Wanted: "Personal Ball-Washers"
Here's the dream job you've been waiting
for fresh off Craig's List: "Personal Assistant/Family Cook Who Can
Travel."
Run the errands, do the shopping, feed the baby, feed the
dogs, feed the adults, clean the kitchen, make a daily report on petty cash.
Only nine hours a day. Only five days a week. And as an added bonus, you get to
go home at night (except, of course, for the "1-4 months a year" when you must
travel with this self-described Beverly Hills "show biz" family while it's
shooting on location).
Just as well, because with average rents in L.A.
County hitting more than $1400 a month and the
average home here now costing $453,000, and with this job paying less
than $600 a week (after taxes), it's unlikely this chief bottle washer could
afford to pay for a whole year's housing.
A younger relative in my family tipped me off to the plethora of
personal assistant-type listings now taking up pages of space
on Craig's List . As the income gap widens and, excuse me, as the rich get
richer, what's a better status symbol than your own fleet of personal
assistants, what fabulous comedian Lewis Black calls
"personal ball-washers."
What isn't very funny is how the poor bastard who gets to wait
hand and foot on these Bev Hills snobs — and their baby, and their dogs"”will
probably wind up paying about the same tax rate as his or her celeb employer.
Read all about it in this story by The New York Times' David Cay Johnston,
one of the very best reporters working in America:
The people at the top of
America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled
far ahead of the rest of the population"¦They have even left behind people
making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.They are not just a few
Croesus-like rarities.Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners
- the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each
with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more. The average income
for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which
averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million,
adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose
nearly as fast.The share of the nation's income earned by those in this
uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002.
The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and
the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.Next, examine the net worth of
American households. The group with homes, investments and other assets worth
more than $10 million comprised 338,400 households in 2001, the last year for
which data are available. The number has grown more than 400 percent since
1980, after adjusting for inflation, while the total number of households has
grown only 27 percent.The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap
between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share
of the tax burden.
Just how much have these super-rich benefited from the Bush
non-taxation system? More than you can imagine. Indeed, it's not an all
overstatement to say that the $40,000 a year traveling kitchen slave/nanny/assistant would pay the same
tax rate as the ten-or-twenty-or-even ninety million a year celebrity. The NY
Times analysis cited by Johnston reveals:
¶Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400
taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last
year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare
and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their
incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.¶Those earning more than $10
million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those
making $100,000 to $200,000.¶The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago
to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the tax
cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million -
thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars annually. Far fewer of the very
wealthiest will be affected by this tax.
Anyone who thinks this widening gap
has anything to do with enhancing democracy is — once again to quote Lewis
Black"”"fuckin' nuts." This is how you build neither democracy nor even
meritocracy, but rather aristocracy (against which, I believe, we lodged some sort of revolution or another a couple of hundred years ago).
And by the way, if you're interested in
that Beverly Hills servant job, best get in line. It's definitely a buyer's market. As the want ad warns: the successful applicant must not only be "smart"¦
organized"¦ able to pass a full security background check" but must also demonstrate
possession of " a full-service heart." You wouldn't want to short-change your generous employer, wouldya?
June 6th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
Good post, Marc. The entire NY Times series, “Class Matters,” is brilliant. Best thing in any American newspaper thus far this year.
June 6th, 2005 at 9:20 pm
Absafuckinglutely Marc. What we have in this country, and especially in the most fashionable blue state cities, is a new urban caste system, with a small, property owning elite (what percentage of Angelinos and San Franciscans and San Diegans can afford to buy homes now? about a quarter?) and a vast servant class of virtually all ages, races, ethnicities, and increasingly educational backgrounds (read: including people with college and graduate degrees) - clerks, nannies, waiters, housekeepers, bartenders, delivery people, et al - who can barely pay rent from month to month, let alone own their own places. And whose interests do we think the a-hole Democrats (and they are usually Democrats) elected in blue state cities and state houses are serving, the NIMBY property owners who don’t want their views obstructed or property values to decline as new housing is built + the rich white NIMBY eco crazies who don’t want any new housing built anywhere (as if all those huddled masses are just going to disappear I guess) + the extreme multiculturalists who don’t want any new housing (including low income housing) built in any neighborhoods dominated by people of color because of the possibility (gasp) of inter-racial neighborhoods or the majority of blue state urbanites who just want a chance at a decent life, and a shot at owning their own place. How is it that socialist Vancouver was able to greenlight literally dozens of new apartment buildings downtown in the last decade, making rent cheap and ownership a possibility for many, many more Canadians, and allegedly progressive cities like San Francisco and Seattle have been literally sitting on their asses for decades?
