World Politics, then and now

This week's post appears here.

Labor Day articles

A friend of mine recently described our local newspaper, the Boston Globe, as a shadow of its former self, and he wasn't kidding.  After the New York Times lost a great deal of money buying it some years ago, they sold it to hedge fund manager John Henry, who happens to be the owner of the Boston Red Sox. I remember it in the 1970s when it had a very robust Washington bureau and covered local politics very thoroughly.  Now it has an even more PC orientation than the Times, I think, typified by an article this morning that black entrepreneurs are being shut out of the booming new legal marijuana movement, despite the black population's role as consumers.  Something happened over the weekend, though, and I was astonished by the three guest op-eds I discovered in it today--all the more so because it happens to be Labor Day, and the staff might have found some one to discuss the plight of the contemporary American worker,  so many of whom are at work as usual today in retail and food service industries, among man others.

Reading from left to right, the first of these pieces is about college debt.  This problem, it argues, has been vastly exaggerated.  66% of Millennials (the generation is not defined by the author) have no college debt, it states, either because they never went to college in the first place or because they managed without loans, or have paid them off.  The article claims that of those who have borrowed, the average debt is $28,000--but another source that I found says that's the average for all Millennial college graduates, period.  (That source put Millennial birth years from 1981 to 1999 which I think is very close to correct).  The author, one Beth Akers, thinks they can pay that off relatively easily.  She also argues that  most of those who owe a lot more--say $100,000--will also be able to pay them off because they invested in well-paying graduate degrees.  She also mentions (but does not describe in any detail) programs already in place to make it easier to pay. She thinks our student debt system is too complicated and should be simplified, but on the whole, she sees no crisis at work.  Ms. Akers, the piece also informs us, is associated with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that can be counted on to advocate free-market solutions to almost everything, and she does not stop to compare today's America to that of 50 years ago, when pratically no young people graduated from college with significant student debt, and tuition and fees were less than 1/3, adjusted for inflation, of what they are now--and paid for a much better education.

The second piece, by one Jennifer Braceras, asks what will happen to the billions of dollars that Johnson and Johnson agreed to pay the state of Oklahoma for its part in creating the disastrous opioid epidemic, which killed more than 217,000 Americans from 1999 through 2017 thanks to overdoses of perscription drugs.  Ms. Braceras talks a lot about what happened to the billions paid by the tobacco industry in response to similar settlements, complaining bitterly that relatively little of it went to help prevent smoking.  Instead, states spent the money on education, infrastructure, and making broadband accessible to rural areas, as well as simply for general purposes.  To those like myself who believe that some tobacco and drug company executives should be  headed for prison as punishment for feeding their fellow Americans poison, it seems quite logical to at least confiscate some of the wealth they earned by doing so and using it, in various ways, for the public good.  Ms. Braceras is also upset that Johnson and Johnson was found guilty at all, since its opioids were approved by the FDA.  When a corporation has enough political influence to get a fatal product approved, she seems to think, it shouldn't have to bear the consequences.  Ms. Braceras directs the Center for Law and Liberty a tthe Independent Women's Forum, a conservative organization that denies that climate change is man-made, takes conservative positions on women's issues, and has financial and other links to the Koch brothers. 

The third Labor Day op-ed, by Michael Rosenblatt, also deals with drugs--in this case, with how they are developed.  It's a full-blown defense of our private drug industries, who need the freedom to profit from ideas that may originally have been developed by government agencies if they are going to do the long, hard work of turning them into effective treatments.  The author says nothing about the well-documented preference of  major drug companies for drugs that treat chronic conditions for many years, as opposed to drugs that might actually cure diseases--much less about the corruption of the FDA which has led not only to the opioid catastrophe, but to the approval of numerous profitable drugs whose impact on disease is actually relatively marginal.   He, it turns out, is now an executive in a venture capital firm, having previously served as the chief medical officer of Merck.

