On March 15, Cronon posted a blog entry entitled, "Who's Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn't Start Here)", seeking to focus attention on out of state conservative groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the infamous phone call that Walker had a month ago with blogger Ian Murphy, who posed as Republican financier David Koch.Yes, the facts are certainly stubborn things, and they remain biased against The Right: liberal inquiry and freedom in the pursuit of knowledge and truth may be tolerated at the universities (for now), as long as these quaint vestigial traditions of the Enlightenment are not admitted into the common discourse, the general political culture, such as it is. Everybody by now knows about Professor Cronon's story, but how about this one?
Just this week, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a right-wing research group in Michigan, has now made an even more widely drawn public records request to the labor studies departments at three public universities in the state asking labor studies faculty members for any emails mentioning “Scott Walker,” “Madison,” “Wisconsin,” or “Rachel Maddow.” The group is funded, according to Mother Jones, by “the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation (the Wal-Mart Waltons), and foundations tied to two of Michigan's best-known and wealthiest conservative political families: the DeVos family of Amway fame and the Prince family of Blackwater fame.”Is this very public fusillade against labor right now some desultory, coincidental case of earnest budget warrior happenstance? No, because these bills clearly have nothing to do with the budget. The real answer is that corporate America has labor, and hence the only truly effective means for participatory democracy, by the throat-----and the poor economy is only emboldening them to squeeze. Out of the top 10 contributing donors in our elections, five support Democrats, and three of those are big unions. A pretty easy calculation for Republicans wanting to knock them out. Nonetheless, it should be interesting to watch Obama and the Democratic Party do next to nothing besides spout the occasional platitudes from the sidelines. Seated alongside their Wall Street donors, the Democrats will most likely yawn while the victims, actual working Americans, continue to be more and more productive only to ensure less and less in compensation (As a side note: see this unsurprising story on how the U.S. economy is growing faster than other industrialized countries, yet creating fewer jobs. "Jobless recovery" anyone? These guys are loving it, and some magnanimous economic leaders may even let shareholders vote on executive compensation sometime in the NEVER existent future). Take one of the many studies illustrating something very obvious to working stiffs in this country: that there has been an enormous increase in productivity over the last thirty years with only marginal increases in wages:
...American workers across the board -- whether in the private or public sector, high school- or college-educated –- "have suffered from decades of stagnating wages despite large gains in productivity." The trend isn’t new, either. Between 1979 and 2009, EPI says, U.S. productivity increased by 80 percent, while the hourly wage of the median worker has only gone up by 10.1 percent.However, with college-educated public sector workers, even though their wages have gone up only 9.5% compared to 19.4% in the private sector, they are most likely targeted (for among other reasons) because of their benefits, which raise them up to 20.5% compared to the 17.9% of their counterparts. Holy shit! How outrageous that they would like to gain at a rate slightly more commensurate to their productivity. And at 2.6% more than their private counterparts? Oh, the shame. Yet, all of this should be understood as the climax (or denouement, rather?) of what the Center for Economic Policy in its study of labor markets and inequality since the 1970s has identified as "broader shifts in political power":
changes in the legal environment facing unions; legislative decisions about the level of the federal minimum wage; central bank decisions about interest rates; the federal government's attitude toward industry regulation; and public opinion about issues as diverse as the efficiency of markets and the desirability of maintaining a social safety net for those experiencing short- and long-term economic difficulties.And what are the effects of this shift?
Between 1979 and 2004, wages for workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution only just kept pace with inflation –over a period when the output per hour of the average workers grew by over 66% in real terms...incomes across most of the distribution have grown more slowly than they did in the earlier postwar period, with rising annual hours worked playing an important role in what real gains families did experience. The distribution of wealth has become more skewed toward the very top, with "stock-holder democracy" having little impact on the actual distribution of national wealth. In all cases, these economic divisions are especially sharp across gender and racial lines. The well-documented decline in union representation, the falling real value of the minimum wage, nearly two decades of restrictive macroeconomic policy, and a forced opening up of much of the US economy to competition from the rest of the world can explain much of the recent rise in economic inequality. These key developments all took place alongside a widespread move toward economic deregulation, the privatization of government services (especially at the state and local level), and cutbacks in the social safety net (best exemplified in the wholesale restructuring in 1996 of the "welfare" system supporting poor mothers of young children)."Stockholder democracy" indeed. Consider Warren Buffett's challenge to find anyone making a living off investments who is taxed at a higher rate than those making wages. He pays a little more than half the tax rate his receptionist does (17.7% vs. 30%). There are some societal values for you: make your living through wages and not only do you have to listen to wealthy investment types bitch about how much they pay in taxes, but their type of work is so valuable they only pay half the rate you do. Justin Wolfers at the Freakonomics site has an interesting discovery as well regarding those who are well off, but not super rich, like himself. "But the point remains: I had never quite realized that the Warren Buffett problem extends far enough down the income distribution that even folks like myself aren’t paying their fair share." He pays 16% of his income in taxes. "And if it is true here, I suspect the same goes equally for most folks in the top 10 percent of income earners.(Incidentally, according to Piketty and Saez, around half of all income in the U.S. goes to those of us in the top decile — roughly anyone with a family income of six figures or more.)" It's actually more than that. But here's where silencing the people who are constantly trying to set the record straight, and address the political misconceptions, seems moot: the assumption that when confronted with the truth, people will make rational decisions and correct political misinformation that could seriously improve their own lives and the health of society as a whole is also apparently belied by the facts. From the Daily Kos:
Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.So, why even care, right? What's so threatening about an "elitist," "ivory tower" Prof adding some much-needed context to the Wisconsin fiasco? Many knew that out-of-state Mormons injected millions in order to defeat a California proposition to finally respect gay Americans 14th Amendment rights. It didn't change the result. What's so big about a historian pointing out the concerted, out-of-state efforts to subvert collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, a very pro-labor state with a very pro-labor history? One might as well ask then: Why is the governor of Maine removing a labor mural (over the weekend when he thought nobody would notice) from the Department of Labor? Easy enough. It's because the "11-panel mural includes scenes of mill workers, labor strikes and child laborers" and "depicted a biased view of labor history." Governor LePage wants to correct our misapprehensions about the history of our poor, beleaguered wealthy classes. He "contends the mural depicting labor history overlooks the contributions of entrepreneurs." Simultaneously, his party is pushing brand new child labor laws that do not oppress entrepreneurs. No kidding: "LD 1346 suggests several significant changes to Maine’s child labor law, most notably a 180-day period during which workers under age 20 would earn $5.25 an hour." But there's so much more:
Ok, so Republicans’ contempt for workers is hardly news. But G.O.P governors in the Midwest are playing their hand at utterly annihilating unions. And during economic hardship and faux concerns over the deficit and budget, what better place to start than with the public sector, especially considering that the union rate there is up to 36% compared to the 6.9% of the private sector that is unionized? Overall, that only 12% of American workers are protected by a union doesn't matter because the public sector is the only place where unions are growing. So, it is more about defeating the last formidable bastion of unionism, public unions, in hopes of ultimately nullifying union influence entirely. God help us, as that would continue unabated the already nearly inconceivable disparity in the distribution of wealth, which, for the last thirty years has been working out so well for the already very well-to-do. But that is just it. Almost as terrible as the disparity itself, is the incredible misperception about it. In a report entitled "United by Our Delusion" * tax reporter David Kay Johnston looks at Americans' perceptions about the disparity:•Maine State Sen. Debra Plowman (R) introduced a separate bill that would extend the number of hours employers can require a minor to work. Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) backs this proposal.
•Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) delivered a lengthy lecture where he claimed that federal child labor laws violate the Constitution. His Republican colleagues in the Senate rewarded him with a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee — the committee with jurisdiction over constitutional questions.
•Missouri State Sen. Jane Cunningham (R) introduced a bill which would “eliminate[] the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen. Restrictions on the number of hours and restrictions on when a child may work during the day are also removed.”
•Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s (R) most recent brief attacking the Affordable Care Act relies heavily on a discredited Supreme Court decision striking down a federal child labor law that was overruled decades ago.
•Judges Roger Vinson and Henry Hudson, the two outlier judges who struck down the ACA, also relied heavily on this discredited anti-child labor decision in their decisions.
They estimated that the top fifth of Americans owns about 60 percent of the wealth. The reality? Eighty-five percent. So what about the bottom 120 million of us? Those surveyed said that ideally, the bottom 40 percent would own 20 to 25 percent of all wealth. When asked to estimate the share of wealth actually owned, the collective guesses were between 8 and 10 percent. Reality: 0.3 percent. That means Americans think ideally the poorest 120 million Americans should own somewhere between every fourth and fifth dollar of net worth, when in fact they own every 333rd dollar.Reminds me of Ishmael being offered the 777th lay aboard the Pequod. Although, he had it negotiated down on his behalf to the 300th, without unions, we could all be relegated to the 777th lay. And we all know how that ship fared (Ishmael had a Quaker with a conscience in his corner). But the scientific survey Johnston offers us, conducted by Prof. Ariely and his coauthor, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, also demonstrated this:
High-income or low, Republican or Democrat, young or old, male or female, Bush voters or Kerry voters, Americans are united in what they believe is the ideal distribution of wealth. And they are just as united about what they imagine to be the distribution of wealth in America. The problem is that neither the ideals we broadly share, nor our estimated distributions of wealth today, bear much relationship to reality.Without using loaded words like "death tax" the 5,522 participants were shown pie charts and asked to estimate the actual and then select the ideal wealth distribution. Little did they know they selected Sweden's distribution for the ideal, and were way off on the actual distribution. Their discrepancies are intriguing. They estimated that the top 20% own around 57% of the wealth when actually it is 85%. Moreover, the lowest two quintiles at .3% didn't even register yet they imagined them at almost 10%. And therein lies the explanation for silencing the truth. Johnston sees the "learned helplessness" of those at the very bottom and the "lack of knowledge about taxes" as the "politically toxic amalgam" ripe for political exploitation. It's the political and economic truth these well-funded proponents of the ultimately unstable wealth disparities that will seek to silence whomever they can, by whatever methods. Information----and more importantly peoples' perceptions----matters, so the G.O.P. will continue attempting to intimidate public university academics for the same reason that government tries to silence whistle blowing in general, or Wikileaks (or its supporters) in particular. Well, let's see how this plays out in the Midwest, but point taken. G.O.P. to academia: If you enter into the fray armed with facts, the Party will call that [actual quote] "the use of state resources for political purposes," and even play the victim themselves for good measure. Wisconsin State Republican Party Executive Director Mark Jefferson: "I have never seen such a concerted effort to intimidate someone from lawfully seeking information about their government." Since when are public universities government? Profs are not public officials either, but maybe pointing out that reality is "political" as well. Yeah, there's a "concerted effort" all right, but not of the type he's suggesting. *This report comes from University of California at Santa Cruz Professor of Sociology G. William Domhoff's invaluable site, which is well worth a perusal. p.s.--I don't know why this won't space correctly.
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