And of course nationally the war against the middle class and working people has been a bi-partisan project over the last generation (spearheaded to be fair by Republicans). Anyone know what the real rate of taxation for the wealthiest and middle class was in early January, 1969? It was above 60% for the wealthiest Americans and (great society and all) below 20% for the middle class. Anyone know what it was by 1975, after Nixon and his GOP and Democrat enablers in congress got finished with the tax code? Just over 30% for the wealthiest Americans, and well over 20% for the middle class. You have to credit to Reagan though. He dispensed with Nixon’s populist pretense and stealth tactics and in full daylight brought the tax burden of the wealthiest Americans and the middle class into statistical parity (thanks Mr. Sherman for teaching me about “statistical parity” PS it may not be a good idea to sleep with your underage students).
And then there’s the steady erosion of economic security for the middle class, with the ongoing exodus of high wage, high benefit blue collar middle class jobs (Europe and Asia subsidize their manufacturing sectors - why didn’t we?), and now the emerging exodus of high wage, high benefit white collar middle class jobs (which you’ll note often require years and years and tens of thousands of dollars worth of education), all of which might be okay if we were actually creating new economic sectors (unless sucking on Tom Friedman’s toes counts as a new economic sector). Add to this the fact that tens of millions of Americans still don’t have health insurance (including millions of middle class Americans), the costs of higher education are insane (and no pell grants for the middle class), to say nothing of the noxious bankruptcy bill (but at least the rich still have loopholes to shield their assets, right? thank God for that).
June 6th, 2005 at 10:05 pm
One observation I have made is that the super rich have also become super arrogant.
The culture industry seems to have an obsession with the super rich. Popular culture from Cribs on MTV, the show about Gotti’s daughter, the seemingly endless number of shows that document the absurd celebrity consumption, etc…
Yet the net effect on the average person is confusing to me. When I watch cribs and see Russell Simons (rap mogul featured in THE NATION subscription ads) is on TV bragging about his gold toilet, I want to get involved in a revolutionary group. I mean what an asshole.
But the Wealth marketing of the culture industry only seems to create envy. A kind of relativist wealth envy. The “if you were rich, you would buy a gold toilet” kind of rationalizations. Or “he worked hard for his money” kind of thing. Well most people, especially in entertainment are lucky. As someone that works in the biz, Hollywood is the shallowest place on earth.
The owner of the company I work for gets a $40 (or maybe $60 in city of LA) parking ticket almost everyday. He parks in the yellow zone, that will not get you towed but will get you a fine. For me, the fine is fairly stiff. For him, it is chump change.
He could easily park less than a block up the road and not get a ticket. But I think he does it because he can do it. Sort of a passive aggressive form of bragging. A way of reminding us employees of how lucky we are. All the while the girl next to me has a $25,000 a year base salary (and meager bonus pay) in Los Angeles.
It does not bother him in the least bit that his hard working employee has to take on a second job to survive. Or that she took a pay cut to work for him. He keeps on getting those daily parking tickets just to let us know “who is boss.”
But wait, it gets better; he drives a Prius (no bullshit) with a “no war on Iraq” sticker and donated $50,000 of company money to MoveOn, the Sierra Club, and ACT.
Why on can’t working people bring up class again?
June 7th, 2005 at 12:17 am
I would be embarrassed to have a personal assistant in my home unless I were in invalid. Even then I would be embarrassed.
