Picking Up The Pieces When The Rationalizers Leave Town

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." - James Madison

It might seem obvious that humans aren't angels. Yet even as someone who believes that people are basically good and want to be cooperative, I'm regularly reminded that US politics is heavily influenced by those who argue (whether or not they believe it, who knows,) crazy things; such as that business owners would all be benevolent in the absence of regulation or external pressure, or that economic decisions are always made on rational grounds of profit maximization.

Employers are always good to their employees? Humans are always rational? Maximizing immediate profit is always rational? It's like someone was high on cold medicine!

You'd think those who made such claims would be laughed out of serious discussions, but instead, they dominate them. As a result, both sensible health care and industrial policies that would benefit ordinary Americans are what's been laughed out of consideration by the conservative, bipartisan political establishment of Washington, DC.

Benevolent Despotism

"When you go into the workplace, democratic rights you have [such as] to free speech ... go completely out the door," Bob Baugh, Executive Director of the AFL-CIO, explained in an interview last month. Unions, he said, weren't even seeking to entirely democratize the workplace, just make it better. But after the Reagan era, when government became an active enemy of unionization, it became difficult to do even that.

The "greed is good" era successfully repackaged the classic American Dream as a ruthless fight of everyone for themselves, damn the parasites (a.k.a., the losers,) that was nonetheless winnable by everyone who wanted it badly enough. The accrual of celebrity status to business figures and the popularization of lifestyles of the rich and famous made it seem as though the country was awash in wealth and opportunity enough for anyone.

Little did most suspect that it was also the beginning of a series of bubble economies (real estate, software, government contracting, real estate again) whose damage would be hidden for over 30 years by consumer credit doled out to replace stagnant wages that represented the increased siphoning off of productivity by business owners and investors.

They had ready cash to loan us because they didn't pay us living wages. We needed to borrow it because we weren't getting paid living wages. Any questions? And all the time, the average worker was being strung along by the myth that if we just worked hard enough and didn't complain, we'd be that boss someday, they told us so.

Along with policies of deliberate deindustrialization, the corporatization of politics, and the political elite's open loathing of wage labor, perhaps little has so undermined the idea of the need for union organizing to counteract this ongoing productivity theft besides the benevolent despotisms of workplaces mainly geared towards what Richard Florida has called the "creative class" and people who are culturally sympathetic to urban or liberal values. Local governments across the country have taken Florida's profile of the creative class and tried to attract them in order to revive flagging economies. It mostly hasn't worked.

The creative class conjures up images of highly paid programmers, architects, medical researchers, wealthy artists and consultants. The reality of it is that most of the writers, non-profit employees, musicians, graphic or visual artists and entrepreneurs also encompassed in that grouping are as poorly paid and tenuously employed as they ever were.

(And if you want truly crappy creative class working conditions, go into progressive politics. Not all, but certainly most, employers keep driven, highly motivated employees cranking out maximum productivity on wages that could never support a family, and may barely support an individual. But it's all right. It's for a cause. If the union movement wanted to truly effect radical change, they'd organize liberals and educate non-profit donors on what it means to dismiss living wages as 'overhead'. But I'm just talking about crazy things that will never happen, so pay no mind. Must be the cold medicine.)

The even worse reality is that many of the educated professionals, working in the truly (or at least formerly) well-compensated professions whose bosses used to load them up with perks are finding that globalization has made them expendable, too, and those never-contractually-guaranteed benefits can slip away with dizzying speed. And it's done at companies like Microsoft just the same way it's done to the people at Whole Foods who sell them (among other things) the kind of good, healthy food everyone who lived in rural America used to just think of as "food."

John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods and current Whole Foods board member, is just the most recent, high-profile example of the mindset. He got wealthy from being the caterer to the creative class, providing in a retail establishment food marketed to their health-conscious, environmentally concerned mindsets. He's also an avid union buster, though without the string of atrocities that's made Walmart infamous among much of Whole Foods' key demographic.

With Whole Foods routinely singled out as a good place to work, Mackey said during his time as CEO that bosses should just be like him and then no one should need to unionize. He provides health care to his employees, so there should be no need for a national public option. What about now that he isn't CEO anymore?

Both Whole Foods and Starbucks, another business that tends to market to the creative class, have been engaged in union-busting at the national level. They've lent their cutting edge, hipster credentials to efforts matched by the rest of the food and beverage industry to gut the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), so that people who don't think their bosses are enlightened can't democratize their workplaces. If their CEOs are less benevolent than Mackey makes himself out to be, they're out of luck.

This pattern cuts across industries and regions. I saw it many times in the software industry, always the same trends played out, whether they happened fast or at a snail's pace. They call you partners and team members one day, they cut your benefits to increase profits the next. You'd do something about it, but if you once worked with someone who'd talked about organizing they've already been fired. And can you afford not to have a paycheck or health coverage after all your years of hard work? Don't make me laugh.

Profit Maximization

If you were an investor and you could finance businesses anywhere in the world, would you do it in a country like the US where around twice as much private money is wasted on health insurance than is spent per capita providing health care to the citizens of any other developed nation? Our workforce has never been cheaper to buy, but the money, it does not roll in and it's hard to imagine the drag of our health overhead as anything but a deterrent.

Then, because the US has no industrial policy, jobs go away and don't come back or are replaced with jobs that have worse wages and benefits. Corporations who've outsourced overseas and investors chasing returns across the globe make profits, concentrated in ever fewer hands, on what should have been our jobs. GDP counts those investment returns as if they were as good as broadly dispersed wages, but the only thing that trickles down is urine.

