Goodbye, "3 1/2 T"

[pbrower2a]

(08-05-2020, 08:03 AM)sbarrera Wrote:

(08-05-2020, 03:16 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Much of the economy seems dedicated to the devouring of middle-class assets. Corporate farms are squeezing out family farms. Advanced college education becomes necessary for the professions that still pay-- and it becomes increasingly expensive. If you remember the bumper-sticker that read "We're spending our grandchildren's inheritance" -- nursing homes now do that. Life is getting drearier and grimmer... and the delights are more exploitative and ephemeral. That cannot last.   

Trump is of course horrible, the sort of leader that one gets if a country has scorpions in its souls. I have said enough about him. I hope to see our society promoting more rationality and equality of results, an anathema to Donald Trump and the Tea Party types who presaged him. 

COVID-19 will leave us with a changed culture. Too many people have died for any other consequence to be possible.

I agree, but how do we change if we just teeter between the resentment politics of the Trump Republicans and the neoliberal world order of the establishment Democrats? Those are the two options our political system has offered up. But as you say, COVID-19 will force our hand. It's already forcing us to establish a paltry version of UBI in the form of extended benefits and relief money.

Time should name the coronavirus its person of the year.   

(I assume they'll actually pick healthcare workers or essential workers as a group).

Back to the idea that the American economy seems dedicated to devouring middle-class assets on behalf of rapacious elites. 

One concept is vice. Vice is available at all times and in all places. I have my definition as self-indulgent behavior that exploits or demeans others or that offers ephemeral delight at an exorbitant price (whether finances or health) to the participant. Vice is an antithesis of charity and compassion. It arises most easily in places of desperation, where people are generally helpless and where opportunities for self-improvement and economic advancement are rare. Such we used to associate with the ghetto, where people who suddenly got a little money might drink it up or gamble it away in a pathetic attempt to make a little big of money become a huge windfall. This is where gambling, narcotics, and prostitution were infamously available. Life in poverty in a hyper-materialistic society is simply awful. Delights are rare, and they are exorbitant. 

The solution to that is to reach the kids if not the beyond-reach adults. More rigor in education? More vocational training that prepares people for work outside the ghetto? Extending the bus lines so that they reach the suburbs?

Maybe it works somewhat even if we see much failure. At one time it was reliably certain that at commute times, traffic would be heavy one way but light the other. Thus at 8  AM one could expect to share an over-burdened freeway toward Detroit but find smooth sailing away on a usual workday. The last time i was in Greater Detroit I took  Interstate 96 (which is lightly traveled west of Lansing) out of Greater Detroit and I found the highway heavily traveled leaving Detroit around 9 am. The people traveling in the same direction as me were largely black... and because blacks have no special proclivity to work night shifts I figure that their jobs are in the suburbs. (They are not going to Lansing or East Lansing, which I assume are too far to be within commuting range of any part of Greater Detroit).

Now what would I do if I wanted to degrade the middle class into poverty? I would make middle class ways (like saving, deferred gratification, and planning) irrelevant or impossible. I would debase public education at the K-12 level and make college education mandatory for even clerical work. I would make sure that education at all levels were purely technical and spirit-dead. I would make only mass low culture available and accessible. I would promote gambling, heavy drinking, and drugs. I would inculcate the attitude among men that they need to turn in the old model wife for a newer, sexier one -- perhaps as young as one's daughter. Divorce and dating, after all, are much costlier than stable marriages. As mindless consumerism I would push behaviors that are harmful yet costly, like cigars and over-priced, excessively-fast vehicles. 

And what of the worker? Obviously, destroy his union! Workers can be told that if they don't pay union dues they can have more money for Christmas presents. Bullhist! Collective bargaining is the real benefit of being a union member, and it prevents employers from what they would do without it, is to base pay upon the weaknesses of an employee as a bargainer with a bureaucratic organization that has deputized his supervisor to spy on him so that the 'negotiator' can offer on a take-it-or-leave (employment) basis... 

"Hey, Pedro (and the victim of such would have  high likelihood of being Hispanic)... we notice that your wife Jacinta has given birth. Now we all know that you would like to make our company's economic position stronger so that your job will be more secure. Surely you will accept a 10% pay-cut on behalf of your future." 

Collective bargaining prevents that sort of abuse. A worker of unusual talent is not going to get paid better just for his productivity without collective bargaining. If an employer suggests that individual employees far better if the employer gets to assess their productivity... most assembly-line work is machine-paced, which paces the productivity, and someone capable of doing more-skilled work can be directed into improving his opportunities through training.    

Vice flourishes in a 3T, and the effort to profiteer from it has not gone away as we have economic elites who exploit it because it is more profitable than more salubrious business. People who engage in vice go broke and are helpless, which is exactly what a rapacious elite devoid of empathy or social conscience wants.