June 7th, 2005 at 1:03 am
“I would be embarrassed to have a personal assistant in my home unless I were in invalid.”
Why the subjunctive, Michael? Weren’t you just explaining to me over at GM’s that you are?!
June 7th, 2005 at 3:43 am
I think the correct word is ‘jealousy’ not envy.
“What isn’t very funny is how the poor bastard who gets to wait hand and foot on these Bev Hills snobs – and their baby, and their dogs—will probably wind up paying about the same tax rate as his or her celeb employer.”
Why does the poor bastard take the job in the first place?
And it is a simple fact that the more you earn the more, in terms of the percentage of total income tax payments collected, you contribute. The top 50% of of taxpayers, by income, paid 96% of the individul income taxes collected in 2000 and 2001 (last years I could find stats for). The income for this same 50% amounts to 86% of the total.
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/js1287.htm
But you’re correct, the share of adjusted gross income of the top 50% has increased when comparing, say, 1995 to 2001. But that brings us back to jealousy and envy because it doesn’t appear to have anything to do with tax policy.
June 7th, 2005 at 5:41 am
This site has the 2002 stuff as well (kind of makes you wish the IRS could get its data out a little quicker)
http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html
Top 5% of wage earners still accounting for over 50% of tax revenue.
June 7th, 2005 at 6:20 am
Yeah and more of them are Republicans than not. Check out a ski town sometime. I go up to Sun Valley weekends. You should see there rents there. A long way from Hemingway’s time.
June 7th, 2005 at 6:25 am
It’s good to see the wingnuts here love their kings and queens. Let them eat cake. Imagine people making umpteen millions paying more tax than the hired help? The horror.
June 7th, 2005 at 7:07 am
I don’t like the kings or queens much, but ENVY is terrible — the desire to destroy the good fortune of others. The Leftist rage is fueled by the envious Russian dream … that his neighbor’s prize cow dies. (Lots of anti-Americanism is based on the desire to see America come down, rather than they themselves go up. Admiration envy is the American dream … that you can keep up with the Jones’s)
After Bush’s tax cuts: 1) unemployment went down from what it would have been. A low unemployment rate is the BEST thing for poor people, on an absolute level.
2) The percentage of the total “income tax collected” by the IRS from the top 20% went UP — the rich got a smaller percentage tax cut than the middle class. (The poor already pay almost no income tax — can’t cut 0 by much).
Finally, the US should focus more on WEALTH taxes, not INCOME taxes — honestly punish the wealthy for being so wealthy rather than punish the hard working for creating so much wealth. (All taxes are essentially punishments.) A Land Value Tax (see Henry George) would be good — and also reduce the prices of houses.
June 7th, 2005 at 7:54 am
A point often missed because so many would not prefer live-in jobs, is that there are almost no live-in jobs left in this country. We are expected to work for little and pay rent and utilities at the same time. How does someone who has hit very hard times “start over”. Once upon a time, live-in jobs in hotels etc. gave people a chance. Where too now?
June 7th, 2005 at 8:33 am
Mark York
It’s not a love of kings and queens. It’s recognition that penalizing success is a bad thing.
June 7th, 2005 at 9:21 am
Envy? I dont think so. I would pay dearly to NOT be that family who has to hire someone to feed its dogs. No thank you. Nor am I going to respond to such ridiculous notions that gross inequality and blatant unfairness in the tax system is somehow fair. If some of you inmates are satisfied with your conditions, who am I to rile you?
What I cant let go however is what our good friend “too many steves” asks about why the galley slave would take the job in the first place. Im going to go way out on a limb here and say it’s because he or she prefers to eat rather than to starve. Oh.. sorry… I just remembered, it’s all a matter of choice. As Victor Hugo, I believe, pointed out (correct me if Im wrong) “both a rich man and a poor man have an equal right to sleep under a bridge.”
June 7th, 2005 at 10:32 am
Marc -
I think it was Anatole France.
June 7th, 2005 at 11:08 am
To those of you crying “Class Envy, Class Envy!” Did you read the article or the book, “Perfectly Legal?”
