US Inequality Quiz

Can You Pass The US Inequality Quiz?
By Jeffrey Rudolph  (June 2011; last update August 2023)

The American mainstream media regularly laments the incontrovertible reality of rising inequality, yet rarely provides historical perspective or detailed analysis. Rather, the typical article provides statistical facts of inequality coupled with theoretical claims linking capitalism, incentives, economic growth and inequality.

While few doubt that capitalism is the preferred economic system for a country—despite its inevitable resulting inequality—the fundamental issue is whether the American model of capitalism should be preferred to versions of capitalism in, say, Europe or Japan. A misleading assumption of the mainstream media is to equate capitalism with America’s “free-market” version. The alternative thus becomes the authoritarian, centrally planned system of the defunct Soviet Union.

The following quiz is intended to bring more depth to the issue of capitalism and inequality by providing historical context and international comparison. The conclusion is heartening: the United States can be made both more just and more productive—indeed, it once was.

 The US Inequality Quiz

1. True or False: Rising income inequality is simply the result of impersonal economic forces that have affected the United States and the rest of the advanced world.

-False. “The sharp rightward shift in US politics is unique among advanced countries; Thatcherite Britain, the closest comparison, was at most a pale reflection. The [impersonal] forces of technological change and globalization, by contrast, affect everyone. If the rise in inequality has political roots, the United States should stand out; if it’s mainly due to impersonal market forces, trends in equality should have been similar across the advanced world. And the fact is that the increase in US inequality has no counterpoint anywhere else in the advanced world. During the Thatcher years Britain experienced a sharp rise in income disparities, but not nearly as large as the rise [in the US]…, and inequality has risen modestly if at all in continental Europe and Japan.”
   “[T]he forces of technological change and globalization have affected every advanced country: Europe has applied information technology almost as rapidly as we have, cheap clothing in Europe is just as likely to be made in China as is cheap clothing in America….In terms of institutions and norms, however, things are very different among advanced nations: In Europe, for example, unions remain strong, and old norms condemning very high pay and emphasizing the entitlements of workers haven’t faded away….There is [a] case for believing that institutions and norms, rather than technology or globalization, are the big sources of rising inequality in the United States.” (Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal, W. W. Norton, New York: 2007, 9, 137, 140-1. Hereinafter, “Krugman 2007.”)
   For an example of the significance of norms and institutions to inequality, consider that Denmark’s Gini Index (for disposable income, i.e., after taxes and transfers) was .23 in 1985 and .25 in 2008 while the US’s respective numbers were .34 and .38. (It’s important to note that Denmark ranks highly on the Index of Economic Freedom. Therefore, despite–or because of?–its robust welfare state transfers and government spending, Denmark has a successful mixed economy.)
https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/49499779.pdf
http://www.heritage.org/index/
   “Denmark has embraced an expansive government role, with public spending more than half of GDP. [While] American policy has been increasingly hostile to organized labor,…two-thirds of Danish workers are unionized. Conservative ideology says that Denmark’s policy choices should be disastrous,…[however, as of 2018,] Danes are more likely to have jobs than Americans, and in many cases they earn substantially more. Overall GDP per capita in Denmark is a bit lower than in America, but that’s basically because the Danes take more vacations.” (Krugman 2020, 319-20)
   The Nordic countries are examples of everything conservatives hate. Their successful economies and societies are a clear rebuttal to conservative claims that low taxes, limited government regulation, and harsh treatment of the poor are essential to prosperity.

-“In 2013 the Gini index for American market income (before taxes and transfers) was a high .53; for disposable income (after taxes and transfers) it was a moderate .38. The US has not gone as far as countries like Germany and Finland, which start off with a similar market income distribution but level it more aggressively, pushing their Ginis down into the high .2s and sidestepping most of the post-1980s inequality rise.” (Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Viking, New York: 2018, 115. Hereinafter, “Pinker 2018.”)

-“[W]hen economists, startled by rising inequality [in the early 2000s], began looking back at the origins of middle-class America, they discovered…that the transition from the inequality of the Gilded Age [1870s to the beginning of the 20^th century] to the relative equality of the…[post WWII] era wasn’t a gradual evolution. Instead, America’s postwar middle-class society was created, in just the space of a few years, by the policies of the Roosevelt administration…” (Krugman 2007, 7-8)

-It is primarily the policies of the US government that have increased inequality. “Technology has been displacing workers (i.e. costing jobs) for decades, in fact centuries….The question is the rate at which workers are being displaced. And here the news is the opposite of what we are being told. Technology is actually having less effect in recent years than in prior years because productivity growth has slowed…[W]e all know stories about robots or computers making this or that job obsolete. The point is that if we bothered to look we would know many more such stories about jobs in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.”
   With respect to international trade, “we can find low paid manufacturing workers in places like Mexico, Vietnam, and China who are costing jobs for steel workers and auto workers in the United States. [However,] this is [not] a natural process…We have been crafting trade deals for the last quarter century to bring about this outcome. The executives of companies like General Electric and Ford were sitting at the negotiating table helping to write rules that would make it as easy as possible for them to take advantage of low paid labor…While there are hundreds of millions of people in the developing world who are happy to work in factories at much lower pay than workers in the United States, there are also hundreds of millions of people in the developing world who are smart and capable and would be delighted to work as doctors, lawyers, dentists, or other highly paid professionals in the United States. But we did not construct trade agreements to put our highest paid professionals in direct competition with lower paid counterparts in the developing world. These workers still enjoy protected labor markets.”
   “Why are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America still in business? Because the government saved them and other financial behemoths from their own incompetence during the financial crisis….We also have high drug prices due to government granted patent monopolies.” (18 Dec. 2014)
https://cepr.net/schumer-should-focus-on-keeping-government-from-redistributing-income-upward/

-Before President Jimmy Carter deregulated the trucking industry in the late 1970s, “‘we used to think of [trucking] as a good job. And it’s now [2020] a poorly paid extremely stressful job, with real wages down around 30 percent from their peak in the 1970s. And that’s not [due to] technology. We don’t have self-driving trucks yet[.] [And it’s] not due to globalisation,’ because trucking isn’t traded. So what are we left with? ‘Essentially political decisions,’…There was a leap of faith in the [ideology of the] invisible hand, which fed through to policies that weakened the unions, and ended up exacerbating the power imbalance between the trucker and his boss.” (28 Feb. 2020)
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thomas-pikettys-capital-idea-economics-history-inequality-krugman-interview-review  

2. What percentage of total income (excluding capital gains) was held by the top 10 percent of Americans in 2005? 1920s?

-2005: 44.3 percent; average for 1920s: 43.6 percent. (The top 1 percent held 17.4 percent and 17.3 percent in 2005 and the 1920s, respectively.) The US is back to levels of inequality not seen since the days before the New Deal. (Krugman 2007, 16)

-“[In September 2022] the Congressional Budget Office released a study of trends in the distribution of family wealth between 1989—immediately after President Ronald Reagan began the antiregulation and antitax push—and 2019. In those thirty years, total real wealth held by families tripled from $38 trillion to $115 trillion. But the distribution of that growth was not even.”
   “Money moved toward the families in the top 10%, and especially in the top 1%, shifting from families with less income and education toward those with more wealth and education. In the 30 years examined, the share of wealth belonging to families in the top 10% increased from 63% in 1989 to 72% in 2019, from $24.3 trillion to $82.4 trillion (an increase of 240%). The share of total wealth held by families in the top 1% increased from 27% to 34% in the same period. In 2019, families in the bottom half of the economy held only 2% of the national wealth, and those in the bottom quarter owed about $11,000 more than they owned.”
   “The relative invisibility of these statistics after forty years under Republican ideology has enabled today’s Republicans to insist the Democrats are ‘socialists’ who are trying to redistribute wealth downward even as our laws are clearly redistributing it upward.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-28-2022

-In 2011 “the top 10 percent of earners hauled in 46.5 percent of all income…the highest proportion since 1917 – and that doesn’t even include money earned from investments. The wealthy have benefited from favorable tax status and the rise in stock prices, while the rest have been hit with a continuing unemployment crisis that has kept wages down.” “American capitalism as currently practiced clearly redistributes income upward. According to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the richest 1 percent of Americans now hold 25 percent of the country’s wealth. The total income share for the 1 percent has jumped more in the US than in any other major Western country since 1960…The top 1 percent’s share of income dipped in some European countries and increased by up to 4 percentages elsewhere, but in the…US, land of opportunity, it soared over 9 percentage points.”
http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/9-economic-facts-will-make-your-head-spin

-Between 1989 and 2018, according to an analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Distributive Financial Accounts data series, “the top one percent increased its total net worth by $21 trillion [while the] bottom 50 percent actually saw its net worth decrease by $900 billion…” And, as at the end of March 2019, “the top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-numbers-behind-americas-appalling-wealth-gap/   (17 June 2019)

-“The gap between the haves and have-nots in the US grew [from 2017 to 2018] to its highest level in more than 50 years of tracking income inequality, according to Census Bureau figures….The nation’s Gini Index, which measures income inequality, has been rising steadily over the past five decades. The Gini Index grew from 0.482 in 2017 to 0.485 [in 2018]…The Gini Index is on a scale of 0 to 1; a score of ‘0’ indicates perfect equality, while a score of ‘1’ indicates perfect inequality, where one household has all the income.”
   “The inequality expansion [in 2018] took place at the same time median household income nationwide increased to almost $62,000 [in 2018], the highest ever measured… But the 0.8% income increase from 2017 to 2018 was much smaller compared to increases in the previous three years…”
   “‘In 2018 the unemployment rate was already low, and the labor market was getting tight, resulting in higher wages. This can explain the increase in the median household income…However, the increase in the Gini index shows that the distribution became more unequal. That is, top income earners got even larger increases in their income, and one of the reasons for that might well be the [2017] tax cut.’”
   “A big factor in the increase in inequality has to do with two large population groups on either end of the economic spectrum…On one side, at the peak of their earnings, are baby boomers who are nearing retirement, if they haven’t already retired. On the other side are millennials and Gen Z-ers, who are in the early stages of their work life and have lower salaries… ‘I would say probably the biggest factor is demographics…A wealth tax isn’t going to fix demographics.’”
   “The areas with the most income inequality last year were coastal places with large amounts of wealth — the District of Columbia, New York and Connecticut, as well as areas with great poverty — Puerto Rico and Louisiana. Utah, Alaska, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota had the most economic equality. Three of the states with biggest gains in inequality from 2017 to 2018 were places with large pockets of wealth — California, Texas and Virginia. But the other six states were primarily in the heartland — Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire and New Mexico.”
https://time.com/5686765/income-inequality-census-gini-index/

-“In 2018, for the first time in history, America’s richest billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than the working class. … [I]n 2018 the average effective tax rate paid by the richest 400 families in the country was 23 percent, a full percentage point lower than the 24.2 percent rate paid by the bottom half of American households. In 1980, by contrast, the 400 richest had an effective tax rate of 47 percent. In 1960, their tax rate was as high as 56 percent. The effective tax rate paid by the bottom 50 percent, by contrast, has changed little over time.”
   “The relatively small tax burden of the super-rich is the product of decades of choices made by American lawmakers, some deliberate, others the result of indecisiveness or inertia…Congress has repeatedly slashed top income tax rates, for instance, and cut taxes on capital gains and estates. Lawmakers have also failed to provide adequate funding for IRS enforcement efforts and allowed multinational companies to shelter their profits in low-tax countries.”
   “The top 400 families have more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of households, while the top 0.1 percent own as much as the bottom 80 percent.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-time-history-us-billionaires-paid-lower-tax-rate-than-working-class-last-year/

Miscellaneous Information Regarding Question 2:
-In 2012 “the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928. The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/business/international/taking-on-adam-smith-and-karl-marx.html?_r=0

-In 2005, US “households in the bottom 20 percent had an average income of $10,655, while the top 20% made $159,583—a disparity of 1,500 percent, the highest gap ever recorded.” (Arianna Huffington, Third World America, Crown Publishers, New York: 2010, 18. Hereinafter, “Huffington.”)

-In 1980, the top 0.1% of Americans (approximately 300,000 people) received 2 percent of all income; in 2015 they received 8 percent. (For the top 1%, the comparable percentages are 8 and 18.) (Pinker 2018, 98)

-In 2010, the Walton family (of Walmart fame) owned more wealth ($89.5 billion) than the bottom 40 percent of America (49 million families). http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jul/31/bernie-s/sanders-says-walmart-heirs-own-more-wealth-bottom-/

-Japan’s Equality: “The 90 percent of Japanese at the bottom of their nation’s wealth distribution own 60.7 percent of their nation’s wealth. In the United States…[t]he bottom 90 percent of Americans own…30.2 percent of US household wealth…Japan’s wealth spreads throughout Japanese society.” (Dec. 2006)
http://www.fpif.org/articles/deeply_unequal_world
   -Feb. 2024 Overview: Despite being in recession (after barely growing for decades) and having a shrinking population (which “falls by about one-half of 1 percent a year”), Japan displays “few signs of the societal discord you might expect…such as accumulating garbage, potholes or picket lines. The country remains remarkably stable and cohesive…” (“[F]or nearly the entirety of the postwar era, [Japan] has been led by the Liberal Democratic Party…” “Prime ministers may come and go, but they are replaceable emissaries of the status quo.”)
   “It’s easy to see why people might be nonchalant. Unemployment is low, the trains run on time…Tourists are flooding the shrines and shopping districts, and the stock market has hit a record high.” Inflation isn’t a problem. “Housing is generally affordable even in Tokyo, and everybody is covered by national health insurance. Crime is low: In 2022, there were just three gun killings in all of Japan. If you forget your cellphone in a restaurant, chances are it will be there when you return.”
   “The lulling sense of calm is heightened by an [awareness that the] outside world [is] plagued by wars and social challenges.” Nevertheless, there are entrenched problems.
   “With its intense work culture and social pressures, Japan is among the unhappiest of developed countries…, and suicide is a major concern. Gender inequality is deep-rooted…, and the poverty rate among single-parent households is one of the highest among wealthy nations. Rural areas are rapidly emptying, and an aging population will increasingly add to pension and caregiving burdens.” (In 2024, “nearly one in five [Japanese] will be 75 or older, a phenomenon that will increasingly expose labor shortages in a country that struggles to accept and integrate immigrants. Already, service gaps are emerging…” But general “decline is gradual, and in some ways barely perceptible.”)
   “The economy — now the world’s fourth largest, after dropping below Germany’s [in February 2024] — dips up and down but has largely weathered a rate of national debt that is the highest in the world.” (The New York Times, Welcome to Japan, Where the Bad News Is the Good News, 29 Feb. 2024)
   -Education and Culture: “To outsiders, Japan is often seen as an orderly society where the trains run on time, the streets are impeccably clean, and the people are generally polite and work cooperatively.” What visitors don’t see is how the educational system, starting from the earliest grades, plays an important role in instilling the values of rigorous discipline, personal responsibility, and concern for the collective that creates such a society. For example, very young “students align their shoes ramrod straight in storage cubbies, clean their classrooms and serve lunch to their classmates.” 
   What can “seem like an almost militaristic devotion to order, teamwork and self-sacrifice” results in hardworking, responsible citizens and workers. However, significant stress can be experienced; along with an insular mindset. (The latter can even lead certain citizens — including the offspring of mixed marriages — to be treated as foreigners. (The New York Times, Documentary Filmmaker Explores Japan’s Rigorous Education Rituals, 5 April 2024)
   -Why East Asian Firms Value Drinking: “Collective harmony and hierarchy are strongly idealised across East Asia. Communication is thus implicit and indirect. Conflict aversion and emotional suppression make it harder to learn what someone else really thinks. So what’s the solution? Alcohol reduces people’s inhibitions. This promotes social bonding and information-sharing….But this exact same cognitive shift also elevates risks of sexual abuse. Women may prefer to leave early. By doing so, they miss out on homosocial boozing and schmoozing.”
   “Cultures vary in how much they value direct or indirect communication….Americans are extremely direct, they say what they think. Brits are a bit more subtle[;] to be polite [they] sugar-coat criticism, in ways that can be confusing for outsiders. Japanese are even more indirect: one must read between the lines. The Dutch and Israelis are famously direct. They don’t mind confrontation, so usually speak their mind and take no offence. By contrast, East Asians are more likely to value collective harmony. This means that they avoid direct confrontation, so artfully use subtle and diplomatic language….Collective harmony, conflict-aversion and strict hierarchy cumulatively entail extremely delicate use of language. For reasons of decorum, it may be better to keep one’s true feelings suppressed.” (24 Feb. 2024)
https://www.ggd.world/p/why-do-east-asian-firms-value-drinking

-“[I]f we compare income growth in France and in the US between 1975 and 2006, we see that growth in GDP per capita was stronger in the US (32.3%) compared to France (27.1%). However, if we remove the richest 1% of citizens in both countries from the calculations, the results are reversed: income growth was stronger in France (26.4%) than in the US (17.9%). [F]rance’s bottom 99% experienced much bigger growth in their material well-being than did the bottom 99% in America.” (Linda McQuaig, The Sport & Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth, Dundurn Press, Toronto: 2019, 203-4. Hereinafter, “McQuaig 2019.”)

-“Even when upward income redistribution creates more wealth…there is no guarantee that the poor will benefit…[T]he trouble is that trickle down usually does not happen very much if left to the market. For example…the top 10 per cent of the US population appropriated 91 per cent of income growth between 1989 and 2006, while the top 1 per cent took 59 per cent. In contrast, in countries with a strong welfare state it is a lot easier to spread the benefits of extra growth that follows upward income redistribution…through taxes and transfers. Indeed, before taxes and transfers, income distribution is actually more unequal in…Germany than in the US, while in Sweden and the Netherlands it is more or less the same as in the US.” (Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, Bloomsbury Press, New York: 2010, 145-6. Hereinafter, “Chang.”)

-The 2008 recession seems to have cemented income and wealth inequality in the US. The “top 10 percent earn a larger share of overall income than they have since the 1930s. The earnings of the top 1 percent took a knock during the recession, but have bounced back. In contrast, the average working family’s income has continued to decline through the anemic recovery. The distribution of wealth has become more concentrated as well” as the “top 1 percent of households now hold a larger share of overall wealth than the bottom 90 percent does.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/business/economy/income-inequality-may-take-toll-on-growth.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=all&
   Wealth inequality for households with at least one child under the age of 18 “grew significantly from 1989 to 2013. The top 1 percent saw their wealth increase by 156 percent, while parents in the bottom half saw their wealth shrink by 260 percent. About a third of all families with children in 2013 had no wealth, only debt.” (“Parental wealth, in addition to parental income, plays an important role in college attendance and graduation [and thus has profound long-term effects on children].”) “Why are so many parents with children faring so poorly? In part, it’s a result of long-term changes in employment. [From 1989 to 2013], employment became more unstable, as companies replaced full-time jobs with part-time work and short-term contracts….The other problem…is debt: not credit card or car loan debt which hasn’t changed much since the late 1980s, but student loan and mortgage debt.” (The New York Times, 20 May 2018, SR 7)

-For graphs displaying inequality and its relation to other variables go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/27/2012-the-year-in-graphs/

-Pareto Principle of Unequal Distribution: “[The] same brutal principle of unequal distribution applies outside the financial domain–indeed, anywhere that creative production is required. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists. A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell [nearly] all the books. A million and a half separately titled books sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies. Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras.”
   “Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), an Italian polymath, noticed [the principle’s] applicability to wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form. It also applies to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words), among other things. Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: ‘to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.’” (Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Random House, Toronto: 2018, 8-9.)
   “Originally, the Pareto Principle referred to the observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the population. More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly. It can mean all of the following things: 20% of the input creates 80% of the result; 20% of the workers produce 80% of the result; 20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue; 20% of [computer] bugs cause 80% of the crashes… [B]e careful when using this” principle as the relationship doesn’t have to be 80/20. For example, 5% of the workers could create 95% of the result or 70% could create 75%. “[T]he 80/20 rule is a rough guide about typical distributions….The key point is that most things in life…are not distributed evenly – some contribute more than others.”
https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-pareto-principle-the-8020-rule/

-Woke Cure for Inequality: Change Culture and Psychology First: “What is America all about, at its best? Equality and liberty. What is the left all about, at its best? Transforming those ideals into lived realities.”
   “But this project keeps running into limits…Everywhere you look, terrible disparities persist. And that persistence should force us to look deeper, beyond attempts to win legal rights or redistribute wealth, to the cultural and psychological structures that perpetuate oppression before law and policy begins to play a part. This is what the terminology of the academy has long been trying to describe — the way that generations of racist, homophobic, sexist and heteronormative power have inscribed themselves, not just on our laws but on our very psyches.”
   “And once you see these forces in operation, you ‘awake’ — and you can’t accept any analysis that doesn’t acknowledge how they permeate our lives.”
   “This means rejecting, first, any argument about group differences that emphasizes any force besides racism or sexism or other systems of oppression. (Indeed, the very measurement of difference — through standardized testing, say — is itself inevitably shaped by these oppressive forces.) Even differences that seem most obviously biological, such as the differences between male and female athletes or the bodies that people find sexually attractive, should be presumed to be primarily culturally inscribed — because how can we know what’s really biological until we’ve finished liberating people from the crushing constraints of gender stereotypes?”
   “It also means rejecting or modifying the rules of liberal proceduralism, because under conditions of deep oppression, those supposed liberties are inherently oppressive themselves. You can’t have an effective principle of nondiscrimination unless you first discriminate in favor of the oppressed. You can’t have real freedom of speech unless you first silence some oppressors.”
   “And all of this is necessarily a cultural and psychological project, which is why schools, media, pop culture and language itself are the essential battlegrounds. Yes, economic policy matters, but material arrangements are downstream of culture and psychology. The socialists have merely gentled capitalism, the environmentalists have merely regulated it. If you want to save the planet or end the rule of greed, you need a different kind of human, not just a system that assumes racist patriarchal values and tries to put them on a leash.”
   “Consider…what we’ve already seen with gay rights. There, the left overthrew a system of deep heteronormative oppression by establishing a new cultural consensus, in the academy and in pop culture and only at the end in politics and law, using argument but also shaming, social pressure and other ‘illiberal’ means.”
   “And look what we’ve learned: That once homophobia diminishes, millions upon millions of young people begin to define themselves as what they truly are, as some form of LGBTQ, slipping the shackles of heteronormativity at last. Which is why the backlash against the spread of transgender identification among kids must be defeated — because this is the beachhead, the proving ground for full emancipation.”
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2023/03/21/ross-douthat-conservative-tries/
-Woke Education: The AP African American Studies Pilot Course Guide (fall 2022) doesn’t mention, even once, Abraham Lincoln in its section on the Civil War. However, it (rightly) refers to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman multiple times.
https://arktimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/AP-African-American-Studies-Pilot-Guide-1.pdf
   Unwoke Education: According to a 1956 Virginia seventh-grade textbook, “Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those for whom they worked. They were not so unhappy as some Northerners thought they were, nor were they so happy as some Southerners claimed. The Negroes had their problems and their troubles. But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to these arguments.”
https://civilrightsheritage.com/2018/04/16/happy-slaves-described-in-7th-grade-virginia-textbook-used-for-20-yrs/
   “A standard progressive complaint about K-12 education policy is that reliance on local property tax revenue creates an inequitable situation where the poorest communities have the smallest budget to hire teachers. This is, in practice, pretty outdated. States have changed their funding formulas significantly, so the biggest gaps these days are between high-spending and low-spending states, not between rich communities and poor communities within a particular state. One area where things really do work that way, though, is policing.”
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-police-are-in-the-wrong-places
-Two Sexes, Many Genders: Carole Hooven, a longtime Harvard lecturer in evolutionary biology, “came under fire after a 2021 television interview in which she said that while diverse gender identities should be respected, there are just two biological sexes, male and female, which are ‘designated by the kinds of gametes we produce.’ The student leader of her department’s diversity task force, writing on social media, called her comments ‘transphobic and harmful,’ and graduate students declined to serve as teaching assistants for her course… Hooven, who did not have tenure, left her position in…2023, after receiving what she has described as no support from the administration.” (“A gamete is a reproductive cell of an animal or plant. In animals, female gametes are called ova or egg cells, and male gametes are called sperm. Ova and sperm are haploid cells, with each cell carrying only one copy of each chromosome. During fertilization, a sperm and ovum unite to form a new diploid organism.”) (The New York Times, The Fight Over Academic Freedom, 16 Feb. 2024)
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Gamete#:~:text=A%20gamete%20is%20a%20reproductive,form%20a%20new%20diploid%20organism.
-Sex (Assigned?) at Birth: Some medical forms now “ask for ‘sex assigned at birth’…(often in addition to gender identity). The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association endorse this terminology…” “This trend began around a decade ago, part of an increasing emphasis in society on emotional comfort and insulation from offense…[Therefore, one] reason for the adoption of ‘assigned sex’…is that it supplies respectful euphemisms, softening what to some nonbinary and transgender people, among others, can feel like a harsh biological reality.” “[B]ut ‘sex assigned at birth’ can confuse people and creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any…This matters because sex matters…for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults….[W]hatever view one takes on the matter [of transgender women participating in female sports], biologically driven athletic differences between the sexes are real.” “[We should not be] repressing the very vocabulary needed to discuss the opinions in the first place….[Using] ‘sex assigned at birth’ — unlike [using other euphemisms such as] ‘larger-bodied’ — is very misleading. Saying that someone was ‘assigned female at birth’ suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork….[It] can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind ‘male’ and ‘female’…[T]he sex binary is not a human invention.” “We need shared language that can help us clearly state opinions and develop the best policies on medical, social and legal issues. That shared language is the starting point for mutual understanding…even if strong disagreement remains.” (The New York Times, The Problem With Saying ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’, 3 April 2024)
-Culture Isn’t Appropriated: “Proscriptions on cultural appropriation assume a kind of cultural purity few objects ever have. Even in ancient times, art was traded and influences were blended until it was often impossible to tell which tribe was the object’s owner — if ownership is the right model for culture at all….Of course cultural appropriation should not be confused with cultural exploitation. Attempts to underpay artists for the work they create should be resisted like any other form of profiteering. But woke insistence on a tribal understanding of culture is not far enough from a Nazi insistence that German music should only be played by Aryans…” “Great adult literature always renders the universal in the particular. How else could so many of us come to care about Tolstoy’s chronicles of the intricacies of Russian aristocracy, Achibie’s portrait of a village boy in war-torn Nigeria…” (“Most of us know, though we’re able to forget it, that members of other tribes feel pain and seek freedom just as we do. The arts can turn a piece of banal knowledge into a truth that has the power to move us, when a hundred propositions leave us cold.”) (Susan Neiman, Left is not Woke, Polity Press: 2023, 54-5. Hereinafter, “Neiman 2023.”)
-Proper Pronouns: “We’ve long known that the personal is political, but when only the personal is political, we have given up hope. Changing your pronouns may feel like radical change, but the vehemence of woke arguments about the importance of pronouns is the expression of people who fear they have little power to change anything else.” As well, does it really change the reality, or show more respect, by using unhoused, differently abled and enslaved in place of homeless, disabled and slave? (Neiman 2023, 138, 140)
-Power Corrupts Justice and Reason: “[Woke] begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization….Woke emphasizes the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage. In the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal.” However, basic logic tell us that while some moral claims to justice are hidden claims to power, we can’t conclude “that every claim to act for the common good is a lie”; not every reason is a self-serving rationalization. The Focaultian “insistence that power is the only driving force goes hand in hand with contempt for reason.” (Neiman 2023, 5, 64, 66)
-Victimology: “Identity politics embodies a major shift that began in the mid twentieth century: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim. Two world wars had undermined the urge to valorize traditional forms of heroism….So the movement to recognize the victims of slaughter and slavery began with the best of intentions. It recognized that might and right often fail to coincide, that very bad things happen to all sorts of people, and that even when we cannot change that we are bound to record it.” (Neiman 2023, 15)
   However, what Woke misses is that “undergoing suffering isn’t a virtue at all, and it rarely creates any.” (Jean Amery, who survived Auschwitz, wrote: “‘We did not become wiser in Auschwitz…In the camp too, we did not become [intellectually] deeper…[We] did not become better, more human, more humane…We emerged from the camp stripped, robbed, emptied out, disoriented–and it was a long time before we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom.’”) “Victimhood should be a source of legitimacy for claims to restitution, but once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and legitimacy, from virtue altogether.” (“Cries of pain deserve a hearing and a response, but they are no more privileged a source of authority than careful arguments.”) While “[p]revailing over victimhood, as [Frederick] Douglass did, could be a source of pride; victimhood itself was not. The rash of contemporaries inventing worse histories than they experienced is something new.” (Neiman 2023, 16-18, 51)
   According to some critics, even when identity politics pursues leftist policies, it tends to resemble traditional interest-group politics, as its aim is to change the distribution of benefits, not the rules surrounding distribution. (Neiman 2023, 21)
-Enlightenment Universalism is not Woke: “Universalism is under fire on the left because it’s conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture’s time, place, and interests. This happens daily in the name of corporate globalism, which seeks to convince us that the key to human happiness is a vast universal mall.” Nevertheless, “[a]ppealing to the humanity of those who are being dehumanized is the universal form we use to respond to oppression everywhere. That [Thomas] Jefferson and Kant [and other Enlightenment figures] did not [always] practice what they preached is no argument against the sermon.” (“Immanuel Kant…contended in 1775 that ‘the Negro…is lazy, soft and trifling.’ John Locke, undoubtedly one of the most influential political philosophers in European history, owned shares in slave-trading companies and leveraged Enlightenment ‘reason’ to defend the practice.”) (Neiman 2023, 21, 23) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critically-cringe-on-susan-neimans-left-is-not-woke/
   “[T]he idea that one law should apply to Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, lords and peasants, simply in virtue of their common humanity is a recent achievement, which now shapes our assumptions so thoroughly we fail to recognize it as an achievement…Let’s also consider the opposite: views like those of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt…[who, inter alia, argued] that universalist concepts like humanity are Jewish inventions meant to disguise particular Jewish interests seeking power in a non-Jewish society. The argument is perilously close to the contemporary argument that Enlightenment universalism disguises particularly European interests seeking power in an increasingly non-white world.” (“If values are empty positivistic categories, on what basis could Nazis be condemned?”) (Neiman 2023, 24-5, 74)
   “The left-wing turn to tribalism is particularly tragic because the early civil rights and anti-colonial movements resolutely opposed tribal thinking…[In addition,] [t]ribalism is a dangerous game…If the demands of minorities are not seen as human rights but as the rights of particular groups, what prevents a majority from insisting on its own?” Furthermore, “for those who believe that only tribal interests are genuine, calls for universal outrage in the face of [anti-black or anti-LGBT or anti-immigrant] crimes make no sense; only arguments based on the interests of particular groups will seem like solid ground.” (Neiman 2023, 26, 27)
-“Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism on the basis of universalist ideas.” “Enlightenment discussion of the non-European world was rarely disinterested. Its thinkers studied Islam in order to find another universal religion that could highlight Christian faults. [V]oltaire argued that Islam was less cruel and bloody than Christianity because it was more tolerant and rational. The Sinophilia that swept the early Enlightenment was not just a matter of curiosity about a distant ancient culture; studying the Chinese was part of an agenda. Bourgeois Frenchmen chafing under the feudal restrictions that gave government contracts to the aristocracy praised the Confucian system, where advancement was based on as much merit as national exams can measure.” Essentially, through the “self-critique it invented, [Enlightenment has] the power to right most of its own wrongs.” (Neiman 2023, 32, 38)
   Woke critics of Enlightenment forget that it “emerged from…a continent soaked with blood….It was a history of plague without cure, and ever-returning religious wars in which countless people died….Women were regularly burned alive as suspected witches, men thrown chained into dungeons for writing a pamphlet. From across the Atlantic came news of barbarities visited on the peoples of the New World. Small wonder that no era…wrote more…about the problem of evil.” (Neiman 2023, 33)
   “Into this landscape the Enlightenment introduced the very idea of humanity…Enlightenment thinkers [of the 17th and 18th centuries] insisted that everyone…is endowed with innate dignity that demands respect. Versions of that idea can be found in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts that claim at least some of us were made in God’s image, but the Enlightenment based it on reason not revelation. [However,] it hardly follows that differences between people do not matter. Individual histories and cultures put flesh on the bones of abstract humanity. What does follow is a notion of human rights that should be guaranteed to everyone, regardless of the history they’ve lived or the culture they inhabit.” (Neiman 2023, 33-4)
   In 1948, in the wake of World War II’s carnage, and despite meaningful differences, it’s impressive that committee members from nations as diverse as Canada, Lebanon, and China, could sign a  document that aimed to transcend cultural and political differences. “With ten abstentions, the fifty-eight nations that belonged to the UN at the time agreed to the 30 articles that make up the [non-binding] Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” (Neiman 2023, 35)
-Conscience: “[E]mpires were not invented by the modern European nations whose advanced ships and guns were more effective in maintaining them than forced marches and pikes. Stronger nations have colonized weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history; indeed, before there were nations in our sense at all. Greeks and Romans built empires, as did the Chinese, the Assyrians, the Aztecs, the Malians, the Khmer, and the Mughals. Those empires operated with varying degrees of brutality and repression, but all of them were based on an equation of might and right, which amounts to no concept of right at all. All of them used their power to compel weaker groups to surrender resources, submit tribute, press soldiers into service for further imperial wars, and accept commands that overrode local custom and law. As far as we know, there was one thing they lacked: a guilty conscience.” (Neiman 2023, 40-1)
   The Enlightenment did question “the imperial project as a whole….Here is Kant’s stinging attack on colonialism: ‘[Consider] the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice they show to lands and people they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands…were at the time of their discovery considered…as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing…[They] oppress the natives, excite widespread wars among the various states, spread famine…and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind. China and Japan, who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused them entry.’…Diderot went even further, arguing that indigenous peoples threatened by European colonizers would have reason, justice, and humanity on their side if they simply killed the invaders like the wild beasts those intruders resembled.” (Neiman 2023, 41-2)
   “The Romans felt no remorse or need to justify their empire. Nor did they tell their subjects that being colonized was good for them. In addition to better ships and weapons, nineteenth-century colonizers had something earlier imperialists lacked: a need for legitimacy.” (Neiman 2023, 45)
   “There are scattered offensive remarks about blacks and Jews in the texts of even the greatest Enlightenment authors. Enlightenment thinkers were men of their time [and]…their struggle to free themselves of prejudice…could never be final. Kant never noticed the contradictions between his occasional racist comments and his systematic theory.” Nevertheless, considering the depth of Enlightenment writing and its application to disadvantaged people, “pace Audre Lorde, sometimes you need the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.” (Neiman 2023, 46, 47)
-Reason v. Nature: “[R]eason’s ability to ask what is natural and what is not is the first step toward any form of progress. One major aim of Enlightenment study of non-European cultures was to question a host of European institutions. Their authority rested on church and state insistence that they were natural, hence immutable. Recall what was considered natural in the eighteenth century: slavery, poverty, the subjection of women, feudal hierarchies, and most forms of illness. Well into the nineteenth century, English clerics argued that attempts to relieve the Irish famine would defy God’s order….Every time you argue that an economic, racial or gender inequality is not inevitable, you are using your reason to question those who insist inequalities are natural.” (Neiman 2023, 67)
   “Defining reason as a matter of courage rather than knowledge was one way to insist on human equality: every peasant can think for herself, as every professor can fail.” (“In an era of drastic censorship and widespread illiteracy, the claim that anyone of any station had a right to think was explosive, and church authorities used their considerable power to suppress it with force.”) “Reason and freedom are connected in more ways than one: knowledge was meant to liberate people from superstition and prejudice, instrumental reasoning from poverty and fear. Enlightenment philosophers were perfectly aware that reason has limits; they just weren’t prepared to let church and state be the ones to draw them.” (Neiman 2023, 67-8)
   “Reason and logic are needed for the instrumental rationality required for finding the best means to an end, including technological solutions designed to…cure illnesses…[However,] [r]eason’s most important function is to uphold the force of ideals. Unless you can show that reality can be changed on the basis of ideas of reason, every demand for change will be dismissed as utopian fantasy.” Hence, Kant’s essay: On the Old Cliché: That May be right in Theory but it Won’t Work in Practice. “There he turns the claims of…realists on their head. Of course the ideas of reasons conflict with the claims of experience. That’s what ideas do. Ideals are not measured by how well they fit reality; reality is judged by how well it lives up to ideals.” (Neiman 2023, 68-9)
   “Reason does have the power to change reality, but to view it as merely a form of power is to ignore the difference between violence and persuasion, and between persuasion and manipulation….As we grow older we learn that most actions are undertaken for more than one reason, but overdetermination doesn’t undermine the distinction between reason and brute force. Those who ignore it [are not] acknowledging the banal truths that frame our lives. For the distinction between reason and violence undergirds the distinction between democracy and fascism…” (Neiman 2023, 70)
-Rhetorical Questions for the Woke: “Because universalism has been abused to disguise particular interests, will you give up on universalism? Because claims of justice were sometimes veils for claims of power, will you abandon the search for justice? Because steps toward progress sometimes had dreadful consequences, will you cease to hope for progress?” (Neiman 2023, 140)

3. Why have advocates of a smaller welfare state and regressive tax policies been able to win elections in the US, even as growing income inequality has made a larger welfare state and progressive tax policies more popular?

