Letter 2 America for January 17, 2014

Dear America,

The President's announcement in North Carolina on Wednesday that he was seeking to create a "manufacturing institute" there was a step in what has been a lackluster policy package based on "Promise Zones."  All of these would-be innovations are based on the same principle--one urged by business in the form of puling over the lack of trained job applicants for the jobs they purportedly would fill with Americans if only Americans were more qualified...and cheaper--because it is de rigueur in today's economic milieu to augment the economy by priming the pump rather than turning on the irrigation system, if you'll excuse the tedious metaphor.  Of course, we have now had about three and a half decades of Reaganomics by which to measure the efficacy of such policies, and given the growth of the economic divide between management and capital on one side and unions and labor on the other...given the palpable inequality that our economy has wreaked upon us...one may draw his own conclusions without looking far for data on which to base it.  But even liberal politicians continue to eschew the progressive course that served us so well during the recovery from the Great Depression of the 1930's because communalism in America is passé.  Out of false pride, arrogance, or just the conceit that we are a nation in which going it alone, as we now say we do, is a virtuous creed, we have abandoned the qualities that made this country the place to which everyone wanted to come for all the right reasons.  This was a place in which justice thrived and oppression was unknown.  People got together to build each other's barns and to feed each other in hard times.  By the middle of the twentieth century, we were an enormous community of common men and women who had from the inception of our nation rejected the concept of royalty and constitutionally banned hereditaments of title, thus guaranteeing that each of us is as entitled as each other, but from 1980 on, a new system of entitlement began to emerge.  The Reagan administration was the nascency of what I call neo-feudalism, in which power does not emanate from those hereditaments barred by the language of The Constitution.  Rather, it devolved from the evolution of a plutocratic class that now has control of so much of the wealth of our nation that they are an oligarchy--a political ruling class--rather than just a de facto force in our politics.  The Koch brothers, the Waltons and their ilk are now in control by virtue of the trillions of dollars in their coffers, and with the power of their wealth behind them, they can withhold the jobs we need as if those jobs were their largess to give.  That's what The President's Promise Zones are designed to overcome, but it will never work.

The problem is not that there is a paucity of resources with which to enhance our economy with more job opportunities.  Corporate America is sitting on a pool of about $3 trillion right now, so giving those corporations more money won't solve any problem.  The problem is "structural," as economists say.  It is not just a function of today's circumstances.  It is born of the concentration of too much wealth in the hands of too few when those few will never be satisfied that they have enough.  The problem is that 95% of the wealth created over the past five years of what we euphemistically call a recovery has gone into the bank accounts of 1% of the American people, and half of that has gone to one tenth of that one percent.  That might not be such a bad thing if they had created all that wealth, but they didn't.  Some of it, what I call artificial wealth, came from the stock market, which is nothing but a rigged game these days.  Some of it came from the toils of labor...most of it, in fact.  But other than financial manipulation, the rich created almost none of it.  We have become a nation of owners and the owned because in some larger sense, the vast majority of us owe our souls to the company store, which doesn't need subsidies from government designed to be passed on to the rest of us in the form of dead-end jobs.  Part of Mr. Obama's plan is to give back to business in the form of tax credits up to 20% of the first $15,000 that it pays new workers, but that won't encourage employers to hire anyone at a salary over minimum wage.  It is a plan to augment wealth and institutionalize substandard pay and living conditions.  And as for enhancing our educational system so that business and industry don't have to train anyone anymore, that is just another sop for the rich...kind of like a prayer that they will do the right thing.  It hasn't worked for thirty years, and it won't work now.

As I read over what I have just written, I recognize in it the radical fervor of my youth...echoes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Ruben.  And frankly, that's no way to make an impression in this day and age, much less to make progress.  But in a more subdued vein, let me point this out.  As a society we are in the process of formulating what we will be in the history of the twenty first century.  When historians assess our contribution to the order of the world, will they opine that we stood for those principles on which we founded our nation or will they see us as a force for something less idealistic...less pure.  Like many of us, I ponder that question and my role in determining the answer.  I hope we all do.  I think we all should.

Your friend,

Mike