This isn’t about people making 100 or 200K a year. Those folks are getting screwed tax-wise. It is that tiny, tiny minority of super ultra wealthy that comprise a tenth of 1 percent of the population. Their wealth and share of the wealth has grown exponentially since the late seventies, and no, it is not “trickling down.” Meanwhile the tax rate they pay is as good as the middle income earners, and that’s on what they declare. Who knows how much is hidden away, untaxed.
Meanwhile, more and more folks get to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax (which is not indexed to inflation). Nobody talks about it because to fix this problem would make our deficits even worse. There just is no money for tax relief for the moderately wealthy, but an endless supply, it seems, for the oh-so-very-very-rich.
So wake up, those of you who think the Bush tax cuts really helped you out. Chances are you got squat.
June 7th, 2005 at 11:11 am
Man, now that is the Left’s power source…economic analysis.
June 7th, 2005 at 11:36 am
What Marc said.
Envy. Ah, yes. What a convenient way to explain away any desire for social or economic justice. For those confused about these issues I recommend spending some serious time with the working poor. And, by that I don’t mean giving to charity from a great height, but actually walking with people who, de spite the fact that they work hard every day to feed their families, really have trouble making it. “What’s hard for the nonpoor to see,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich in her wonderful book, *Nickel and Dimed*, “is poverty as acute distress.”
Josh, thanks for the daily parking ticket/boss story. It’s depressingly memorable—all the more so for the Prius and accoutrements.
Somewhat OT, a heads up for those commenters, readers and lurkers in the LA area: David Hare’s play “Stuff Happens,†has just opened at the Mark Taper Forum. It debuted in London 9 months ago, but has been remounted for the Taper’s smaller stage by Gordon Davidson as his pre-retirement swan song.
The subject matter is the Bush and Blair administrations and the run up to war. Hare has culled the bulk of the dialogue from actual statements made by all the various “characters‗-Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Condi, Colin Powell, Rumsfield, Blair, Jack Straw, French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, Hans Blix….and others.
I saw it over the weekend, and thought it was stupendous theater. The play is assuredly liberal in its views, but incredibly smart, very entertaining and, despite having a strong POV, it takes no easy shots. Hare’s much too skillful for that. (And Gordon, BTW, does a great job of directing.) It’s gonna sell out fast, so if you have any urges to see it, buy tickets now.
(The LA Times reviewed it this morning: http://www.calendarlive.com/stage/cl-et-stuff7jun07,0,1120752.story?coll=cl-stage-top-right)
And to circle this subject vaguely back to the topic of wealth, class and privilege, it should be noted that the Taper sells $12 tickets for all but Saturday night performances, two hours before the box office opens.
June 7th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
I love this crap about “penalizing success.” That’s right, let someone work all day for ten bucks an hour with no medical insurance, sweat it out how he’s going to pay for rent, health care, a the phone bill, a new oil pump and save a buck fifty a week for his kid’s college education AND then go home and worry about electing the right poltician to make sure that some fuck who makes $87 million isnt “penalized” for his success?!?
If this isnt the Stockholm Syndrome, what is?
Here’s a novel thought for those of you in the “dont penalize success” mindset: try turning it on it’s head. Why are you then in favor of penalizing what you might call failure? Or poverty? Or being born to working class parents? All these dumbfucks should be penalized and pay the same portion of taxes as Penelope Friggin’ Cruz?
What a sad, sad state of affairs that y’all can have your brains so thoroughly washed. Of course, in the end, the joke’s really on you. Even if ur a comfy six figure earner, you’re getting hosed by the current tax skew. Stop by my house and I’ll give you some free vaseline to enhance ur pleasure
June 7th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
I’ve always thought our national discussion about workers unions is a bit disingenous (understatement) given that we don’t mind when the rich forms unions at all. Only we don’t call them unions, we call them lobbies..
June 7th, 2005 at 12:55 pm
“If this isn’t the Stockholm Syndrome, what is?”
CLASSIC!!!
All those laborers demanding fair wages are just jealous. Slaves were especially jealous of their Masters…damn!!!