-“[S]omething has allowed movement conservatism to win elections despite policies that should have been unpopular with a majority of the voters.…[That something] can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican.”
   After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President “Johnson told…a presidential aide, ‘I think we’ve just delivered the South to the Republican Party for the rest of my life, and yours.’ He was right…The changing politics of race made it possible for a revived conservative movement, whose ultimate goal was to reverse the achievements of the New Deal, to win national elections—even though it supported policies that favored the interests of a narrow elite over those of middle- and lower-income Americans.”
   Running for governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan said: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house he has a right to do so.” Likewise, “Reagan began his 1980 [presidential] campaign with a states’ rights speech outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered; [in 1994] Newt Gingrich was able to take over Congress entirely because of…the switch of Southern whites from overwhelming support for Democrats to overwhelming support for Republicans.”
   (Since the late 1960s, movement conservatives have learned to be more circumspect in their public statements. In 1981, Lee Atwater, a political strategist for Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., said the following in a tape-recorded interview: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N-word, N-word, N-word.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘N-word’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N-word, N-word.’” (It’s true that when “you cut government services, as…Atwater said, ‘blacks get hurt worse than whites.’ What’s lost in that formulation is just how much white people get hurt, too.”))
   Movement conservatism’s “pandering to a subset of white voters by catering to their fear of blacks (and other non-whites such as Hispanics)…has less electoral impact as the US becomes less white and as many whites become less racist.” (In 1980, Hispanics constituted 6.4% of the US population; in 2000, 12.5%.) “The importance of the shifting politics of race is almost impossible to overstate. Movement conservatism as a powerful political force is unique to the United States. The principal reason movement conservatives have been able to flourish here, while people with comparable ideas are relegated to the political fringe in Canada and Europe, is the racial tension that is the legacy of slavery. Ease some of that tension, or more accurately increase the political price Republicans pay for trying to exploit it, and America becomes less distinctive, more like other Western democracies where support for the welfare state and policies to limit inequality is much stronger.” (In other words, if race could be removed as an issue in politics, it’s not unlikely that fiscal policy in the US would resemble Northern Europe’s.) (Krugman 2007, 12, 86, 99-100, 178-9, 211) (Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, One World, New York: 2021, 33, 39. Hereinafter, “McGhee 2021.”)

-At the 2012 Republican National Convention, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, commenting on the rising proportion of non-white voters, had this to say: “The demographics race we’re losing badly. We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Sen. Graham’s concern for Republicans is valid as “[e]xit polls from 2008 showed that 90 percent of GOP voters were white, a homogeneity that has been consistent for more than 30 years, even as the percentage of the electorate that is white has fallen.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-republican-convention-emphasizes-diversity-racial-incidents-intrude/2012/08/29/b9023a52-f1ec-11e1-892d-bc92fee603a7_story.html
   In the 2012 presidential election, Romney did gain a strong majority of the white male vote. However, to be precise, he “won poorly-educated, older white males….Obama actually won, albeit narrowly, among highly educated white males, and won handily among younger highly educated white males.”
http://bernardavishai.blogspot.ca/2012/11/my-demographic-and-ours.html

-“[President] Trump’s [2016] supporters, who were 90 percent white, can continue to put Republican candidates over the top only if an increasing number of minority voters stay away from—or are kept away from—the polls.”
   Making it harder for minorities to vote, restricting legal immigration, and deporting illegal immigrants is consistent with the vision of presidential advisors Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Attorney-General Jeff Sessions who wish to reshape “the United States by tethering it to its European and Christian origins.” They see “changing demographics—the rising number of minority and foreign-born residents—as America’s chief internal threat.”
   “Making it harder to vote tends to help Republicans win office, in part because it tends to have a disproportionate impact on minority voters, who are less likely to have a required form of ID and who generally support Democrats. Over the next four election cycles, the national share of eligible voters who are minorities is projected to rise steadily, to about 40 percent from about 30 percent.” (The New York Times Magazine, 5 March 2017, 38, 41)

-Despite the following facts, the Trump administration and the likes of Tucker Carlson have promoted false information that portrays the US as being seriously harmed by rampant crime, voter fraud and immigration, as such a portrayal caters to their base supporters and justifies policies that advance divisive nationalism.
(i) “[V]iolent crime has been declining sharply for 25 years”. (“[S]ince Sept. 11, [2001], white supremacists and other non-Muslim extremists have killed nearly twice as many Americans as radical Muslims”.) (The New York Times Magazine, 5 March 2017, 38, 41)
(ii) “The number of undocumented immigrants has fallen slightly in the last decade, and these newcomers are less likely to commit violent crimes than people who were born [in the US]”. (The New York Times Magazine, 5 March 2017, 38, 41)
(iii) Immigrants are an engine of economic growth and entrepreneurship. “The Trump administration rejected a study conducted by its own Department of Health and Human Services finding that refugees had a net positive value in the US over the past decade…The study found that between 2005 and 2014, refugees ‘contributed an estimated $269.1 billion in revenues to all levels of government’ through the payment of federal, state, and local taxes — which far outweighed their cost to the country. ‘Overall, this report estimated that the net fiscal impact of refugees was positive over the 10-year period, at $63 billion.’”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/19/16333778/trump-administration-rejects-study-refugees-help-economy
(iv) “[H]alf of the 87 American startup companies worth more than $1 billion in 2016 were founded by immigrants.” (Graham Allison, Destined For War, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York: 2017, 145.)
(v) “[E]conomists broadly reject [the] argument that immigration to the US ‘drives down wages for low-skilled workers nationwide’…As one review of the relevant literature put it, ‘Decades of research have provided little support for the claim that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers.’ Immigrants compete for jobs but also help generate new ones, not only by raising demand for goods and services but also by helping fill out workplaces as they expand to hire native-born workers with different skills. While some studies have found that earlier waves of low-skill immigration may have had short-term impacts on the wages of one relatively small group — high school dropouts — other studies have found ‘small to zero effects,’ as a landmark analysis by the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering stated in 2017.” (The New York Times, 1 May 2022, 21)
(vi) Illegal Immigration Benefits Employers: “[B]arring a major reorganization of America’s immigration system, [matters] are unlikely to improve over the long term. That’s because the ‘solutions’ [–for example, declaring arrests of undocumented persons a priority and separating migrant families–] rarely address the root cause: Unauthorized immigration, for all of the obstacles America throws at it, remains a boon for countless US employers and a reasonable bet for migrants who seek a better life.” “America’s economy has always relied upon a mass of disempowered, foreign-born laborers, whether it was enslaved Africans picking cotton, Chinese building railroads, Irish digging coal, Italians sewing garments or Mexicans harvesting fruit. Even [in 2023], some sectors…seem almost reserved for workers who have been deliberately kept vulnerable.” (The New York Times Magazine, 8 Oct. 2023, 48)
(vii) “[J]ust four cases of in-person voter fraud have been identified from the 2016 presidential election, and a Loyola Law School study in 2014 discovered only 31 credible allegations of fraud in a sample of one billion votes”. Nevertheless, an October 2016 Politico/Morning Consult poll reported that “73 percent of Republicans believed that the election could be stolen from Trump”; and, according to a 2017 survey, “52 percent of Republicans said they would support postponement” of the 2020 presidential election if Trump said this was necessary to “make sure that only eligible American citizens can vote.” (The New York Times Magazine, 5 March 2017, 38, 41) (Levitsky 2018, 61, 197) “[A]n investigation by the Associated Press after the 2020 election found only 475 potential cases of voter fraud in the six states Republicans insisted had been stolen for Biden, most of which were not counted because they were caught, and which, collectively, would not have changed the outcome. These fraudulent votes were not identified by party, and the high-profile cases that have hit the news have involved Republicans, not Democrats.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-2-2022?s=r

-Democrats Promote Voting and Republicans Claim Voter Fraud: “[Republicans] objected when the Democrats in 1993 made it easier to register to vote by passing the so-called Motor-Voter Act, permitting voters to register at certain state offices. The next year, losing Republican candidates argued that Democrats had won their elections with ‘voter fraud.’ In 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters. In 2010 the Supreme Court green-lit the flood of corporate money into our political system with the Citizens’ United decision; in 2013 it gutted the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to election laws in some states, prompting a slew of discriminatory voter ID laws. In 2010, REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) enabled Republicans to take over state legislatures and gerrymander the states dramatically in their own favor.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-25-2022?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&s=r
   “In the two years after Republican candidates swept the 2010 midterm elections, legislators [–backed by the conservative-funded American Legislative Exchange Council–] in forty-one states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how. The measures would most reduce the political influence of low-income voters and young people, who had been inclining leftward….[B]efore long [the measures were] affecting outcomes.” (MacLean 2017, 231)
   (“[B]y the 1920s, in both Europe and the US, ‘the expansion of the voter franchise’ beyond ‘wealthy male landowners’ had produced the…result of enlarged public sectors. Alas, ‘the elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests leads to higher turnout and higher welfare spending.’” (MacLean 2017, 221))

Background: Voter Suppression
-“Since the beginning of [the] Republic, and especially since Emancipation and the stirrings of black suffrage established in the 14th and 15th Amendments [ratified in 1868 and 1870, respectively], restricting the franchise has been a frighteningly effective tool of conservatism and entrenched interests.”
   “America has a long history of attempts to restrict the right to vote to people with property, with sufficient formal education and, too often, to those privileged by gender or race. Political minorities — today’s Republican Party, antebellum slaveholders, Gilded Age oligarchs or rural states empowered disproportionately by the Electoral College — have always feared and suppressed the expansion of both the right and the access to the right to vote. There is no Republican majority in America, except on Election Days.”
   During Reconstruction (1865–77), the bulk of “white Southerners were hellbent on trying to restore white supremacy, especially in voting….In Southern history, when the law wasn’t on the side of voter suppression, intimidation, fraud and murderous violence served as ready alternatives.” (On and after Election Day in 1898 in Wilmington, NC, a “coup and bloody massacre [were] committed by white Democrats[;] 15 to 20 people were murdered in the immediate uprising, while hundreds of black women and children fled into nearby swamps. About 1,400 fled the city during the next 30 days.”)
   “As many Americans broadly embraced the defeat of Reconstruction in the South, viewing it as a futile, even unnatural, racial experiment, historians at the turn of the 20th century declared black suffrage the great demon of a ‘tragic era.’…The ‘undoing’ of Reconstruction could be measured…in the large reductions of black voter turnout in Southern states….[For example,] [b]etween 1896 and 1904, registered black voters in…Alabama [plummeted] from 180,000 to 3,000. Today’s Republicans can only dream of such numbers, but they need only fractions of those counts to succeed.”
   “[T]he right to vote never seemed so important and newly triumphant as on the day President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But it became law against the same resistance and rhetoric left over from the past….Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina trotted out numerous notorious segregationists to testify before his Senate Judiciary Committee. The new power of the Voting Rights Act empowered the Justice Department to scrutinize any changes to voting laws and practices (so-called preclearance) in seven states and other regions of the country with especially notorious records of denying the franchise.”
   The Voting Rights Act has largely been effective. “But since Shelby v. Holder in 2013, in which the Supreme Court struck down the crucial preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act, and even before that in other court challenges, a new era of Republican schemes of voter suppression has emerged. [The Republican Party fears] the loss of power in the face of demographic change it cannot control.”
   “Trump’s newfound opposition to mail-in voting (having voted by mail himself in the past), claiming it is an invitation to fraud, is just one more example of the latest turn in the Republican obfuscation of reality….In 2011 and 2012 alone, before the Shelby decision, 180 new voter restrictions were created in 41 states, and 27 specific laws were enacted in 19 states, nearly all controlled by Republicans.”
   “Conservative voter suppression has always emerged in perceived crises and necessitated new variations on old lies about the threats of blacks or other marginalized groups to ‘civilization’ or social ‘order,’ or the ‘liberty’ of the powerful. After the 2008 election, the Republicans paid lip service to a new inclusivity; the Obama coalition scared them. But the Tea Party, financial conservatives and Trumpian white nationalism have driven them instead into a spiral of moral panic and voter suppression.” (The New York Times, 12 April 2020, SR 6)
-“Republicans’ rejection of the idea that voters have the right to choose their leaders is not a new phenomenon. It is part and parcel of Republican governance since the 1980s, when it became clear to Republican leaders that their ‘supply-side economics,’ a program designed to put more money into the hands of those at the top of the economy, was not actually popular with voters, who recognized that cutting taxes and services did not, in fact, result in more tax revenue and rising standards of living. They threatened to throw the Republicans out of office and put back in place the Democrats’ policies of using the government to build the economy from the bottom up.”
   “So, to protect President Ronald Reagan’s second round of tax cuts in 1986, Republicans began to talk of cutting down Democratic voting through a ‘ballot integrity’ initiative, estimating that their plans could ‘eliminate at least 60–80,000 folks from the rolls’ in Louisiana. ‘If it’s a close race…, this could keep the Black vote down considerably,’ a regional director of the Republican National Committee wrote.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-16-2022

-Southern Border: Effects of Militarization, Nafta, Central American Violence, Poverty: “[In the late 1800s,] western agribusinesses [was] built on migrant labor of Mexicans, Japanese, and poor whites, among others…From the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it without restrictions. But in 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, putting a cap on Latin American immigration for the first time. The cap was low: just 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually.”
   “After 1965, workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal. In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the US and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the US had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.”
   “Then, in the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with US corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work in the American Southeast. This immigration boom had passed by 2007, when the number of undocumented Mexicans living in the US began to decline as more Mexicans left the US than came.”
   “In 2013, with a bipartisan vote of 68–32, the Senate passed a bill giving a 13-year pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, who would have to meet security requirements. It required employers to verify that they were hiring legal workers. It created a visa system for unskilled workers, and it got rid of preference for family migration in favor of skill-based migration. And it strengthened border security. It would have passed the House, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) refused to bring it up for a vote, aware that the issue of immigration would rally Republican voters.” (“Rallying voters with threats of ‘aliens’ swamping traditional society is a common tactic of right-wing politicians…”)
   “But most of the immigrants coming over the southern border now are not Mexican migrants. Beginning around 2014, people began to flee ‘warlike levels of violence’ in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, coming to the US for asylum. This is legal, although most come illegally, taking their chances with smugglers…”
   “The Obama administration tried to deter migrants by expanding the detention of families, and it made significant investments in Central America in an attempt to stabilize the region by expanding economic development and promoting security. The Trump administration emphasized deterrence. It cut off support to Central American countries, worked with authoritarians to try to stop regional gangs, drastically limited the number of refugees the US would admit, and—infamously—deliberately separated children from their parents to deter would-be asylum seekers.”
   “The number of migrants to the US dropped throughout Trump’s years in office. The Trump administration gutted immigration staff and facilities and then cut off immigration during the pandemic under Title 42, a public health order.”
   “The Biden administration coincided with the easing of the pandemic and catastrophic storms in Central America, leading migration to jump, but the administration continued to turn migrants back under Title 42 and resumed working with Central American countries to stem the violence that is sparking people to flee. (In nine months, the Trump administration expelled more than 400,000 people under Title 42; in Biden’s first 18 months, his administration expelled 1.7 million people.)”
   “[In 2022, the] US is in a period of high immigration. Currently, 15 percent of the inhabitants of Washington, DC, are foreign born, [as are approximately 17 percent] of the population of Texas…About 29 percent of the inhabitants of Boston come from outside US borders, as do 36 percent of the inhabitants of New York City.”
   “In the lead-up to the [2022] midterms, Republicans have tried to distract from their unpopular stands on abortion, contraception, marriage equality, and so on, by hammering on the idea that the Democrats have created ‘open borders’; that criminal immigrants are bringing in huge amounts of drugs, especially fentanyl; and that Biden is secretly flying undocumented immigrants into Republican states…”
   “In fact, the border is not ‘open.’ Fences, surveillance technology, and about 20,000 Border Patrol agents make the border more secure than it has ever been. That means apprehensions of undocumented migrants are up…Although much fentanyl is being stopped, some is indeed coming in, but through official ports of entry in large trucks or cars, not on individual migrants, who statistically are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes. And the federal government is not secretly flying anyone anywhere…; US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sometimes moves migrants between detention centers, and CBP transfers unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services.”
   “There are a lot of moving pieces in the immigration debate: migrants need safety, the US needs workers, our immigrant-processing systems are understaffed, and our laws are outdated.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-16-2022
   (English-Speaking Illegals: “Something most Americans don’t learn in high school (though New Mexicans do): Before the [1803] Louisiana Purchase, most of what is today the United States belonged to Spain and was under the administration of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The language of administration was Spanish. And the law was Spanish. Then the illegal immigrants started coming. They spoke English.”) (Robert Scott Horton, Facebook post, 13 April 2024)

-Migrants: Biden Tougher Than Trump: “[W]hat’s the evidence behind the narrative that Trump did so much better than Biden has done in deterring illegal immigration? In November [2023], the libertarian-leaning Cato Institution analyzed the government data and reached this conclusion: ‘Migrants were more likely to be released after a border arrest under President Trump than under President Biden. In absolute terms, the Biden DHS is removing 3.5 times as many people per month as the Trump DHS did.’” (19 Jan. 2024)
https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/jamie-dimon-joins-the-trump-normalizers
  Trump Blocks Border Action: “[A]lthough MAGA Republicans have insisted the border is such a crisis that no aid to Ukraine can pass until it is addressed, Trump is preventing congressional action on the border because he wants to run on the issue of immigration. [In January 2024,] Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told a closed meeting of Senate Republicans that ‘the nominee’ wants to run his campaign on immigration, adding, ‘We don’t want to do anything to undermine him.’”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-24-2024

-Trump Attacks Immigrants Due to Racism and Zero-Sum Ignorance: “Trump and those around him are profoundly hostile to immigration in general. Partly this is xenophobia, if not outright racism. If you repeatedly declare, as Trump has, that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ you don’t really care if they came here legally, you’re all but saying that what matters is whether they’re white.”
   “But it’s not just that. People close to Trump have a zero-sum view of the economy, in which every job taken by someone born outside the US is a job taken away from someone born here….Remarkably, [in 2020] Trump issued an executive order meant to deny visas to highly skilled foreigners…” In practice this undermined US competitiveness.
   “Far from taking jobs away, foreign-born workers have played a key role in America’s recent success at combining fast growth with a rapid decline in inflation. And foreign-born workers will also be crucial to the effort to deal with our longer-term [demographic] problems.”
   One key to our impressive economic “performance has been rapid growth in the US labor force, which has risen by 2.9 million since the eve of the pandemic [in 2020]. How much of that growth was due to foreign-born workers? All of it. The native-born labor force declined slightly [since 2020], reflecting an aging population, while we added three million foreign-born workers.” And as America essentially enjoys full employment in 2024, those foreign-born workers didn’t take jobs away from…native-born Americans. (“The unemployment rate among native-born workers averaged just under 3.7 percent in 2023, as low as it’s been since the government began collecting the data.”)
   Complementary: Much research shows that “immigrant workers often turn out to be complementary to the native-born work force, bringing different skills that, in effect, help avoid supply bottlenecks and allow faster job creation.”
   Fiscal Saviors: “Foreign-born workers are crucial to America’s fiscal future. To a first approximation, the federal government is a system that collects taxes from working-age adults and spends much of the proceeds on programs that help seniors, such as Medicare and Social Security. Cut off the flow of immigrants, who are largely working-age adults, and our system would become much less sustainable.” (The New York Times, Immigrants Make American Stronger and Richer, 5 Feb. 2024)

-Jewish-Bolshevik Immigration: “During the 1920s, America experienced a backlash to the massive immigration from eastern and central Europe that had occurred in recent decades. A push to restrict, if not halt, the influx of what were seen as inferior races that could dilute the American bloodstock coincided with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, an economic recession, and the rise of fascist movements abroad, which were often seen as representing a necessary and desirable bulwark against Russian Bolshevism. Indeed, after 1919, the Red Scare morphed into a permanent campaign on the Right to ferret out domestic traitors beholden to Moscow.”
   “As the conviction hardened that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same, fears of the subversion of traditional American values by immigrants from eastern and central Europe, over a million of them Jewish, became ubiquitous. ‘Throughout the US…there was near universal concern about Jews infiltrating cherished organizations…’ Henry Ford published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his Dearborn Independent and claimed that a vast Jewish conspiracy aimed to overthrow American government. [President] Wilson was not only a virulent racist who resegregated the federal government, but he also expelled a  number of Jewish radicals…to Russia during the 1919 Red Scare…” Wilson’s successor, Warren Harding, backed restrictions on immigration and in 1921 stated that the US’s race problem “‘is a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.’” (Jacob Heilbrunn, America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators, Liveright Publishing, New York: 2024, 53-5. Hereinafter, “Heilbrunn 2024.”)

-1965: Racist Immigration Policy Ended: “In 1965, [President] Johnson…approved the Hart-Celler Act, which lifted the racist immigration ban that prevented immigrants coming from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. America’s disgraceful history of barring immigrants based on nationality began with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which expanded to the Immigration Act of 1917 that banned everyone from Asia and the Pacific Islands. Finally, in 1924, using the ugly science of eugenics as their defense, the US government expanded the restriction to every country except for a slim quota of Western and Northern Europeans. All other immigrants were restricted since they were from inferior stock that would ‘corrupt’ the American populace. [President] Johnson downplayed the seismic importance of the Hart-Celler legislation…He had no idea that the law would irrevocably change the face of America. Since 1965, 90 percent of American immigrants have hailed from outside Europe. By 2050, the Pew Research Center predicts, white Americans will become the minority.” (Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, One World, New York: 2021, 72.)
   Hitler Impressed: The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act “reduced by nearly 95 percent the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe–in other words, Italians, Poles, and Jews. A young agitator in prison in Germany was impressed by the changes wrought by the law. ‘They refuse to allow immigration of elements which are bad from the health point of view,’ wrote Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, ‘and absolutely forbid naturalization of certain defined races.’” (More broadly, “the antisemitic Nazi policies that preceded the Holocaust were inspired, in large part, by segregationist laws and ideals from the US….[W]hen the Nazis were criticized for their policies they ‘pointed to Mississippi. They were able to say: You say that we should not treat these people who we regard as inferior badly, but you do it…You have lynchings in the United States. You make it difficult for them to vote. So, how dare you reproach us for this?’”)
(Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, Mariner Books, New York: 2022, 351. Hereinafter, “Hochschild 2022.”)
https://www.insider.com/nazis-studied-us-eugenics-jim-crow-laws-model-policies-2022-9
   Eugenics Justified Prejudice: “The early 1900s brought the fad of eugenics, which categorized people into an elaborate racial hierarchy of Teutonic, Alpine, Celtic, Mediterranean, Semitic, and other types. To make these distinctions, enthusiasts of eugenics carefully measured ears, noses, and, above all, skulls. They advocated ‘race improvement’ by encouraging the breeding of ‘superior’ races and restricting that of ‘inferior’ ones–whose numbers might otherwise overwhelm us all. Eugenics infused anti-immigration campaigning with the kind of overt racism that many whites had long directed at Blacks and Native Americans, and it enabled believers to cloak their prejudices with a statistical, scientific-sounding veneer. Just before the First World War, for example, a prominent eugenicist examined a cross-section of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island and classified 80 percent of Hungarians, 79 percent of Italians, and 76 percent of Jews as ‘morons.’” (Hochschild 2022, 49-50)
   “Economic stress exacerbated [anti-immigrant feeling], for in such times it is always tempting to find scapegoats, whether newcomers ‘just off the boat’ threatening to take your job and do it for lower pay, or people who seem to be prospering when you’re not. During a severe depression in the 1890s, for instance, there were boycotts of Catholic merchants, and mobs set fire to Jewish-owned shops and houses in Louisiana and Mississippi and stoned Jews in northern cities.” (And, of course, there were many politicians who “made racism central to their careers–and this was true not only of segregationist southerners.”) (Hochschild 2022, 50)
   Mengele’s Rockefeller Support: “In the US, eugenicists like Charles Davenport…had been promoting [forced sterilization] since the early 1900s. Their goal was to protect the population from undesirable traits, at least by their racist standards. Blacks, Jews, immigrants, and indigenous peoples were deemed genetically inferior, as were the poor, criminal, and disabled. Their genes had to be kept separate or removed from white, Nordic, and Anglo-Saxon stock. By 1937, forced sterilization was legal in thirty-two states. Davenport [an American zoologist and Harvard instructor] set up a laboratory at the Carnegie Institution that kept index cards on nearly a million ordinary citizens and advocated for strict immigration laws and sterilization of the unfit. When the first German eugenics research was done in the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation helped fund it. Josef Mengele, later known as the Angel of Death for his medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, was among those Rockefeller supported. The Nazis went on to forcibly sterilize nearly four hundred thousand people.” (“Wiesloch was no ordinary nursing home[;] it was part of a network of facilities used to exterminate nearly a third of a million physically and mentally disabled Germans between 1939 and 1945. Some were injected with phenobarbital…; others were placed in specially designed gas chambers or simply starved to death. Two weeks later, the families of the victims would receive a forged death certificate and letter of consolation…Some of the [victims’] disorders…were psychological (idiocy, dementia, schizophrenia, exhibitionism); some physical (epilepsy,…blindness, progressive paralysis); and some behavioral (theft, fraud, alcoholism, sodomy, homosexuality, pedophilia, and other sexual offenses).”) (Bilger 2023, 146, 147-8)

-Second-Generation Immigrants: “[R]esearch linking millions of fathers and sons dating to the 1880s shows that children of poor immigrants in America have had greater success climbing the economic ladder than children of similarly poor fathers born in the US. That pattern has been remarkably stable for more than a century, even as immigration laws have shifted and as the countries most likely to send immigrants to the US have changed.”
   There are two explanations for why second-generation immigrants experience greater economic mobility. First, the “fathers may have artificially low incomes. A lawyer trained in another country who must drive a cab in America, for example, would appear in this economic data to have a lower income than his skills and training would suggest. It’s likely that language barriers, discrimination or limited job networks would contribute to depressing incomes for immigrant fathers…” Second, where a child lives influences economic mobility and “immigrants have tended to cluster in common international ports of entry, in major cities, in communities where jobs are easier to find. The places they have moved to have frequently been the same places that have offered better economic mobility to everyone.” Unlike US-born families, immigrants are not “bound by generations of family ties or by the feeling they can’t leave a particular place…” (The New York Times, 29 Oct. 2019, B4)

-Benjamin Franklin: Germans Unassimilable: “[A]t nearly every stage of [American] history, the people who were already established as American citizens found convenient targets to designate as unable to assimilate: the indigenous peoples; conquered Mexicans; slaves; or the newest immigrants, who were usually classified as nonwhite.”
   “In 1751…Benjamin Franklin wrote: ‘perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country, for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind.’ He favored ‘the English’ and ‘white people,’ and did not want Pennsylvania to become a ‘colony of aliens,’ who ‘will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.’ He was speaking of the Germans.”
   “The eventual whiteness of German-Americans saved them from being thrown en masse into internment camps during World War II, unlike Japanese-Americans.” (The New York Times, 20 May 2018, SR 7)

-Woodrow Wilson: Undesirable Immigrants: “The US, like the 13 colonies before it, had long been dominated by Protestants whose ancestors were from Great Britain and northwestern Europe. But by 1890, most of those coming ashore at Ellis Island and other ports of entry, the women in kerchiefs, the men in fur hats or workmen’s brimmed caps, were now from Italy, eastern Europe, or the Russian Empire. And they were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish. More than four million arrived on American shores from Italy alone in the 35 years before the First World War. By 1900, the majority of men in Manhattan over the age of 21 were foreign-born.” (Hochschild 2022, 48)
   “Many in the country’s Anglo-Saxon elite were appalled by these changes, including [Wilson then] a young college professor who wrote in 1902: ‘Throughout the [19th] century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main stream of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country…but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.’” (Hochschild 2022, 48-9)

