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"It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam" [1]

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Date: 2022-07-07

The title of this post comes from an opinion piece in The NY Times by Tim Kreider.

Tim Kreider is a cartoonist and the author of two essay collections, “We Learn Nothing” and, most recently, “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.” He writes the Substack newsletter The Loaf.

The gist of Kreider’s piece is that the American capitalist economy is seriously flawed — I’ll get to that in a moment, but first some context. (Both articles linked below should allow passage through the Times paywall.)

Kreider’s It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam appears in the same issue of the Times where Peter Coy reports in a subscriber-only newsletter that the Federal Reserve is planning another interest rate hike to cool off the economy. Coy asks: The Economy Is Already Cooling, So Why Is the Fed Dousing It With Cold Water?

..Fed officials seem to be putting too much weight on the one sign of continuing strength in the economy, which is the job market. The unemployment rate was a low 3.6 percent in May and economists are predicting that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will report on Friday that it stayed at 3.6 percent in June. There have been more than 10 million unfilled jobs in the United States each month since July 2021, double the average of the previous two decades.

emphasis added

So let’s see. Inflation is a problem (now starting to subside) because of disruptions to the economy because of the pandemic, supply chain disruption, and government aid to people that kept them from going under when the economy tanked — which heated things up too much. (Also, Ukraine.)

But… also because companies have jacked up prices for record profits because of lack of real competition and because we can’t impose windfall profits taxes, or make them pay their fair share of taxes.

But... we can (through the Fed) do something about workers finally having the power to demand higher wages as their share of those profits they make possible: force unemployment to rise so workers are back to competing with each other and their employers reap the benefits. Which is where Kreider’s opinion piece starts to take on some real punch.

Here’s some excerpts: read the whole thing.

..A decade later, people aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work — or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice. Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”

emphasis added

..I think people are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment. The future their elders are preparing to bequeath to them is one that reflects the fondest hopes of the same ignorant bigots a lot of them fled their hometowns to escape. American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will. More young people are opting not to have kids not only because they can’t afford them but also because they assume they’ll have only a scorched or sodden wasteland to grow up in. An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it. I’m not sure anyone’s composed a more eloquent epitaph for the planet than the stand-up comedian Kath Barbadoro, who tweeted: “It’s pretty funny that the world is ending and we all just have to keep going to our little jobs lol.”

emphasis added

Also this:

..In the actual dystopian future we now inhabit, the oligarchs have realized they could work everyone harder, pay them less, eliminate benefits, turn every human institution from medicine to corrections into a racket, charge far more for basic rights and services than people in any other nation would stand for without revolting, and get rich beyond the penny ante dreams of a Carnegie or Astor. In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity, plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere — like cutting out the inefficient business of digestion and metabolism by pouring a fine bottle of wine directly into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman of you.

emphasis added

I have alluded elsewhere to Yeat’s Paralysis, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” It’s time to change that. Kreider concludes his philippic against mindless capitalism with a call to arms.

If there’s a problem with the Democratic establishment (well one of many), it’s that as a party devoted to competence, rationality, and actual facts, it’s too invested in Things As They Are and too busy keeping stuff from falling apart to recognize that this is not what we need and that it’s unsustainable. (They ARE really good at sending out fund-raising appeals as a reflex response to GOP atrocities.)

As Kreider notes:

..It’s no coincidence that so many social movement arose during the enforced idleness of quarantine. One important function of jobs is to keep you too preoccupied and tired to do anything else. Grade school teachers called it “busywork” — pointless, time-wasting tasks to keep you from acting up and bothering them.

emphasis added

It also doesn’t help that the Republican Party has learned from Trump that creating chaos is a great way to keep a scam going. MikePhoenix linked yesterday to a Jennifer Rubin piece calling on Democrats to follow the lead of VP Kamala Harris on making the GOP accountable for their actions. (This comment on that diary has a link to the full article.)

The world is made by the people who show up for the job. It’s time to drop the busy work and get down to the real task at hand.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/7/2108942/--It-s-Time-to-Stop-Living-the-American-Scam

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