I bet those Republican Judges Reagan and Bush I placed into power are anti-Religious Right on social issues, but when it comes to business, the real Republican agenda is there.
I still get sick thinking about all the energy the Republicans put into Teri Schivo, only to have there own judges knock them down.
But when it came to the Bankruptcy bill and business’ pet projects in the courts…total silence.
June 7th, 2005 at 1:14 pm
Top One Percent & the Brainwashing of Voters
The top one percent controls approximately half our nation’s wealth, yet they only control (directly) one percent of the vote. How does the top one percent ensure that elected politicians look out for their interests and not the interests of the other 99%?
One clue can be found in the words of conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks. In 2002, he wrote:
My favorite polling result of the 2000 election was a Time magazine survey that revealed that 19 percent of Americans believe that they have incomes in the top 1 percent, and a further 20 percent believe they will someday. A large majority of us regard ourselves as pretty far above average.
With 39% of Americans thinking that they’re either in the top one percent or they’re going to be there one day, we now understand that when a Democrat talks about the top one percent, 61% of the electorate tunes him out.
The top one percent has managed to convince an additional 38% of the electorate that they’re part of the elite club. How did they manage to do this? It must be brainwashing.
People need to be educated that if they are not currently part of the top one percent, and their parents aren’t part of the top one percent, then the chances of them reaching the top one percent are pretty slim—probably less than one percent.
February 25, 2005 at 02:28 PM | Permalink
http://abigail.blogs.com/garden/2005/02/top_one_percent.html
June 7th, 2005 at 1:19 pm
Marc
Before I address the substance, there are a couple of things I would like to get out of the road.
First, I believe strongly in individuals helping the poor. I don’t believe in the government helping the poor.
Second, social darwinism is brutal. But the track record of socialism is worse.
Now about the “penalizing success” thing. People respond to incentives, it is naive to think otherwise. And the Robin Hood syndrome provides backwards incentives. In this case, correct incentives would be to place the bulk of the tax burden on the poor, which is not realistic (or even desirable if it were). Even a flat tax is not realistic. But to continue to push for more incentives that are opposite of the desired behavior is not a winning solution either.
I like solutions that help the poor, but I don’t think you can defend steeply progressive taxes as doing that.
June 7th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
One of the most pivotal points, growing up working class, was an event between my mother and father.
They both had just left a primarily Puerto Rican Pentecostal church, to attend a primarily white evangelical Assemblies of God. My brother and I were attending an evangelical pre-school that insisted on English submergence. All English all the time, even on Sundays, so that we could be up to speed on our classes.
My mother had grown up around white people, and can certainly pass as white, so there was not much culture shock. But my father was a black Puerto Rican from the hills and when he migrated to the States, Jim Crow and anti-Spanish crap (the language) was applied to him.
This was at the beginning of the 80’s, and the Assemblies of God churches were ground zero for the rise of the Right-Winging Christian agenda. I knew Dr Dobson and the Left-Behind stuff intimately. But the scene was alien to my father and my mother did just fine. So obviously there was tension. As my mother began to embrace this agenda and its myths my father began to withdraw.
One day there was a fight (which was rare, being Christian/Protestant and all) and my father snapped. “WE ARE NOT RICH WHITE PEOPLE!†and my mother just started weeping some thing fierce and through her sobs said, “Don’t say we are poor. That is a lie from hell. We have Jesus; we are the wealthiest people on earth!â€
My father is a pretty devout dude; he “had Jesus†and knew what this meant, but when he talked about being poor it wasn’t really a bad thing. It was just a statement of fact. He was being honest about our economic condition. My mother viewed “being poor†as being a state-of-mind and shouldn’t be discussed, unless you “didn’t have Jesus.â€
They are both still happily married and working poor, but are night and day when it comes to politics. My mother is very typical of many working poor people who attend evangelical churches.
June 7th, 2005 at 3:25 pm
I agree completely with Green Dem’s comments and Marc’s statement.