-More Contact, Less Prejudice: Academic findings covering the US and Germany found that “anti-immigrant views are strongest in the states with fewest immigrants….For example, West Virginia, with the lowest unauthorized immigrant proportion, also is the least immigrant supportive….[And, more generally,] in 477 studies of nearly two hundred thousand people across thirty-six cultures, intergroup contact predicted lower prejudice in every culture….The more interracial contact South African Blacks and whites have, the less prejudice they feel…The more contact straight people have with gays and lesbians, the more accepting they become. The more contact people have with transgender individuals, the less trans prejudice they express….For white students, having a Black roommate improves racial attitudes…The more contact younger people have with older adults, the more favorable their attitudes toward older people.” (David G. Myers, How Do We Know Ourselves: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 2022, 174, 176-7. Hereinafter, “Myers 2022.”)
   Exposure Effect: “Hidden beneath most unconscious prejudice is a simple natural bias–a preference for what’s familiar and a wariness of things unfamiliar. This seemingly hardwired tendency led our ancestors to respond adaptively to things that were either familiar and generally safe or unfamiliar and possibly dangerous. ‘If it’s familiar…it has not eaten you yet.’…As we become familiar with others, we usually begin to like them more…Even infants, by three months, begin to prefer photos of the race they see most often–usually, of course, their own race.” (Myers 2022, 203-4)
   Familiarity Breeds Belief: “Our preference for the familiar is akin to, and likely feeds, the persuasive power of repetition. As mere exposure breeds liking, so mere repetition breeds belief. Repeated statements…become easy to process and remember, and thus to seem more true….The mere repetition effect is well understood by political manipulators….George Orwell understood. His world of Nineteen Eighty-Four harnessed the controlling power of mere repetition. ‘Freedom is slavery.’ ‘Ignorance is strength.’ ‘War is peace.’ As Hitler explained in Mein Kampf, ‘All effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans.’ Familiarity breeds belief.” (Myers 2022, 207)

4. Which Republican leader wrote the following? “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt…, a few other Texas oil millionaires…Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

-By the time US President Eisenhower wrote those words in 1954, Republican leaders had, as a matter of political necessity, accepted the institutions created by the New Deal. (In fact, taxes on corporations and the rich were even higher during the Eisenhower presidency than they had been under FDR.) As the great majority of Americans are assisted by programs such as social security, it should not be surprising, that when facts are understood, progressive government is popular.
   The moderate Republican trend of domestic governance continued under President Richard Nixon. While Nixon exploited the race issue to get elected in 1968, he “governed as a liberal in many ways: He indexed Social Security for inflation, created Supplemental Security Income…, [raised taxes, ended military conscription, embraced affirmative action to promote equal employment opportunity,] expanded government regulation of workplace safety and the environment [by creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency], and even tried to introduce universal health insurance.”
   By the mid-1970s movement conservatism had the organization in place to achieve power. What facilitated the acquisition of power was “a double crisis, both foreign and domestic. In foreign affairs the fall of Vietnam was followed by what looked at the time like a wave of Communist victories in Southeast Asia and in Africa, then by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and—unrelated, but feeding the sense of anxiety—the Islamic revolution in Iran and the humiliation of the hostage crisis. On the domestic front a combination of bad policy and the energy crisis created the nightmare of stagflation, of high unemployment combined with double-digit inflation.”
   “[T]he dire mood of the 1970s made it possible for movement conservatives to claim that liberal policies had been discredited. And the newly empowered movement soon achieved a remarkable reversal of the New Deal’s achievements.” (Krugman 2007, 58-9, 62, 81, 122-3)
   Nevertheless, the US “allocates 19 percent of its GDP to social services, and despite the best efforts of conservatives and libertarians the spending has continued to grow….Indeed, social spending…is even higher than it appears, because many Americans are forced to pay for health, retirement, and disability benefits through their employers rather than the government….For all their protestations against big government and high taxes, people like social spending.” (Pinker 2018, 109)

-1935 Social Security Act Refashioned Government-Citizen Relationship: “[I]n 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While FDR’s New Deal had put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.”
   “The Social Security Act is known for its payments to older Americans, but it did far more than that. It established unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship of the government to its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.”
   “The driving force behind the law was FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she lasted from 1933 to 1945. She brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had harped on the idea of a ‘rugged individualism’ in which men worked their way up, providing for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that people in communities had always supported each other. The vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality…”
   “The [1911] Triangle Shirtwaist Fire turned Perkins away from voluntary organizations to improve workers’ lives and toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system, the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.”
   “The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering caused by the Great Depression made Perkins realize that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people.”
   “Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation. They said they worried that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that those displaced by the Depression had added new pressure to the idea of old-age insurance….By the time the [Social Security Act] came to a vote in Congress, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.” (Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook post, 14 Aug. 2021)

-Same Orientation from Lincoln to TR to FDR to Joe Biden: “In his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, FDR condemned the policies of his predecessors that turned the government over to businessmen, declaring that ‘the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.’ He pledged to give the American people a ‘new deal’ to replace the one that had led them into the Depression, and to lead a ‘crusade to restore America to its own people.’”
   “But FDR was not the first president to see ordinary Americans as the heart of the nation and to call for a government that protected them, rather than an economic elite. FDR’s distant relative Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, made a similar argument as president thirty years earlier. Responding to a world in which a few wealthy industrialists—nicknamed ‘robber barons’—monopolized politics and the economy, he called for a ‘square deal’ for the American people. ‘[W]hen I say that I am for the square deal,’ TR said in 1910, ‘I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.’ He called for conservation of natural resources, business regulation, higher wages, and ‘social’ legislation to create a ‘new nationalism’ that would rebuild the country. Overall, he wanted ‘a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.’”
   “But TR didn’t invent the idea of government investment in and protection of ordinary Americans either. In his New Nationalism speech, TR pointed back to his revered predecessor, Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the government must serve the interests of ordinary people rather than those of elite southern enslavers. When South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate in 1858 that society was made up of ‘mudsills’ overseen by their betters, who directed their labor and, gathering the wealth they produced, used it to advance the country, Lincoln was outraged. Society moved forward not at the hands of a wealthy elite, he countered, but through the hard work of ordinary men who constantly innovated. A community based on the work and wisdom of farmers, he said in 1859, ‘will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.’ In office, Lincoln turned the government from protecting enslavers to advancing the interests of workingmen, including government support for higher education.”
   -Bidenomics: In 2023, Biden has “embraced the term ‘Bidenomics,’ a term coined by his opponents who insist that their embrace of tax cuts is the only way to create a healthy economy. But Bidenomics is simply a new word for a time-honored American idea.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-28-2023
  As of the end of 2023, under the Biden administration, America has seen the largest creation of manufacturing jobs since the sixties. “Official statistics from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics show that manufacturing employment has risen by 789,000 since Biden took office in January 2021….The first three-quarters of those job gains represented a return to pre-recession levels. But historical post-recession patterns show that it’s rare for manufacturing jobs to bounce back at all.” In fact, “the nation’s current manufacturing jobs rebound is the strongest at this point after a recession in 72 years.”
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/dec/13/joe-biden/fact-checking-joe-biden-on-manufacturing-jobs/
   Biden’s record in a nutshell: “major enhancements of Obamacare, student debt relief, big infrastructure spending, large-scale promotion of semiconductors and green energy that have led to a surge in manufacturing investment”, unemployment at record lows (with manufacturing employment fully recovering from the Covid shock), and inflation brought under control. As of the end of 2023, and based on the change in real GDP, the country with the best record in economic recovery from the pandemic—by far—is the US. (“[S]ince the end of 2019 [to the end of 2023] the American economy has grown about 8%, while the EU has grown about 3%, Japan 1%, and Britain not at all.”)
(The New York Times, Bidenomics Is Still Working Very Well, 22 Feb. 2024)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/28/global-economy-gdp-inflation/
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-18-2024
   “[Biden] did preside over a burst of inflation, but so did the leaders of other advanced economies, pretty clearly indicating that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than policy, were responsible.” And inflation was eventually brought under control “without the high unemployment some economists asserted would be necessary.” (Inflation was a serious problem: “prices of groceries for home consumption rose 19.6 percent between January 2021 and January 2023, then another 1.2 percent over [2023].” Interesting to note that when egg prices more than doubled it was due to an outbreak of avian flu.)
   “Overall, wage gains have more than kept up with inflation, and wage gains have been most rapid for lower-paid workers. As a result, most workers’ wages adjusted for inflation are higher than before the pandemic, and are actually above the prepandemic trend.” In fact, Biden “has presided over a significant reduction in inequality.” (Since the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, “[w]ages have gone up for all but the top 20% of Americans, whose wages have fallen, reducing inequality.”)
(The New York Times, Who Really Stands With American Workers, 29 Feb. 2024)
(The New York Times, Paul Krugman Newsletter, 27 Feb. 2024)
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-18-2024
   “Over the past four years, wages of nonsupervisory workers, who account for more than 80 percent of private employment, are up by about 24 percent, while consumer prices are up less, around 20 percent.”  “Without question, there are Americans who are hurting financially — sadly, this is always true to some extent, especially given the weakness of America’s social safety net. But in general, Americans are relatively optimistic about their own finances….Americans are upbeat not just about their own circumstances; they’re also upbeat about their local economies….Basically, Americans are saying, ‘I’m doing OK, people I know are doing OK, but bad things are happening somewhere out there.’…The [main explanation:] partisanship.” (The New York Times, Good Economy, Negative Vibes: The Story Continues, 8 April 2024)
   Trump’s record in a nutshell: Despite campaigning “as a different kind of Republican, [Trump] mostly governed as a standard conservative. His promises to rebuild America’s infrastructure — which drew pushback from Republicans in Congress — became a running joke. His biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut that was a big giveaway to corporations and high-income Americans. His attempt at health care ‘reform’ would have gutted Obamacare without any workable replacement, causing millions of Americans to lose health insurance coverage. Trump did depart from GOP orthodoxy by imposing substantial tariffs on imports…which probably destroyed jobs on net.” (For more information on Trump’s trade policy, read the portion of the response to question 22. titled “2024 Trump Proposal.”)
   Despite Trump’s ill-conceived policies, the US economy “was running close to full employment on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic [in February 2020]. But this mainly reflected the fact that Republicans in Congress, who delayed recovery from the 2008 financial crisis by squeezing government spending, suddenly loosened the purse strings once Trump was in office.” (The New York Times, Who Really Stands With American Workers, 29 Feb. 2024)

-MAGA Lens Distorts Perceptions: “[2023] was a very good one for the US economy. Job growth was strong, unemployment remained near a 50-year low and inflation plunged….What is a mystery is why the improving economy hasn’t been reflected in public perceptions.” One important explanation: partisanship. “Indeed, weak consumer sentiment may be almost entirely about MAGA….Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say that the economy is good when their party holds the White House and bad when it doesn’t….Republican assessments of the economy soared when Donald Trump took office [in 2017]. Even during the pandemic recession, when unemployment rose to almost 15 percent, Republicans had a more favorable view of the economy than they did in the Obama years. And when Joe Biden came in, almost all Republicans declared that the economy was bad — a view that has barely budged in the face of good macroeconomic news.”
(New York Times, Paul Krugman Newsletter, 9 Jan. 2024)
https://static.nytimes.com/email-content/PK_sample.html

-1947 Mont Pelerin: Conservative Oppose Active Government: “[A] number of conservative economists…were enormously frustrated in the early years following the Second World War, when the impressive performance of government in lifting America out of the Great Depression and winning the war against Hitler had generated great public confidence in government’s ability to act to improve the lives of Americans. With the public applauding the extension of government, particularly into areas like social security, a small international cadre of distinguished conservative economists famously met at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland, in 1947 to strategize about undermining the considerable public and academic support for government’s expanded role. These economists, including Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, were to play a significant role in overturning the consensus supporting John Maynard Keynes and his advocacy of government intervention in the economy. The Swiss gathering was the launch of a robust revival of laissez-faire economics.” (McQuaig 2019, 43)
   Hayek: Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, “was written as a critique of British politics, a warning that Labour Party socialism might lead eventually to totalitarianism. The book’s weakest point…is that Hayek’s main prediction never came true. Although Britain did go enthusiastically socialist after the war, it never abridged its traditional freedoms of speech, assembly, the press, and so on. The country even reversed itself in the 1970s and swung energetically back toward the market.” Thus, Hayek was wrong to write that markets have to be free, or else other freedoms will disappear. (“Indeed, before it went into effect and became immensely popular, Medicare…was denounced as ‘socialized medicine,’ amid dire warnings that it would destroy American freedom.”) (Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire, Metropolitan Books, New York: 2012, 164.) (Krugman 2020, 313)
   Kochs: “Many wealthy American families and corporate interests have contributed to the funding of the conservative assault on Keynesianism and New Deal thinking…But none of these donors stands out like the Koch brothers, who built a family-owned, oil-related business into one of the richest corporate empires in history….Operating mostly behind the scenes, and driven by an abiding hatred of government and anything that smacked of distributing wealth more broadly, the Kochs invested massively over the next few decades in creating a vast network of think tanks, academic programs, front groups, political action bodies, campaigns, and lobbyists to influence the public, the media, and politicians…” (McQuaig 2019, 46-7)
   Nevertheless, “American voters are actually center-left in their policy preferences. But they’re also conservative, not in the left-right sense, but in the sense that it’s much easier to sell them on preserving existing social programs [such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid] than on major new initiatives [such as Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health reform plan, which entails the elimination of private health insurance].” (Paul Krugman, nytimes.com, 11 Feb. 2020)
   “[O]n the really big [economic] issues, the argument is essentially a philosophical debate about values rather than policy analysis, and that there’s a legitimate conservative position that no amount of wonkery can debunk.” For example, in the worldview of Robert Nozick “people should have the right to act as they like, so long as it doesn’t hurt others, and this principle of freedom should prevail even if you might prefer that some people have more and others less. Nozick acknowledged that there would have to be some limits to libertarianism: Individuals can’t simply refuse to pay the taxes that support national defense, nor does freedom of choice include the freedom to, say, dump toxic waste into a river. But the Nozickian view does call for a government as limited as possible, certainly much smaller than the big welfare states all advanced countries currently operate.” (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 27 July 2021)

-Socialism v. Social Democracy: While “socialism can mean different things to different people[,] the classic definition is ‘government ownership of the means of production’…” Nevertheless, a standard textbook definition normally includes the three following elements: 1) state ownership of key industries, 2) economic planning by government in conjunction with business and labor, and 3) a large welfare state financed by high taxes. However, what the bulk of “Americans who support ‘socialism’ actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: A market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation. They want us to look like Denmark or Norway, not Venezuela.” They essentially want some variant of the third element of socialism. (Krugman 2020, 313)
https://www.eastoregonian.com/opinion/columnists/krugman-trump-versus-the-socialist-menace/article_38d87aba-2b44-11e9-9a55-8bb6da4eb9e1.html  (7 Feb. 2019)

-Progressive Economics v. Progressive Culture: “While socialism might not poll well with voters, Democratic proposals to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and lower the age of Medicare eligibility do.”
   “But on social, cultural and religious issues, particularly those related to criminal justice, race, abortion and gender identity, the Democrats have taken up ideological stances that many of the college-educated voters who now make up a sizable portion of the party’s base cheer but the rest of the electorate does not.”
   “Republicans have sought to exploit this gap by waging an aggressive culture war against Democrats.” Accordingly, they highlight, for example, critical race theory and transgender issues in fundraising and campaign ads.
   “[T]he Democrats’ leftward trend, whether real or perceived, is resoundingly popular with…the party’s staff members and activists and especially its donors, who fund a slew of nonprofits and super PACs that relentlessly push the progressive line. In America’s very blue and very online precincts, performative positioning is often accepted as a substitute for the compromises that can be necessary to secure legislation — [such as] Schumer and Pelosi donning kente cloth and kneeling in the Capitol to demonstrate solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters in lieu of actual police reform…” Such performances impact elections, as a progressive’s social media post (or tweet) in Brooklyn, New York can become part of a Republican’s campaign in Butte, Montana. (The New York Times Magazine, 3 July 2022, 29)
   Better Fund the Police: “In some states it is harder to get a license to wash, cut, and dry someone’s hair than it is to get a license to enforce the law with a lethal weapon. [Grossly inadequate police training] suggests that slogans like ‘Defund the police’ are misguided. What’s needed is better funding: for police training to learn to distinguish problems of crime and problems of mental health…; for community programs that provide skills, training, and hope for young people of color whose otherwise hopeless prospects make rage, or at least drug peddling, the most reasonable of available options.” (Neiman 2023, 29)

-FDR Electrified the South Out of Poverty: “[T]he American South was transformed and elevated out of crippling poverty” by “what current Republicans call ‘socialism’.” “In 1921, the southern states were severely impoverished operating at an economic level closer to Latin America than the American northeast. They had a severe shortage of modern conveniences that the northeastern, midwestern and Pacific states had. They had very little electricity, and were roughly at the same level of human development as northern South America. In 1932, FDR’s publicly funded New Deal addressed this by electrifying parts of the south through the Tennessee Valley Authority. It also addressed issues of flooding, and a reforesting initiating a revival of growth in the south.”
   “Another publicly funded New Deal initiative was the Hoover Dam (finished in 1935) allowing water and water generated power in the southwest. It started the growth of the southwest and brought water to southern Nevada, Arizona and southern California.”
   “In the late 1940’s, LBJ initiated public spending to electrify west Texas and it spurred massive economic growth. He and FDR were called socialist by the very people whom these programs lifted to prosperity.” (Scott Horton, Facebook post, 13 July 2022)

-Anarchists, Don’t Underestimate Reformism: Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was an influential anarchist, political activist, and writer in the US and Europe. In 1920, when she visited a factory in the USSR, “she was astonished at the ‘militarization of labor’ and the control of factories by party officials rather than by the workers. She was especially shocked at ‘the sight of pregnant women working in suffocating tobacco air and saturating themselves and their unborn with the poison.’ Legislation protecting working women, which Goldman had considered ‘a cheap palliative’ in the US, now seemed imperative.” (Marian J. Morton, Emma Goldman and the American Left: “Nowhere at Home”, Twayne, New York: 1992, 108. Hereinafter, “Morton 1992.”)
   In December 1919 the US deported Goldman and she went to Soviet Russia. “Although she…had been curious to see the Communist experiment and had great hopes for it, [she] quickly became appalled by its violent suppression of all dissent. After two years, deeply disillusioned, [she] left Russia forever…” (Hochschild 2022, 350)
   While Goldman was never clear how an anarchist society would operate, she did express the concern that “a Socialist state, its powers swollen by control over the economy, might be even more oppressive than a state under capitalism.” (She did describe the “anarchist society in standard terms: ‘voluntary co-operation of productive groups, communities and societies loosely federated together.’ But this society was only the means to the end. The end was the development of the individual’s ‘latent qualities and innate disposition…’”) (Morton 1992, 64, 56)
   FDR’s Reformism: “[A]lthough the Depression persisted and worsened, there was no revolution in the US. Hundreds of thousands of workers joined unions, and there were scattered outbursts of violence…But most Americans blamed themselves or each other, not free-enterprise capitalism, for their financial problems. Liberal solutions to the long-running economic downturn, the second phase of the New Deal in 1935, included a more progressive income tax, social insurance in the form of the Social Security Act, and the National Labor Relations Act, or Wagner Act, which put the federal stamp of approval on unions and collective bargaining. None of these measures was revolutionary or even new. Most had been discussed since the Progressive period [1896-1917]. But in the context of long-term unemployment and hunger, the legislation appeared at least reformist.” (Morton 1992, 141-2)
   CPUSA Works With Liberals and Leftists Against Fascists: “Also in 1935, liberal reformism became good enough for the CPUSA. Frightened by fascism on its borders and searching for allies among the western democracies, the Soviet Communist party ordered a reversal of its earlier demand for an immediate and exclusively Communist-led revolution….In the US, this policy meant a ‘Popular Front’ against fascism, a cease-fire in the CPUSA’s attacks on the ‘social fascist’ Socialists, and collaboration with whatever liberal and leftist elements would go along….Communists formed or controlled a wide variety of ‘front organizations’ with left-wing and liberal memberships, including the American Writers Congress, the National Negro Congress, and the American Student Union.” Communists were effective union organizers. “Communists led the United Auto Workers in the victorious sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Michigan, and Communists became officials in many industrial and white-collar unions…By 1939 the party had begun to support FDR for a third term. The CPUSA membership was estimated at 80,000 to 90,000…The party also exerted influence over thousands of nonmembers through front groups and unions.” “But as [the] war ended and the Cold War against international communism began, the US experienced a second ‘red scare.’ Scores of CPUSA leaders…went to prison. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of the enormity of Stalin’s purges, and then the Soviet invasion of Hungary, cost thousands of American Communists their last illusions and the CPUSA much of its remaining membership.” (Morton 1992, 142-3, 154)

-American Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Reaction to Government Policies –> Racist Militias: In America, the meaning of the word socialism “comes not from international socialism, in which the government owns the means of production, but rather from the earlier history of Reconstruction [1865–77], when white opponents of Black voting insisted that the money to pay for programs like schools, which helped ordinary and poorer people, must come from those with wealth, and thus redistributed wealth. They demanded an end to the taxes that supported public programs.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-6-2021
   Accordingly, right-wing authoritarians’ fight against socialism began in 1871, but what [they] stood against was not government control of the means of production—an idea that never took hold in America—but the popular public policies which cost tax dollars…Public benefits like highways and hospitals, [they] argued, amounted to a redistribution of wealth, and thus were a leftist assault on American freedom.”
   “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that fight against socialism took the form of opposition to unionization and Black rights. In the 1920s, after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had given shape to the American fear of socialism, making sure that system never came to America meant destroying the government regulation put in place during the Progressive Era and putting businessmen in charge of the government.”
   “When Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt established business regulation, a basic social safety net, and government-funded infrastructure in the 1930s to combat the Great Depression that had laid ordinary Americans low, one right-wing senator wrote to a colleague: ‘This is despotism…The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom.’”
   “The roots of modern right-wing extremism lie in the post-World War II reaction to FDR’s New Deal and the Republican embrace of it under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Opponents of an active government insisted that it undermined American liberty by redistributing tax dollars from hardworking white men to those eager for a handout—usually Black men, in their telling. Modern government, they insisted, was bringing socialism to America. They set out to combat it, trying to slash the government back to the form it took in the 1920s.”
   “Their job got easier after 1987, when the Fairness Doctrine ended. That Federal Communications Commission policy had required public media channels to base their stories on fact and to present both sides of a question. When it was gone, talk radio took off, hosted by radio jocks like Rush Limbaugh who contrasted their ideal country with what they saw as the socialism around them: a world in which hardworking white men who took care of their wives and children were hemmed in by government that was taxing them to give benefits to lazy people of color and ‘Feminazis.’ These ‘Liberals’ were undermining the country and the family, aided and abetted by lawmakers building a big government that sucked tax dollars.”
   “In August 1992, the idea that hardworking white men trying to take care of their families were endangered by an intrusive government took shape at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. Randy Weaver, a former factory worker who had moved his family to northern Idaho to escape what he saw as the corruption of American society, failed to show up for trial on a firearms charge. When federal marshals tried to arrest him, a firefight left Weaver’s fourteen-year-old son and a deputy marshal dead. In the aftermath of the shooting, federal and local officers laid an 11-day siege to the Weavers’ cabin, and a sniper wounded Weaver and killed his wife, Vicki.”
   “Right-wing activists and neo-Nazis from a nearby Aryan Nations compound swarmed to Ruby Ridge to protest the government’s attack on what they saw as a man protecting his family. Negotiators eventually brought Weaver out, but the standoff at Ruby Ridge convinced western men they had to arm themselves to fight off the government.”
   “In February [1993], the same theme played out in Waco, Texas, when officers stormed the compound of a religious cult whose former members reported that their leader, David Koresh, was stockpiling weapons. A gun battle and a fire ended the 51-day siege…Seventy-six people died.”
   “While a Republican investigation cited ‘overwhelming evidence’ that exonerated the government of wrongdoing, talk radio hosts nonetheless railed against the Democratic administration, especially Attorney General Janet Reno, for the events at Waco. What happened there fit neatly into what was by then the Republican narrative of an overreaching government that crushed individuals, and political figures harped on that idea.”
   “Rush Limbaugh stoked his listeners’ anger with reports of the ‘Waco invasion’ and talked of the government’s ‘murder’ of citizens…[A]lex Jones, who would go on to become an important conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars…warned that Reno had ‘murdered’ the people at Waco and that the government was about to impose martial law. The modern militia movement took off.” (“Before Waco, the number of armed militia groups scattered around the country numbered in the dozens; by 1995, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 441.”)
   “The combination of political rhetoric and violence radicalized a former Army gunner, Timothy McVeigh, who decided to bring the war home to the government. ‘Taxes are a joke,’ he wrote to a newspaper in 1992. ‘More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement….Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that. But it might.’”
   “On April 19, 1995, a date chosen to honor the Waco standoff, McVeigh set off a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City [the capital and largest city of the state of Oklahoma]. The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children younger than six, and wounded more than 800.”
   (“McVeigh hoped to foment an uprising. [H]e and his friend Nichols chose a federal outpost in the heartland…as the target for an attention-getting spectacle. To remind the world of his casus belli, McVeigh chose the second anniversary of the fire at Waco for his attack….McVeigh expected his bold strike to bring new members to the militia movement. Instead, ‘Oklahoma City’ now stood for homegrown terror that killed the wrong people.” Accordingly, “in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, the patriot movement retreated…” )
   “By 1995, right-wing terrorists envisioned themselves as protectors of American individualism in the face of a socialist government, but the reality was that their complaints were not about government activism. They were about who benefited from that activism.”
   “In 2014, Nevada cattle rancher Cliven Bundy brought the contradictions in this individualist image to light when he fought the government over the impoundment of the cattle that he had been grazing on public land for more than 20 years. Bundy owed the government more than $1 million in grazing fees for running his cattle on public land, but he disparaged the ‘Negro’ who lived in government housing…Black people’s laziness led them to abort their children and send their young men to jail, he told a reporter, and he wondered: ‘are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life… or are they better off under government subsidy?’”
   “Convinced that he was a hardworking individualist, Bundy announced he did not recognize federal power over the land on which he grazed his cattle. The government impounded his animals in 2014, but officials backed down when Bundy and his supporters showed up armed. Republican Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Bundy and his supporters ‘patriots’; Democrat Harry Reid (D-NV), the Senate Majority Leader at the time, called them ‘domestic terrorists’ and warned, ‘it’s not over…’”
   “It wasn’t. Two years later, Bundy’s son Ammon was at the forefront of the right-wing takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, arguing that the federal government must turn over all public lands to the states to open them to private development. The terrorists called themselves ‘Citizens for Constitutional Freedom.’”
   “[Since 2016], Trump and his enablers have tried to insist that unrest in the country is caused by ‘Antifa,’ an unorganized group of anti-fascists who show up at rallies to confront right-wing protesters. But the Department of Homeland Security [in 2021] identified ‘anarchist and anti-government extremists’ as ‘the most significant threat… against law enforcement.’ According to DHS, they are motivated by ‘their belief that their liberties are being taken away by the perceived unconstitutional or otherwise illegitimate actions of government officials or law enforcement.’ Those anti-government protesters are now joined quite naturally by white supremacists, as well as other affiliated groups.”
   “Right-wing terrorism in America has very deep roots, and those roots have grown since the 1990s as Republican rhetorical attacks on the federal government have fed them. The January 6 [2021] assault on the Capitol is not an aberration. It has been coming for a very long time.”
   (Consider. “The Michigan Militia, known as the Wolverines, was one of many that suffered after the [1995 Oklahoma] bombing. Founded in 1994 in the aftermath of Waco, it soon became the largest in the country, claiming ten thousand members. McVeigh…had attended Michigan Militia meetings….Michigan’s organization disbanded before reemerging in April 2020, when members of a reconstituted Michigan Militia, now an organization of more than a dozen local groups, carried long guns into the Capitol Building at Lansing….[According to one participant], such actions are meant not to intimidate but ‘to stand our ground for what’s right–lawfully.’ Four members of the state’s militia were charged with joining a 2020 plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a scheme orchestrated by FBI agents. The charges came to nothing in April 2022, when a Michigan jury sided with defense attorneys who called it a case of entrapment…The jury acquitted two defendants and deadlocked on charges against two others who would later be convicted–a temporary victory for the militants that went almost unnoticed outside Michigan. It didn’t take a conspiratorial bent to acknowledge that the alleged plot got far more press attention than the news that it had been an FBI operation.”)
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-16-2021
(Kevin Cook, Waco Rising: David Koresh, The FBI, and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias, Henry Holt and Company, New York: 2023, 198-200.) 