Our politicians have aided and abetted this. Democrats have done so by voting for 'free' trade and financial policies that have severely eroded US manufacturing, Republicans by pushing greater resource extraction and piety as the cure for all our ills.

But you know, if resource extraction was a path to prosperity, then all the developing nations going broke under IMF and World Bank structural adjustment regimes would be doing great. They aren't, because when a country exports raw materials and imports the more expensive finished products, they get mired in perpetual debt and never develop a highly skilled workforce. And if a country insists on pricing health care beyond the reach of most people to pay without straining, you end up with a workforce that doesn't get medical care, simple as that. These are not circumstances that attract businesses offering stable, fairly compensated careers.

In fact, if resource extraction, piety and high investment returns were all you needed to make an economy stable and share prosperity widely, as various members of our serious political elite tell us, then Saudi Arabia is the best place on Earth. Saudis import almost everything, rely on immigrant labor for much of their skilled, non-professional work and, in their homegrown version of a creative class, have been mostly encouraging the young to get religious studies degrees for a very long time.

The Saudis are lucky they still have oil and that it's selling so well these days, but it's really all they've got. After decades of all this, they're left rejoicing in the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks, denying global warming in a way that would make John Mackey proud, and insisting to anyone who will listen that a global emissions regime reducing their national income needs to pay them for any financial losses. Good luck with that!

Have the Saudis nothing else to fall back on, you wonder, where did all the money go? Are you kidding me? That money went to the same menus of things John Mackey, Bernie Madoff, Kenneth Lay and Jamie Dimon spent, or spend, their money on: yachts, mansions, fine clothes, lap dances, jets and vacations.

Saudi Arabia is the pinnacle of elite profit maximazation, with its corresponding economic stagnation, public denial of ordinary reality, waste and hoarding of capital.

Though Saudi Arabia is the conservative vision of the future, right there, no matter who's peddling it. As Thomas Frank recently described it in a GRITtv interview with Laura Flanders about his book, The Wrecking Crew, establishment DC conservatism has no interest in the culture wars they sell to the rest of us, and is instead organized around the principle that the market is the only legitimate authority. The market, as you may have noticed, isn't a democracy.

And if the market is the only legitimate authority, and it isn't democratic, that spells dire things for the parts of society that are supposed to be democratic, such as the government. Naturally, people who think democracy is illegitimate would be appalled by the idea of democratizing work places, and they've made sure that it sounds appalling to everyone they can influence.

Which is probably, in the end, why planning economic recoveries around Richard Florida's creative class ideas was doomed from the beginning, even if it was the last acceptable place to turn. If manufacturing isn't desireable anymore, if we're going to throw up our hands when it comes to developing new industries, if service industry jobs are what DC is gushing over (and you know they don't usually pay much rent), if your region has no commodities to sell, if organizing workers to ensure they end up with a fair share of the profits they generate is unseemly, what do you try?

Of all the solutions local governments could have landed on to perk up their economies, making cities and towns more friendly to society's quirkier members is probably the most kindhearted and endearing option possible.

Greater inclusiveness is a policy with no downside, unless you spent the last of your spare 'please fix our local economy' funds on it, while the larger economy is shedding all jobs. It's a policy that might even have worked if we still lived in a country where more workers earned enough to be able to plan to start that business they always wanted, someday. In fact, while the economy rewards rather than penalizes employers for being short-sighted profit maximizers, even if their behavior takes down the whole economy, nothing will work.

So creative class people might like to move to a different town and start a new business, but man, most of us are broke, too. We're even broke for about the same reasons, or at least because of the same jerks. Also, no one will loan us money for start-up capital because they already did that for our college loans, and we don't want to talk about how that ended up.

They, the big corporations and their pet politicians, told us all that if we worked hard enough, we could win big ourselves. They lied to the people who believed in the dream of a college education leading to great things. They lied to the people who believed that values, hard work and the promise of an opportunity was all you needed to support a family and dream big for the kids. They lied to the towns who gave them exorbitant tax breaks, grants, and low-interest development loans in the name of creating a friendly business climate. They lied, stole everyone's money, then lied about it some more.

Dead End

The creative class, expanding the service industry, encouraging entrepreneurs, reviving manufacturing, nothing is going to save the US economy for the middle class and the return of living wages if the dead hand of corporatism isn't taken off the tiller.

Running a society solely on the despotic whims of the market produces, in the end, only one thing: profits. Maximized, concentrated, rationalized and rarefied profits that most people, most cities and towns, never see.

The pursuit only of money, particularly the glorification of hoarding money, won't produce a growing middle class, or decrease inequality, it will destroy or prevent those aims. Pursuit solely of fast and exorbitant profits will destroy the resources, including the people, used up in achieving them. And if a system of governing human society doesn't value humans, what good is it?

It's become a core operating value of the US government to prize wealth over work. It's become a core operating value of the political press to legitimize the views of despotic business activists and ignore the views of democratically organized labor.

We see where that's gotten us.

Rarely has the nation been so pathetically grateful to be stuck in economic neutral, in a dead end alley, unable to get past the barrier of insistence that the already wealthy are always, every time, the best people to give more money to. After all, aren't they the best people to have in the drivers' seat while the rest of us get out and push?

I'm not sure how to wrest the economy away from the crazies and the despots (maybe it's the cold medicine,) but it should be tried. Otherwise, one of these days we'll end up in a country that resembles that conservative paragon, Saudi Arabia, except without the oil.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future