What does all this mean?  While the mainstream media obsesses over President Trump's tweets, the difficulties of female presidential candidates, and a wide variety of sex scandals, corporate America is continuing its decades-long campaign to shape public discussion of economic issues in ways that will make the rich richer.  That's the job of the Manhattan Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, both of whom successfully stormed the Globe's editorial page today.  Trump will leave office in one-plus or five-plus years, but their campaign will still be continuing and still be having an effect.  Meanwhile, the number of workers in unions--and the number of workers who got Labor Day off--continues to shrink.  The Boston Globe remains a liberal newspaper, but its brand of liberalism isn't doing the average American much good.

Trump and Stalin: A focused comparison

From the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency I have rejected the idea that he is, or could become, a dictator such as the world experienced in the 1930s and 1940s, or even a strong man like Erdogan of Turkey or Duterte of the Philippines.  I believe this mainly because we live in a completely different age, marked by individual and corporate freedom, and a general decline in political authority in most of the world.  The great difficulty the administration has experienced in trying to implement its policies on the issue it cares about most, immigration, illustrates the inertia that characterizes our political life today.  Any authoritarian ambitions Trump might have, it seems to me, threaten our nation much less than our chronic inability to make any large-scale policy initiative happen.

Yet as I pondered the President's recent fusillades of tweets, and got a message from a friend who was reading Darkness at Noon, it occurred to me that there is a profound similarity between Trump and Joseph Stalin relating to their world views.  Like Trump, Stalin inhabited a mental universe in which he could literally do no wrong.  He, and he alone, knew what the Soviet Union and the world needed.  He was better at anything he attempted than anyone else.  What he did was good by definition, because he had done it.  When anything went wrong, enemies must be at work, enemies who needed to be unmasked and dealt with summarily.  Stalin's view,  one could argue, was a little more sophisticated intellectually than Trump's, since he saw history and political life as a ceaseless class struggle, in which he represented the world's proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Trump has no such ideological scheme. For him, everything is personal. 

Stalin was far more dangerous to his nation and the world because he disposed of total power, wielded by secret police without any check upon it at all.  Thus, when the collectivization of agriculture led to famine in Ukraine and elsewhere, he could not only claim that the peasants must be hoarding their grain, but also send squads of police and young activists into the countryside to punish their non-existent sins, brutally.  When factories failed to meet their quotas the security services would fabricate cases of sabotage.  Beginning in 1937 Stalin had hundreds of high-ranking officers executed, as well as many high party officials from the USSR and elsewhere, based on false accusations of treason.  In the first half of 1941, he insisted against all evidence that Germany was not going to betray the Nazi-Soviet Pact and attack the USSR, and that reports to the contrary were provocations.  Interestingly enough, Stalin seems to have gotten a better grip on reality during the Second World War, but when the war was over, his paranoia returned with a vengeance.

Now let's compare Donald Trump, using just the current week's worth of tweets.  Last Monday the President announced, not for the first time, "The Fake and corrupt Media is sooo bad for our Country. The Enemy of the People!"  ("Enemy of the people" was a favorite Stalinist phrase.)   On the same day he announced that google had "manipulated from 2.6 to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election."  On Wednesday, he quoted an observer to the effect that he "is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world."  He also accused "the Fake News LameStream Media" of trying to create a recession," but threw in an attack on Chairman Powell of the Federal Reserve: "So far he has called it wrong, and only let us down.  He also blasted leading automobile companies who do not want to abandon the tougher pollution standards mandated by California in favor of his own new, much looser ones.  On Friday--just days after announcing that he was doing "great" with China--he asked, "who is our gibber enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman X?" He repeatedly claims that he has led the most successful administration, for the time he has served, in American history.

There is, of course, a clinical term for these problems.  The Mayo Clinic lists the following symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder.

"People with the disorder can:

"Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance.
"Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration
"Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
"Exaggerate achievements and talents
"Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
"Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people
"Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior
"Expect special favors and unquestioning compliance with their expectations
"Take advantage of others to get what they want
"Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
"Be envious of others and believe others envy them
"Behave in an arrogant or haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and pretentious
"Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office
"At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they perceive as criticism, and they can:

"Become impatient or angry when they don't receive special treatment
"Have significant interpersonal problems and easily feel slighted
"React with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make themselves appear superior
"Have difficulty regulating emotions and behavior
"Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change
"Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection
"Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation."