-Public Options Popular: “Americans love public options and have relied on them for hundreds of years….A public swimming pool is a public option; many people have private swimming pools.” Public libraries, public parks, public schools and public defenders “are all public options, government provision of goods and services that coexist with the private marketplace.”
   Public options promote equal opportunity and make capitalism work better. For example, public education provides educated workers; “public transit and the post office support economic activity. The public option also competes in the marketplace…[thus] acting as a check on monopoly power in concentrated sectors.” (The New York Times, 7 July 2019, SR 10)

-Investors Encourage Privatization of Infrastructure: Large institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies have encouraged governments to privatize infrastructure assets such as highways and hospitals. “A 2015 analysis by J.P. Morgan Asset Management points out that, compared to other investment options, infrastructure offers very high returns at very low risk. The analysis…highlight[s] other highly attractive features: infrastructure assets operate in monopoly situations, free from competition, and therefore produce reliable revenue streams, even during economic downturns.” (McQuaig 2019, 21)

-SaskTel: Publicly Owned Telephone Company: A 2015 report compared the telephone systems of two Canadian provinces: Manitoba and Saskatchewan. “Both provinces were served by publicly owned telephone companies for many decades until Manitoba privatized its system in 1997. The report…found that publicly owned SaskTel was providing much better value for its customers than the privatized Manitoba Telephone System. SaskTel’s basic telephone service was 27 percent cheaper, its CEO compensation one-tenth as high, and it had delivered $497 million in dividends to Saskatchewan over the previous five years, as opposed to the measly $1.2 million in provincial corporate taxes paid by Manitoba Telephone System over the same time period.”
   “But the most compelling evidence of the higher costs of privatization came from a 2014 investigation by Ontario auditor general Bonnie Lysyk. In an audit of seventy-four infrastructure projects, Lysyk found that the province’s decision to partner with the private sector, rather than building the projects itself, cost Ontario taxpayers an extra $8 billion. This exorbitant additional cost was mostly because private financing is so much more expensive than government financing…” (McQuaig 2019, 65)

-Republican Extremism: Dominant White Christians in Decline Blame Liberals and Govt:   “The story of rising political polarization isn’t a matter of both parties moving to the extremes. It’s hard to make the case that Democrats have moved significantly to the left: On economic issues from welfare to taxes, Bill Clinton arguably governed not just to the right of Jimmy Carter, but to the right of Richard Nixon. On the other side it’s obvious that Republicans have moved to the right: Just compare the hard-line conservatism of George W. Bush with the moderation of Gerald Ford.” (Krugman 2007, 5)
   Furthermore, the Republican Party has led the way in violating norms of democracy, as the following four egregious examples demonstrate: the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1999; the 2003 mid-district redistricting in Texas; the Senate’s refusal in 2016 to even consider the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court; and, the 2016 “legislative coup” conducted by the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina.
   “[T]he Republicans have become a more extremist party [due to] the way our parties have been polarized along racial and cultural lines. And the way that our parties have lined up, with the Democrats being a party, essentially, of secular, educated whites and a diversity of ethnic minorities and the Republicans being a fairly homogeneous…white Christian party, the Republicans have basically come to represent a former ethnic majority in decline.” (“Whereas 50 years ago both parties were overwhelmingly white and equally religious, advances in civil rights, decades of immigration and the migration of religious conservatives to the Republican Party have given rise to two fundamentally different parties…”)
   “White Christians are not just any group: They are a once-dominant majority in decline. When a dominant group’s social status is threatened, racial and cultural differences can be perceived as existential and irreconcilable.” (In other words, the current polarization “is not a traditional liberal-conservative divide. People don’t fear and loathe one another over taxes and health care.”) As a result, many Republican voters feel that the country they “grew up in, is being taken away from them. And that can lead to pretty extremist views and voting patterns.”
   Many white conservatives feel that while they’ve worked hard, they’ve been betrayed and disadvantaged by affirmative action for blacks regarding college admission and jobs, as well as by other federal government policies that unduly support women, immigrants, refugees, gays and public sector workers. They also resent being lectured to by liberal culture, as reported by Fox News, that they hold wrong opinions regarding blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, gays and government. Trump says plainly what they feel, and, as a result, he has returned their “honor” and gained their deep support.
   “Republican elites have encouraged their high-turnout voting base to see every election as an epic battle to save white Christian America from a socialist, secular, gun-seizing left, with right-wing media and surrogate groups like the NRA leading the charge.”
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/579670528/how-democracies-die-authors-say-trump-is-a-symptom-of-deeper-problems
(The New York Times, 28 Jan. 2018, SR 6-7)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/opinion/republicans-trump.html
   Culture > Economics: “In the [2016] election, voters in the two lowest income brackets voted for Clinton 52-42, as did those who identified ‘the economy’ as the most important issue. A majority of voters in the four highest income brackets voted for Trump, and Trump voters singled out ‘immigration’ and ‘terrorism,’ not ‘the economy,’ as the most important issues.” Research shows that “supporters of authoritarian populism are the losers not so much of economic competition as cultural competition. Voters who are male, religious, less educated, and in the ethnic majority ‘feel that they have become strangers from the predominant values in their own country, left behind by progressive tides of cultural change that they do not share….The silent revolution launched in the 1970s seems to have spawned a resentful counter-revolutionary backlash…’” (Pinker 2018, 339, 340)
   Mythical Past Promised by Authoritarian: “There is a direct correlation between growing economic inequality and the growing popularity of authoritarianism. Scholars of authoritarian systems note that a population that feels economically, religiously, or culturally dispossessed is an easy target for an authoritarian who promises to bring back a mythological world in which its members were powerful. But, having lifted strongmen into power, they learn that they were only tools to put in place someone whose decisions are absolute and who is no longer bound by the law.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-28-2022

-Liberals as Evil Echoed by Republican Politicians: As of early 2022, reflecting distorted extremism, “roughly half of Republicans believe that ‘top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.’ [A]n even more [disturbing] number: 66 percent of Republicans buy into ‘white replacement theory,’ agreeing wholly or partly with the claim that ‘the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world.’ Given this mind-set, ambitious Republican politicians naturally pursue policies devised to play to the base’s paranoia and accuse anyone who opposes these policies of being part of a nefarious conspiracy.”
   “And the bizarre nature of [Florida’s Republican] attacks on Disney [–which objected to the Don’t Say Gay bill–] doesn’t just pander to the craziness of the GOP base; the attacks’ very absurdity is also a message of intimidation aimed at the business world. It says, in effect: ‘…If you criticize our actions, or fail in any way to demonstrate fealty to our cause, we will find a way to punish you.’”
   Orban Model: “The obvious role model here is Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where the Conservative Political Action Conference will be held [in May 2022]. As a recent Freedom House report put it, in Hungary ‘businesspeople whose activities are not in line with the financial or political interest of the government are likely to face harassment and intimidation, and subject to increasing administrative pressure for a possible takeover.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/opinion/republicans-florida-disney-conspiracy-theories.html
   “Orban is the architect of what he calls ‘illiberal democracy,’ or ‘Christian democracy.’ This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Illiberal democracy rejects modern liberal democracy because the equality it champions means an acceptance of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights and an end to traditionally patriarchal society. Orban’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-19-2022?s=r

-Obama-Trump Voters Reject Mainstream Politicians: Professor John Sides estimates “that 9 percent of voters who cast ballots for Obama ended up voting for Trump [in 2016]. Among white voters who had never been to college, it was 22 percent.” It’s unlikely, such voters were motivated by racism. Rather, dissatisfaction with an economy overseen by mainstream Democrats and Republicans probably led them to vote for the person who insulted mainstream candidates and pledged to create manufacturing and mining jobs. (It’s worth noting that many George W. Bush voters, fed up with the Republican Party over the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis, voted for Obama.) (The New York Times, 6 May 2018, 18)
   A mere “80,000 voters in the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania decided the [2016] election.” (Pfeiffer 2018, 195)
   It was not uncommon for Democrats to ask, “were Trump voters economically anxious or were they racists?” However, this “question is poorly framed: racism is often fueled by people’s perceived or real loss of economic status and concern about their economic future. Their genuine hardship leads to scapegoating and hatred.”
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/11/what-the-left-must-fight-against

-Republican Policies Don’t Help Failing Republican Regions: “Regional disparities aren’t a new phenomenon in America. Indeed, before World War II the world’s richest, most productive nation was also a nation with millions of dirt-poor farmers, many of whom didn’t even have electricity or indoor plumbing. But until the 1970s those disparities were rapidly narrowing. Take, for example, the case of Mississippi, America’s poorest state. In the 1930s, per-capita income in Mississippi was only 30 percent as high as per-capita income in Massachusetts. By the late 1970s, however, that figure was almost 70 percent…[However, by 2018] Mississippi is back down to only about 55 percent of Massachusetts income….[And] Mississippi isn’t an isolated case.” (And, as expected, “the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems: a rising share of prime-aged men not working, rising mortality, high levels of opioid consumption.”)
   Regional disparities are largely the result of “structural changes in the economy [that] have favored industries that employ highly educated workers–and…these industries do best in locations where there are already a lot of these workers. As a result, these regions are experiencing a virtuous circle of growth: their knowledge-intensive industries prosper, drawing in even more educated workers, which reinforces their advantage. And at the same time, regions that started with a poorly educated work force are in a downward spiral, both because they’re stuck with the wrong industries and because they’re experiencing…a brain drain.”
   “[S]elf-destructive politics” in the failing regions–radical tax cuts and savaging education, for example–have only made their situation worse. And by supporting Trump they have voted for their own impoverishment. “New Deal programs and public investment played a significant role in the great postwar convergence; conservative efforts to downsize government will hurt people all across America, but it will disproportionately hurt the very regions that put the [Republicans] in power.” (Krugman 2020, 291-3)
   While President Trump spouts populist economic rhetoric, he has placed “many bankers and billionaires in his cabinet, and has relentlessly pursued…many 1-percent friendly policies [which] his supporters don’t seem to mind[.] [H]owever, Trump is far from unique. The history of bait-and-switch between conservative electioneering and conservative governance [deserves far more attention].”
   Reagan: Business Supported Cutting Social Programs: “In their 1987 book, ‘Right Turn,’ the political scientists Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson presented public-opinion data demonstrating that Reagan’s crusade against activist government, which was widely understood to be the source of his popularity, was not, in fact, particularly popular. For example, when Reagan was re-elected in 1984, only 35 percent of voters favored significant cuts in social programs to reduce the deficit. Much excellent scholarship…suggests an explanation for Reagan’s subsequent success at cutting back social programs in the face of hostile public opinion: It was business leaders, not the general public, who moved to the right, and they became increasingly aggressive and skilled in manipulating the political process behind the scenes.” (The New York Times Magazine, 16 April 2017, 41)

Background: Partisan Polarization
-“The norms sustaining [the US] political system rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion. The stability of the period between the end of Reconstruction and the 1980s was rooted in an original sin: the Compromise of 1877 and its aftermath, which permitted the de-democratization of the South and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Racial exclusion contributed directly to the partisan civility and cooperation that came to characterize twentieth-century American politics. The ‘solid South’ emerged as a powerful conservative force within the Democratic Party, simultaneously vetoing civil rights and serving as a bridge to Republicans. Southern Democrats’ ideological proximity to conservative Republicans reduced polarization and facilitated bipartisanship.” (Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, Crown, New York: 2018, 143. Hereinafter, “Levitsky 2018.”)

   “The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratize the US. But it would also polarize it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual toleration and forbearance since Reconstruction.” (Levitsky 2018, 144)

   Americans should expect the continuing efforts of Republicans “to disenfranchise minority groups, under the pretense of combating voting fraud[,] [as this has been a feature of modern conservatism. President] Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act, and as late as 1980 he described it as ‘humiliating to the South.’” (Krugman 2020, 300)

-“When [Newt] Gingrich arrived in Washington [representing Georgia in Congress] in 1979, his vision of politics as warfare was at odds with that of the Republican leadership. House Minority Leader Bob Michel [was friends] with his Democratic colleague Dan Rostenkowski… Winning a Republican majority, Gingrich believed, would require playing a harder form of politics. Backed by a small but growing group of loyalists,” and exploiting C-SPAN, Gingrich worked to upend existing norms of civility and bipartisan cooperation. (Levitsky 2018, 147-8)

   “[Gingrich] questioned his Democratic rivals’ patriotism. He even compared them to Mussolini and accused them of trying to ‘destroy our country.’ … Through a new political action committee, GOPAC, Gingrich and his allies worked to spread [his] tactics across the party. … Even as Gingrich ascended the Republican leadership structure–becoming minority whip in 1989 and Speaker of the House in 1995–he refused to abandon his hard-line rhetoric.” (Levitsky 2018, 148)

   “The Senate was likewise transformed by the arrival of ‘Gingrich Senators,’ whose ideology, aversion to compromise, and willingness to obstruct legislation helped speed the end of the body’s traditional ‘folkways.’” (While undoing democratic norms can occur quickly, having democratic norms take hold among a population is a slow process. As a British witticism goes: In establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.) (Levitsky 2018, 149)

   (“[W]hen the rule of law, which treats every business equally, has been replaced by the whims of a dictator, success depends on closeness to the leader rather than on quality. ‘One of the biggest myths of authoritarianism is that it is good for business…[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has jailed over 100,000 business people on trumped-up charges of tax evasion, financial irregularities, etc. Anyone with a profitable enterprise becomes a target, regardless of their political sentiments. This practice goes on in Hungary and Turkey too. Business people should know that this can happen anywhere, to anyone, if autocrats take power.” (Prof. Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook post, 1 Nov. 2021))

   “Though few realized it at the time, Gingrich and his allies were on the cusp of a new wave of polarization rooted in growing public discontent, particularly among the Republican base. Gingrich didn’t create this polarization, but he was one of the first Republicans to exploit [it]. And his leadership helped to establish ‘politics as warfare’ as the GOP’s dominant strategy.” Democrats weren’t simply opponents but enemies. (Essentially, “Republicans from Newt Gingrich to [President] Trump learned that in a polarized society, treating rivals as enemies can be useful–and that the pursuit of politics as warfare can be appealing to those who fear they have much to lose.”) (Levitsky 2018, 149, 174)

   “The Republicans’ new hardball approach was manifest during the presidency of Bill Clinton [1993-2001]….Before the 1970s, the annual number of cloture motions filed to end Senate debate–a good measure of a filibuster attempt–never exceeded seven; by 1993-94, the number had reached eighty.” (Levitsky 2018, 149-50)

   Naturally, in response, Democrats strayed from traditional norms during the Bush Jr.’s presidency [2001-09]. Due to the intensifying polarization, the “GOP effectively abandoned oversight of a Republican president, weakening Congress’s ability to check the executive.” (For example, “Congress resisted oversight of the Iraq War, launching only superficial investigations into serious abuse cases, including the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.”) (Levitsky 2018, 152-53)

   “To his great credit, President Bush did not question the patriotism of his Democratic rivals, even when anti-Muslim hysteria in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks created an opportunity to do so. But Fox News commentators and influential radio talk-show hosts used the moment to imply that Democrats lacked patriotism. Commentators began at times to link Democrats to Al Qaeda–as Rush Limbaugh did in 2006, when he accused Senator Patrick Leahy of ‘taking up arms for Al Qaeda’ after Leahy probed Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito on the Bush administration’s use of torture. … But what was especially troubling about the 2008 campaign is that the right-wing media’s rhetoric of intolerance was picked up by leading Republican politicians. Tom DeLay, for example, declared that ‘unless Obama proves me wrong, he’s a Marxist,’ while Steve King…warned that [Obama] would lead America into ‘totalitarian dictatorship.’ Although Republican presidential candidate John McCain did not employ such rhetoric, he nevertheless selected a running mate, Sarah Palin, who did.” (Levitsky 2018, 155-7)

   Just weeks after his 2009 inauguration, Obama’s opposition was “embodied in a mass political movement” — the Tea Party — which considered Obama anti-American and a serious threat to the American way of life. (Glenn Beck, then at Fox, declared that Obama “had a deep-seated hatred for White people.”) “Although Trump opted not to run against Obama in 2012, his high-profile questioning of President Obama’s nationality gained him media attention and endeared him to the Republicans’ Tea Party base.” (Levitsky 2018, 158, 160) (Pfeiffer 2018, 154)

   “A stunning 385 filibusters were initiated between 2007 and 2012–equal to the total number of filibusters in the seven decades between World War I and the end of the Reagan administration.” As a result, Obama “responded with norm breaking–in the form of unilateral executive actions….[For example,] Unable to get Senate consent for a nuclear treaty with Iran, the Obama administration negotiated an ‘executive agreement,’ which because it was not formally a treaty, did not require Senate approval.” (Levitsky 2018, 163-4)

-“Being a Democrat or a Republican has become not just a partisan affiliation but an identity”, as their respective “voters are now deeply divided by race, religious belief, geography, and even ‘way of life.’” (Levitsky 2018, 167, 168) 

   “The post-1965 realignment also began a process of sorting out voters ideologically. For the first time in nearly a century, partisanship and ideology converged, with the GOP becoming primarily conservative and the Democrats becoming predominately liberal.” (Levitsky 2018, 169)

   The parties “represent not just different policy approaches but different communities, cultures, and values. [O]ne major driver of this [is] the civil rights movement. But America’s ethnic diversification was not limited to black enfranchisement. Beginning in the 1960s, the US experienced a massive wave of immigration…In 1950, nonwhites constituted barely 10 percent of the US population. By 2014, they constituted 38 percent, and the US Census Bureau projects that a majority of the population will be nonwhite by 2044….So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.” (Levitsky 2018, 170)

  Trump capitalized on the immigration issue which, until his 2016 election, was a source of divergence between the base of the Republican Party and its elite. “It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.”  (Krugman 2020, 303)

   “The Republican Party has also become the party of evangelical Christians. [See questions 7 and 8 of the US Christian Right Quiz for details.] … White evangelicals–who had leaned Democratic in the 1960s–began to vote Republican [in the late 1970s].” (Levitsky 2018, 171)

-“[P]artisan polarization reflects the fact that ethnic diversity surged during a period (1975 to the present) in which economic growth slowed, especially for those at the bottom of the income distribution. For many Americans, the economic changes [since the mid-1970s] have brought decreased job security,…and, consequently, a growth in social resentment. Resentment fuels polarization.” (Levitsky 2018, 227-8)

   “Policies aimed at addressing economic inequality can be polarizing or depolarizing, depending on how they are organized….Means-tested programs create the perception among many middle-class citizens that only poor people benefit from social policy. And because race and poverty have historically overlapped in the US, these policies can be racially stigmatizing….[Therefore, more] [s]ocial policies that benefit everyone–Social Security and Medicare are prime examples–could help diminish resentment…” (Levitsky 2018, 228)

-“It is difficult to find examples of societies in which shrinking ethnic majorities gave up their dominant status without a fight. In Lebanon, the demographic decline of dominant Christian groups contributed to a fifteen-year civil war. In Israel, the demographic threat created by the de facto annexation of the West Bank is pushing the country toward a political system that two of its former prime ministers have compared to apartheid. And…in the aftermath of Reconstruction, southern Democrats responded to the threat posed by black suffrage by disenfranchising African Americans for nearly a century.” (Levitsky 2018, 208)

-“Republican voters rely more heavily on partisan media outlets than do Democrats. In 2010, 69 percent of Republican voters were Fox News viewers. … The rise of right-wing media [has] affected Republican officeholders. During the Obama administration, Fox News commentators and right-wing radio personalities almost uniformly adopted a ‘no compromise’ position, viciously attacking any Republican politician who broke with the party line.” (Levitsky 2018, 172)

   “Hard-line positions were reinforced by well-funded conservative interest groups. In the late 1990s, organizations such as Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the Club for Growth became leading voices in the GOP, pulling Republican politicians toward more ideologically inflexible positions….Thanks, in part, to the loosening of campaign finance laws in 2010, outside groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the American Energy Alliance–many of them part of the Koch billionaire family network–gained outsize influence in the Republican Party during the Obama years. In 2012 alone, the Koch family was responsible for some $400 million in election spending. Along with the Tea Party, the Koch network and other similar organizations helped elect a new generation of Republicans for whom compromise was a dirty word.” (Levitsky 2018, 172-3)

   “Wealthy outside donors…and influential media personalities exert greater influence over elected Republican officials than does the GOP’s own leadership….This hollowing out has left the party vulnerable to takeover by extremists.” (Levitsky 2018, 223)

-“[I]n the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed–and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous. [And], Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican electorate….Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president [who enjoys significant support among Republican voters], Republicans find themselves…constantly redefin[ing] what is…tolerable.” (Levitsky 2018, 201)

   The National Rifle Association, “which claims five million members and is closely tied to the Republican Party”, released recruiting videos in 2017 which included dangerously deviant language, as follows. “[Democrats] use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler….[Their media makes] them protest,…scream racism and sexism…, terrorize the law-abiding…The only way we can stop this…is to fight the violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.” “In short, we’re coming for you.” (Levitsky 2018, 202-3)

-“[T]he harsh divisions among Americans [which were broadcasted on TV during the 1968 presidential campaign] have largely endured. They are rooted in profound disagreements based on culture and creeds that are impervious to compromise. If one thinks abortion is murder or that LGBTQ people deserve every right that heterosexuals have, the very idea of finding a middle ground is abhorrent.”

   “In addition, the alienation of rural white Americans from cosmopolitan urban dwellers has only increased since big cities became entry points of immigrants from all over the world. The family reunifications made possible by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 helped create today’s polyglot big cities.”

   “The absence of a stable partisan majority also keeps…domestic conflicts on a persistent burn. Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968 and his landslide re-election four years later tore apart the New Deal coalition that had dominated national politics, with barely a pause, since the early 1930s. Of the 11 presidential contests from 1976 to 2016, Republicans have won six and Democrats five. But on just four occasions has the Republican victor gained a plurality of the popular vote.”

   “[C]ivil wars, even cultural ones, seldom end with settlements that please both sides. Until the left or the right wins a lasting victory, America will remain a society rent in two.” (The New York Times, 26 Aug. 2018, 4-5)

-“[T]he modern Republican Party is all about cutting taxes on the rich and benefits for the poor and the middle class. And Trump, despite his campaign posturing [to expand health care and raise taxes on the rich], has turned out to be no different. Hence, the failure of our political system to serve socially conservative/racist voters who also want to tax the rich and preserve Social Security. Democrats won’t ratify their racism; Republicans, who have no such compunctions, will…but won’t protect the programs they depend on.” (Krugman 2020, 309)

   “Why did Republicans stake out [economic policies] so far from voters’ preferences? Because they could. As Democrats became the party of civil rights, the GOP could attract working-class whites by catering to their social and racial illiberalism, even while pursuing polices that hurt ordinary workers.” (What happens if a true, racist populist–with Trump-like political skills–emerges? “There’s a substantial bloc of racist-populist voters…that someone [may seek to attract. Perhaps] the gravitational attraction of big money–which has completely captured the GOP, and has arguably kept Democrats from moving as far left as the electorate really wants–is too great.”) (Krugman 2020, 309, 310)

-Default Setting: “Conservatism is our natural instinct…Institutions or events that latch onto our pre-dispositions towards group loyalty and tribalism are going with the current of human nature. Liberalism has to be acquired and learned, one reason why it appears so elegant to the people who know its etiquette. But it’s often a façade. Very few people are truly non-conformist–society couldn’t function if they were–and political views are very influenced by social pressure…and taboo (which is why the Left is correct to believe that anti-racism norms have to be policed very strictly, being very thinly held by many).” https://edwest.substack.com/p/the-feast-of-fools-at-westminster

-Sabotage Strategy: The US political system is vulnerable “to sabotage by a ruthless opposition party. For voters often judge presidents based on factors over which they have little control. In some cases, this lack of control reflects the limits of American power in general. For example, the price of gasoline is highly salient politically, yet it mainly reflects crude oil prices, which are set in world markets over which US policy has limited influence.”
   “Beyond this, when voters think about our government, they usually think about the executive branch, sometimes skipping over the fact that there are many things a president can’t do without approval from Congress. Further, we have a bicameral system in which a president can be hamstrung even if the other party controls only one congressional chamber…But voters often don’t focus on that. When things are going well, they give the president credit; when they feel that they’re going badly, they blame him.”
   “[T]his disconnect between public perceptions and the reality of presidential power has at times favored both parties. Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory in 1984 thanks largely to a boom engineered by an independent Federal Reserve…; Bill Clinton won in 1992 thanks to a weak labor market…that really wasn’t George H.W. Bush’s fault.”
   “Still, while stubbornly high unemployment helped Democrats in 1992, they didn’t deliberately use their control of the House and Senate to make things worse.” However, in 2024, Republicans, following instructions from Trump, have killed a bipartisan immigration “bill that would have given the GOP most of what it said it wanted….[Republicans] didn’t even really try to hide the cynicism: They’d rather have the American public see a border in crisis than help fix the problem, because they believe this will benefit them politically.” (The New York Times, Long Island and the Limits of Sabotage, 19 Feb. 2024)

-Only Need Two Consecutive Wins: “Politicians can only be as good as the voters let them be and in the end they will be as bad as the voters demand. Donald Trump is not a cause, he is a symptom….What’s the alternative? It’s not monarchy, or autocracy, or oligarchy. Even if you take it as given that the end goal of government is liberalism, and the mode of government that achieves liberalism is value-neutral, democracy is still the best bet by a mile. Yet the Achilles’ heel of democracy is that if you let The People choose over and over and over, then eventually they will choose either illiberalism, or autocracy, or both. And while democracy has to win every time, the illiberal autocrats only have to win two in a row. [This] problem is as old as Plato and is what America’s Founding Fathers wrestled with in designing our Constitution. The question is: How do you give The People the final word, but try to discourage them from making bad choices? [T]he answer[:] institutions.”
   “Institutions, in the broadest sense, are devices that sit between the demos and its expression of power. Our three branches of government are institutions. Our political parties are institutions. Churches, community groups, the media, businesses, universities—they’re all institutions of one sort or another.”
https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/confessions-of-an-institutionalist

-How We Polarize: Four psychological forces drive and sustain polarization. (i) “[B]elief perseverance solidifies ideas when our explanations of why they might be true outlast the discrediting of evidence that inspired them.” (ii) “Motivated reasoning justifies what we already believe or want to believe.” (iii) “[C]onfirmation bias motivates our search for belief-confirming evidence.” (iv) Group polarization “further amplifies the shared views of like-minded folks. When like minds discuss, their attitudes often become more extreme….[For example,] [w]hen jury members lean toward awarding damages, their group award tends to exceed that preferred by the median jury member….The phenomenon can work for good, as when [human rights] activists gain strength from connecting with kindred spirits….Terrorist mentality usually emerges slowly, among people who share a grievance. As they interact in isolation…, their views grow more extreme. Increasingly, they categorize the world as ‘us’ against ‘them.’” (Myers 2022, 90-2)
   “People have long gained conviction from the meeting of like minds. But three more recent cultural changes provide fertile soil for extreme group polarization.” (i) The internet enables like-minded people to friend “and link one another to sites that affirm views they share and disparage views they despise.” The result is that the partisanship of progressives and conservatives “veers toward tribalism.” (ii) Partisan cable TV has enabled polarization to deepen “even among those least likely to use [the internet]….In the past, a handful of mainstream news sources fed us all. Today, we can choose like-minded news–think Fox and MSNBC evening talk shows–that reinforce our existing views.” (iii) Geographic division reflects the fact that “people are drawn to those with whom they share attitudes, beliefs, interests, age, religion, education…We could wish it were otherwise, because there are benefits to diversity in neighborhoods and work teams.” The fact we like being around like-minded people “helps explain why, in an age of increased mobility…our internet/TV bubbles are compounded by geographic bubbles…Blue counties have become a deeper blue, and red counties…[T]he Democratic presidential candidate’s margin in Democratic voting counties increased from an average 15 percent in 2000 to 23 percent in 2020, while the average Republican candidate’s margin in Republican-voting counties increased from 26 to 43 percent.” (Myers 2022, 92-4)
   The following forces can assist depolarization. (i) Technologists should flag demonstrable untruths, create forums for deliberative democracy and link people across boundaries, thereby “increasing shared understandings.” (ii) “Citizen initiatives can engage dialogue. Nonprofit organizations working to depolarize America include Living Room Conversations…For some specific policies, such as higher taxes on the superrich, net neutrality, and a $15 minimum wage, there is already bipartisan supermajority support.” (iii) “Education aims to counter the power of misinformation and ‘anecdata’ by teaching evidence-based critical thinking.” (Myers 2022, 94-5)

Rural America: Small Farm Decline to 1960s Industrialization to 2000s Deindustrialization to Rage
-Evolution to Rage: Today as in the past, “[r]ural people feel…that their authentic, independent way of life is under threat from an out-of-touch urban élite.” However, “the rural United States is, in fact, highly artificial. Its inhabitants are as much creatures of state power and industrial capitalism as their city-dwelling counterparts.”
   “There were long-standing rural communities that sought to pass their ways and lands down through history—but they faced a devastating invasion from across the Atlantic. There are still places where people have lived continuously for centuries, such as the millennium-old Acoma Pueblo, in New Mexico. But the rural Americans with the deepest roots, the Native ones, were very often violently dispossessed.”
   “The people who replaced them, meanwhile, were transplants, less sprung from the soil than laid like sod over Indigenous lands. Settlers liked to imagine that their takeover was swift and natural, that Native Americans were already en route to extinction. This was a consoling myth. The process of uprooting one rural people and implanting another took time, and heavy state intervention. By the official count, Indigenous people fought 1,642 military engagements against the US. The ensuing treaties…cost the government billions of dollars.”
   “Settlers styled themselves as pioneers who had won their land with their bare hands….Yet in the end land ownership came, directly or indirectly, from the state. The Homestead Act of 1862, along with its successors, gridded up and gave away an area the size of Pakistan. [Homesteading’s] most active period came…in the twentieth century.”
   “One irony is that—after Indigenous towns—it’s the havens of the East Coast élite, such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which have the deepest roots. Most bastions of ‘real America’ are, by contrast, relatively new. Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin served as mayor, really is a small town in a farming area. But most of its farms were created by a New Deal campaign to relocate struggling farmers from the Upper Midwest.”
   “Agriculture has become a capital-intensive, high-tech pursuit, belying the ‘left behind’ story of rural life. Fields resemble factories, where automation reigns and more than two-thirds of the hired workforce is foreign-born.” “The government classifies most as ‘family farms,’ but this doesn’t mean they’re diminutive. ‘Family corporations’ is…the agribusiness operations that maintained family ownership for legal reasons.”
   “Since the Depression, the government has aggressively managed the farming economy, variously limiting supply, ginning up demand, and stabilizing prices….Certainly, the over-all effect of government policy was to favor large firms like [Archer-Daniels-Midland Company].”
   “The small farmer, standing on his property with a pitchfork, has been an endangered species for a century. Today, a leaf blower would be a better symbol for those who tend the land. [T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics counts more landscapers and groundskeepers than people working on farms. If small, rugged farms have not filled the countryside, what has?…For the past century, rural spaces have been preferred destinations for military bases, discount retail chains, extractive industries, manufacturing plants, and real-estate developments.”
   “The story of how cities such as Chicago lost industrial jobs is well known; the story of how small towns gained them isn’t. Still, the ‘rural industrial boom’ that started in earnest in the nineteen-sixties was… ‘the defining economic process within the American heartland’ in the latter part of the twentieth century. Faced with unrecoverable job losses in agriculture, small-town leaders courted manufacturers with subsidies, obliging regulations, and a cheap, non-unionized workforce.”
   “Manufacturers, accepting this invitation, industrialized the rural landscape. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, also seeking cheap land, militarized it.”
   “With so few income sources available, rural people depend heavily on each employer. The opening of a mine, a factory, or a military base might bring flush times, but their closure spells ruin. While cities are, by their diversity, hedged against economic fluctuations, small towns lie dangerously exposed. That’s why they were so devastated by the trade liberalization of the nineteen-nineties and, particularly, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001. Jobs that had once left the city for the countryside moved abroad, causing a rural manufacturing collapse that rivals the urban one of the nineteen-seventies….Where metropolitan employment bounced back from the recession of 2007-08 in five years, rural employment still hasn’t recovered.”
   “It’s now possible to interpret elections in geographical terms: Democrats win cities, Republicans win rural areas, and the main question is which way the suburbs will break. Although we normally think of suburbs as outgrowths of cities,…they sit on formerly rural land and are often filled with formerly rural people. They are as much ‘post-rural’ as ‘sub-urban,’ and their politics show it.”
   “For city dwellers, this geographical line-drawing is ominous. Rural people are a fifth of the population yet punch well above their weight in elections. The constitutional allocation of two senators for every state gives low-density states outsized representation….Since a state is allocated two Presidential electors for its two senators, the rural advantage skews Presidential elections, too; in the past six, Democrats won the popular vote five times but the Presidency only three.”
   “In the past decade, rural voters have transformed the Republican Party, pushing aside élite-favored politicians like Jeb Bush in favor of ones like Trump. Although some of Trump’s hobbyhorses—windmills, low-flush toilets—are idiosyncratic, his talk of ‘disastrous trade deals’ and shuttered factories is not. Trump took rural deindustrialization seriously and, astonishingly, turned the market-friendly GOP against globalization.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/23/beyond-the-myth-of-rural-america

-Technology Impacts Rural Jobs, Dignity Loss, Misdirected Anger:  “Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset…losses…” Nevertheless, progress and technological change can undermine “not just individual workers but whole communities.” This has happened to rural America. And “the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to [American] democracy…”
   “Technology is the main driver of rural decline…” American farms and coal production, for instance, require significantly less labor input than they once required. (“The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role…”)
   “Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.”
   “So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas….While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship…, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that…a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Biden, who…has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Trump,…who offers little other than validation for their resentment.”
   “This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic…to the denizens of big cities…” In fact, “[p]rime-working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed…Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers…” These are social problems that increase when work disappears.
   The sad result “is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes and rural America as the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.” (The New York Times, The Mystery of White Rural Rage, 26 Feb. 2024)
   (Important to note that another major reason “white non-college voters turned to Trump in 2016 and 2020 is the fear of lost white hegemony — that the US will become a majority-minority nation sometime in the near future.”) (The New York Times, The Red-Blue Divide Goes Well Beyond Biden and Trump, 28 Feb. 2024)

Background: Fox News
-“Fox News was launched in 1996 as the ‘Fair and Balanced’ conservative alternative to the purportedly liberal mainstream media.” While it’s true that most reporters are liberal and Democrats, and that this “ideological bias bleeds into coverage and commentary” (on, say, marriage equality and gun control), it’s important to separate the difference between ideological bias and political bias.”

   “The mainstream media does not skew their reporting to help Democrats win” (i.e., their reporters are not politically biased). And, in any event, “Despite the liberal leanings of individual reporters, the overriding bias in the mainstream media is not ideological; it’s toward conflict, controversy, clicks, and ratings.”

   “Fox News isn’t covering news from a perspective that is outside the elite media bubble; it is not even covering issues from a conservative perspective. Simply put, Fox News is not a news outlet. It is a Republican propaganda machine…that exists to elect Republican politicians and promote their positions–whatever they are at the time. This makes Fox News very different from traditional ideological outlets like the conservative National Review or the liberal Mother Jones.”

   “When Obama was president, Fox News almost never covered the good news in the economic recovery, but [in 2018 as] Trump is president, the same jobs and growth numbers that were ignored or dismissed under Obama are trumpeted…When Obama was president, the consistent theme was that Obama was not tough enough in his response to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria. [In 2018 as] Trump is president, in part because Russia interfered with our election, Fox News is leading the defense of Trump’s pro-Putin foreign policy.”

   All news outlets make mistakes, “but Fox tends to err only in ways that hurt Democrats and help Republicans. And more often than not, in ways that exacerbate racial animus. After a while, it becomes clear that these are not mistakes.” (Dan Pfeiffer, Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump, Twelve, New York: 2018, 144-6, 149. Hereinafter, “Pfeiffer 2018.”)

-“Researchers have found that Fox News isn’t very effective at informing Americans. A 2012 study by Fairleigh Dickinson University reported watching Fox News had ‘a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge.’ The study found that those who regularly watched Fox News actually knew less about both domestic and international issues than those who watched no news at all. NPR listeners were particularly well-informed, the study found, but even people who got their news from a comedy program like ‘The Daily Show’–or who had no news source whatsoever–knew more about current events than Fox viewers. That may be correlation not causation, but at the least it suggests that Fox News viewers don’t actually learn much.”

