises of modern times with surprisingly little disruption in the wider economy. Despite politicians who would usurp our rights, our courts keep reliably saying that the First Amendment and the Second Amendment pretty much mean what they say. I just filled up my car for $1.78 a gallon.

 The world isn’t ending.

The world is healthier, wealthier, and less hungry mainly because of the efforts of millions of unknown investors, entrepreneurs, farmers, workers, bankers, etc., all working without any central coordinating authority….There is much left to do: We have unsustainable fiscal situations in the Western welfare states, irreconcilable Islamist fanatics originating in points east but spread around the world, environmental challenges, and that tenth of the human race that still needs lifting out of hardcore poverty. But we have achieved a remarkable thing in that unless we mess things up really badly, in 50 years we’ll be having to explain to our grandchildren what a famine was, how it came to be that millions of people died every year for want of clean water — and they will look at us incredulously, wondering what it must have been like to live in the caveman times of the early 21st century.

Liberal Democracy and Free Markets, Take a Bow (National Review) Or better yet, strap on flight suit and hang up a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Yes, for the folks on the Right, it truly is a Golden Age. There are a few flaws in the ointment like those pesky welfare states and all that but, hey, gas is cheap! Can’t you just feel the bright, shiny future ahead? Here’s a another sampling from The Wall Street Journal:

The trajectory of the world doesn’t justify this pessimism. People are living longer on every continent. They’re doing less arduous, backbreaking work. Natural disasters are killing fewer people. Fewer crops are failing. Some 100,000 people are being lifted out of poverty every day, according to World Bank data.

Life is also getting better in the U.S., on multiple measures, but the survey found that 55% of Americans think the “rich get richer” and the “poor get poorer” under capitalism. Sixty-five percent agree that most big businesses have “dodged taxes, damaged the environment or bought special favors from politicians,” and 58% want restrictions on the import of manufactured goods.

Has the World Lost Faith in Capitalism? (WSJ) Silly people, how dare they “lose faith!” Once we stamp out every last vestige of “socialism” we can restore that faith.

So what’s going on here? Listening to the Right, one gets the appearance that things have never been better, and that people are just totally irrational and determined to complain no matter how good they have it, despite voluminous scientific literature portraying optimism bias as the default cognitive condition for most people.

I think it stems from two areas – the Neoliberal experiment has clearly been an unmitigated disaster, so the literature constantly has to portray a rosy picture for those still living in the elite ideological bubble by cherry-picking data: Cheer – Inequality is Falling Globally!! (and similar nonsense) (Pieria). It’s much like the “happy peasant” literature that prevailed on the eve of the French Revolution and during early Industrialism to convince upper-class readers that their efforts were actually for the good of all, not just themselves; it’s just that the feckless peasants were too short-sighted to realize it. The elites, for some reason, have a need to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the free-market fundamentalism they subscribe to is making everyone–not just them–better off. Perhaps it is a remedy for cognitive dissonance and a guilty conscience.

The second agenda might be to cover up the agenda of eliminationism referred to above.
Going back to the original topic, it’s fairly clear that getting rid of the lower classes is, as The Joker put it in The Dark Knight, “all part of the plan.”

Now that might seem a bit paranoid, but consider this – the governors of many states are withdrawing basic social protections for their poorest citizens, and actually paying for the priviliege! Here’ Kevin Drum:

…the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are denying health care to the needy and paying about $2 billion for the privilege. Try to comprehend the kind of people who do this. 

The residents of every state pay taxes to fund Obamacare, whether they like it or not. Residents of the states that refuse to expand Medicaid are paying about $50 billion in Obamacare taxes each year, and about $20 billion of that is for Medicaid expansion. Instead of flowing back into their states, this money is going straight to Washington DC, never to be seen again. So they’re willing to let $20 billion go down a black hole and pay $2 billion extra in order to prevent Obamacare from helping the needy. It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?

Red States Spent $2 Billion in 2015 to Screw the Poor (Mother Jones)

Last week, McClatchy documented the unnecessary pain being inflicted on red state residents by their elected Republican representatives…Roughly 260 million Americans (roughly 85 percent) already have health insurance provided by their employers, the government or through individual policies they purchased. In places like Oregon, Colorado, New York, California and other, mostly Democratic states, governors and state legislators accepted the expansion of Medicaid to provide free health insurance for those earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty (FPL). For those earning between 138 and 400 percent of the FPL, the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies will help them purchase insurance in the private market. But in the states where Republicans said “no” to the expansion of Medicaid, the picture is much different. As the AP explained the coverage gap:

Nearly 2 in 3 uninsured people who would qualify for health coverage under an expansion of Medicaid live in states which won’t broaden the program or have not yet decided on expansion.

The resulting Republican body count is staggering. Thanks to the GOP’s rejection of Medicaid expansion, 1.3 million people in Texas, 1 million in Florida, 534,000 in Georgia and 267,000 in Missouri will be ensnared in the coverage gap.