Because Donald Trump has been obsessed with the idea that he can do the impossible--both as a real estate developer and a politician--he constantly runs afoul of reality.  He generally responds with a habit that is not listed among the symptoms of narcissism, but which he shares with both Joseph Stalin and Joseph McCarthy: he blames a vast conspiracy of wicked enemies for everything that goes wrong.  He does not have the power to do the kind of harm that Stalin did, although American legal traditions have allowed him to carry out cruel policies towards those who have crossed our border without authorization.  But he clearly lacks the emotional and intellectual wherewithal to deal with any really serious situation.  A recession, I think, would undoubtedly make his symptoms much worse.  In any case, a government based on the idea of rationality needs a more rational person at its head in order to function.

The Most Important Administration of Our Times

For the last few days I have been watching an extraordinary miniseries, The Loudest Voice, which tells the story of the Fox News career of Roger Ailes on Showtime.  It ranks with the British production of Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson as one of the best historical dramatizations ever. Russell Crowe, who gained between 50 and 100 pounds for the part, turns in an extraordinary performance, and the show effectively uses real footage.  It also gives a terrifying portrayal of heavy duty sexual harassment at the highest corporate levels.  I haven't read the book on which it is based, but even some of the plot lines that might seem a bit over the top--including one that involves Rupert Murdoch's wife--have a certain ring of truth.The series focuses on critical years: 1996 (the launch of Fox News), 2001 (9/11 and its aftermath), 2008, 2009, etc.  The 2001 episode really got me thinking, once again, about the critical impact of the administration of George W. Bush on American life.  The collapse of the American political system, now so visible before our eyes, began, I believe, with him.

The collapse began, really, in November and December 2000, when our institutions failed a critical test.  Confronted with the closest election in American history, they failed to discover who had won and see that the right man was inaugurated.  Both sides of the controversy played a role in this sad outcome, because Al Gore didn't have the sense to demand a full recount of the whole state of Florida--a move which, a team of journalists later concluded, would probably have shown that he had won.  As it was, the Bush campaign orchestrated a coup d'etat, really, first by purging the Florida registration rolls before the vote, and then by getting a partisan Supreme Court to stop the recount altogether and award the election to Bush.  That, however, was only the beginning.

Once in office, Bush, Cheney, and Karl Rove showed that they wanted to play the role Strauss and Howe had laid out only ten years or so earlier in Generations: to preside over a crisis or "fourth turning" that would take the nation in a new direction.  9/11, which they did not foresee, gave them the chance to do that.  (The Loudest Voice shows that Ailes gave them some important help, which in turn established his network as the Ministry of Propaganda for Republican administrations.)  Bush, Cheney, and the neoconservatives who dominated their Defense and State Departments wanted to use 9/11 and the theme of "terrorism" to establish American rule over the whole world by successively overthrowing the "rogue regimes" or Iraq, Iran and North Korea that stood in the way of American hegemony.  Over a two-year period they planned and mobilized widespread support for the invasion of Iraq, the last major presidential initiative in the 21st century that enjoyed genuine bipartisan support, including intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan, and Michael Ignatieff.  Never since then has the American elite and public united around a common enterprise.  Their publicists announced the beginning of "World War IV," designed to democratize the Islamic world.  They eventually spent about $1 trillion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while failing to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden.  They corrupted intelligence and created a myth of Iraqi WMD to make the war happen.  They created, as a senior official (probably Karl Rove) told Ron Suskind, "our own reality," and most of the country bought it for several years.  But the whole project turned into a disaster, because it rested on false assumptions about American power, the dominant historical trends in politics, and the specific politics of the Middle East.  The fall of Saddam in Iraq unleashed a catastrophic religious conflict between Shi'ites and Sunnis that continues to this day, after taking hundreds of thousands of lives.  The Afghan War, conducted in effective opposition to our "ally" Pakistan, has lasted now for 18 years without positive results.  For the second time in half a century, a generation of American veterans has had to cope with PTSD incurred in a worse than useless war.