   “Yet if Fox News doesn’t inform citizens, it does sway their votes. Two Stanford scholars…published a [2017] paper…suggesting that without the network, the Republican share of the vote for president would have been 0.46 percentage points lower in 2000, 3.6 points lower in 2004 and 6.3 percentage points lower in 2008.” (The New York Times, 17 Nov. 2019, SR 11)

   “Survey after survey has consistently demonstrated that Fox viewers are among the worst-informed of all sentient citizens. One team of political scientists addressed this question in December 2016 with a detailed multivariate analysis of the level of accurate information individuals possessed about current events. After surveying more than 3,000 people, the researchers concluded that ‘relying on Fox News as a major news source significantly decreased a person’s score more than relying on any other news source.’” https://www.thenation.com/article/society/fox-news-coronavirus/

   A 2019 study “found that 12 percent of Fox News viewers believe that climate change is mostly caused by humans, compared with 62 percent of all other Americans. At the same time, 78 percent of Fox viewers believe that Trump has accomplished more than any president in American history, compared with 17 percent of other Americans.” (The New York Times Magazine, 7 Apr. 2019, 71)

   “Coverage of COVID-19 has dominated the news and resulted in skyrocketing ratings for the nation’s cable news networks. And according to a survey conducted March 10-16, 2020, as a part of Pew Research Center’s Election News Pathways project, responses to that coverage and the pandemic itself vary notably among Americans who identify Fox News, MSNBC or CNN…as their main source of political news. In particular, the responses to COVID-19 news from those whose main source for political news is MSNBC or Fox News are strikingly different….One such difference emerges around knowledge and understanding of the pandemic. The group who names MSNBC as their main news source is far more likely than the Fox News group to answer correctly that the coronavirus originated in nature rather than a laboratory and that it will take a year or more for a vaccine to become available.” https://www.journalism.org/2020/04/01/cable-tv-and-covid-19-how-americans-perceive-the-outbreak-and-view-media-coverage-differ-by-main-news-source/

   In Oct. 2021, “polls show that 82% of people who watch the Fox News Channel believe the Big Lie that President Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election; 30% of Republicans think violence might be warranted to reclaim America.” (Prof. Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook post, 1 Nov. 2021)

   “A [Sept. 2020] Pew Research Center survey makes clear the extent of the problem [of Fox News on electoral politics]. Among those who get their election news primarily from Fox ‘News,’ 86 percent say Trump is delivering the ‘completely right’ or ‘mostly right’ message about the pandemic, 78 percent that ‘the US has controlled the outbreak as much as it could have’ and 61 percent that Trump and his administration get the facts right about the coronavirus ‘almost all’ or ‘most of the time.’ Perhaps the most disturbing finding of all: 39 percent of Fox News viewers say that QAnon — an insane conspiracy theory that posits that Trump’s opponents are satanic child-molesters — is ‘somewhat good’ or ‘very good’ for the country….[However,] these are not issues on which rational people can legitimately disagree. Trump’s covid-19 message — that, as he said [on Oct. 10], ‘it is disappearing’ — is objectively false. In the past week [as of Oct. 13], daily confirmed coronavirus cases in the US have increased by 13.3 percent and hospitalizations by 9.8 percent. Trump’s claims to the contrary, we have done far worse during the pandemic than most wealthy countries. If we had the same death rate as Canada, 132,000 victims of covid-19 would still be alive. And it should go without saying that QAnon, whose adherents have been linked to numerous acts of violence, is a bane, not a boon.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/13/how-can-42-percent-americans-still-support-worst-president-our-history/

   In July 2020, “a panel of Wikipedia administrators…declared that Fox News would no longer be considered ‘generally reliable’ in its reporting on politics and science, and in those areas ‘should be used with caution to verify contentious claims.’ (Fox News articles on other topics were unaffected.) There simply were too many examples of misleading, inaccurate, and slanted reporting about science and politics for Wikipedia to pass on Fox News articles as part of a broader search for the truth….[This decision] deprives Fox News of the ability to frame how the public interprets political events and politicians on Wikipedia.” https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-calling-fox-a-reliable-source/

   It’s important to note that Fox News’s 2020 election coverage, during the short periods I watched it, was factual, clear, and professional. In fact, on November 5, it denigrated Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. However, Fox’s opinion shows, which are very popular with Trump’s base, remained factually-challenged and grossly biased.

-“A [September 2021] study examining the effects of viewing Fox News programming on a regular basis suggests that Fox News viewers who switch to one of the network’s competitors are more likely to have a better understanding of political and societal issues.”

   “The study…enlisted hundreds of Fox News viewers to participate. The researchers randomized a portion of the entire group, offering that sample $15 per hour to switch to watching CNN for 30 days. The researchers then compared that group’s views and opinions to the control group that continued watching Fox News during that time.”

  “‘We found large effects of watching CNN instead of Fox News on participants’ factual perceptions of current events (i.e., beliefs) and knowledge about the 2020 presidential candidates’ positions,’ the researchers said. Those that made the switch were more likely to change their attitudes on a host of issues, including on the pandemic and on then-President Donald Trump, the study found. Their views also appeared more aligned with facts — for example, those who switched networks were 6 percentage points more likely to believe the COVID-19 crisis was handled better in other countries.” https://truthout.org/articles/study-fox-viewers-more-likely-to-have-factual-opinions-if-they-switch-networks/  (5 Apr. 2022)

-“In an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for [the] month [of September 2020]. At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats’ attitude to police….The findings suggest that political perspectives can be changed – but also reveals the influence partisan media has on viewers’ ideology.”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/11/fox-news-viewers-watch-cnn-study

-“Part of the reason [Fox embraced propaganda over news] is money. Fox News makes nearly $2 billion a year. Its intensely loyal audience allows the channel to charge more for advertising and in fees assessed by cable companies. Inciting viewers is crucial for keeping ratings high.” For example, pre-Trump, Hannity’s show was in decline. “In Trump, Hannity sensed a chance to turn things around. He glommed onto the ascendant [bombastic] candidate, stoking fears of rigged elections, violent immigrants and murderous Democrats, and pitching Trump as the panacea.” (The New York Times Book Review, 27 Sept. 2020, 16)

-From the start of Obama’s presidency, Republicans, even if they wanted to, could not work with him “because it would upset their voters. They were petrified of being tossed out in a primary challenge…Their voters hated Obama so much that it paralyzed the Republican Party. Now these Republicans should have had the courage to stand up to the rabid fringe of their party that believed Obama was a secret Muslim…That failure is how we ended up with Trump. Before the Republican establishment knew it, the far-right fringe they tried to placate started calling the shots…” (It’s no surprise that, during his second term, Obama came to rely on executive actions.) (Pfeiffer 2018, 180, 192)

-Fox created Trump by giving him a “regular forum on Fox & Friends to build his brand with the voters who would decide the Republican nomination” and, more importantly, “by creating the context for his rise over many years. Fox News has created an alternative reality for their viewers that has perverted politics in so many dangerous ways, because it’s not just Republican voters who get their news and their worldview from Fox; it’s Republican politicians and their aides.”

   Fox creates false news by the following three steps: 1) “A piece of false information, a misleading story, or a conspiracy theory shows up somewhere in the dark corners of the Internet.” 2) “A Fox News [or opinion] show…repeats the false story.” 3) “A Republican politician (often Donald Trump) communicates the false story to the voting public, citing Fox News as the source.” (Pfeiffer 2018, 162)

-“[E]very effort to create a progressive version of Fox has failed…This is largely because Democrats have not spent decades trying to convince their voters that the mainstream media is terrible and therefore it’s harder to get them to abandon the mainstream media for some alternative.” (Fox also delivers an entertaining product.) (Pfeiffer 2018, 167-8)

-“On the right, audiences concentrate attention on purely right wing outlets. On the left and center audiences spread their attention broadly and focus on mainstream organizations. This asymmetric pattern holds for the linking practices of media producers. Both supply and demand on the right are insular and self-focused. On the left and center they are spread broadly and anchored by professional press.”

   “On the right, because audiences do not trust or pay attention to outlets outside their own ecosystem, there is no reality check to constrain competition. Outlets compete on political purity and stoking identity-confirming narratives. Outlets and politicians who resist the flow by focusing on facts are abandoned or vilified by audiences and competing outlets. This forces media and political elites to validate and legitimate the falsehoods, at least through silence, creating a propaganda feedback loop.”

   “[F]ox News is by far the most influential outlet on the American right — more than five times as many Trump supporters reported using Fox News as their primary news outlet than those who named Facebook.” And Fox is “the transmission vector of widespread conspiracy theories….[For example,] The Clinton pedophilia libel that resulted in Pizzagate was started by a Fox online report, repeated across the Fox TV schedule, and provided the prime source of validation across the right-wing media ecosystem. In 2017 Fox repeatedly attacked the national security establishment and law enforcement whenever the Trump-Russia investigation heated up. Each attack involved significant online activity, but the spikes in attention and transition moments are associated with Hannity, ‘Fox & Friends’ and others like Tucker Carlson or Lou Dobbs.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/06/blame-fox-not-facebook-for-fake-news/?utm_term=.36e4f0f4483f

-“Switching the channels this morning [3 July 2020] between Fox on one hand, and the established networks and CNN, on the other, you get the clear sense that Fox News is broadcasting from a different planet. In their bizarro world, huge, violent riots are going on all across the United States, and we are all supposed to be cowering in fear from big Black people who plot to raid our homes and take all our property. Watching it, the parallels to Nazi propaganda [are] striking. Except in those cleverly mashed up films, which reflected no events that actually ever occurred, it was violent Jews and Poles who were the threatening menace.”

   “[Americans] need to focus not simply on the damage that Trump has done to our democracy, but also on the role played by his most dangerous enabler, Rupert Murdoch. In sum, why should a man who behaves in such a reckless and demagogic fashion have a broadcasting license?” (Scott Horton, Facebook post, 3 July 2020)

-“While [Fox’s] Tucker Carlson rules over cable TV, [Ben] Shapiro is the true king of conservative media, dominating talk radio, podcasts, and especially social media. NPR reported [in July 2021], ‘over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro founded, The Daily Wire, received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin.’” https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/27/ben-shapiros-authoritarian-moment/

-On 16 March 2022, “[R]ussia specialist Julia Ioffe told MSNBC: ‘Every time I’m asked by Americans do Russians really believe [Putin’s inane propaganda concerning the Ukraine invasion]…as if we don’t have the same thing happening here. You have 40 percent of the American population that was convinced in just one year that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election….’ And, indeed, Trump loyalists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Fox News personality Tucker Carlson continue to echo Russian talking points to undercut Ukraine’s war effort. Media scholar Eric Boehlert noted that ‘the anti-democratic, authoritarian bonds are becoming tighter as the Trump movement now turns to the Kremlin for its messaging cues. The overlap is undeniable, and the implications are grave.’” (Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook post, 16 March 2022)  https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1504301184663764995

-(Non-)Breaking News: Fox Knew It Lied: “In the days and weeks after the 2020 elections, Fox News Channel repeatedly broadcast false claims that then-President Donald Trump had been cheated of victory. [However,] [o]ff the air, the network’s stars, producers and executives expressed contempt for those same conspiracies, calling them ‘mind-blowingly nuts,’ ‘totally off the rails’ and ‘completely bs’…”
   “The network’s top primetime stars — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity — texted contemptuously of the claims in group chats, but also denounced colleagues pointing that out publicly or on television. Ingraham called Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell ‘a bit nuts.’ Carlson, who famously demanded evidence from Powell on the air, privately used a vulgar epithet for women to describe her. A top network programming executive wrote privately that he did not believe the shows of Carlson, Hannity and Jeanine Pirro were credible sources of news.”
   “Even so, top executives strategized about how to make it up to their viewers — among Trump’s strongest supporters — after Fox News’ election-night team correctly called the pivotal state of Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden before other networks. A sense of desperation pervades the private notes from Fox’s top stars, reflecting an obsession with collapsing ratings.”
   “‘It’s remarkable how weak ratings make… good journalists do bad things,’ Bill Sammon, at the time the network’s Washington managing editor, privately wrote on Dec. 2, 2020. Network executives above him stewed over the hit to Fox News’ brand among its viewers. Yet there was little apparent concern, other than some inquiries from Fox Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, over the journalistic values of fairness and accuracy.”
   “The audience started to erode severely that fall, starting on election night itself. Fox executives and stars equally obsessed over the threat posed by the smaller right-wing network Newsmax. Hannity texted Carlson and Ingraham that Fox’s Arizona call ‘destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.’ Carlson shot back that it was ‘vandalism.’ Others hosts…were equally shocked.”
   “Fox News host Neil Cavuto was attacked by colleagues for pulling his show away from a presentation by then White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany in which she made unfounded claims of fraud once more. (McEnany is now a host on Fox News.)”
   “Those revelations and far more surfaced in legal filings made public [in Feb. 2023] as part of Dominion Voting System’s blockbuster $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox and its parent company. Dominion sued after Fox hosts and guests repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the company had switched Trump votes to Biden.”
   “The claims against the election tech company recurred on Fox News despite Dominion sending thousands of communications dissecting and disproving the false claims — even taking to the opinion pages of Fox News’ corporate cousin, the Wall Street Journal, to do so. (Both Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are part of the Murdoch family’s media empire.)” “[F]ox never retracted the claims made about Dominion on its airwaves.”
   “[F]ox’s attorneys call Dominion’s suit an attempt to punish the news network for reporting on ‘one of the biggest stories of the day.’ The network says it could dissuade journalists in the future from reporting allegations ‘inconvenient to Dominion—and other companies.’” Fox’s attorneys add that, “‘According to Dominion, [Fox News] had a duty not to truthfully report the President’s allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false,’… Fox further asserts that Dominion did not suffer harm as a result of the broadcasts, and that the company’s value as a business is nowhere near the $1.6 billion in damages it is seeking….‘The core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.’”
   “Under the high legal bar of actual malice, defined in that 1964 US Supreme Court decision…, Dominion has to show Fox acted either with knowledge that what it was broadcasting to the public was false, or that it acted with reckless disregard of the truth. ‘Here,’ Dominion’s legal team wrote in its filings, ‘every person acted with actual malice.’ It offered one example after another that key Fox figures knew what the network was putting on the air was false.”
   “On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, texted a friend: ‘[T]here is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations – stories. Twitter. Bulls***.’ The following week, a producer for Ingraham sent a note conveying similar disgust. ‘This dominion s*** is going to give me a f***ing aneurysm.’”
   “Meanwhile, fixated on the erosion of viewers to smaller right-wing rivals, Fox News executives purged senior journalists who were fixated on reflecting the facts….On Jan. 5, 2021, the day before Congress was to ceremonially affirm Biden’s win, and an angry pro-Trump mob sacked the U.S. Capitol to prevent it, Rupert Murdoch forwarded a suggestion to Fox News CEO Scott. He recommended that the Fox prime time stars — Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham — acknowledge Trump’s loss. ‘Would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen,’ he wrote. They did not do so. ‘We need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers,’ Scott said to a colleague.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157558299/fox-news-stars-false-claims-trump-election-2020
   April 2023 Settlement: “Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787.5 million settlement agreement…narrowly heading off a trial shortly after the jury was sworn in….Absent from the settlement details shared with the public was an apology or any admission that the network had indeed defamed Dominion when it allowed baseless conspiracies to proliferate on air about the company’s voting machines ‘rigging’ 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump. A statement from Fox about the agreement recognized the court’s previous ruling that the claims Dominion had challenged in its defamation lawsuit were indeed without merit.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/media/fox-news-settles-dominion-defamation-lawsuit-rcna80285

Background: The Fairness Doctrine
-“After [World War II], the idea that radio listeners should hear two sides of every controversy evolved from self-regulation by the broadcasting industry into the government’s ‘Fairness Doctrine’ of 1949, which required broadcasters to allow responses to personal attacks and controversial opinions. It was enforced by the Federal Communications Commission and upheld in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC in 1969.”
   The broadcasting industry’s self-regulation occurred in response to the 1930’s radio broadcasts by Father Charles Coughlin, “a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with unfettered access to America’s vast radio audiences”, who, inter alia, spewed hate and deceit toward Jews and others. He even began “calling President Franklin D. Roosevelt a liar, a betrayer and a double-crosser. His fierce rhetoric fueled rallies and letter-writing campaigns for a dozen right-wing causes, from banking policy to opposing Russian communism. At the height of his popularity, an estimated 30 million Americans [–23 percent of the population–] listened to his Sunday sermons.”
   “[Due to] the deregulatory era of the 1980s, the Fairness Doctrine was abolished as the abundance of cable TV and radio was said to have ‘eroded’ the rationale for regulation. And yet, as it turned out, the expected abundance morphed into one-sided talk radio and social media echo chambers. These worked, as did Father Coughlin, to undermine tolerance and democracy.”
   “There’s not much that separates, on the one hand, the mad fanaticism that held Jews supposedly responsible for their own persecution in 1938 [as preached by Father Coughlin] and, on the other, the fevered delusion of 2020: that Donald Trump’s victory was stolen or that the president is on a mission to expose a satanic pedophile ring consisting of liberal politicians and media elites. In both cases, a relatively new medium was harnessed to inject hateful ideas into American society for political gain. And in both cases, private business had to step in when the consequences became evident.” https://theconversation.com/that-time-private-us-media-companies-stepped-in-to-silence-the-falsehoods-and-incitements-of-a-major-public-figure-in-1938-153157
-Many historians believe the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, which required TV and radio “broadcasters to present a variety of views on issues of public importance, paved the way for the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late 1980s and 1990s, which later served as a model for Fox.” “By the 1990s, talk radio had perhaps 20 million listeners, treated to daily tirades from right-wing talk-show hosts, with left-wing guests uninvited.” “Those talk radio shows continue to be popular…”
   “As a cable network, Fox News wouldn’t have been bound by the doctrine, which only applied to broadcast channels. But…its removal changed the rules of the game. ‘It served as a kind of check…It was always on the mind of everyone who was in the news business.’”
   In the UK, a media regulator Ofcom “enforces rules on impartiality and accuracy for all news broadcasters. Those who breach the rules can be censured or fined — putting pressure on TV channels to play stories fairly straight. Russian state-funded news channel RT, for example, was slapped with a $272,000 penalty for repeatedly breaking impartiality rules in its 2018 coverage of the poisonings of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as well as the conflict in Syria. It has not been fined since.” “‘What the [UK] impartiality rules do is ensure you cannot have the kind of shock jock culture — far right, or indeed far left, one-sided interpretation of events’…[In fact,] the framework has protected against the kind of disinformation peddled by Fox News in the US.” https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/16/media/fox-news-uk-ofcom/index.html (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Harper, 2003, 564. Hereinafter, “Zinn 2003.”)

5. Which country’s law mandates that the employees of large corporations elect one-half of the board of directors? (Therefore, shareholders do not elect all of the board.)

-Germany. Germany has a very successful economy and a strong welfare state. Its unemployment rate is similar to the US’s (and was far lower during the recession of 2008/9). During the 2010s, Germany, a nation of 82 million people, was the world’s third largest exporter, after China and the United States. Germans work less than Americans with six weeks of vacation time. Poverty rates for children and the elderly are less than half that of the US. Unlike most Americans, the average German isn’t perpetually indebted because basic public goods (such as healthcare, education and childcare) are paid for by the state. This last point is crucial for understanding how Germans can pay much higher taxes and still be able to save.
   The three building blocks of German social democracy are the worker council, the co-determined board and regional wage bargaining. With respect to the last block, “unions bargain for wages and pensions just like in America, except instead of negotiating with one employer at a time, they do so with as many employers in the same industry as possible….[T]his system [for example] would allow clerks at…all bookstores to be paid the same wage. Same work, same pay, so that companies aren’t competing based on wages and the ‘race to the bottom’ is stopped in its tracks. The system is powerful: Unions negotiate the wages of 60 percent of Germany’s private sector workforce, more than eight times the percentage of US workers covered by bargaining agreements. But things get much more interesting with the other big blocks. Works councils, comprised of elected workers, actually help to manage companies. That means the councils help determine core issues, like when to open and close the store or office, who gets what shift, and who gets laid-off or fired….[W]orkers and bosses make decisions together. More interesting are the co-determined boards….In any German company with more than 2,000 employees, workers get to elect half the firm’s board of directors — the same amount that shareholders get to elect. Although the board chairman, chosen by shareholders, gets to break ties, this arrangement gives [non-supervisory] workers…a modicum of control over the firm. They can try to block factory shutdowns and protect good manufacturing jobs and block capital flight and outsourcing.”
   Why does Germany have these effective labor-infused structures? “After World War II, US Army leaders, overseeing Germany’s reconstruction and steeped in the New Deal, advocated for works councils and co-determined boards in order to bring real democracy (not just better wages) to post-Nazi Germany.” (However, “the idea of works councils was not invented by Americans. In fact, it had its origins in Weimar Germany.” And prior to WWII, Germany had a strong trade union movement and the first mass socialist party. In fact, it was to keep those forces from power that the Nazi movement gained the backing of foreign investors and German capitalists.)
(Thomas Geoghegan, In These Times, July 2010)
http://www.worldstopexports.com/worlds-top-export-countries/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/continued/6194/what_we_can_learn
https://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/consider-the-germans-co-determination-and-works-councils/

-GM Avoids German Co-Management: In the late 1940s, GM was concerned that the powerful United Auto Workers, under the leadership of Walter Reuther, wanted a say in management. “In May 1950…the two sides announced an agreement…The new contract between the UAW and GM would last for five years. Workers would get a cost-of-living increase every three months, plus a measure of job security, plus a company health insurance plan, plus a company-paid retirement pension [to supplement Social Security]–all of which was previously almost unheard-of for American factory workers. GM, in exchange for the promise of a long period of labor peace and the union’s putting aside its ambitions to function as comanager of the corporation, was willing to set itself up as a comprehensive welfare state for its workers.” (Nicholas Lemann, Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 2019, 77. Hereinafter, “Lemann 2019.”)

-Coronavirus and Worksharing: German workers have benefited from the “country’s trademark approach to economic downturns. Instead of leaving employers to lay off workers en masse during hard times, and then have the workers apply individually for unemployment benefits, the German government subsidizes employers’ payrolls directly. Workers at a given firm or business agree to all work fewer hours, to spread what work remains among the whole staff instead of having some people laid off. But through government subsidies, they continue to receive a sizable share of their usual pay, as high as 87%, even if circumstances have them working few hours for the time being. When the economic crisis passes, they return to work full time, without the upheaval of losing a job and filing for unemployment on their own.”
   “Some 10 million Germans are currently benefiting from Kurzarbeit, as it’s called there — literally, short-work. It has been adopted in similar form during the pandemic crisis by several other countries, including France, Spain and the UK.”
   “The difference in approaches [between Germany and the US] has helped contribute to wildly different levels of economic fallout and social upheaval in response to the same pandemic. In Germany, the unemployment rate has increased from 5% to 5.8% from March to April [2020]. In the US, it surged from 4.4% to 14.7%.“
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-germany-saved-its-workforce-from-unemployment-while-spending-less-per-person-than-the-u-s

-Parental Leave: Few Americans know “that Germany grants new parents sixteen months of paid leave after every child is born….Europeans, in turn, are not well-informed about the absence of labor rights in America, largely because they are so stunned by the savagery of the social system that they don’t know how to report it. [Indeed, when Germans learn] that most Americans had no sick leave amid [the coronavirus] pandemic, their reaction was not merely regret [but shock].” (Neiman 2023, 131-2)
   “Well-educated Americans will occasionally mention Scandinavia, which they view as a utopian welfare state — a description which implies neither justice nor rights. The example reinforces the idea that only small homogenous countries can afford a system of social rights, or navigate the conflicts it might bring. Even Bernie Sanders never mentions that Germany, an increasingly diverse society with the world’s fourth largest economy, has a system of social rights he has yet to envision.” (Neiman 2023, 130)

-Housing Costs Impact Female Employment (2023): “Millions of people [around the world] have moved to cities, where [housing] demand outpaces supply. In Latin America, the ratio of house prices to earnings has become enormous. In Sydney and Vancouver, house prices exceed annual incomes ten-fold. The ratio has risen especially steeply in Anglo-speaking countries…”
   “Households’ relative expenditure on housing also varies internationally. It is far higher in the US than Germany and Austria. This holds even though US households typically comprise two full-time earners, whereas German and Austrian women are often part-time. Germans also tend to work fewer hours.”
   “Germany’s housing market is more regulated. Over half of German households are renters, and under rent controls. This caps higher spending.”
   Accordingly, it’s argued “that men and women’s labor market commitment is mediated not just by pay but also expenses. This helps explain why Germans work fewer hours in general, why German wives typically work part-time, and why German management remains over 70 percent male.”
   It’s worth noting that “Germans and Americans seem similarly egalitarian. Germans actually elect more women leaders. Their cabinet is now gender equal. Angela Merkel served 16 years as Chancellor, while America has never had a female head of state.” (29 June 2023)
https://draliceevans.substack.com/p/have-house-prices-pushed-up-female

-2023 Politics and Economics: “The economy is stuttering and a constitutional court ruling has upended the government’s spending plans. The far-right Alternative for Germany party, fresh from success in two regional elections, is cementing itself as the country’s second-most popular party. Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.”
   “[G]ermans have had to deal with a lot: the war in Ukraine, an energy crisis, inflation and…the painful fallout from war in Gaza. Even though immigration is rising, [the country] still lacks skilled labor — teachers, plumbers, IT specialists — and public infrastructure is crumbling.” Accordingly, dissatisfaction has grown, with collapsing support for mainstream parties. Nevertheless, “it’s clear that a majority of Germans do not support extreme positions.” (In January 2024, large demonstrations were held to protest right-wing extremism, as reports were published “of a far-right meeting in Potsdam last November [where plans were discussed] for the mass deportation of millions of foreigners and Germans from migrant families.” The protests, involving over 2 million people, were held “not just in liberal cities like Berlin, Hamburg and Munich but also in many cities in eastern Germany, where the far right is particularly strong.”)
   “[T]he government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights…is seen as suspect…The police…have cracked down on pro-Palestinian rallies…[P]oliticians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian demonstrations to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda….[In fact, in late 2023 Germany decided] on measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash…”
   “Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims. [Nevertheless,] Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.”
   “Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party, once fringe, is firmly mainstream, as are its concerns. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.”
   “Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy. All these critiques are valid[:] German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.”
   “Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of GDP, ensuring strict limits on spending. During the pandemic, the government got around it by claiming extra spending on the economy as an emergency measure. [In 2023], the government repurposed $65 billion of the funds that were left over for climate and energy programs. But in [late 2023], the constitutional court declared the plan to be unlawful, setting off a budget crisis.”
   “The effects have been immediate: [Finance Minister] Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills…More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans…” The AfD party may well benefit if the ruling parties don’t refocus.
(The New York Times, Opinion: Lukas Hermsmeier, 6 Dec. 2023)
(The New York Times, Opinion: Anna Sauerbrey, 31 Jan. 2024)

Fascists Popularity Due to Response to Interwar Economic Challenges
-“[F]ascism did not become powerful simply by appealing to citizens’ darkest instincts. Fascism also, crucially, spoke to the social and psychological needs of citizens to be protected from the ravages of capitalism at a time when other political actors were offering little help.”
   “The origins of fascism lay in a promise to protect people. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rush of globalisation destroyed communities, professions and cultural norms while generating a wave of immigration. Right-wing nationalist movements promising to protect people from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets arose, and frightened, disoriented and displaced people responded. These early fascist movements disrupted political life in some countries, but they percolated along at a relatively low simmer until the Second World War.”
   “The First World War had devastated Europe, killing 16 million people, maiming another 20 million, crushing economies and sowing turmoil. In Italy, for example, the postwar period saw high inflation and unemployment, as well as strikes, factory occupations, land seizures and other forms of social unrest and violence. The Liberal Italian governments of the postwar era failed to adequately address these problems. The Liberals’ constituencies – businessmen, landowners, members of the middle class – abandoned them. The country’s two largest opposition parties – the socialist PSI and the Catholic PPI – also offered little effective redress to these basic social problems.”
   “Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (PNF) stepped into the breach, taking advantage of the failure or ineffectiveness of existing institutions, parties and elites, and offering a mixture of ‘national’ and ‘social’ policies. Fascists promised to foster national unity, prioritise the interests of the nation above those of any particular group, and promote Italy’s stature internationally. The fascists also appealed to Italians’ desire for social security, solidarity and protection from capitalist crises. They promised therefore to restore order, protect private property and promote prosperity but also to shield society from economic downturns and disruption. Fascists stressed that wealth entailed responsibilities as well as privileges, and should be administered for the benefits of the nation.”
   “These appeals enabled the fascists to garner support from almost all socioeconomic groups. Italy was a young country (formed in the 1860s), plagued by deep regional and social divisions. By claiming to serve the best interests of the entire national community, it was in fact the fascists who became Italy’s first true ‘people’s party’.”
   “After coming to power, the Italian fascists created recreational circles, student and youth groups, sports and excursion activities. These organisations all furthered the fascists’ goals of fostering a truly national community. The desire to strengthen (a fascist) national identity also compelled the regime to extraordinary cultural measures. They promoted striking public architecture, art exhibitions, and film and radio productions. The regime intervened extensively in the economy….Such policies kept fascism popular until the late 1930s, when Mussolini threw his lot in with Hitler. It was only the country’s involvement in the Second World War, and the Italian regime’s turn to a more overtly ‘racialist’ understanding of fascism, that began to make Italian fascism unpopular.”
   “Italian fascism differed from its German counterpart in important ways. [A]nti-Semitism and racism were more innate in the German version. But Italian and German fascism also shared important similarities. Like Italy, Germany was a ‘new’ nation (formed in 1871) plagued by deep divisions. After the First World War, Germany had found itself saddled with punitive peace terms. During the 1920s, it experienced violent uprisings, political assassinations, foreign invasion and a notorious Great Inflation. Then the Great Depression hit, causing immense suffering in Germany. The response of the government, and other political actors, however, must also be remembered. For different reasons, both the era’s conservative governments and their socialist opponents primarily favoured austerity as a response to the crisis. Thus came a golden opportunity for fascism.”
   “Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) promised to serve the entire German people, but the German fascist vision of ‘the people’ did not include Jews and other ‘undesirables’. They promised to create a ‘people’s community’ that would overcome the country’s divisions. The fascists also pledged to fight the Depression and contrasted its activism on behalf of the people’s welfare with the meekness and austerity of the government and the socialists. By the 1932 elections, these appeals to protect the German people helped the Nazis become the largest political party, and the one with the broadest socioeconomic base.”
   (“In an example that could almost have been ripped from [Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies], Hitler wrote, ‘The German people have no interest [in] a German financial group or a German shipyard establishing a so-called subsidiary shipyard in Shanghai to build ships for China with Chinese workers and foreign steel.’ Joseph Goebbels, his future propaganda minister, invoked another [Trump] trope: ‘Certainly,’ said the defiant Goebbels, ‘we want to build a wall, a protective wall.’”)
   “When, in January 1933, Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis quickly began work-creation and infrastructure programmes. They exhorted business to take on workers, and doled out credit. Germany’s economy rebounded and unemployment figures improved dramatically: German unemployment fell from almost 6 million in early 1933 to 2.4 million by the end of 1934; by 1938, Germany essentially enjoyed full employment. [(In January 1933 one in three Germans were unemployed.)] By the end of the 1930s, the government was controlling decisions about economic production, investment, wages and prices. Public spending was growing spectacularly.”
   “Nazi Germany remained capitalist. But it had also undertaken state intervention in the economy unprecedented in capitalist societies. The Nazis also supported an extensive welfare state (of course, for ‘ethnically pure’ Germans). It included free higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance and an array of publicly supported entertainment and vacation options. All spheres of life, economy included, had to be subordinated to the ‘national interest’, and the fascist commitment to foster social equality and mobility.”
   “Largely for these reasons, up till 1939, most Germans’ experience with the Nazi regime was probably positive. The Nazis had seemingly conquered the Depression and restored economic and political stability. As long as they could prove their ethnic ‘purity’ and stayed away from overt shows of disloyalty, Germans typically experienced National Socialism not as a tyranny and terror, but as a regime of social reform and warmth.”
   “There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism, much less ethnic cleansing, but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem.”
   “In response to the horror of fascism, in part, New Deal Democrats in the United States, and social democratic parties in Europe, also moved to renegotiate the social contract. They promised citizens that they would control capitalism and provide social welfare policies and undertake other measures to strengthen national solidarity – but without the loss of freedom and democracy that fascism entailed.”
   Two critical lessons for the present are clear. First, “you can’t beat something with nothing. If other political actors don’t come up with more compelling solutions to the problems of capitalism, the popular appeal of the resurgent Right-wing will continue. And then the analogy with fascism and democratic collapse of the interwar years might prove even more relevant than it is now.” Second, while demagogues will always exist, it’s crucial to recognize the role of those in a position to halt their progress. “Faced with jingoist politicians who resort to poisonous lies,…the forces of democracy can prevail only if they muster courage, resolve and cooperative spirit.”
https://aeon.co/ideas/fascism-was-a-right-wing-anti-capitalist-movement
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-a-hypernationalist-crafty-liar-exploited-political-divisions-in-1930s-germany/2018/07/19/fedb41c8-8475-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU1IVW6uqM0

