On Mediocrity

Mediocrity inspires a certain exciting familiarity. We (who think ourselves humble) see it and in it recognize something of ourselves. Mistaking the thrill of recognition for brilliance, we glorify our own identities within the mundane. Thus the success of Avatar, American Idol, Sarah Palin, et al.

–Lael Ewy

News in Brief

Headline: Goldman Sachs gets record $500 million fine. Passes hat in office, pays it off.

Meanwhile, Fabrice Torre gets Scootered; the truly responsible skate. As NPR reported this morning, no management changes are expected at Goldman, even after they admitted fraud. In other words, the world is still safe for the rich and privileged.

Meanwhile, the NAACP Uncle Toms on its previous statements asking the Tea Party movement to repudiate the racists among its ranks after Tea Party leader Mark Williams goes all Mel Gibson and says this:

“You’re dealing with people who are professional race-baiters, who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history.”

So, Mark Gibso—er, Williams accuses the NAACP of being worse than slave traders and racists and gets away with it, with Ben Jealous and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson all bowing to this guy? Really? And they wonder why the NAACP is viewed as largely ineffective?

The facts are these: Tea Party activists spat on members of the Congressional Black caucus and called them niggers. They called Barney Frank a faggot, and they support Arizona’s blatantly racist anti-immigrant law. Are they all bigots? Of course not, but Mel, er Mark Williams’ statement, if it is in any way indicative of Tea Party sentiments, would suggest that they are more racist than not.

Even more disturbing, Williams’ words provide a perfect opportunity to simply expose what these people are actually like and let their movement self-destruct as we’ve been waiting for it to do for the past year or so. All the NAACP had to do was issue a counter-statement saying “See? That’s what we’re talking about!” Even CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN wouldn’t have been able to ignore that, as they did Williams’ initial riposte.

Exposing the truth about the nutjobs, in their own words, is exactly the sort of tactic Edward R. Murrow used to stop McCarthy, and Murrow had the courage to counter the Red Scare in much more dire circumstances. After all, we had genuine worries; the Russian Bear had megatons of nukes with which to strike us. Last I checked, black folk and Mexicans were not so well equipped. The Mainstream Media has everything to gain (ratings, particularly) if they pursue this fight, and the NAACP has the chance to regain its reputation as being a genuine force against racism and of actually appealing to millions of disillusioned black youth. This is a tremendous missed opportunity, and its ramifications can be seen in what follows.

As McLatchy news service has it, a list of 1300 illegal immigrants has been anonymously circulated in Utah, causing the governor to investigate, and “worrying” Hispanic residents. So the Red Scare is replaced with the Brown Scare. But it gets worse. Not willing to simply name names, as McCarthy did, this latest list draws on the power of contemporary information gathering and provides “Social Security numbers, birth dates, workplaces, addresses and phone numbers,” along with names of children and the due dates of pregnant women. An accompanying letter “demands that those on [the list] be deported immediately.”

How long, then, before the Brown Scare leads to our own bands of Brown Shirts, harassing and expelling every Latino or Latina they see? How long before they just start beating up swarthy guys with farmer’s tans like me? It’s a chilling development, and my local paper saw fit to give it three short paragraphs on page 8.

The tendency in the ultra-right is toward ethnic cleansing, fueled by paranoia and bigotry. Whether they call themselves Tea Partiers or law and order conservatives or patriots of what-have-you, their motives are mean-spirited and their actions reminiscent of the worst history has to offer.

And we are doing little or nothing to stop them.

T.S. deHaviland

Wal-Mart, Wall Street, Welfare, and the Senseless Entitlements of Wealth

The common wisdom, probably due to comments Ronald Reagan made in the 1980s about “welfare queens” (and incessantly repeated by Rush Limbaugh), is that the poor have a “sense of entitlement” to their welfare benefits and that the public dole has become a “lifestyle” for the poor. The theory goes further, stating that this results in a large number of people who have no incentive to work and have become lazy and complacent.

There may be an element of truth to this, but with 45 million Americans now qualifying for food assistance, it can’t be all true. This statistic is shored up by the fact that the fastest growing segment of the homeless and of food bank users is comprised of families in which at least one adult works—so clearly the problem isn’t that people receiving assistance don’t want to work.

Receiving welfare is still a matter of deep shame in America, and its rolls are swelled by the economic downturn and the shrinking American wage, not by laziness or a sense among those getting it that welfare is anything other than a last resort that they would gladly give up if given a chance to earn a decent living.

The “sense of entitlement” language is, if anything, a classic case of Freudian projection by the rich onto the poor. For recent evidence of this look no further than Wall Street shaking down Uncle Sam for $700 billion simply because the big Wall Street banks gambled away all their money on risky financial instruments. This sense of entitlement that involves private jets and Fifth Avenue apartments, not a sackful of groceries for this kids and a housing voucher for a run-down Section 8 apartment.

More subtle examples can be drawn from the common practice of major corporations demanding tax breaks for locating in a particular area. In economic development terms this is known as being competitive on a global scale. In mafia terms, this is known as a protection racket. But it derives from a sense by the corporations and the rich people who run them of pure entitlement; they demand special treatment that other, smaller businesses can’t get, and they demand a special status that actual people—versus the corporate “people” a recent Supreme Court decision assured us exist—can never achieve. The promise, of course, is that by locating in a given area, the company will “create jobs” which will then lead to eons of wealth and contentment in that locale. Until, of course, the company finds a better deal elsewhere.