While pursuing this disastrous project, however, the Bush Administration demonstrated the characteristic flaw of the Boom generation; believing that they could have everything at once.  Rather than raise taxes to pay for their crusade, like Lincoln and FDR, they cut them, turning a federal surplus into a permanent deficit.  They allowed the new shadow banking system to flourish, and did nothing about the housing and subprime mortgage boom that kept the economy going until 2007.  They staffed the federal government with ideologues and cronies, leading to the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina.  Re-elected in another close election in 2004, Bush squandered any political capital he had on an attempt to privatize Social Security that never got off the ground.  The Iraq war dragged on, and the electorate had had enough.  The Democrats won control of both houses of Congress in 2006.  Then the housing bubble burst, and in 2008, the market crashed.  It was at that moment that a large part of the Republican base deserted their establishment, even blocking the passage of the banks' bailout on the first vote.  John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin did not placate them, and McCain went down to defeat.

Barack Obama came into office with larger Congressional majorities, but without ambitions comparable to those of Bush.  He managed to get the Affordable Care Act through Congress and passed a moderate-size stimulus, but any hopes of an FDR-style New Deal faded away quickly when he appointed a team of establishment economists and decided not to try to break up the big banks.  He failed to mobilize the anger in the country, and the Tea Party turned against him.  Under the influence of the Koch brothers, I believe, the Republican Party became entirely obstructionist.  Obama managed to win a comfortable re-election, and he remains the only Democrat since Lyndon Johnson to win significantly more than 50% of the presidential popular vote.  But like his predecessor, he squandered any re-election dividend on a hopeless cause--in his case, on tighter gun control measures.  And to keep the government operating, he had to agree on tight rules on new spending that made it very hard for the federal government to take any new initiatives.  In his last years he relied more and more on executive orders.  By 2016 much of the  public had completely lost faith in professional politicians, and a reality TV star won the Republican nomination and the election.

Donald Trump's only legislative accomplishment, of course, is his tax cut, which undid the work of seven years of deficit reduction under Obama at one fell swoop. The Democrats in the House of Representatives have now passed some important legislation, but the Republicans in the Senate refused even to consider it.  Meanwhile, newspapers and web sites fill their pages with presidential tweets, endless rehashes of the Russiagate and other scandals, and stories about sex crimes.  The country has lost the habit of reading about public affairs, because since Bush II's disastrous grasp at world empire the government in Washington has given them so little to write about.  While the public cares a great deal, pro or con, about Donald Trump, it cares less and less about what its government is or might be doing.  This, it seems to me, is largely one of the legacies of George W. Bush.

Race, Income, and Politics

A few weeks ago, I saw a video on Facebook that tried to explain the impact of “systemic racism.”  It compares the lives and family histories of two children, Kevin (white) and Jamal (black.) Kevin lives in well-to-neighborhood with good schools; Jamal lives in a poor neighborhood with bad schools. That, the video argues, is because, generations ago, Kevin’s grandparents bought a house with a cheap mortgage and went to college, whereas Jamal’s grandparents could not buy a house because of redlining, a practice which denied loans to residents of certain areas.  In addition, Kevin’s grandparents went into “a handful of top universities,” while Jamal’s grandparents’ college opportunities were limited by segregation.  The video also cites “implicit biases” which will make it harder for Jamal to get a job even if he goes to the same college and does just as well as Kevin.  The video also remarks, tellingly, that the problem with “systemic racism” is that no single person is responsible for it, making it very hard to fix.  It urges us all to become more aware of our implicit biases.