-Best of Times, Worst of Times: “In 1952, the American [writer] Milton Mayer spent nine months in the town of Marburg, an hour north of Frankfurt, to try and understand how ordinary people came to allow such a catastrophe to happen. He chose ten townsfolk to interview extensively…When he asked them how it felt to live under Nazi rule before the war, the answer was almost always the same: Those were the best years of their lives. ‘There were jobs and job security, summer camps for the children, and the Hitler Jugend to keep them off the streets,’ Mayer wrote in his book, They Thought They Were Free. ‘After ’33, we had more children…A man saw a future.’” (Bilger 2023, 127)
   Of course, Mayer recognized that while Nazis were happy, anti-Nazis were not. He recognized that there are two countries in every country. “In a city like Berlin, where Jews and Christians, Nazis and Communists, lived side by side, it could be hard to keep the two worlds apart — to live one truth without blinding yourself to the other. But how hard was it in a village [or small town]?” (Bilger 2023, 128)
   Perhaps many Germans convinced themselves “that the Nazis might still build ‘a tolerable relation between the German people and the Jews,’ as Hitler declared in Nuremberg, in 1935. [They] should have paid more attention to Hitler’s next words: ‘If it fails, [the Jewish problem] must be handed over by law to the Nazi Party for a final solution.’” (In a January 1939 speech, Hitler “declared that a new war in Europe would lead to ‘the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’…”) (Bilger 2023, 135) (Heilbrunn 2024, 96)

-Lesson For Progressives: “[T]he Nazis came to power through democratic elections, but they never won a majority until they were already in power. Had the left-wing parties been willing to form a united front, as thinkers from Einstein to Trotsky urged, the world could have been spared its worst war. The differences dividing the parties were real; even blood had been spilled. But though the Stalinist communist party couldn’t see it, those differences paled next to the difference between universal leftist movements and the tribal vision of fascism. We cannot afford a similar mistake.” (Neiman 2023, 143)

-Us v. Them: “‘The most telling symptom of fascist politics…is division. It aims to separate a population into an us and a them.’ A skeptic might say that this definition tells us nothing terribly special about fascism since the strategy of dividing the world into enemies and friends is a commonplace of politics everywhere. But this may be the most sobering lesson: fascism may be less a distinctive mode of political organization than the reductio ad malum, the dark undertow of modern society carried to an extreme. This was [Ernst] Cassirer’s view: fascism, he warned, was a latent temptation in democracy, a mythic form that could reawaken in times of crisis.”
   “No differently than other terms, fascism now belongs to our common archive of political memory. Exceeding its own epoch, it stands as a common name for a style of institutionalized cruelty and authoritarian rule that recurs with remarkable frequency, albeit in different guises. In the United States, it would no doubt take a different form. As the historian of European fascism Robert Paxton has observed, ‘the language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would ultimately have little to do with the original European models.’ In an American fascism, he writes, one would see not swastikas but ‘Christian crosses’ and ‘Stars and Stripes.’”
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/07/why-historical-analogy-matters/

-Enraged Leftists: “As French-Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell chronicled, fascist movements actually emerged out of a dissenting socialist trend: They wanted to destroy the system so badly that they cared little for the mechanism or outcome of that destruction. These ‘national syndicalists’ replaced class as the historical change agent with ‘nation,’ thus redirecting the dramatic anger the masses held towards their stagnating societies away from a class struggle and onto a racialized, authoritarian nightmare. They certainly wanted revolution, just not the type the left typically desires.”
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/01/conspiracy-theories-corrosive-to-social-movements/

-Populist Anger Redirected: “Undirected populism tends to reproduce our society’s bigotries and biases. For the West, antisemitism was a primary folk narrative to explain dislocation and alienation: ‘It was the Jews who were responsible for widening inequality and political disenfranchisement.’ This belief has deep roots in Christian empire. And when modernity emerged and people were looking to explain new systems of abstraction, many turned to older antisemitic theories and simply secularized them. As European colonialism spread across the globe, it also exported many of its ideas, which explains why antisemitic conspiracy theories are found far from antisemitism’s Christian origins.”
   “During populist uprisings, it’s common for antisemitism to replace grounded political analysis. These ideas are often not the result of intentional misdirection by antisemites, but present because antisemitism remains a part of the Western populist imagination. Marxist scholar Moishe Postone called this ‘structural antisemitism’ because the complicated way that capitalism works often confuses the public as to where the center of power lies, and what kind of figures should be seen as uniquely pernicious. The same principle works for most forms of scapegoating, such as when economic conflict is channeled into anti-immigrant xenophobia.”
   “This culture of conspiracy theory and blame-setting is endemic to the political right, which needs to channel working-class anger away from those in power and onto a marginalized community as a patsy. Since the right is not interested in challenging the wealthy or petitioning the powerful, they redirect disaffection onto a mirage.”
   “This dynamic can also exist on the left when political acumen is not valued and rebellion of any type is understood as a net positive. The left has changed dramatically over the past 30 years, moving into more spontaneous formations like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and mass antifascist actions. This has created a vacuum where movements need support, training and political development. Communities now organize more horizontally, and there is no turning back the clock on this development, at least in the near term. But when these movements lack any clear plan to achieve liberation, activists can also misread the issue, relying on conspiracism instead of analysis…”
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/01/conspiracy-theories-corrosive-to-social-movements/

-Allure of The Autocratic Leader: Mussolini to Trump: “Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.”
   “The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an ‘other’ that their followers could hate.”
   Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.”
   “America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all people as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were African American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Native Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous ‘Code Talk,’ based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.”
   “[President] FDR hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.”
   “Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will? Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.”
   “But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.”
   “The once-grand Republican Party has been captured by the right wing. It has lined up behind former president Donald Trump and his cronies, who have vowed to replace the nonpartisan civil service with loyalists and to weaponize the Department of Justice and the military against those they perceive as enemies. They have promised to incarcerate and deport millions of immigrants and children of immigrants, send federal troops into Democratic cities, ban Muslims, silence LGBTQ Americans, prosecute journalists, and end abortion across the country. They will put in place an autocracy in which a powerful leader and his chosen loyalists make the rules under which the rest of us must live.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-7-2023
   -Trump Rallies Echo Style of Mussolini Regime: “[It’s] the incoherence, the bombast, the grandiosity, the extravagant lies, the demonization, the xenophobia, the bogus nods to religiosity and patriotism, the references to himself with the royal we, the condescending sops to his toadies, the ecstatic gaze of the people arranged behind him on stage. But there’s also an undeniably comic aspect, too…” (The New York Times, Trump Is in His Element, 26 Feb. 2024)

-Tribalists (Ironically) Unite: Since the 2010s, the lurch to tribalism has been international and organized. “From Bangalore to Budapest and beyond, right-wing nationalists meet regularly to share support and strategies, although each nation thinks its civilization superior. The solidarity between them suggest that nationalist beliefs are only marginally based on the idea that Hungarians/Norwegians/Jews/Germans/Anglo-Saxons/Hindus are the best of all possible tribes. What unites them is the principle of tribalism itself: you will only truly connect with those who belong to your clan, and you need have no deep commitment to anyone else. It’s a bitter piece of irony that today’s tribalists find it easier to make common cause than those whose commitments stem from universalism…” (Neiman 2023, 3-4)
   Universalism has traditionally “defined the left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the right, which recognized no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The left demanded that the circle encompass the globe[:] to care about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican volunteers in Spain…What united was not blood but conviction — first and foremost the conviction that behind all the differences…human beings are deeply connected in a wealth of ways. To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say that they determine us is false.” (Neiman 2023, 11)

-Fictional Tribes: Under Hitler, genealogy “was a national obsession…Kinship offices were created, document agencies established…At first, only Nazi Party members and their spouses, and members of organizations affiliated with the party, had to provide proof of ancestry….Then soldiers, students, civil servants, lawyers, doctors, dentists, and others were added to the list.”
   “Often, a birth certificate and a sworn statement were all the documents that authorities needed. But on occasion — if someone claimed that the Jewish father who raised them wasn’t their birth father, for instance — a heredity exam had to be administered. First a blood test (often inconclusive) to see if they were born out of wedlock. Then a study of their fingerprints, facial features, eye color, skull shape…Once the data had been…analyzed, the candidates were slotted into precise (though largely fictional) racial categories: Aryan, Jew, Alien, and Mischling or Mixed Race. Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws left no room for ambiguity. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was barred from citizenship, civil service, and sexual relations with ‘true’ Germans.” Blood mattered. (Burkhard Bilger, Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets, Random House, New York: 2023, 39-40. Hereinafter, “Bilger 2023.”)

-Accepting Guilt: “Till the late twentieth century, the one thing no national narrative emphasized was a nation’s history of crime. [However,] several decades after World War II, West German activists, intellectuals, artists and church groups began to demand that Germany recognize its role as perpetrator of Nazi crimes….[I]n the first decades after the war, most inside West Germany sounded like devotees of the Confederate Lost Cause. Few foreigners know how fondly they nursed a litany of grievance and suffering….It took forty years for a West German president to declare that while Germans had suffered during and after the war, other peoples had suffered more, and their suffering was Germany’s fault. (East Germany’s self-image was very different.) In the decades that followed, the idea that Nazi crimes are fundamental to German identity has solidified.” (Neiman 2023, 116-7)
   It’s asked whether America or Britain “had the conditions for historical reckoning that had been present in Germany, a nation occupied by armies that defeated it. The last time any part of the US was occupied by victorious armies was when Federal troops ended Reconstruction by leaving the the South in 1877; the last time England was occupied was 1066. This supposes that German historical reckoning was forced, or at least facilitated, by the occupying armies. It was not. Germans viewed Allied denazification programs with contemptuous humor, part of a package of what they called victors’ justice.” (Neiman 2023, 118)
   In any event, the “tidal wave of reckoning that Black Lives Matter jump-started in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020” was “a sign of progress….The fact that America is confronting slavery, and Britain colonialism, is a step forward toward healthier nations. Fierce backlash to those attempts should not surprise us. Fifty years after World War II, German efforts to reckon with Wehrmacht crimes were met with violent resistance, including mass demonstrations and firebombings.” (Neiman 2023, 118-9)

-Adenauer’s Motives: “West Germany’s munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a ‘late 19th-century colonialist’ who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernization. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany’s ‘international standing’, adding that ‘the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.’”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/pankaj-mishra/memory-failure
   1968 Generation: Germans who came of age amid the political turbulence of 1968 demonstrated in Bonn (while French youths rioted in Paris). “Police brutality and government repression, like foreign wars and a conservative press, were the predictable outgrowths of the West’s authoritarian roots, they believed. Germans had been taught to turn their backs on the two World Wars — to forget that their culture was nearly destroyed and get on with rebuilding it. But the signs of their parents’ complicity were all around them. The government, military, and universities were still riddled with former fascists. Even the chancellor himself, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, was once a member of the Nazi Party. The old guard had never left, it seemed; they had simply traded in their uniforms.” (Bilger 2023, 49)
   Children began asking their parents uncomfortable questions. However, uncertain how they might have behaved under Hitler, many withheld judgment. In fact, “to understand the Nazi years, you had to understand the crushing poverty in the village after the First World War. To understand the war, you had to understand Prussian authoritarianism and the bitter persistence of the German feudal system in the Black Forest [which impoverished many].”)  (Bilger 2023, 52)

-The Marshall Plan: In his famous June 1947 speech, Secretary of State George Marshall “outlined the principles of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The speech challenged European governments to work together to make a plan for recovery and suggested that the US would provide the money. European countries did so, forming the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948. From 1948 to 1952, the US would donate about $17 billion to European countries to rebuild, promote economic cooperation, and modernize economies. By the end of the four-year program, economic output in each of the countries participating in the Marshall Plan had increased by at least 35 percent.”
   “This investment helped to avoid another depression like the one that had hit the world in the 1930s, enabling Europe to afford goods from the US and keeping low the tariff walls that had helped to choke trade in the crisis years of the 1930s. Marshall later recalled that his primary motivation was economic recovery, that he had been shocked by the devastation he saw in Europe and felt that ‘[i]f Europe was to be salvaged, economic aid was essential.’”
   “But there was more to the Marshall Plan than money. The economic rubble after the war had sparked political chaos that fed the communist movement. No one wanted to go back to the prewar years of the depression, and in the wake of fascism, communism looked attractive to many Europeans.”
  “‘Marshall was acutely aware that this was a plan to stabilize Western Europe politically because the administration was worried about the impact of communism, especially on labor unions,’ [according to] historian Charles Maier…‘In effect, it was a plan designed to keep Western Europe safely in the liberal Western camp.’”
   “It worked. American investment in Europe helped to turn European nations away from communism as well as the nationalism that had fed World War II, creating a cooperative and stable Europe.”
   “The Marshall Plan also helped Europe and the US to articulate a powerful set of shared values. The US invited not just Europe but also the Soviet Union to participate in the plan, but Soviet leaders refused, recognizing that accepting such aid would weaken the idea that communism was a superior form of government and give the US influence. They blocked satellite countries from participating, as well.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-4-2022?s=r

6. In 1969, how much did a typical auto industry production worker earn (in 2005 dollars)? In 2005, how much did a typical Wal-Mart nonsupervisory employee earn?

-In 1969, the typical GM production worker salary (in 2005 dollars): $40,000 (with excellent benefits). In 2005, the typical Wal-Mart nonsupervisory employee salary: $18,000 (with limited benefits).  (Krugman 2007, 139)

-“From 1947 through about 1978, wages and benefits for rank-and-file workers grew roughly in tandem with the overall productivity of the US economy: both more than doubled over that period.…Between 1979 and 2007, productivity shot up by another 70 percent. But compensation for the American rank and file hardly moved, inching up only 5 percent, after factoring in inflation. In recent decades, only the elite—those in the top tenth of income distribution—saw their real earnings keep pace with gains in productivity.”

   “By the end of the previous economic expansion, in 2000, the median American family earned about $61,000 annually, after accounting for inflation. In 2007, before the economy turned down again, the median family had seen its earnings contract to $60,500. For the first time since the government began keeping records more than a half century earlier, an expansion had ended, with most Americans effectively sliding backward.…[During the same general period,] corporate profits as a percentage of national income swelled close to the highest level in sixty years.” (Peter S. Goodman, Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy, Times Books, New York: 2009, 10-11, 161. Hereinafter, “Goodman.”)

-The reason why US “manufacturing workers, construction workers, and restaurant workers lose their jobs to low-paid workers from the developing world, and doctors and lawyers don’t, is that doctors and lawyers use their political power to limit the extent to which they are exposed to competition from their low-paid counterparts in the developing world. Our trade policy has been explicitly designed to remove barriers that prevent General Electric and other companies from moving their manufacturing operations to Mexico, China or other developing countries. By contrast, many of the barriers that make it difficult for foreign professionals to work in the United States have actually been strengthened in the last two decades.” http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/inequality-the-silly-tales-economists-like-to-tell

-In May 2019, “the Federal Reserve Board of Governors released its report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households… Based on a survey of 11,316 American households, the report says: ‘If faced with an unexpected expense of $400, 61 percent of adults say they would cover it with cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement—a modest improvement from [2018]. Similar to [2018], 27 percent would borrow or sell something to pay for the expense, and 12 percent would not be able to cover the expense at all.’”

   “Within that 39%, about half would cover the expense with either a credit card or a bank loan. Another 10% of the original 11,316 could borrow the money from a friend or relative, and 2% would take a payday loan. Just 12% would not be able to cover the expense at all. It is also worth noting how much these numbers improved over time. In 2013, 50% of Americans didn’t have $400 in cash, now 61% do.”
https://qz.com/1630506/most-americans-are-not-400-away-from-financial-ruin/?utm_source=google-news  (3 June 2019)

-“The incomes of typical Americans rose in 2015 by 5.2 percent, the first significant boost to middle-class pay since the end of the Great Recession and the fastest increase ever recorded by the federal government, according to the Census Bureau.”

   “Real median household income was $56,500 in 2015,…up from $53,700 in 2014. The gain was a combination of rising wages in the economy – spurred by a labour market where unemployment is falling and employers are being forced to compete more for workers – and low inflation….[T]he gains brought median incomes nearly back to their levels before the recession, after adjusting for inflation, though they remain below 1999 levels.” (“The unemployment rate…declined to 4.9 percent as of [August 2016].”)

   “Incomes increased for men and for women and across racial and ethnic groups. They grew most for the lowest-earning workers and least for the highest-earning ones, though all income groups saw improvement. The only weak spots were geographic: Median incomes rose by 7.3 percent for workers who live in major cities. For workers in rural areas, they did not rise at all.”

   “[T]he poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1968. There were 43.1 million Americans in poverty on the year, 3.5 million fewer than in 2014.” “The share of Americans who lack health insurance continued a years-long decline, falling 1.3 percentage points, to 9.1 percent.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/middle-class-incomes-had-their-fastest-growth-on-record-last-year-a7262406.html  (13 Sept. 2016)

-As of Sept. 2017, “if the economy is so wonderful, why are so many Americans still feeling left behind? … ‘Over the past five decades, Middle America has been stagnant in terms of its economic growth,’… In 1973, the inflation-adjusted median income of men working full time was $54,030. In 2016, it was $51,640… A big chunk of that group – white working-class men – formed a critical core of support for Mr. Trump, who spoke to their economic anxieties and promised changes in trade, immigration and tax policies as a solution.”

   “[S]ince the 1950s, three-quarters of working Americans have seen no change in lifetime income. … [T]he kinds of jobs and salaries that high school graduates used to be able to command have dived. ‘That’s the single most important reason we’re having so much trouble… You have to have better skills and more knowledge to make $60,000 to $80,000 a year now than in the past.’” (The New York Times, 17 Sept. 2017, BU 1 and 4)

-Research on the effects of globalization between 1988 and 2008 reveals that its winners include 70 percent of the world’s population, “the emerging global middle class, mainly in Asia. Over this period they saw cumulative gains of 40 to 60 percent in their real incomes. The…world’s richest one percent [also] saw their incomes soar. [The primary losers were] the lower middle classes of the rich world, who gained less than 10 percent. These are the focus of the new concern about inequality: the ‘hollowed-out middle class,’ the Trump supporters, the people globalization left behind….[Thus] the world’s poor have gotten richer in part at the expense of the American lower middle class”.

   Nevertheless, in absolute terms, Americans have been moving up. “Between 1979 and 2014, the percentage of poor Americans [$0-$30,000 for a family of three] dropped from 24 to 20, the percentage in the lower middle class dropped from 24 to 17, and the percentage in the middle class shrank from 32 to 30. Where did they go? Many ended up in the upper middle class ($100,000-$350,000), which grew from 13 to 30 percent of the population, and in the upper class, which grew from 0.1 percent to 2 percent. The middle class is being hollowed out in part because so many Americans are becoming affluent. Inequality undoubtedly increased–the rich got richer faster than the poor and middle class got richer–but everyone (on average) got richer.”

   “[I]nequality measures understate the progress of the lower and middle classes in rich countries. Income is just a means [to pay] for things that people need [and] want. When poverty is defined in terms of what people consume rather than what they earn, we find that the American poverty rate has declined by ninety percent since 1960, from 30 percent of the population to just 3 percent. The two forces that have famously increased inequality in income have at the same time decreased inequality in what matters. The first, globalization, may produce winners and losers in income, but in consumption it makes almost everyone a winner. Asian factories, container ships, and efficient retailing bring goods to the masses that were formerly luxuries for the rich….The second force, technology, continually revolutionizes the meaning of income…A dollar today, no matter how heroically adjusted for inflation, buys far more betterment of life than a dollar yesterday. It buys things that didn’t exist, like refrigeration, electricity, toilets, vaccinations…Together, technology and globalization have transformed what it means to be a poor person, at least in developed countries.” (Pinker 2018, 112-3, 114, 117)

   “Spending power — the amount of goods and services that a person can buy — is what really matters to people because it captures the ability to satisfy their wants and needs…Study after study has shown rising inequality of income and wealth [in the US. For example, an influential 2017 paper] found that the average real income of the top 0.1 percent of the population grew by 298 percent between 1984 and 2014, while the average real income of the bottom half grew just 21 percent. But spending power gives a [less concerning but still serious] picture….The richest 1 percent of 40- to 49-year-olds in the US own 29.1 percent of their cohort’s net wealth but account for only 11.8 percent of their group’s remaining lifetime spending power…The poorest fifth of the 40-somethings own just 0.4 percent of the group’s net wealth but have 6.6 percent of the remaining lifetime spending power…Difference in wealth overstates inequality because it fails to capture two of the main enablers of spending power, namely earnings from work and government benefits…Someone who has no money in the bank can still have a relatively decent lifestyle based on salary and various transfer payments, including social security.” (The New York Times, 24 July 2022, SR 10)

7. True or False: The US has higher social mobility than the Scandinavian countries.

 -False. “[I]nternational comparison of social mobility [shows that]…the Scandinavian countries have higher social mobility than the UK, which in turn has higher mobility than the US. It is no coincidence that the stronger the welfare state, the higher the mobility. Particularly in the case of the US, the fact that low overall mobility is largely accounted for by low mobility at the bottom suggests that it is the lack of a basic income guarantee that is preventing poor kids from making use of the equality of opportunity. [The percentage of Americans born to parents in the bottom fifth of income who will climb to the top fifth as adults is only 7 percent.]…Unless we create an environment where everyone is guaranteed some minimum capabilities through some guarantee of minimum income, education and healthcare, we cannot say that we have fair competition….Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.” (Chang, 219-20)

-The US’s lack of “universal health care, all by itself, puts Americans who are unlucky in their parents at a disadvantage: Because American children from low-income families are often uninsured, they’re more likely to have health problems that derail their life chances. Poor nutrition, thanks to low income and a lack of social support, can have the same effect….Then there’s the highly uneven quality of US basic education…” (Krugman 2007, 249)
   “[T]he US spends an astonishing 16 percent of its GDP on health care, while leaving millions without coverage; Canada spends 10 percent of its GDP and covers all Canadians. … Roughly two million Americans declare bankruptcy each year due to medical bills.” (McQuaig 2019, 205)
  The primary reason the US doesn’t have universal health care is race: “[Americans] almost got universal coverage in 1947, but segregationists blocked it out of fear that it would lead to integrated hospitals (which Medicare actually did do in the 1960s). Most of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government would bear the great bulk of the cost, are former slave states.” (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 2 June 2020)
   (The “beneficiaries of [President] Truman’s universal coverage would have been overwhelmingly white, as white people at the time made up 90 percent of the US population. Few Americans, Black or white, had private insurance plans, and the recent notion that employers would provide it had yet to solidify into a nationwide expectation.” (McGhee 2021, 51))

Charter Schools: According to a 2019 report, “More than 35 percent of charter schools funded by the federal Charter School Program between 2006 and 2014 either never opened or were shut down, costing taxpayers more than half a billion dollars…The state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to [Trump’s] Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/12/09/report-federal-government-wasted-millions-dollars-charter-schools-that-never-opened/
   “A lot of people have overcorrected from ‘educational outcomes are largely explained by selection effects’ (which is true) to ‘educational outcomes are entirely explained by selection effects.’ In fact, lottery studies show charter schools outperforming traditional public schools by increasingly large margins and particularly doing so in urban areas. Unfortunately, as the evidence for charter schools has gotten stronger, both parties have walked away from them.” (4 Jan. 2024)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/william-julius-wilson-thought-deserves

-One important reason why many poorer Americans accept policies underlying income inequality, and thus respond negatively to policies that would benefit them, is their (false) belief in high rates of social mobility. “Why would the poor oppose taxes on the wealthy? Because many believe that they, or at least their children, will eventually be wealthy, voting for taxes on the rich may feel like voting for taxes on themselves….[The issue is] whether educating Americans about the current level of wealth inequality…might increase their support for policies that reduce this inequality.”
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/03/21/rising-wealth-inequality-should-we-care/living-beyond-your-means-when-youre-not-rich

-The “World Bank’s top analysts acknowledged…that redistribution—as well as economic growth—is needed to end world poverty. Nations can’t offer equity of opportunity…without first achieving a healthy measure of equity in distribution. That’s because…societies with extreme inequality in wealth generate also extreme inequality in power….[G]overnments that reflect these extreme inequalities in power…tend to govern not in the public interest, but in the interest of wealthy elites.”
http://www.fpif.org/articles/deeply_unequal_world

-Generous social programs also create more personal freedom. A strong safety net “frees Nordic citizens from the daily torment of worrying about financial security and allows them to get on with improving their lives and building their careers. [Accordingly,] the lack of a social welfare system creates dependence in many Americans [who] depended ‘on their employers for all sorts of things that were unimaginable to [a Nordic citizen]: medical care, health savings accounts, and pension contributions…The result was that employers ended up having far more power in the relationship than the employee.’” (McQuaig 2019, 204)

-“Progressives don’t deny that incentives can matter. To use one [example], countries that offer generous benefits to people who retire early, like France, end up with many people…retiring early. But economists on the center left generally argue that the disincentives created by anti-poverty programs [–such as, if a person’s government benefits decrease as employment income rises, that person may avoid working more–] are exaggerated, and that the main thing actually trapping people in poverty is a lack of resources: It’s hard to get an education, start a business, even move to a place where jobs are available, when you have no money in the bank and are living hand-to-mouth. Also, being poor imposes a lot of cognitive stress: It’s hard to focus on self-improvement when you’re constantly worrying about where the next rent check will come from or how to pay medical bills.”
   “If you see resources as the main problem for the poor, the answer to poverty is to provide more resources; this doesn’t just improve the lives of the poor in the short run, it also increases their chances of breaking free of the poverty cycle.”
   “This is the kind of debate that should be settled with evidence. And…there is growing evidence that the resources view of poverty is much closer to the truth than the incentives view. [T]his is especially true for programs that help families with children, which seem to improve the lives of those children long after they’ve matured past receiving aid.” Unfortunately, the Republican party ignores evidence. (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 26 January 2021)

8. Who wrote the following? “By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct.”

-The concept of relative deprivation (not merely absolute poverty) was described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. As Smith recognized, income inequality has significant negative consequences.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/03/060403fa_fact?printable=true&currentPage=all

-“It appears that, while money matters to people, their relative ranking matters more….Poor health may be the most dramatic consequence of relative deprivation, but there are more subtle effects as well…[For example,] children from poor families may lack skills…that could enhance their prospects in the job market….Being relatively poor in a rich country can be a great capability handicap, even when one’s absolute income is high in terms of world standards.”
   Conservatives generally reject relative-poverty measures, because as “some people will always earn less than others, the relative-poverty rate will never go down. Fortunately, this isn’t necessarily true. If incomes were distributed more equally, fewer families would earn less than half the median income. Therefore, the way to reduce relative poverty is to reduce income inequality—perhaps by increasing the minimum wage and raising taxes on the rich.” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/03/060403fa_fact?printable=true&currentPage=all

-“[T]here is overwhelming evidence that as inequality grows a country becomes nastier. [R]ates of violent crime and racism tend to be higher where the gap between rich and poor is greater. So firmly established is the link between homicide rates and inequality…that many criminologists regard it as more important than any other environmental factor….[I]n some countries inequality reduces the life expectancy of the poorest by as much as 25 percent. We are talking about the effects not of absolute poverty but of inequality – which apparently leads to acute anxieties and insecurities, and a chronic lack of social trust.” http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2006/12/29/inequality-does-matter/
   “Show social scientists a time or place with great inequality, and they will likely show you a time or place with a perceived unfairness and mistrust and a high rate of misery, violent crime, obesity, teen births, and more. Disparity dispirits.” (Myers 2022, 201)
   “[H]istorians will tell you that in the US, race and gender tensions are significantly lower when income and wealth are more evenly distributed than when a few people at the top of the economic ladder control most of the nation’s capital. The rise of lynching in the US in the late 1880s, just as trusts came to monopolize the economy, was not a coincidence.” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-10-2022

-“A sharp rise in death rates among white middle-aged Americans has [been identified in 2015]. The alarming trend [which began in 1998]…has hit less-educated 45- to 54-year-olds the hardest, with no other groups in the US as affected and no similar declines seen in other rich countries….The rise in death rates among middle-aged white Americans means half a million more people have died in the US since 1998 than if the previous trend had continued.”
   “The researchers cite the surge in the use of powerful opioid painkillers as one contributing factor, with drink and suicide potentially related to people needing relief from pain or mental health problems. But they suspect that financial stress is involved too, with the fall in household incomes among white non-Hispanics being particularly tough on those with no more than a high school education….[I]f what is happening is an epidemic of despair, that people on the bottom of the economic heap are being increasingly left out as inequality expands, then what we are seeing is just one more terrible consequence of slow growth and growing inequality.’”
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/nov/02/death-rate-middle-aged-white-americans-aids
   Accordingly, the sociologist William Julius Wilson was right when he “famously argued that the social ills of the nonwhite inner-city poor had their origin not in some mysterious flaws of African-American culture but in economic factors — specifically, the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. Sure enough, when rural whites faced a similar loss of economic opportunity, they experienced a similar social unraveling.” (“[W]e should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind.”)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/opinion/trumpland-economy-polarization.html
(Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future, W. W. Norton & Company: 2020, 287. Hereinafter, “Krugman 2020.”)
  “At the end of the 1980s, at least a third of African-American families fell below the official poverty level, and black unemployment seemed fixed at two and a half times that of whites, with young blacks out of work at the rate of 30 to 40 percent….Along with poverty came broken homes, family violence, street crime, drugs. In Washington, D.C.,…42 percent of young black men between the ages of 18 and 35 were either in jail, or out on probation or parole. The crime rate among blacks, instead of being seen as a crying demand for the elimination of poverty, was used by politicians to call for the building of more prisons.” (Zinn 2003, 582)
   The following 17-minute video provides an historical overview of the negative impact of racist policies on the accumulation of wealth by Black Americans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUwcs9qJXY

-William Julius Wilson: Wilson argued “that deindustrialization and the suburbanization of work, coming on the heels of Civil Rights success stories, left a lot of African-Americans trapped in a dysfunctional situation, right as many other [Blacks] were ascending to the middle class….A few things happen when work disappears — one is just that people in a very literal sense get less money, but there are also broader consequences for society….Without steady, blue collar work available, [many men fail to play] a conventional provider/husband/father role. A lot of men in those situations turn to high risk criminal undertakings. And when young men start going down that path, some of them do get money. But a lot of them end up dead or incarcerated, and that has second- and third-order consequences. For starters, the dead or imprisoned ‘missing men’ create a skewed gender balance that encourages polygynous behavior and low-commitment, unstable relationships. Kids (especially boys) growing up without consistent engagement from their fathers are more likely to act out and misbehave.”
   “Senator J.D. Vance, before he took his Trumpist turn to get elected, liked to talk about the application of Wilson’s ideas to white ‘rust belt’ communities where work — specifically steady, male-oriented blue collar factory work — started to disappear…Vance’s original take on Trump, of course, was that backing Trump was a sort of lashing-out from dysfunctional communities that were suffering from very real problems.”
   In 1990, Wilson argued “that Democrats should ‘promote new policies to fight inequality that differ from court-ordered busing, affirmative action programs, and antidiscrimination lawsuits of the recent past.’ He argued that those kind of policies, by triggering white backlash, put Republicans in office and left African-Americans, especially the truly disadvantaged, much worse off than they’d be with race-neutral economic programs. In 2011…, he argued that in light of shifts in the American political landscape, you didn’t need to tread quite as carefully and endorsed things like the Harlem Children’s Zone that are specifically targeted but that continue to ‘reinforce the belief that the allocation of jobs and economic rewards should be based on individual effort, training, and talent.’” (4 Jan. 2024)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/william-julius-wilson-thought-deserves

-“Declining health and life expectancy are good news for one constituency: Pension plans, which must send a monthly check to retirees for as long as they live. According to…the Society of Actuaries, life expectancy for pension participants has dropped since its last calculation by 0.2 years. A 65-year-old man can expect to live to 85.6 years, and a woman can expect to make it to 87.6. As a result, the group calculates a typical pension plan’s obligations could fall by 0.7 percent to 1 percent.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-23/americans-are-retiring-later-dying-sooner-and-sicker-in-between