Health Insurance “Coverage Gap” Coming To A Red State Near You (Crooks and Liars)

That’s right, Republican governors are blowing a hole in their budget just to remove social protections for the poor. Often times, “unaffordability” is cited as a justification, but clearly this is not at work here. It’s pure ideology. But what is that ideology? Here’s more detail:

American conservatives for the past several decades have shown a remarkable hostility to poor people in our country. The recent effort to slash the SNAP food stamp program in the House; the astounding refusal of 26 Republican governors to expand Medicaid coverage in their states — depriving millions of poor people from access to Medicaid health coverage; and the general legislative indifference to a rising poverty rate in the United States — all this suggests something beyond ideology or neglect.

The indifference to low-income and uninsured people in their states of conservative governors and legislators in Texas, Florida, and other states is almost incomprehensible. Here is a piece in Bustle that reviews some of the facts about expanding Medicaid coverage:

In total, 26 states have rejected the expansion, including the state of Mississippi, which has the highest rate of uninsured poor people in the country. Sixty-eight percent of uninsured single mothers live in the states that rejected the expansion, as do 60 percent of the nation’s uninsured working poor.

These attitudes and legislative efforts didn’t begin yesterday. They extend back at least to the Reagan administration in the early 1980s…

Most shameful, many would feel, is the attempt to reduce food assistance in a time of rising poverty and deprivation. It’s hard to see how a government or party could justify taking food assistance away from hungry adults and children, especially in a time of rising poverty. And yet this is precisely the effort we have witnessed in the past several months in revisions to the farm bill in the House of Representatives. In a recent post Dave Johnson debunks the myths and falsehoods underlying conservative attacks on the food stamp program in the House revision of the farm bill.

This tenor of our politics indicates an overt hostility and animus towards poor people. How is it possible to explain this part of contemporary politics on the right? What can account for this persistent and unblinking hostility towards poor people?

Why a war on poor people? (Understanding Society)

Let’s restate this to be clear to make sure the point is not lost: these states are willing to lose money in order to make sure their poor die quicker. Clear enough? And we’re not even talking about things like the outright cold-blooded murder of the homeless by police, the breaking up of homeless encampments, the mass incarceration, and return of debtors’ prisons, and so on. It’s expensive to be poor in  America. We do everything by the Matthew Effect from jobs to education, and wonder why class mobility is nonexistent. Yet we’re still told that everyone wants to be an American, that it’s the land of opportunity, and that things have literally never been better.

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry (Guardian)

Much of the well-funded efforts of plutocrats and their allies has been to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which was designed by Right-wing think tanks), not to reform it or replace it with something more effective, but to return to the predatory status quo ante. Now, businessmen may be greedy, short-sighted and sociopathic, but they are not stupid. They surely know that the American System is wildly more expensive than any other place on earth, but they are willing to lose billions of dollars in profit just to make sure people don’t get health care! Think about that. A European friend said to me once that he didn’t understand why American businesses seemed to want sick, insecure employees who either don’t have access to health care, or are worried about going broke trying to pay for it. It seemed totally irrational to him. But it’s only irrational if you don’t understand the underlying ideology of eliminationism. Some societies actually want to kill off their own people, as Nazi Germany and other tragic examples have shown.

And it’s of a piece with the withdrawal of mass education that Blacker documents in his book. The elites are disinvesting from society in every way because they just don’t need us anymore. And their propaganda mills are dedicated to making sure the blame is squarely placed on individuals so that we will internalize learned helplessness which has prevented any effective resistance. Or their mills are insisting that it’s just not happening, and everybody is really better off, as we saw above, except for a few churlish losers who have no one to blame but themselves (and are probably looking for a handout).

Who turned my blue state red? (NYT). A great explanation of America’s crab mentality.

I’ve featured the analogy of horses that some economists use before. Human beings may have found other jobs (which is debatable), but the population of horses just went down in line with the work that was available for them to do. I think it’s obvious that this is a good analogy for what’s happening.

…Similarly, one could just as easily have said, a century ago, that: “Fundamental economic principles will continue to operate. Scarcities will still be with us…. Most horses will still have useful tasks to perform, even in an economy where the capacities of power sources and automation have increased considerably…”

Yet demand for the labor of horses today is vastly less than it was a century ago, even though horses are extremely strong, fast, capable and intelligent animals. “Peak horse” in the U.S. came in the 1910s, I believe. After that there was no economic incentive to keep the horse population of America from declining sharply, as at the margin the horse was not worth its feed and care. And in a marginal-cost pricing world, in which humans are no longer the only plausible source of Turing-level cybernetic control mechanisms, what will happen to those who do not own property should the same come to be true, at the margin, of the human? What would “peak human” look like? Or–a related but somewhat different possibility–even “peak male”?

Technological Progress Anxiety: Thinking About “Peak Horse” and the Possibility of “Peak Human” (Brad DeLong)

Off to the glue factory with the middle class, then. As long as it’s kept diffuse enough, it will never be picked up on; “Work Makes You Free” hangs in the air over our heads instead of over the entry gates. Perhaps we should just inscribe it on the Gateway Arch.

So, all told, the self-destructive habits of the middle-aged white poor are hardly irrational. Rather, it seems to be to be the most rational response to the type of world we’ve created. The only question is, why do so many of us apparently want to stay on this path?