What’s tragically missing here is a Democratic Party (absent perhaps Edwards) talking about a strategy for growing wages and income. Green is right in that industrial policy among savvy nations does not engage in a race for the bottom in wage costs but a race for the top in productivity and adaptability.
My biggest beef is that the Dems engage in David Geffen populism; closing off beach access from the hoi polloi while posing as “liberals” at $1,000 dinners for various politicians and arguing over Gay Marriage (nice to have, not as nice as upward mobility).
WSJ has pretty thoroughly shown upward mobility to be closed off now; yet there is no discussion about serious efforts to remake this nation into a place where incomes rise steadily. Instead we seem to be importing the worst from Europe (corporatism, cronyism, static government unions) and Asia (sweatshop race for the bottom in wages).
This country is supposed to be all about upward income mobility; it’s time Dems got off their ass and started to push it; this doesn’t mean picking and choosing companies as winners but does mean doing EVERYTHING to pick up wages; among them closing off illegal immigration (employer penalties, secure borders, real enforcement); penalizing outsourcing in serious ways; reforming bankruptcy laws to encourage risk-taking entrepeneurism, an emphasis on US manufactured products and services, and various tax and spending preferences for highly skilled, high wage products.
And yes among these items is investment in world class infrastructure, including telco, sewage, water, schools, and transportation.
June 7th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
It is my own personal sense that people largely loathe both parties since they are not responsive to their needs.
IMHO people view Gay Marriage, Stem Cell research, and other social issues as “nice to haves” but not decisive, instead they are angry and sick at the degradation of the American Dream, by the Dem’s refusal to stand up for the economic populism and income growth, as well as come up with something better than Bush’s endless attrition warfare against terrorism; and the Republican’s unremitting hostility to average people’s income growth and mobility as well as common sense social issues that shouldn’t even be under discussion.
Ultimately I don’t think this condition is stable, we don’t have the nuclear armageddon of the Cold War hanging over us; and the opportunity for a third party Demagoge or visionary is great. Jesse Ventura and Arnold did NOT happen in a vacuum; both were the beneficiaries of the failure of the two party establishments to offer a compelling economic argument for the vast majority of the people.
There’s a danger and opportunity here; the danger being some demagoge who can take legitimate anger over the political failure by the people and harness it in disastrous ways (basically, an Alcibiades or worse); the opportunity being a renewal by someone able to break the confines of an unresponsive duopoly (a new FDR or TR). Hopefully we will get the latter and not the former but I think there’s no question that the American people are not envious or jealous or gulled; they are just sick and angry.
June 7th, 2005 at 3:47 pm
“My biggest beef is that the Dems engage in David Geffen populism”
Brilliant!!!
June 7th, 2005 at 3:50 pm
Well, I may not have a personal assistant, but I do have a personal trainer and it’s the best thing I have ever done for myself….I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have a personal assistant, not if it made me more productive at work; I’d hope to pay them well and fairly, is all.
June 7th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
Does having one’s kid to mow the lawn in order to get his allowance qualify as having a personal assistant?
June 7th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
I am here, in the way I view the available evidence, significantly outnumbered. Clearly, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs is the rule proposed. I simply don’t agree.
I find myself, through the choices I have made in my life, in a significantly higher income and tax quintile than that of my parents as they were of theirs. I know plenty of other people who are too. Anecdotal, sure, but…
If we were born into classes that we were doomed to inhabit our entire lives then I might feel differently.
June 7th, 2005 at 4:54 pm
One of the biggest mistakes men (and ladies) like my father made was trusting the generation before them. This is to say, the two generation of workers, before my father, were able to work hard at a manufacturing job and retire. Being a devoted worker to one company was the tradition…but Reagan happened and every wage worker was now a “business man†or “investorâ€. And social contracts were viewed as communist ideals and greed became a holy and divine state.
This had nothing to do with work ethic and everything to do with generating profits.