-Monkey Morals: Watch from 12:30 to 15:00 to see what happens when a monkey is rewarded unequally for doing a task. Notice the stress that the under-rewarded monkey suffers. https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals
   The view that all that’s natural are biologically determined drives to reproduce ourselves “has been persuasively questioned by a number of primatologists who spend their lives studying our closest kin. Frans de Waal’s work is the most philosophically far-reaching. His research on a variety of apes and monkeys led him to conclude that ‘we are moral beings to the core.’ This research is important because it begins at the bottom. It shows that even if you accept the idea that culture is trivial (or anyway evolutionarily recent) and that most of what’s essential to human nature is beastly [and driven by self-interest], we are much better off than supposed. The emotional responses to others’ suffering, which we share with apes, are building blocks of the complex structures of human morality. De Waal and others have shown that primates have the capacity most basic to moral development: the ability to put yourself in others’ shoes. The feeling of sympathy, the capacity for gratitude, the sense of justice all start right there.” (Neiman 2023, 88)
   “In Darwin’s own era, discussion of human motivation was infinitely richer than in ours….The difference is that until quite recently human motives were considered to be mixed. It seemed self-evident that people are moved by the wish to behave according to certain standards as well as the wish to secure more narrow forms of well-being….The [modern] supposition [driven by evolutionary psychology] that any genuine explanation of human behavior must penetrate high-flown, idealistic descriptions to reach the self-interested wheels that turn us is itself a piece of ideology [–perhaps underpinned by the worldviews of globalization and neoliberalism].” (Neiman 2023, 89)
   A moments reflection tells us that our actions are not always driven by selfishness. “We care about asserting truth, not just maintaining power; we often act with regard for others, from interests that are not material interests; and our behavior is rarely guided by the impulse to reproduce as many copies of ourselves (or our images) as possible.” (Neiman 2023, 90)
   “There is, however, a prominent exception: Donald Trump. Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior. Nor does he appear to understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people to override self-interest in order to honor them….Might this example function as a reductio ad absurdum of the self-interested power paradigm? A world in which that model was truly universal would be a world in which everyone behaved like Trump.” (“By taking the trouble to be a hypocrite, George W. Bush paid compliments to virtue. No wonder even those who wanted him jailed for war crimes feel occasional nostalgia.”) (Neiman 2023, 91)
   “What you think is possible determines the framework in which you act. If you think it’s impossible to distinguish truth from narrative, you won’t bother to try. If you think it’s impossible to act on anything other than self-interest, whether genetic, individual or tribal, you’ll have no qualms about doing the same. There are many things philosophy is good for; one is uncovering the assumptions behind your most cherished views and expanding your sense of possibility. ‘Be realistic’ sounds like common sense, but hidden behind it is a metaphysics that underlies many a political position, a whole set of assumptions about what’s…doable and what’s imaginable….For millions of people, reality changed the moment chattel slavery was abolished, women allowed to vote…If you want a glimpse of reality in places where those changes are yet to come, take a look at chattel slavery in Mauritania or India, the rights of women in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan…” (Neiman 2023, 123)

-“[A] study found that opioid deaths rose roughly 85 percent among people of prime working age in [US] counties that had lost an automotive assembly plant in the previous five years, compared to counties where such factories had not closed.”
   “The findings dovetail with prior research showing that job losses negatively impact public health, but the new paper is among the first to suggest that opioid deaths in particular are strongly associated with economic despair.”
   “To isolate the impacts of losing a factory and its associated jobs, the study focused on counties where manufacturing employed the biggest share of local workers. The researchers looked at 112 counties near car factories between 1999 and 2016, about a quarter of which had experienced a plant closure. These counties were mostly in the Midwest and the South. The study’s first ten years coincided with a massive loss of automotive manufacturing jobs, which plummeted from 1.3 million to 650,000. Presently [2019], the industry has come back to around one million jobs.”
   “[W]hile the economic conditions identified in this study may have played a role in the rise of the opioid epidemic, past research has shown that the biggest factor was the rampant prescription of opioids.” https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/476656-auto-plant-closures-associated-with-increase-in-opioid
(3 Jan. 2020)

-“Many conservatives in the US believe that poverty is mainly a result of bad personal decisions….[For example,] [i]n a memorable 2016 article, National Review writer Kevin Williamson blamed divorce and substance abuse for the despair of the white working class…” However, people in Japan generally “work hard, avoid drugs, alcohol and violence, and [don’t have] children out of wedlock,…[yet Japan] still has plenty of poverty.”
   “Defined by the percentage of the population earning less than half of the median national income, Japan’s poverty rate is more than 15% — a little lower than the US [17.8%], but considerably higher than countries such as Germany [10.4%], Canada [12.4%] or Australia [12.1%]…”
   “Too many people [in the US and Japan] fall through the cracks in the capitalist system because of unemployment, sickness, injury or other forms of bad luck. And the market, on its own, simply doesn’t create enough well-paying jobs for everyone to be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle. So the solution for the US’s [and Japan’s] relatively high poverty rate[s] will probably rely little on personal responsibility and moral rectitude. Instead, [these two countries] should look to European countries, or to Australia and Canada, for ideas on how to reduce poverty. There’s just no substitute for a strong social safety net.” (“In terms of the welfare state, Japan lags well behind Europe.”)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-30/u-s-economy-personal-bad-behavior-isn-t-what-causes-poverty

-It’s important to not confuse “absolute” and “relative” poverty. Thomas Piketty, author of the 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, “wrote, ‘The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.’ But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not ‘as poor.’”
   Research shows that people will generally accept “economic inequality as long as they feel that the country is meritocratic, and they get angry when they feel it isn’t. Narratives about the causes of inequality loom larger in people’s minds than the existence of inequality. That creates an opening for politicians to rouse the rabble by singling out cheaters who take more than their fair share: welfare queens, immigrants, foreign countries, bankers, or the rich, sometimes identified with ethnic minorities.” (Pinker 2018, 99, 102)

-Income-Happiness Correlation: “In repeated surveys across nations, a middle-class income — and being able to control one’s life — beat being poor. Moreover, people in developed nations tend to be happier and more satisfied than those in the poorest of nations. But beyond the middle-class level we seem to have an income ‘satiation point,’ at which the income-happiness correlation tapers off and happiness no longer increases. For individuals in poor countries, that point is close to $40,000; for those in rich countries, about $90,000…” (Myers 2022, 198-9)
   “What triggers the diminishing psychological payoff from excess income? Two factors: (1) Our human capacity for adaptation. [W]e adjust our neutral levels — at which temperatures seem neither hot nor cold, lights neither dim nor bright, events neither gratifying nor disappointing — based on our recent experience….[W]ake up to a new world of no bills, no ills, and ample luxury and you will be elated…for a while. Continual pleasures subside. (2) Our tendency to assess our own circumstances by ‘social comparison’ with those around us–and more often those above us….Become a millionaire and move to a rich neighborhood, you still may not feel rich.” (Myers 2022, 200)

9. Which political leader said the following? “We had to struggle with the old enemies of [domestic] peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hatred for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

-The above was spoken by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the eve of the 1936 presidential election. Rich Americans had good reasons to hate FDR. His New Deal imposed a heavy tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, fostered the growth of unions, and oversaw a narrowing in income inequality (that included a substantial fall in after-tax incomes at the top). (Krugman 2007, 59-60)

-“Thousands of lobbyists plus billions of dollars equal access and influence out of the reach of ordinary Americans….In 2009, more than 13,700 registered lobbyists spent a record $3.5 billion swaying government policy…double the amount lobbyists spent as recently as 2002….And that is just the money corporate America is spending on lobbying. Millions more are given directly to politicians and the political parties.”
   “Over the past two decades, [the financial sector] was the top contributor to political campaigns….[T]he bankers’ money rained down [to both Democrats and Republicans]…The investments paid off…with the rollback of…financial regulations that had kept the worst excesses of corporate greed in check since the Great Depression…The results for corporate America: record profits, record pay packages, and record bonuses. The results for the rest of us: the savings and loan crisis, the corporate scandals of the Enron era, and the [2008] economic collapse…” (The US “spent $182 billion to bail out AIG ($12.9 billion of which went straight to Goldman Sachs)…this amount alone would be more than enough to close the 2010 budget gap in every state in the Union.”)
   “[One] effective means of restoring the integrity of our government is through the full public financing of political campaigns….[This is] the one reform that makes all other reforms possible….If someone’s going to own the politicians, it might as well be the American people.” (Huffington, 10, 128-130, 172)

-“After serving as a Republican staffer in the US Congress for more than twenty years, Mike Lofgren, in his 2016 book The Deep State, [concluded]: ‘While the public is now aware of the disproportionate influence of powerful corporations over Washington…few fully appreciate that the US has in the last several decades gradually undergone a process…Our venerable institutions of government have outwardly remained the same, but they have grown more and more resistant to the popular will as they have become hardwired into a corporate and private influence network with almost unlimited cash to enforce its will.’”
   “The [uncaptured] state, through its institutions, is the only organization with the capacity to deal with [a challenge like] global warming. This makes Charles Koch’s call to ‘destroy the prevalent statist paradigm’ particularly meaningful and menacing. Individuals acting alone can have a valuable symbolic effect in starting the movement away from carbon, but they cannot solve the problem. An effective state is the only organization with the capacity to impose limits on emissions; to demand higher standards for fuel economy and building codes; to tax carbon to reflect its full environmental cost…” (Kevin Taft, Oil’s Deep State, James Lorimer & Company: 2017, 116-7, 214.)

-In 2023, the “[i]nsurance industry says an anti-climate change backlash orchestrated by the fossil fuels industry and run through the US Republican party has achieved its goal of severely undermining effort to redress climate change through diversification to other energy sources. The heads of Europe’s largest insurers have warned that a growing political backlash in the US has jeopardised their ability to join forces to combat climate change. The industry’s effort to tackle carbon emissions collectively culminated two years ago in the establishment of the Net-Zero Insurance Alliance, a UN-backed group of insurers that promised to shrink the emissions linked to their underwriting. However, its future has been in doubt since May when a letter from 23 Republican state attorneys-general said that by setting joint targets the alliance appeared to violate antitrust laws, sparking an exodus from the group.”
   “The legal threat came amid increasing opposition among some Republican politicians to companies and investors pursuing environmental activism, which they say is hostile to the oil and gas industry and hurting the wider economy. Legislation designed to thwart environmental, social and governance investing and financing has been adopted in several states, including Florida and Texas. Axa, one of Europe’s biggest insurers, was a founding member of the NZIA but left in May. Its chief executive Thomas Buberl told the Financial Times that ‘my job is to manage insurance and not to deal…with 23 attorneys-general in the US’. It was ‘far more powerful’ to act collectively on climate, he said, but he added: ‘You also have to at some point say to yourself, OK, where are your priorities? Is there a different way of getting to the same result with less hassle?’ Since leaving the group, Axa has published some emission targets of its own. Buberl’s concern was echoed by Christian Mumenthaler, chief executive at reinsurer Swiss Re, which also quit the group in May.”
https://www.ft.com/content/16ac973e-5fb4-40a8-8356-15e6e768182a

-Legislation such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act cannot alone confer the necessary fortitude upon regulators to diligently do their job with respect to powerful industries such as Wall Street. The political will to effectively regulate is often overwhelmed by “massive campaign contributions, relentless lobbying, and multimillion-dollar payouts awaiting government officials who join Wall Street firms…” For example, “one of the best protections against future bailouts short of breaking up the largest banks is to make sure that banks have thick capital cushions that can absorb potential losses. More capital means that the banks’ shareholders–and not the taxpayer through bailouts–pay if the banks suffer large losses. Although Dodd-Frank called for higher capital levels to be set by the regulators for the largest banks…they have still not formally done so.”  (Neil Barofsky, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, Free Press, New York: 2012, 219, 231. Hereinafter, “Barofsky.”)

-The lobbying and business empire controlled by the multi-billionaire Charles Koch “could count on its Club for Growth to fund primary challenges to ensure that the party line on environmentalism would be maintained by Republican members of Congress. That explains why Senator John McCain is but the best-known…Republican to flip his position after being faced with a Tea Party primary challenge [in 2010]. By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change is real.” (Every Republican presidential candidate in the 2016 campaign was a global warming skeptic, including Trump.) (Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Viking, New York: 2017, 216-7. Hereinafter, “MacLean 2017.”)
   “[T]here is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy[:] giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on….Does the one weird trick still work? [I]n Minnesota [in Feb. 2023] Gov. Tim Walz signed into law a historic piece of legislation that would set the state on a course to carbon-free electricity: 80 percent by 2030, 90 percent by 2035, and 100 percent by 2040.”
https://www.volts.wtf/p/minnesota-sets-out-for-net-zero-emissions#details

-“Considering the vitriol directed toward Big Business on the [2016] campaign trail, it’s scored one victory after another in Washington. [In 2015,] Congress gave President Obama the authority he sought to put trade deals on a ‘fast track,’ increasing the chances for ratification of the TPP. It made the research and development tax credit permanent. It suspended the debt limit until 2017, removing the risk of a default crisis. It extended a tax break on capital spending through 2019. And it passed a five-year, $305 billion transportation bill that Big Business had lobbied for. Attached to the bill was a renewal of the charter of the Export-Import Bank…That last victory was especially sweet [as three] Republican senators who were campaigning for president and had their fingers on the public’s furious pulse—Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul—voted nay. The bill sailed through the Senate on Dec. 3 [2015] despite them, 83-16…. ‘Over the last 12 months, the manufacturing community has been extraordinarily successful in implementing its legislative priorities,’ says Aric Newhouse, the chief lobbyist of the National Association of Manufacturers…”
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-open-season-on-big-business/  (25 Feb. 2016)

-“Money is the glue of movement conservatism, which is largely financed by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals and a number of major corporations, all of whom stand to gain from increased inequality, an end to progressive taxation, and a rollback of the welfare state—in short, from a reversal of the New Deal.” (Krugman 2007, 10)

-US polls consistently show majorities in favor of (i) being able to buy into Medicare (but not being required to give up private insurance), (ii) less spending on defense, (iii) increased taxes for the rich, and (iv) government spending to increase employment. Yet lobbying power has moved elected officials (not the majority of the population) to the right.
   “[Americans] got an object lesson in the dissonance between GOP electioneering and public preferences in 2004-2005. [President] Bush made it a national security election, with a tinge of culture war…Then, with victory under his belt, he proclaimed that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security. He didn’t. But many pundits thought he did. For several months after the 2004 election it was conventional wisdom in the commentariat that of course Bush would get his way on Social Security…The overwhelming backlash from voters, who really, really like Social Security (and Medicare, and Medicaid) completely surprised many self-proclaimed political experts.” (Krugman 2020, 306)

-“In 1992, members [of the US Congress] raised money for about fifteen hours a year. Today, it’s at least fifteen hours a week. In 1992, the threshold to be considered a viable candidate was to raise $200,000 during the entire election….Today, viability begins at $1 million and is much more if a candidate is running in an expensive media market….Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 and raised $62 million for that campaign, a record at the time. The new money in the Democratic Party ended up yielding $1.07 billion for President Obama’s reelection in 2012: money given directly to his campaign, to the Democratic National Committee, and to outside, unaccountable super political action committees…”
   “Many books and articles have been written about the influence of money, the lobbying industry, or the obnoxious political greed of a few wealthy Republicans in recent years. They have all missed the real story: To compete with Republicans’ ability to raise money, Democrats sold out not to corporate or lobbying interests but to a very few liberal wealthy elites [who are no better than wealthy Republican elites].” (Lindsay Mark Lewis with Jim Arkedis, Political Mercenaries: The Inside Story Of How Fundraisers Allowed Billionaires To Take Over Politics, Palgrave Macmillan: 2014, 2-3.)

-How Government Got The Lead Out: “As automobile ownership skyrocketed in the 1950s and 1960s, so did the tonnage of lead being blown out of American tailpipes and into the atmosphere–200,000 tons of lead a year by 1973. (Gasoline refiners had been adding lead since the 1930s to increase the efficiency of the refining process.) Despite evidence that the rising tonnage of lead was making its way into the lungs, bloodstreams, and brains of Americans and was retarding the neural development of millions of children, the chemical industry had been able to block all efforts to ban lead additives from gasoline for decades.”
   “The Carter administration began a partial phaseout of leaded gasoline, but it was nearly reversed when Ronald Reagan crippled the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to draft new regulations or enforce old ones. A bipartisan group of congressmen stood up for children and against the chemical industry, and by the 1990s lead had been completely removed from gasoline. This simple public health intervention worked miracles: lead levels in children’s blood dropped in lockstep with declining levels of lead in gasoline, and the decline has been credited with some of the rise in IQ that has been measured in recent decades.”
   “Even more amazingly, several studies have demonstrated that the phaseout…may have been responsible for up to half of the extraordinary and otherwise unexplained drop in crime that occurred in the 1990s. Tens of millions of children, particularly poor children in big cities, had grown up with high levels of lead, which interfered with their neural development from the 1950s until the late 1970s. The boys in this group went on to cause the giant surge of criminality that terrified America–and drove it to the right–from the 1960s until the early 1990s. These young men were eventually replaced by a new generation of young men with unleaded brains (and therefore better impulse control), which seems to be part of the reason the crime rate plummeted.”
   “When conservatives object that liberal efforts to intervene in markets or engage in ‘social engineering’ always have unintended consequences, they should note that sometimes those consequences are positive. When conservatives say that markets offer better solutions than do regulations, let them step forward and explain their plan to eliminate the dangerous and unfair externalities generated by many markets.” (Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Pantheon Books, New York: 2012, 298-300.)

-Regulatory Cycle: “Political scientist William Grover…evaluating environmental policy under [Presidents] Carter and Reagan…concluded: ‘OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Act] appears caught in a cycle of liberal presidents—who want to retain some health and safety regulatory programs, but who also need economic growth for political survival—and conservative presidents, who focus almost exclusively on the growth side of the equation. Such a cycle will always tend to subordinate the need for safe and healthful workplaces to…ensuring that commitment to OSHA will only be as strong as the priorities of business will allow.’” President Reagan, for example, “proposed to replace tough enforcement of environmental laws by a ‘voluntary’ approach, leaving it to businesses to decide…” (Zinn 2003, 575-6)

-A Short History Of Republican Resistance To Medicare: “In 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, the American Medical Association launched what it called Operation Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt at viral marketing.”
   “Here’s how it worked: Doctors’ wives…were asked to invite their friends over and play them a recording in which Ronald Reagan explained that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The housewives, in turn, were supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.”
   “Obviously the strategy didn’t work; Medicare not only came into existence [in 1965], but it became so popular that these days Republicans routinely (and falsely) accuse Democrats of planning to cut the program’s funding.”
   “What about the slippery slope from liberalism to totalitarianism? There’s absolutely no evidence that it exists. Medicare didn’t destroy freedom. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China didn’t evolve out of social democracies. Venezuela was a corrupt petrostate long before Huge Chavez came along. If there’s a road to serfdom, I can’t think of any nation that took it.” (Krugman 2020, 322, 324)

-Pro-Military Lobbying and Empire: “[M]embers of Congress rarely receive any information counter to what the Pentagon and defense industry want them to receive.” The system works as follows:
   “Every Senate office and most House offices have military officers working in them. Generally these officers are tasked with covering military and foreign affairs for the member of Congress to which they are assigned.”
   “Most of the briefings that congressional committees and members of Congress receive come not from the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, etc, but rather come from think tanks that are directly funded by the defense industry.”
   “Understand the cycle: the Congress appropriates the money to the Pentagon; that money is then disbursed, in the hundreds of billions of dollars, to defense companies; the defense companies, in turn, fund think tanks (Institute for the Study of War, Center for New American Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brookings Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, etc); the think tanks hire and promote men and women who are true believers in the utility of military force and the necessity of the American Empire, along with the possibility of a Pax Americana; these men and women, most with startlingly little real military or worldly experience, brief Congress posing as independent experts; the Congress then appropriates a larger defense budget.”
   “This is why members of Congress can be so seemingly sincere in advocating for US troops to remain in [various countries], because they have rarely, if ever, been given any information that runs counter to the narrative that the US military is a ‘force for good’, stabilizing presence, deterrent to terrorism, etc, while the reality is the US military is exactly the opposite of that narrative and is the chief driver of the conditions that provide for the recruitment of those who join militant groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, Boko Harem, etc, while leading to mass and violent schisms within Middle Eastern societies based upon ethnicity and religion. This is also why in 2001 al-Qaeda consisted of 200-400 members worldwide, but now, [in 2018], al-Qaeda has morphed and splintered into organizations numbering in the tens of thousands, across continents, while millions of people have been killed, and multiple nations torn apart and destroyed, yet to listen to members of Congress or to attend a congressional briefing is to only be regaled with a catalogue of US military triumphs. The dissonance is understandable when the framework of supporting the US military victory narrative in Washington, DC is recognized.” (Matthew Hoh, Facebook post, 19 Dec. 2018)

-Russian vs. American Oligarchs: “While Russian oligarchs (Russia’s richest 0.01 percent) have hidden an estimated $200 billion offshore (over half of their financial wealth), American oligarchs — America’s 765 billionaires — have hidden $1.2 trillion (about 4 percent of their wealth), mostly to avoid paying taxes on it.”
   “While American oligarchs park their income and wealth in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Russian oligarchs have hidden their most valuable assets in the United States and Europe. The reason they do so is telling: Western democracies follow the rule of law. Under such laws, before a government can seize property it must follow lengthy and elaborate legal processes. As a result, American and European governments are finding their hands tied in actually taking control of the assets of Russian oligarchs [as called for due to the 2022 Ukraine invasion].”
   “American law makes it difficult even to discover what Russian oligarchs own in the United States because they’ve hidden their assets behind complex trusts and shell corporations. American laws governing taxes, corporations, transportation, and banking are wonderfully convenient for the world’s oligarchs. One out of every six aircraft in the United States, for example, is registered through trusts, Delaware corporations, and even post office box addresses, making it almost impossible to discover their true owners.”
   “American oligarchs have enormous political clout. In the 2012 presidential election…the richest 0.01 percent of Americans accounted for 40 percent of all campaign contributions….What have American oligarchs got out of these campaign contributions? The lowest tax rates on the highest incomes in over a generation — and the lowest among all wealthy nations. They’ve also gotten an IRS so starved of resources it’s barely able to enforce the law.”
   “Russian oligarchs who have pledged loyalty to Putin arguably have less political power in Russia than do American oligarchs in the US. In Putin’s Russia, power is exercised by a narrow circle of officials and generals appointed by Putin, whom he has drawn largely from the former KGB.” (March 2022)
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/comparing-russian-and-american-oligarchs#details

-They’re Just Human: Politicians are no different than businesspeople, bureaucrats, and academics who also “rarely lose sight of their self-interest. We should not be surprised that politicians behave according to the same incentives that define competition in society, in business, in sports, and in academe….The difference is that politicians work in a fishbowl environment, while the rest of us do not. The level of transparency that guides the work of politicians now leaves nothing to chance. We keep adding layers of transparency requirements…Consider the following: [Canada’s federal government] now has an information commissioner, a privacy commissioner, a conflict of interest and ethics commissioner, a commissioner of lobbying, a public sector integrity commissioner and an auditor general. They and their staff [look] for things that went wrong and [try] to find the culprit. If they should overlook missteps, the media–both traditional and social–may not….In brief, we stripped politicians and aspiring politicians of their privacy and imposed a level of scrutiny that we would not tolerate anywhere else. To be sure, transparency is very important in public life…[Citizens] want to know how and why public funds are spent, who is appointed to a position in public institutions, why changes are made to the machinery of government, and whether established rules, processes…are respected. [Citizens should be] less interested in the private affairs of our elected officials.” (Donald J. Savoie, Canada: Beyond Grudges, Grievances, and Disunity, McGill-Queen’s University Press: 2023, 248-9. Hereinafter, “Savoie 2023.”)
   An effective politician needs to make difficult compromises which can make him appear amoral or immoral. “Contrast this with someone watching the evening news at home, seeing politicians struggling with a…controversial issue or trying to strike the right decision. [The TV watcher] will be quick with an answer, frustrated that the politicians cannot see it or do not want to see it. However, the individual likely forgets that another individual watching the same newscast…will also have an answer…It is easy to answer a question on its own merit, in isolation of its impact on other issues…” (Consider how fraught some basic decisions can become in small neighbourhoods.) “[P]olitics is a ‘messy business of accommodating conflicting interests, choosing between options, negotiating unwelcome trade-offs, and taking responsibility for decisions that may often represent the best of the worst option.’” (Savoie 2023, 249, 250)
   “[A democracy] will pay a heavy price if it cannot attract some of the best…to serve….Until the twentieth century, representative democracy was considered a bad idea. It explains, in part, why [Canada has] an appointed rather than an elected Senate. The thinking was that government was too important to turn things over to the people. James Madison feared that the masses would simply ‘vote themselves free beer and pull down the churches and country houses.’” The US in 2023 demonstrates the power of resentment and the fragility of democracy. (Savoie 2023, 251)

Background: American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
ALEC brings together corporations, conservative think tanks, and state legislators “to draft and distribute model bills. Versions of these bills are then passed in state legislatures across the [US].”
   “ALEC is a nonprofit public charity whose major donors include ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and PhRMA, the pharmaceutical trade organization.”
   “Dozens of states have passed versions of ALEC model laws that diverted public-school budgets to private education, restricted voting rights, and decimated labor unions and environmental regulations. ALEC claims nearly one-fourth of all the state legislators in the country are now members…Since 2010, [for example,] Wisconsin has enacted a statewide school voucher program, a right-to-work law, and one of the country’s strictest voter ID laws. An ALEC member introduced each of these bills in the legislature. Many of the provisions were inspired by models ALEC devised, and some were word-for-word copies.”
   “ALEC’s motto, ‘Limited Government, Free Markets, and Federalism,’ is rooted in the long backlash to the New Deal, whose prolabor stance and social welfare programs were seen by many wealthy industrialists as an unwelcome disruption of American capitalism. Some of them began organizing against it [as] early as 1934…” (FDR’s firm response to such industrialists is provided in the quote for question 9.)
   “Shared prosperity and high union density marginalized the strength of the New Deal’s postwar opponents, but by the early 1970s, anger in corporate America reached a boiling point, galvanized by [high-powered corporate attorney and] future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.” In an influential 1971 manifesto titled Attack on the American Free Enterprise System, “Powell blamed the media, clergy, academia, and government for trying to destroy American capitalism through ‘bureaucratic regulation of individual freedom.’ But just as troubling was the business community’s passivity….He implored corporate America to conduct ‘guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system’ and called for funding a counterrevolution in every forum–courts, universities, think tanks, government, the press.”
   Powell’s memo inspired many corporate executives and “conservative activists to begin creating new organizations aligned with its combative spirit. The most dynamic builder of the new infrastructure was [the religious conservative] Paul Weyrich…” (For Weyrich’s key role in creating the Moral Majority in 1979, see the US Christian Right Quiz.)
   “In 1969, Weyrich attended a meeting of congressional Democratic aides, lobbyists, lawyers, and Brookings Institution fellows to orchestrate a pressure campaign to get President Nixon to sign fair housing legislation. ‘All I did was sit there with my mouth open, watching the system being orchestrated…[These included] getting outside demonstrators, when to get the op-ed piece in the newspaper…, when to have personal lobbying…It was magnificent.’”
   “In 1973, Weyrich persuaded Joseph Coors, the anti-union beer magnate, to fund the creation of the Heritage Foundation. Around the same time,…a Republican activist named Juanita Bartnett started ALEC”, which Weyrich came to control by organizing its funding.
   Due to bad publicity ALEC received for its promotion of “stand-your-ground” and other laws, and for its “hostility to renewable energy and climate-change science”, “dozens of large corporations, including Coca-Cola, Kraft,…Walmart,…Facebook, Google [and] Microsoft” dropped their ALEC memberships. (Kaufman 2018, 121-3, 128, 131-4, 150)

Background: History of Antitrust Efforts
“The Biden administration’s use of the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies—suing Amazon, for example, on September 26 [2023]—resurrects the nation’s traditional antitrust vision. By trying to weaken the economic power of large entities in order to restore competition, innovation, and the rights of workers and consumers, Biden officials are echoing the principles articulated by politicians of all political stripes in the early twentieth century. Those principles were in full flood during the presidential election that took place on November 5, 1912.”
   “The progressive impulse grew in response to the rise of the business trusts that grew to control the economy in the 1880s, gathered steam in the 1890s as muckrakers [journalists] explained in detail how a few well-connected men ran business and government in their own interests, and grew stronger as at least 303 firms disappeared in mergers every year between 1898 and 1902. The idea of restoring competition gained a champion in the White House in 1901 when Republican Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the office of the slain big-business defender William McKinley.”
   “Roosevelt turned to litigation and executive orders to break up trusts and protect lands from industrial development. When Roosevelt stepped aside in 1908 for his hand-picked successor, Willam Howard Taft, he warned the nation in his last message that the new conditions of industry had enabled corporations to become a ‘menace’ and required that government regulate them to protect economic competition in general and workers in particular.”
   “In 1910, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats, who backed an investigation [Pujo Committee] into the power of bankers to direct the economy. In 1912 the House Committee on Banking and Currency…began to investigate the growing concentration of wealth in the economy.”
   “Four major parties fielded presidential candidates in the election of 1912; all were progressives. The Republicans renominated President Taft, who during his first term had broken up more trusts even than Roosevelt had. Taft’s nomination prompted Roosevelt to run on a third-party Progressive ticket…The Democrats nominated…Woodrow Wilson, whose advisor, the jurist Louis Brandeis, called for restoring competition to the economy to protect the welfare of all the people. The American Socialist Party also fielded a candidate, Eugene V. Debs, who called for an ultimate end to capitalism and for workers to seize control of the government.”
   “In February 1913, a month before Wilson took office, [the report of the Pujo Committee] showed that overlapping directorates and corporate boards had enabled a handful of men to control more than $22 billion in 112 corporations, where they stifled competition.”
   “Outraged, Americans got behind the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution establishing the power of the federal government to levy an income tax, which was ratified in February 1913. In December 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, providing federal oversight of the country’s banking system. The following year it passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which prohibited anticompetitive economic practices. And it established the Federal Trade Commission to prevent unfair methods of competition.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-5-2023

Background: Concentrated Power, Facebook, and Regulation
-“America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn’t need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth.” (Competition mainly benefits consumers, not owners. More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith observed: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”)
   Responding to pricing and other abuses by oil, railroad and banking trusts during the Gilded Age, “The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable. The Department of Justice broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T.”
   “For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence. Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: ‘Free markets’ are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.”
   “This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations. In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.”
   “The same thing is happening in social media and digital communications. Because Facebook so dominates social networking [and operates under little government regulation], it faces no market-based [and little government-based] accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.”
   “Since the 1970s, courts have become increasingly hesitant to break up companies or block mergers unless consumers are paying inflated prices that would be lower in a competitive market. But this narrow view fails to take into account the full cost of market domination. It doesn’t recognize that we also want markets to be competitive to encourage innovation and to hold power in check. And it is out of step with the history of antitrust law. Two of the last major antitrust suits, against AT&T and IBM in the 1980s, were grounded in the argument that they had used their size to stifle innovation and crush competition.”
   Facebook–and therefore Mark Zuckerberg, who has voting control–is too powerful. Mark knows this and so “is pursuing a twofold strategy to mitigate it. He is pivoting Facebook’s focus toward encouraging more private, encrypted messaging that Facebook’s employees can’t see, let alone control. Second, he is hoping for friendly oversight from regulators and other industry executives.”
   Government regulation of Facebook (and social media more generally) is challenging. However, the bulk of Americans recognize the need for meaningful government oversight of, for example, prescription drugs, automobiles and education to ensure the public interest is protected. With respect to the technology industry, a government agency is needed to protect privacy and “create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media. [While] we would never stand a government agency censoring speech[,] we already have limits on yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater, child pornography, speech intended to provoke violence and false statements to manipulate stock prices….[Any] standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live stream violence.” (The New York Times, 12 May 2019, SR 2-4)
-“In traditional economic theory, what was supposed to protect a successful business from competition was the prohibitive cost of building factories, buying raw materials, and so on. Internet network businesses [like Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber, Airbnb, eBay, and Twitter] didn’t have those things. Their protection was the size of the network itself. More users meant more available material on the network–why would anybody want to join the number two network, especially if that meant abandoning their own elaborately built-up online presence on the number one network?…Networks were a winner-take-all game;…to make money [the company needed to essentially] become a monopoly.” (Lemann 2019, 232-3)
-While many Internet businesses initially promoted themselves as markedly different from most existing businesses — more democratic, more socially aware, less bureaucratic — they’ve become more like traditional businesses as they’ve matured. The leading Internet corporations –such as the Big Five (Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft) — “were very big (and getting bigger), very powerful, relatively immune to interference from either investors or government regulators, [engaging in traditional public relations and lobbying,] and also free of most of the economic obligations to employees that had been imposed on the Industrial Age corporations as they got older.” (“Companies like Google and Facebook had created two classes of stock, one for the founders that had more voting power, another for ordinary investors who were willing to accept enforced passivity as the price of the high returns they were hoping for. … [I]ncreasingly, the few start-ups that succeeded would wind up being sold to one of the Big Five…” For example, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Instagram were acquired by Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook, respectively.) (Lemann 2019, 247)
   “[T]he country has pivoted from awestruck admiration of the big new Internet network companies to resentment and suspicion, as it has become clear that the social and economic benefits of the new system belong mostly to the companies themselves…It’s hard to imagine that a society with a handful of enormous companies and an ever-larger mass of the casually employed would generate a higher level of political and social contentment.” (Lemann 2019, 255)
-“The White House’s [9 July 2021] executive order states that 75 percent of US industries are more consolidated than they were 20 years ago. That, officials say, has helped triple prices for many household necessities, while making it harder for workers to bargain against competing employers for better wages and benefits. A growing body of evidence has pointed to corporate consolidation as a culprit in persistently stagnant wages and the decline of the American middle class. A 2018 study in the Harvard Law Review found that median compensation for workers would be as much as $10,000 higher if markets were less concentrated. A University of Chicago paper in 2016 found that the decline in workers’ share of corporate income is largely tied to increasing corporate consolidation.”
   “Perhaps the most impactful part of the order relates to Silicon Valley. It recommends greater scrutiny of acquisitions by major tech companies, especially those of nascent rivals. That focus comes after the Federal Trade Commission brought an antitrust complaint against Facebook [in 2020] challenging its purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram. A federal judge [in June 2021] dismissed that suit, but the FTC can refile it…The order also calls on the FTC to set new rules to combat ‘unfair competition’ in online marketplaces. Critics have raised concerns about the dual role that tech companies like Amazon and Apple play as marketplace operators and participants within them, competing with smaller retailers or app developers. Congressional investigators in a report last year called out Amazon’s relationship with third-party sellers, accusing the company of exploiting its access to their data and information.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/09/biden-executive-order-promoting-competition/

10. What was the top personal income tax rate on earned income in the US in the 1920s? Late-1930s? Mid-1950s? 1979? 2006?