Wal-Mart is well known for these tactics, but its behavior is even worse. Once the titanic retailer does locate in an area, tax incentives assured, it proceeds to undercut local retailers and drive them out of business, monopolizing local retail. It also pays its employees so little that they qualify for government subsidized food and health care benefits. Thus it “double dips” once at the front end, with tax incentives, and once at the back end by sucking on the public teat to keep its employees healthy and alive. Clearly, it feels entitled to this treatment and to these benefits, as it actually coaches its employees about how to get public assistance.

All that is well known. But then there’s this item from the July 9, 2010 edition of Public Radio International’s Marketplace Morning Report. The piece, titled “Rich More Likely to Walk Away from Homes,” has Nancy Marshall Genzer summarizing a New York Times article that shows about one in seven mortgages worth more than a million dollars is in default, as opposed to one in 12 for those worth less than a million. And apparently it isn’t because the rich can no longer afford these homes. Here are Marshall Genzer’s words: “Well, the Times reports that these homeowners just say, look, their houses are not a good investment, and they decided to walk away.” In other words, they’re screwing the banks, and by default the rest of us who use those banks, by going delinquent on mortgages that they don’t like because they aren’t returning the kind of value they want, not because the mortgage holders are out of work or seriously financially strained. Marshall Genzer goes on to explain how they can get away with this: “[T]he Times also says that the wealthy are less susceptible to tactics used by the government and banks to shame them into paying their mortgage.” What she isn’t saying here, possibly in order not to upset the show’s corporate underwriters, is the next obvious thing: that the wealthy have no shame.

Obviously, that isn’t true of all rich people, just as certainly some poor people abuse their welfare benefits. But the actions of the rich here don’t pass ethical muster. If we apply a little Kant, we can see that if what Wall Street, Wal-Mart, and these rich homeowners do were to become universal law, the economy would not merely be damaged as it has been but utterly destroyed. The ever-weakening responsible middle is keeping the boat afloat by working hard amidships with a bucket. Meanwhile the water flows in from our captains continually running aground.

But these examples above require some type of deeper explanation. Why do those at the very top feel like they can bash the hull in and then retire to their deck chairs? We might be able to move in the direction of understanding this if we look again at Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment from the 1960s. In it, he got a majority of subjects to shock another person to the brink of death. He did this simply through the power of the authority of a man in a lab coat standing next to the subjects and giving them orders. No one really got shocked, of course—all but those giving the faux shocks were actors—but the experiment revealed how people can act in unethical and immoral ways if they feel confident in the authority that assures the course of action. The poor and middle class are less likely to walk away from our debts because we view banks and government agencies as authority figures. But also, perhaps, because we view these entities as somehow infused with the power of the public good. Even the much-despised banks, after all, keep money building interest for regular users and loans flowing to locals building homes and small businesses. Or at least they did before the financial meltdown, which was led by the rich and the Wall Street investment firms.

The rich find their authority figures in other rich people and the corporations they run, not in the public, the government, or some penny-ante bank. Evidence supports their view in a sort of feedback loop: they get the entitlements they want from the government; the government is therefore a sucker; the government therefore deserves no respect. This is reinforced by free-market dogma which shores up the authority effect through think-tanks, Ayn Rand novels, and the business departments of colleges and universities. A Marxist would recognize this as reification, but it happens not as a top-down form of control, but peer-to-peer, excusing bad behavior that keeps the rich rich despite the economic damage they create.

An anthropologist would recognize this as a form of intensification, which is necessary for any culture (or in this case sub-culture) to maintain group cohesion. It is clear the rich are doing this better than the rest of us, and it is to the detriment of both the common culture and the common good.

–EW Wilder

My beloved NPR has done it again, this time failing to call petroleum-industry spokespeople and analysts on so-called “rig migration.” The first I heard of this mysterious behavior was on last week’s Morning Edition when a petro-analyst claimed that the danger in the current moratorium on offshore drilling is that oil rigs will “migrate” from the Gulf to South America and the North Sea.

Immediately, images popped into my head of massive rigs with comically googly eyes and squiggly mouths sticking out their unctuous tongues and hauling ass out the Gulf.

The only things that don’t seem to be migrating in the Gulf these days are oil-coated seabirds. The inability to follow your instincts in this case implies that you have them, that you’re a sentient creature with some measure of volition. Last I checked that category does not include oil rigs.

I hate to break it to the dewy-eyed public radio reporters who want so deeply to believe ala Peter Pan; I really do hate to smash their fiercely imaginative view of the world. But I must. OIL RIGS DON’T MIGRATE. Oil rigs, you see, are owned by very, very rich corporations like BP and TransOcean. They move around when the inordinately compensated leaders of these companies command their underlings to move them. When industry-friendly voices say things like “migrate” they are trying to make the cynical, nature-killing, job-destroying decisions big companies make sound like some kind of natural phenomenon. It is sort of like calling the job losses from massive outsourcing “deciduous.”

This is just another way in which industries erode language–like despotic governments before them–in order to hide responsibility for what they do. It’s not surprising that they do; it is disappointing that our media choose not to confront them.

*

In other news, the Washington Post reports that census takers are getting a hostile and sometimes violent response from many Americans who want nothing to do with the federal government, and some of whom simply think census workers are agents of Obama.

To this I say: splendid! Not for the census workers, of course. But the civic ignorance of the people who refuse to be counted will hurt them when it comes to apportionment of representation in Congress and distribution of some public funds since those are based on census data. The anti-gubmint extremists get what they want, namely left alone, and the rest of us don’t have to pay for them or feel their wrath on the floor of the House. They have chosen to be disenfranchised, and since they are against participation in public life by doctrine, they have no reason, now, to complain when things don’t go their way.

I get the feeling, though, that they will complain nonetheless . . .

–T.S. deHaviland