June 7th, 2005 at 5:01 pm
There are really two storylines playing out on this thread, and they’re interconnected but should really be discussed separately. One is the myriad of ways the middle class (ie people who now make between about 30k and 300k a year) has been fucked up the backside over the last generation, and other other is the myriad of ways the poor have been fucked up the backside over the last generation. Of course, it is the same political and economic elites who have been doing all this ass fucking for so long (which involves among other things no small amount of pitting the poor and middle class against each other), but the issues facing the middle class (lack of affordable housing, the exodus of good blue and white collar middle class jobs, hyper-inflation in health care and higher education, an onerous tax burden, lack of bankruptcy protection now, etc) are in some ways the same and some ways different from what the poor face (including lack of affordable housing and public transit, predatory lending, dismal k-12 education, defunding of pell grants, the war on drugs and their generational criminalization, etc).
Now of course poor Tom up thread (who I’m guessing is despite his intelligence and good looks not pulling in 5 mil a year) has been taking it up the ass so long it apparently doesn’t bother him anymore (and maybe never did - who knows?) or else maybe he and his ilk just give less of a shit about their own economic self-interest than they do about hearing their right-wing icons flog niggers, and faggots, and wetbacks, and feminazis every election cycle (not to mention in between every election cycle). You have to wonder these things…
But what is just so insane and outrageous is that the solutions really aren’t terribly obscure and wouldn’t be all that controversial among the overwhelming majority of Americans if actually enacted into law, regardless of party ID or ideological affiliation. We can have low taxes for the poor and middle class (and reasonable, Clinton-era rates on the wealthiest Americans) while still having a robust economy, universal health care, social security, a world class education system etc, but it means both parties telling their vested interests (from corporations to certain public employee unions) to go to hell.
I mean what don’t people get, both in Washington and out in the country? We need to build more housing (lots more housing in fact, and preferably from sustainable materials) practically everywhere. We need universal health care and we need to introduce genuine market fores and other reforms (which don’t include HMOs or health savings accounts incidentally, but rather building more medical schools, making pharmaceutical companies pay for the NIH research they loot to make drugs, etc) to bring down costs (it’s either genuine s&d market forces or rationing everyone…that’s the choice). We need a manhattan project on energy independence, greenlighting new nuclear power plants and largescale R&D projects in renewables. We need a national infrastructure renewal project (our infrastructure has been neglected since the 1970s, and along with the energy project would create many, many thousands of good middle class jobs to tide us over until the next tech boom). We need to cut bureaucracy at the federal, state, and local level (to the tune of probably a million or more bureuacratic jobs nationally). We need a global coalition of democracies to take over our role as policemen of the world, not because we care what the French think, but because we can’t afford it anymore. We need tax credits for green small businesses. We need to break the illegal big ag trusts. We need to unionize Wal Mart and other major service industry corporations. And so on and so forth. What the hell is the problem?
June 7th, 2005 at 5:17 pm
Good and eloquent posts, Rockford. Some of us may quibble over the specifics on certain issues….but that makes for good discussion. Yet, the overall points are very nicely said. Thanks.
(And thanks to Neodude for the terrific personal story.)
You too, Green Dem. I just read yours while I was getting read to post this. Too rushed to contribute much to this conversation, but I’m enjoying lurking and reading.
June 7th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
“Good and eloquent posts, Rockford.”
I agree.
“You too, Green Dem.”
Tanx. Do I get a cookie and milk?
June 7th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
You know Marc when they can buffalo poor schmucks into standing up for their wealth preservation the ruse is complete. Fairness isn’t communism. It provides a ladder that more can ascend in order to pay taxes. Serfdoms keep it lopsided like this. We know how that worked out.
All of my skilled trades are underpaid. As a scientist I’m making $13.21 an hour working for the Bush administration, or against it since they’re hosing the land at the taxpayers expense for a few, users. Corporate welfare ranching is what it is. The poor things.
June 7th, 2005 at 7:48 pm
Just talked to my father…he said he can’t be poor, he has a mortgage.
He’s a lower middle class janitor.