I have no doubt that in one way or another, racism, beginning with slavery, accounts for much of the aggregate difference in the lives of black and white Americans today.  I am writing this post, however, because I am convinced that that view, while accurate, is too narrow.  First, if one asks some different questions about Kevin, Jamal, and others like them, one finds that racism very clearly is not the only, or even the biggest, cause of economic distress in the United States today.  Secondly, to argue that it is makes it much less likely, in my opinion, that the nation will address the most profound causes of inequality today.   The equation of poverty and racial problems began in the 1960s and it has lasted, for different reasons, to this day.  Both conservative whites and many liberal whites and blacks, it seems to me, prefer to see poverty as primarily a problem of black people.  As it happens, it isn’t.

Focusing, like the video, on Jamal’s archetypal family and its neighbors, I decided to find out how many black families they might represent.  Uncle Google sent me to a nice table breaking down household income by race—white, black and Hispanic.  Unfortunately it dates from 2014 but I doubt that the picture has changed dramatically since then.  Let’s assume that Jamal’s family has an income of $25,000 or less.  That includes a lot of families well above the poverty line, but I think it defines, at the very least, a struggling family.  There were, as it happens, about 5.5 million black households in that category.  There were also 2.4 million Hispanic households in that category, making 7.9 million total black and Hispanic.  There were 22.3 million white households in that category—about four times as many as black households, and about three times as many as black and Hispanic combined.  If we change our threshold from under $25,000 to under $35,000, we get similar results. 32.2 million white households earn less than $35,000, compared to 8.1 million black ones and 4.6 million Hispanics.

Now the total numbers of 2014 households, the table shows, were 98.7 million white, 16.4 million black, and 16.2 million Hispanic.  That means that there were six times as many white households as black, but only four times as many under $25,000 annual income or under $32,000 annual income, confirming that blacks as a group suffer economic disadvantage. But counting the total numbers,we find that there far more white people in these categories than others.  (My household table has no figures for other ethnic groups such as Asians and American Indians.) And we decide elections by raw total numbers.

The video did not suggest to me that Jamal’s family was living in poverty, but I checked figures on families below the poverty line too.  A very thorough table on poverty included data through 2017.  It shows 39.7 million people in poverty in that year.  17 million of them were non-Hispanic whites, 9.8 million were black, and 10.8 million were Hispanic.  Here the black and Hispanic total slightly exceeds the white one, indicating that the overrepresentation of these groups at the lowest income levels is much greater than their overrepresentation in the under $25,000 or under $35,000 per household groups.  The same pattern emerges from census tables on single-parent, female-headed households and the number of them that live in poverty.  The largest racial group of such families (poor or not), 18.4 million, is also white, but the black total is 15.3 million and the Hispanic total is 12.2 million. The percentages of those families living in poverty is 33.3% for the black families (5.1 million people), 19.9 for the white families (3.6 million people), and 34.3% for Hispanics (4.1 million people.)  There are more poor white people in these families than there are blacks or Hispanics, but fewer than blacks and Hispanics combined.

What implications do these figures have?

We commonly see disparities between black and white wealth and income expressed in percentage terms, comparing the percentages of the two groups in poverty, or in terms of averages and medians for income and net worth.  All such measurements show that as a group, black America is much worse off than white America.  Often, median measurement are the only ones I seem to be able to find for important statistics.  I know that median black net worth is way below white, and that the disparity increased as a result of the Great Recession, but so far, I can’t find the numbers of black and white and Hispanic households with zero net worth.  (About 19 million households have net worth of $1000 or less, but I can’t find a racial breakdown.)  I also couldn’t find out how many of the homeowners who were foreclosed during the Great Recession (variously given out as 7 or 10 million) were white, how many were black, and how many were Hispanic. And I really would like to know.

What we do see here is this.  Racism has undoubtedly hurt the economic standing of black people and continues to do so.  But (limiting the comparison for a moment to white and black), for every specific economic problem from which black people suffer—relatively low household income, poverty, female-headed households, and probably, recently foreclosed homes—more individual white people suffer from it than black ones.  And this applies, remarkably, even to perhaps the most racially charged issue in our national life, the shooting of civilians by police.  Of the 992 people shot and killed by police officers in 2018—nearly 3 a day—452 were white, 229 were black, and 154 were Hispanic. (107 were listed as unknown.)  That too is a disproportionate number of black people, but a greater number of white people. So far this year the proportion of white victims (and the total number of victims) has dropped, but they remain the largest group.  And while the black incarceration rate is about five times higher than the white one and nearly three times higher than the Hispanic one, the number of white and black inmates is nearly equal overall.  Evidence suggests that one reason for the higher incarceration rates of blacks and Hispanics is that they have tended to receive longer sentences for the same crimes.