June 8th, 2005 at 5:54 am
This whole thread has brought to mind the cable TV channel ‘Turner Classic Movies”. I love old movies, I’m a fogy and believe they don’t make ‘em like they used to, and watch TCM all the time. Ever notice how the rich are portrayed in those films? When they are not buffoons they are crass villians. If they are redeemed its by seeing how the other half lives and learning the virtues of the common man. Unions are praised, Greed is not good. Oh, and even self-made men get there on the backs of others. So I wonder what changed the zeitgeist? All those HUAC hearings maybe? Maybe there is a reason that people now identify with the richest 1% when it was so different once upon a time in a country long, long ago.
June 8th, 2005 at 7:21 am
richard,
The Reagan Revolution and the 80’s…during that era I knew so many wage earners convinced that they were primarily buisness men on the move and their wage earning jobs were temporary….and real buisness men treated them as such.
June 8th, 2005 at 8:06 am
And one more thing…I’m with Habermas on this one…Habermas predicted, that postmodernist (and their neoconservative counterparts) would sap and distort critiques and identity.
This is during the 70s, mind you.
Postmodernism and Neoconservativism (not necessarily American foreign policy dudes) reduced all critiques to only “symbols and signs of power and culture†where the Left’s traditional strength was the “economics of power and cultureâ€.
The negative discourses of the postmodern reflected a pessi¬mistic take on the trajectories of modern societies. Toynbee, Mills, Bell, Steiner, and others saw Western societies and culture in decline, threatened by change and instability, as well as by the new developments of mass society and culture. The negative discourse of the postmodern thus posits a crisis for Western civilization at the end of the modern world. This pessimistic and apocalyptic discourse would be reproduced in postmodern theor¬ists like Baudrillard. The negative cultural discourse of Howe, Steiner, Bell and others would also prepare the way for the neo-conservative attacks on contemporary culture in the 1980s.
[…]
Thus, by the 1980s, the postmodern discourses were split into cultural conservatives decrying the new developments and avant-gardists celebrating them. Postmodern discourses were proliferat¬ing through different academic fields and by the 1980s debates erupted concerning breaks with modernity, modernism, and modern theory. More extreme advocates of the postmodern were calling for ruptures with modern discourses and the development of new theories, politics, modes of writing, and values. While the discussions of postmodern cultural forms were primarily initiated in North America, it was in France that Baudrillard and Lyotard were developing notions of a new postmodern era that were much more comprehensive and extreme than those produced earlier in Britain and the United States. The developments in postmodern theory in France constituted a rupture with the French rationalist tradition founded by Descartes and further developed in the French Enlightenment. New French Theory can be read as one of a series of revolts against Cartesian rationalism ranging from the Enlightenment attack on theoretical reason in favour of promoting rational social change, through Comte and Durkheim’s revolt against philosophical rationalism in favour of social science, to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to make philosophy serve the needs of concrete human existence. As we shall see in the next section, French structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodern theory constituted a series of attacks on rationalist and Enlighten¬ment theory. Yet these critiques built on another French counter-Enlightenment tradition rooted in the critiques of reason by de Sade, Bataille, Artaud, and others whom Habermas (1987a) terms ‘the dark writers of the bourgeoisie’. A French ‘dandy’ and bohemian tradition stemming from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and others also helped produce the aestheticized, ironic, and subver¬sive ethos of French postmodern theory. In addition, the French reception of Nietzsche and Heidegger played a major role in turning French theory away from Hegel, Marx, phenomenology and existentialism and toward development of new theoretical formations that eventually produced postmodern theory.
from:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/pomo/ch1.html
June 8th, 2005 at 9:21 am
Don’t forget the other prong – if you’re rich and progressive like George Soros (progressivish anyway) then you’re a hypocritical bastard who’s so smart and wealthy that you think you know what’s best for the rest of us. If you’re working woman or man then you’re just jealous of the rich. It’s a catch 22. According to a good anti-taxer there’s no honest motive for believing in social justice. Better just vote Republican and save your soul.
June 8th, 2005 at 10:56 am
“Better just vote Republican and save your soul.”
I thought all good Protestants believed that your fate has already been determined by God and there is no action a human can take, to change that?
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