And why is all this important?

There are, it seems to me, two reasons, one intellectual and one political.  While racism has contributed to black poverty, it cannot be the only cause of poverty in the United States, because more white than black people remain poor.  I do not believe that the causes of poverty can be completely different for black people on the one hand and whites on the other.  People are poor, or have household incomes of $25,000 or less, for many reasons today, including poor education (which is what both low income blacks and whites receive), de-industrialization, the erosion of workers’ rights, our inflated housing market, involvement with the criminal justice system, family breakdown, and a great deal more. And those things affect large numbers of white, black and Hispanic residents of the United States.

The political reason is more important.

The great tragedy of politics in the United States today is this:  relatively poor white and black people (using the same scale) generally vote on opposite sides.  The 2016 CNN exit polls did not break down income and race, but they did break down educational levels (with or without a college degree) and race (broken crudely into white and non-white.)  Among nonwhites with no college degree, 77% voted Democratic and 22% voted Republican.  Among whites with no college degree—of whom about twice as many voted—31% voted Democratic, and 66% voted Republican.  That is why Donald Trump is in the White House. 

I don’t have access to a Gallup Poll database here, but I’m pretty confident that substantial majorities of both white and black voters without college degrees voted Democratic from 1936 through 1964.  In 1968, more than 15% of the white vote—much, though not all of it, from the lower half of our income distribution—moved to Nixon or Wallace.  The intervening four years had seen urban riots, the emergence of the black power movement, the beginnings of a crime wave, and, of course, the escalation of the Vietnam War.  It was during those years, I think, that liberal Democrats began associating poverty with race.  Since 1964, only one Democrat, Barack Obama, has won significantly more than 50% of the popular vote in a presidential election, and no Democrat has won 50% of white votes. 

Meanwhile, inequality has steadily increased, while income in the lower 50% of the population has been nearly stagnant for almost half a century.  Good paying working class jobs have disappeared by the millions, and the cost of a college education has at least tripled over that same half century. An exploding housing market has made it very difficult for young people to buy a first house in our richest metropolitan areas. We have, in short, a winner-take-all economy in which it has become much harder to reach the top.  We also have many more single individuals of all ages who cannot count on any other adults to help them get through life.  What this means is that the average person in the lower economic half of the population—regardless of gender or race—will probably be disappointed by their economic status, all the more so if, like so many, they have substantial student debt.  It is no accident, I think, that the United States made the greatest progress on racial issues in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, decades in which the economy was growing rapidly, inequality was decreasing, and so many millions of Americans had good reason to be satisfied with how things were going.  Now many fewer do, and many find it all too easy, I think, to blame racism, sexism, immigration, or what looks to many like a national obsession with nonwhite poverty, for their own inability to achieve as much as they would like.  While the less well-off blame other racial groups for their plight, we cannot do anything about steadily increasing corporate power. And neither party has really much of anything to arrest the trend towards inequality at the national level for a very long time.

Low income and wealth are diseases from which minority populations are more likely to suffer—but comparable or larger numbers of whites suffer from them too.  Any solution to the problem has to treat the disease for everyone.  History tells us how to do that: by taxing the wealthy much more heavily, by promoting rather than destroying the rights of labor, by building a lot more affordable  housing, by making the government an employer of last resort, and by raising the minimum wage.  Race- and gender-based political appeals will continue to thrive until we start dividing up the pie more equally.  The state of our economy is the thing which, more than anything else, has the chance to bring us together, improve our society, and leave some of the bitter antagonism of recent years behind.  And we need to do those things.