-1920s: 24%; Late-1930s: 79%; Mid-1950s: 91%; 1979: 70%; 2006: 35%.

-“Between 1979 and 2006 the top tax rate on earned income was cut in half [from 70% to 35%]; the tax rate on capital gains was cut almost as much [from 28% to 15%]; the tax rate on corporate profits fell by more than a quarter [from 48% to 35%]….[R]aising taxes on the rich back toward historical levels can pay for part…of a stronger safety net that limits inequality.” (Krugman 2007, 47, 257)

-In 2007, Warren Buffet commented “that his receptionist paid 30 percent of her income in taxes, while he paid only 17.7 percent on his taxable income of $46 million.” (Huffington, 59)

-“The Reagan administration, with the help of Democrats in Congress, lowered the tax rate on the very rich to 50 percent and in 1986 a coalition of Republicans and Democrats sponsored another ‘tax reform’ bill that lowered the top rate to 28 percent.” (However, “‘The turning point on tax politics, when the monied elites first began to win big, occurred in 1978 with the Democratic party fully in power…’…Not only did the income tax become less progressive…, but the Social Security tax became more regressive.”) (Zinn 2003, 580-1)

-“Americans share a fundamental civic commitment to taxpaying….[Extensive] data are clear: Americans do not think it’s smart to avoid your taxes; they think it’s unethical….Every year, about nine in 10 Americans agree with [the] sentiment[:] it is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes.”

   “The social norm of taxpaying is one reason tax compliance in the United States is very high by international standards.”

   “[W]hat really upsets people about the US tax system is tax returns like Donald Trump’s….When the rich can get away with paying less than middle-income people, Americans get very angry…What upsets most people about taxes is not the amount they contribute [but] the amount the wealthy can avoid contributing….That wealthy people and companies can avoid taxes legally does not make the practice acceptable to most Americans….More than three-quarters of Americans say companies benefiting from international tax shelters should not be eligible for government contracts.”

   “Outrage at the wealthy and powerful manipulating the rules to not pay their fair share of taxes is deeply embedded in the American tradition. In fact, the original Boston Tea Party, now wrongly remembered as an early example of American anti-tax fervor, was not motivated by high taxes. It was an act of resistance against what we might deride today as a corporate tax loophole. The British government wanted to give the British East India Company a special tax break on tea they sold in the American colonies. Colonists worried that this policy would give the company an unfair market advantage and create a powerful monopoly. The Sons of Liberty responded, famously, by throwing the subsidized tea into Boston Harbor.”

   In recent years, Americans have even “grown markedly more positive about tax increases. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, about one in five measures raising taxes passed muster with the voters. In the past 10 years, voters have approved half of the 62 tax-increasing measures that have appeared on state ballots.” (The New York Times, 9 October 2016, SR 2)

-“Few people enjoy paying taxes, but as Oliver Wendell Hommes Jr. reminded us, ‘Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.’ On reflection, most of us therefore offer at least implicit support for penalties against tax evasion — penalties that have little meaning unless backed by significant enforcement resources.”

   “Yet prodded mainly by anti-tax Republicans, Congress has cut the IRS budget steadily since 2011. By 2019, the agency was auditing only one in every 222 individual returns, down from one in 90 in 2011. Similar reductions have occurred for corporate returns, and were proportionately larger for the wealthiest individuals and largest corporations.”

   “These cuts have not saved the government money. [It’s estimated] that every $1 trimmed from the agency’s budget has resulted in $4 in lost revenue. But this estimate refers only to direct, or first-round, losses. Because the extent to which people comply with tax laws depends strongly on the behavior of others around them, the ultimate revenue losses are certain to be much larger.”

   “The US was once firmly a member of the small group of countries whose high levels of tax compliance helped sustain the infrastructure investments needed to support broad economic and social prosperity. In a 2004 study that ranked 30 industrial countries and territories on a six-point tax-compliance scale, for example, it was in seventh place with a score of 4.47. Highest on the list was Singapore at 5.05…Last among the 30 was Italy, with a score of 1.77.”

   “Since that study was published, reduced IRS funding has led to significant reductions in tax compliance in the US, the Treasury Department reports. But these reductions are only the beginning. It takes time for people to realize the extent to which others are evading taxes. And once that happens, compliance will fall much more rapidly.” (The New York Times, 1 November 2020, BU 4)

-“In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and [in June 2021] the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.”

   “[IRS] records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year….America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by US laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.” https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax  (8 June 2021)

11. What is the tax rate that US hedge fund managers pay on fund earnings?

-Hedge fund managers’ earnings are taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent. “[I]n Britain capital gains are taxed as ordinary income…” (Krugman 2007, 258-9)

-In August 2022, “Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who single-handedly thwarted her party’s longtime goal of raising taxes on wealthy investors, received nearly $1 million over the past year from private equity professionals, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists whose taxes would have increased under the [legislative] plan. For years, Democrats have promised to raise taxes on such investors, who pay a significantly lower rate on their earnings than ordinary workers. But just as they closed in on that goal…, Sinema forced a series of changes to her party’s $740 billion election-year spending package, eliminating a proposed ‘carried interest’ tax increase on private equity earnings while securing a $35 billion exemption that will spare much of the industry from a separate tax increase other huge corporations now have to pay.”
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/politics/sinema-took-wall-street-money-while-killing-tax-on-investors/2807506/

-It is no wonder that “profit and pay levels in the finance sector have soared over the past three decades. From 1973-1985, the finance sector accounted for under 16% of corporate profits, in the 1990s this ranged from to 21-30% and in the 2000s they peaked at 41% in the lead up to 2007. From 1948-1983, pay in the finance sector ranged from 99% to 108% of pay in other industries. Between 1983 and 2008 it grew to 181%.” (In 2009, the top hedge-fund manager earned $4 billion.)
   In other words, Wall Street got huge, its bankers got very rich, and its political power expanded. Wall Street and Washington merged as a flow of investment bankers went into government. The result was a string of legislation designed to further enhance the freedom and power of finance. Regulations separating commercial and investment banking were repealed. There were major increases in the leverage–amount of debt financing in relation to equity–allowed to investment banks.
http://teslaconference.com/documents/CUK%20-%20Co-operative%20Money%20and%20Economic%20Democracy.June12.pdf
(Huffington, 59)

Background: When Finance Dominates
-“During the great postwar boom — the generation after World War II, over whose course real wages and family incomes roughly doubled — finance was a relatively small part of the economy, around 2 to 3 percent of GDP. Nor was it especially lucrative: Average earnings in finance were only a bit higher than those in the rest of the economy.”
   “Money managers only began to emerge as [dominant] around 1980; the turn probably reflected a combination of deregulation and the proliferation of ‘shadow banking,’ financial arrangements that did an end run around the prudential regulations that still existed. By 2007 both the financial industry and the amount of credit outstanding had more than doubled relative to the size of the economy.”
   “But what did this ‘financialization’ of the economy achieve? Economic growth didn’t accelerate; even before the 2008 crisis it was slower, not faster, than it had been during previous decades. Wages of ordinary workers and the incomes of typical families entered an era of slow growth or stagnation. Household debt did, however, soar, because that — not business investment — was where most of the credit growth went.”
   “Growth in the banking system can be very valuable to poor countries, but once it gets beyond a certain point, research from places like the Bank for International Settlements — a very staid institution of bankers’ bankers — suggests that it becomes counterproductive. The main — perhaps the only — beneficiaries of hyper-financialization seem to have been a small group of very wealthy individuals, who kept their wealth only thanks to huge public bailouts in the [2008] crisis. So it’s kind of amazing to see some of those people [declaring] how much good they do, and the evils of big government.” (5 Nov. 2019)
https://static.nytimes.com/email-content/PK_sample.html

-Neoliberal Agenda: Substantial changes to the economy — such as increased contract work and outsourcing and decreased company pensions — are part of what’s been dubbed ‘the neoliberal agenda’. This agenda comprises “a set of policies based on flimsy pseudo-theories that boil down to the simplistic notion that the private sector is inherently good and the public sector is inherently bad. The result has been a massive transfer of society’s resources from ordinary people to a small set of wealthy individuals and corporations. Workers have lost ground badly as the economy has become increasingly dominated by hedge funds and private equity firms, which typically take over a company, strip out its assets, slash its workforce, pay little or no severance to its terminated workers, and leave the company pension plan unfunded. This sort of stunning corporate indifference to the welfare of workers was amply illustrated in the 2017 shutdown of Sears Canada, once the leading department store in the country with more than 130 stores.” (McQuaig 2019, 215)

-“Neoliberalism starts from the premise that we are best understood as ‘economic man,’ or Homo economicus, ‘solely as a being who desires wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficiency of means for obtaining that end.’ John Stuart Mill, the philosopher who formulated that definition, quickly added that no political economist was ever so absurd as to imagine that real human beings can be captured by it. It may have seemed absurd in the nineteenth century, but today we’re no longer startled by references to human capital.” (Neiman 2023, 134)

-Stock Buybacks: A public corporation does a stock buyback — which reduces the number of its shares that are available on the market — in order to raise its stock’s price. Shareholders may then sell their shares and earn capital gains. “During the 1980s and ’90s, as ‘shareholder value’ — the idea that a company’s primary obligation is to generate returns for its owners — became a mantra of American business and executive compensation was increasingly linked to a firm’s stock price, buybacks surged. [B]etween 1984 and 1997, US corporations repurchased $864 billion worth of their own shares.”
   “[I]n 2019 alone, US companies in the S&P 500 bought back $728.7 billion of their own stocks…[B]uybacks constituted the single-largest source of demand in the stock market, which was also the case in two of the previous three years. This was a period in which the stock market gained around 65 percent. To the extent that buybacks helped fuel the run-up, it suggests that the market was really just a hall of mirrors.”
   “The defense of buybacks…is that if a firm can’t find productive uses for all the profit it has earned, it is obliged to give the surplus to its investors [either through dividends or buybacks], who can then put the money into the economy in other ways.” (As “buybacks offer a tax advantage over dividends, they have become the preferred means of distributing excess profits.”)
   “[S]ome estimates indicate that between buybacks and dividends, the largest US companies returned roughly 90 percent of their earnings to shareholders during the last decade. That’s money that could’ve been used to give employees a raise, or to increase spending on research and development…”
   It’s argued that “the reason companies had so little need to reinvest their profits was that four decades of…wage suppression has been a check on consumer demand. ‘The less you pay people, the less they buy, the less average demand there is in the economy and the less reason you have to invest in increased productive capacity’…”
   “[O]nly 55 percent of Americans are investors in the market,…down from 62 percent in the early-to-mid 2000s…[And it’s estimated that] the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans owned…84 percent of the total stock held by US households.” (The New York Times Magazine, 31 May 2020, 57)

12. How much in corporate income taxes did General Electric pay to the United States on its 2010 billions in profit?

-In 2010, “General Electric…reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. In fact, GE claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.”
   “Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent [–reduced to 21 percent in 2017, see below–] one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less….Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts—from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.”
   “GE spends heavily on lobbying: more than $200 million over the last decade…While GE’s declining tax rates have bolstered profits and helped the company continue paying dividends to shareholders during the economic downturn, some tax experts question what taxpayers are getting in return. Since 2002, the company has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the United States while increasing overseas employment. In that time, GE’s accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion…” https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html
   GE has in fact done poorly. “For years, GE’s profits had been a mirage built on whirlwind mergers and accounting sleight of hand. The funds that had been doled out to shareholders as fat dividends — and had covered its managers’ lavish perks and pay — had largely been borrowed on the strength of the company’s golden credit.” The company “‘overpaid for businesses they didn’t understand and then [were] crushed by the market’…In October [2019, GE] froze pension contributions for 20,000 employees.” (“The company was a charter member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, on board at its creation in 1907…” However, GE was removed from the 30-stock index in 2018.)
https://nypost.com/2020/07/11/how-a-power-hungry-ceo-drained-the-light-out-of-general-electric/

-In 2018 Amazon will pay $0 in federal taxes on its $11.2 billion in profits. (However, in 2018, it did pay $1.18 billion in local, state, and international taxes.) “To top it off, Amazon actually reported a $129 million 2018 federal income tax rebate—making its tax rate -1%….[E]ven though Trump previously blasted Amazon for its limited state taxes[,] its non-existent federal tax payment is a result of the Trump Administration’s corporation-friendly tax cuts. [T]he 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act not only decreased corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, but it also didn’t close ‘a slew of tax loopholes that allow profitable companies to routinely avoid paying federal and state income taxes on almost half of their profits’.” (Amazon paid “an 11.4% federal income tax rate between 2011 and 2016…”)
http://fortune.com/2019/02/14/amazon-doesnt-pay-federal-taxes-2019/?xid=gn_editorspicks
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2019/02/22/why-amazon-pays-no-corporate-taxes/#1018bacc54d5

-“Goldman Sachs…got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the US government in October [2008]…[Its 2008] effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent [in 2007]…The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the [2008] year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits….[Goldman] lowered its [2008] rate with more tax credits as a percentage of earnings and because of ‘changes in geographic earnings mix,’ [i.e., it routed more earnings through lower-tax foreign jurisdictions]…”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a6bQVsZS2_18

-Citigroup “has been involved in virtually every major financial screw-up, from Enron and WorldCom, to the analyst scandals of the tech bubble, to the mortgage fiasco. That long string of setbacks…cost Citi shareholders…about $100 billion in pretax losses from fines, settlements, reserves, or write-downs from 2001 to 2010….In fact, if you look at the entire history of the company, the past decade doesn’t seem like an aberration. The scandals have occurred more frequently…but they’re not new.”
   “[Citi] has come close to failing six times throughout [its] history, in the years 1921, 1932, 1970, 1982, 1991, and 2008. On multiple occasions, it received federal bailouts to remain solvent, and each of those instances follows a similar arc: The company takes on excessive risks, gets into trouble, and requires the government to step in simply so it can survive. That incident leads to new outside regulations against such risky behavior in the future, which the bank grumbles about and then doesn’t follow anyway.”
   We should not take bankers seriously when they argue that since they know a lot more “about the riskiness of their” businesses the government should not closely regulate them. (Mike Mayo, Exile on Wall Street: One Analyst’s Fight to Save the Big Banks from Themselves, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey: 2012, 114-5, 120)

-After the massive government bailouts of the too-big-to-fail banks in 2008 and 2009, “the largest banks had become significantly bigger, led by JPMorgan Chase, which grew by 36 percent, from $1.56 trillion in assets at the end of 2007 to $2.12 trillion at the end of 2010…” It is only to be expected that such growth translates into even greater political influence for the banks than they wielded before the crisis. (Barofsky, 217)

-“Denmark and Poland are refusing to let companies registered in offshore tax havens access financial aid from their [2020] coronavirus bailout packages….The Danish finance ministry on [April 18] extended its bailout program into July but stressed that firms based in tax havens would no longer be covered. ‘Companies seeking compensation after the extension of the schemes must pay the tax to which they are liable under international agreements and national rules…Companies based on tax havens in accordance with EU guidelines cannot receive compensation, insofar as it is possible to cut them off under EU law and any other international obligations.’ Poland took similar measures on April 8. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said large companies wanting a chunk of a roughly $6 billion bailout fund must pay domestic business taxes.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-companies-tax-havens-banned-denmark-poland-bailout-2020-4

13. What was the main cause for the sudden decline in incomes, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, for the richest Americans? (Hint: Your answer can be one word long.)

-Taxes. “Partly as a result [of rising taxes] the ownership of wealth became significantly less concentrated: The richest 0.1 percent of Americans owned more than 20 percent of the nation’s wealth in 1929, but only around 10 percent in the mid-1950s. So what happened to the rich? Basically the New Deal taxed away much…of their income. No wonder FDR was viewed as a traitor to his class.”
   “By the mid-fifties the real after-tax incomes of the richest 1 percent of Americans were probably 20 or 30 percent lower than they had been a generation earlier.…Meanwhile the real income of the median family had more or less doubled since 1929.” (Krugman 2007, 41-42, 48)

14. What was the main reason for the relatively good incomes for American blue-collar workers in the 1960s as compared to the 1920s? (Hint: Your answer can be one word long.)

-Unions. “At the end of the twenties, the American union movement was in retreat.…By 1930 only a bit more than 10 percent of nonagricultural workers were unionized, a number roughly comparable to the unionized share of private-sector workers today [2006].…But under the New Deal unions surged…At the end of World War II more than a third of nonfarm workers were members of unions—and many others were paid wages that…were set either to match union wages or to keep workers happy enough to forestall union organizers.” (In 1933, FDR created the National Labor Relations Board which could force corporations to negotiate with unions.)
   “[T]he existence of powerful unions acted as a restraint on the incomes of both management and stockholders. Top executives knew that if they paid themselves huge salaries, they would be inviting trouble with their workers; similarly corporations that made high profits while failing to raise wages were putting labor relations at risk.” The FDR administration’s shift from agent of bosses to protector of workers’ right to organize enabled the rise of unions. And, union power was an important factor in the creation of a middle-class society in the US. (Krugman 2007, 49, 111, 114-5)

-According to a 2023 US Department of the Treasury report:
   (i) “Middle-class workers reap substantial benefits from unionization. Unions raise the wages of their members by 10 to 15 percent. Unions also improve fringe benefits and workplace procedures such as retirement plans, workplace grievance policies, and predictable scheduling.”
   (ii) “Unionization also has spillover effects that extend well beyond union workers. Competition means workers at nonunionized firms see increased wages too. Heightened workplace safety norms can pull up whole industries. Union members improve their communities through heightened civic engagement; they are more likely to vote, donate to charity, and participate in a neighborhood project. And, the higher pay and job security of both union and nonunion middle-class workers can further spill over to their families and communities through more stable housing, more investment in education, and other channels.”
   (iii) “Unions help create a fairer economy by benefiting all demographic groups. By encouraging egalitarian wage practices, unions serve to reduce race and gender wage gaps. And modern unions have broad representation across race and gender. In 2021, Black men had a particularly high union representation rate at 13 percent, as compared to the population average of 10 percent.”
   (iv) “[I]n addition to supporting the middle class, unions contribute to economic growth and resilience. They do so in part simply by reducing overall inequality. Income inequality often feeds back into inequality of opportunity, which impedes growth if disadvantaged people cannot access the resources necessary to acquire job skills or start businesses. And unions can boost businesses’ productivity by improving working environments and by giving experienced workers more of an input into decisions that design better and more cost-effective workplace procedures.”
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1706

-Union Premium: “Union workers…earn about 20 percent more than nonunion workers in similar jobs. This union premium has held steady since the 1930s.” (The New York Times, 8 July 2018, 3)

-Biden Endorsed by UAW: In January 2024, President Biden “received the enthusiastic endorsement…of the United Auto Workers union, whose president, Shawn Fain, had made it clear that any president must earn that endorsement. Biden stood with the union in its negotiations [in 2023] with the big three automakers, not only behind the scenes but also in public when he became the first president to join a picket line. ‘[Trump] went to a nonunion plant, invited by the boss, and trashed our union… Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a society,’ Fain told the crowd.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-24-2024
  “When Trump took office [in 2017], the auto industry had already regained most of the ground it had lost during the Great Recession [Dec. 2007-June 2009]. This recovery was possible because in 2009, the Obama-Biden administration stepped in to rescue the major auto companies. At the time, many Republicans vehemently opposed that bailout.” Trump initially supported the bailout, but years later sided “with the Republican right in denouncing it, saying, ‘You could have let it [the auto industry] go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself.’ He once floated the idea of automakers moving production out of Michigan to lower-wage locations and then eventually move back ‘because those guys are going to want their jobs back even if it is less.’ [H]e was [thus] suggesting busting the auto unions so that workers would be forced to accept pay cuts. Populism!” (The New York Times, Who Really Stands With American Workers, 29 Feb. 2024)

-Meritocracy Myth: During the 1950s over 30 percent of the nation’s private-sector workforce was unionized. “That gave the nation’s blue-collar workers…enough bargaining power to summon the equivalent (on average, and in [2023] dollars) of $30 an hour — even though many hadn’t finished high school. It wasn’t their brains that accomplished this. It was their bargaining power. But the power of trade unions to negotiate good wages for hourly workers has declined markedly since then.”
   “[T]he notion that you’re paid what you’re ‘worth’ is…so deeply engrained in the public conscious that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault. They may even feel ashamed of what they see as a personal failure — a lack of ‘brains’ or a deficiency of character. The same mythology allows those who earn vast sums to believe they must be extraordinarily clever, daring, and superior. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing so well. This reassuring conviction seemingly justifies not only their great wealth but also their high status in society.”
   “People are ‘worth’ what they’re paid in the market in the trivial sense that if the market rewards them a certain amount of money, they are assumed to be worth it. Some confuse this tautology for a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid — that America is a meritocracy.”
   “The term meritocracy was coined by British sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy’ to depict a society so wedded to standard measures of intelligence that it ignored many gifted and talented people while overlooking character flaws in those who tested well. Since then, the term’s meaning has changed to become a positive description of a society in which anyone can make it based on individual merit — through qualities such as natural intelligence, hard work, ambition, and courage — and in which financial rewards are directly proportional to individual effort and ability.”
   “But a moment’s thought reveals factors other than individual ‘merit’ that play a larger role in determining earnings — inheritance, connections, luck, or discrimination in favor of or against someone because of how they look. It turns out that the most important determinant of someone’s future earnings is the earnings of the family they’re born into.” (“Around 60 percent of America’s wealth is now inherited. Many of today’s super-rich have never done a day’s work in their lives.”)
  “Social work, teaching, nursing, and caring for the elderly or for children are among the lowest-paid professions. Yet evidence suggests that talented and dedicated people in these positions generate societal benefits far out of proportion to their pay.” (22 Dec. 2023)
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-meritocracy-why-is-american

-“According to the International Monetary Fund, an organization known for decades of draconian fiscal prescriptions, ‘the decline in unionization is strongly associated with the rise of income shares at the top.’ The IMF concluded that the rights of workers to bargain collectively must be restored to slow the growth of inequality and enable economic growth.” (MacLean 2017, 219-20)

-“A modest retirement was once guaranteed for many American workers, particularly those in unions, whose contracts offered traditional pensions that paid out a monthly lump sum until the end of life.…But in the 1980s, as union power eroded, many employers quit offering pensions and shifted to the then new 401(k) retirement savings plans, to which they made only limited contributions. Employees themselves contributed the bulk of the money, choosing from a basket of mutual funds and stocks in which to invest, much to the delight of Wall Street banks that earned profits by managing the money.” (Goodman, 12-13)

-The percentage of American workers in unions in 1924: 11%; 1935: 12%; 1945: 35%; 1970: 27%; 2006, 11%. “From 1935 to 1947, union membership in the US quadrupled, from 3.5 million workers to nearly 15 million workers, fueled by the pro-union policies of the New Deal and a labor shortage during WWII. In the mid-1950s, more than one out of every three American workers belonged to a union. By 2017, the percentage of private-sector workers who belonged to a union had fallen to 6.5 percent. Union membership shrank for many reasons–some union bosses turned corrupt, manufacturers pursued cheaper labor overseas, automated systems replaced skilled workers in industry after industry….But the passage of ‘right-to-work’ laws, which began in Arkansas and Florida in 1944, has proved able to corrode labor’s strength from the inside. Right-to-work laws eliminate the requirement for workers in a unionized workplace to pay dues, but not the union’s obligation to provide services to non-dues-paying employees. The more workers ‘opt out,’ the thinner a union has to stretch its funds. Limited funds and fewer members diminish a union’s capacity to negotiate for better wages and benefits, which in turn fuels the desire of more and more members to stop paying dues.” (Kaufman 2018, 164)
   “By 1964, twenty states were right-to-work. Over the next four decades only three more…joined them. But in 2010, as Republicans swept statehouses…, conservative organizations such as ALEC…intensified their efforts to pass right-to-work laws….In 2012, Indiana became the first state to become right-to-work in more than a decade, and [in 2013], Michigan, the birthplace of the UAW, the most powerful trade union in American history…, followed.” (Kaufman 2018, 164-5)
   Weakening unions aids Republicans. “[S]tudies in Europe and the US have shown that union membership exerts a significant impact on its members’ political views and diminishes the appeal of far-right, authoritarian parties. As recently as 2008, labor played a pivotal role in electing [Obama].” (Kaufman 2018, 179)
   “Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that Nafta was responsible for the net loss of roughly 700,000 American jobs to Mexico in its first fifteen years, while China’s admittance to the WTO cost the US more than three million jobs. Roughly three-quarters of those losses were in the more highly unionized manufacturing sector, contributing to the steep decline in private-sector union membership, which went from 15.7 percent in 1993, when Nafta was passed, to a nadir of 6.4 percent in 2016, the lowest figure in a century.” (Kaufman 2018, 185)

-The Reagan administration, “lacking even the faint liberalism of the Carter presidency,…[pursued policies that involved] cutting benefits to poor people, lowering taxes for the wealthy, increasing the military budget, filling the federal court system with conservative judges, actively working to destroy revolutionary movements in the Caribbean.” Furthermore, the result of conservative federal judges and pro-business appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were “judicial decisions and board findings [that] weakened a labor movement already troubled by a decline in manufacturing. Workers who went out on strike found themselves with no legal protection. One of the first acts of the Reagan administration was to dismiss from their jobs, en masse, striking air traffic controllers. It was a warning to future strikers, and a sign of the weakness of a labor movement which in the thirties and forties had been a powerful force.” (Zinn 2003, 573-4)
   Politics, not globalization or technology, explains union decline. “Unions could have remained an important force in American life, [as they did in Denmark and Canada,] even as [the US] transitioned from a manufacturing to a service economy. But to do so they would have had to organize workers in rapidly growing service companies like Walmart and now Amazon. And they generally failed to do so, because the transition to a service economy took place in an era of conservative political dominance. It wasn’t so much that the laws protecting union organizing were weak, although to some extent they were. More important, employers trying to block unionization believed, rightly, that the laws wouldn’t be enforced–that they could get away with, as President Biden said [in March 2021], intimidation, threats, coercion and anti-union propaganda.” (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 2 March 2021)

-The Trump administration continues the effort to weaken private-sector unions. “[N]early 20 percent of rank-and-file union activists are fired during organizing drives, because the penalties for doing so are so weak: A corporation may eventually be fined $5,000 or $10,000 for such a wrongful dismissal, but that is a negligible cost of doing business if it averts unionization.” (The New York Times, 11 August 2019, SR 9)

-“It is likely that no group has benefited more from the labor movement than African Americans. Between 1948 and 1979, the period with the greatest union density in the US, hourly compensation for the average American worker rose by 93 percent, which contributed to a decreasing wage gap between African American and white workers. [B]y the 1970s, 40 percent of African American men and a quarter of African American women were union members.” (Kaufman 2018, 69)
  By 2023, the Black-white wage gap has fallen to its lowest level on record as employment rates converge.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/william-julius-wilson-thought-deserves

-Govt Employees Don’t Have To Pay Union Fees: Free Speech > Free Riders: In 2018, the “US Supreme Court said government employees have a constitutional right not to pay union fees in a ruling that affects 5 million workers and deals a heavy blow to the labor movement. The 5-4 decision overturns a 1977 Supreme Court ruling that had let public-sector unions collect so-called agency fees from non-members to help cover the cost of collective bargaining.”
   “The 1977 ruling, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, said states could let public-sector unions demand agency fees, as long as the money covered representational work like collective bargaining and not ideological or political activities like lobbying. The Abood court said agency fees could promote ‘labor peace’ by buttressing a union’s status as the exclusive representative of a workforce.”
   “Supporters of agency fees said they ensure employees don’t become ‘free riders,’ benefiting from collective bargaining without paying for it. [Judge] Alito rejected that argument, saying the effort to avoid free riders wasn’t important enough to override the speech rights of dissenting workers[,] [as unions do take positions on disputed matters of public concern such as government spending priorities].” (“The case involved only government unions, not those in the private sector[,] [as the] First Amendment limits the government’s power to regulate speech but doesn’t constrain private employers.”)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/u-s-supreme-court-rules-against-unions-on-mandatory-fees-jix6vl5x

-Nordic Unions, Solidarity, 90%, and Tesla: “The Nordic countries are extremely proud of their labor-management system. Strikes are very rare as agreements are formed, sector by sector, to find equitable ways to share the bounty they’ve produced. After decades of mediating the workplace using this system, Nordic workers—and most managers as well—believe it is the backbone of their countries’ high standards of living.”
   “Nordic labor unions are understandably highly protective of their collective labor-management system. They want every employer to participate in it, including Tesla, which has a small but robust Nordic market because the region fully embraces electric vehicles. To protect what they have achieved, unions are more than willing to engage in sympathy strikes and boycotts to force recalcitrant employers to accept the system. Their strength depends on a simple but powerful working-class idea—solidarity: an injury to one is an injury to all.”
   “As a result, [120 Tesla mechanics in Sweden seeking a collective agreement] have gained an enormous amount of support. Garbage is piling up in front of Tesla offices because the sanitation workers won’t pick it up. Janitorial workers won’t clean the Tesla showrooms either. The postal workers won’t deliver license plates for Tesla cars. When Tesla appealed to the courts to allow delivery, or for Tesla to pick them up themselves, the courts ruled in favor of the boycott. The dockworkers won’t unload Musk’s cars in Sweden. Danish dockworkers also are blocking Tesla shipments heading to Sweden.”
   “If Musk doesn’t settle the strike soon, his worries could quickly grow, especially if the heady spirit of solidarity spreads southward to Germany and the 11,000 Tesla workers at the company’s Berlin Gigafactory. To head off an organizing effort by IG Metall, the largest union in Germany, Musk announced a four percent raise in November for German Tesla workers, along with a bonus to make up for inflation. Nevertheless, union organizers claim workers are signing up in droves.”
   “Musk’s biggest worry is not the 120 Swedish mechanics. It’s the organizing efforts of the United Automobile Workers union (UAW) in the US that poses the biggest threat. Buoyed by its enormous victories over the Big Three US automakers (GM, Ford and Stellantis), the UAW, led by Shawn Fain, has Tesla in its sights.”
   “Standing together is the only way labor organizations can successfully challenge corporate power. Unfortunately, only six percent of workers in the US business sector belong to unions, down from nearly 35 percent in the mid-1950s, and a far cry from the 90 percent covered by union agreements in Sweden….[I]f union solidarity holds in Scandinavia, Musk will have no choice but to accept the Nordic model, at least in those countries (or scuttle his market as he seems to be doing with Twitter in Europe.) Whether the power of solidarity spreads elsewhere will depend on the courage of unions like the ILWU and the UAW.” (20 Dec. 2023)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/elon-musk-tesle-unions-sweden

-Background: US Violence Against Unions: “Shadowed by the violence of the frontier, the US had long fought a bloody war on workers trying to unionize. No other country, for instance, had anything comparable to Pennsylvania’s Coal and Iron Police, a force essentially dedicated to battling unions and breaking strikes. Rare was the militant labor leader who had not spent a term in jail. [In fact, until the 1930s,] American workers who tried to form unions had virtually no laws protecting their right to do so.” (Hochschild 2022, 83-4)
   “Strikes or attempts to unionize had long been met with armed force on a scale that seems today inconceivable. By the time troops suppressed an 1877 railway strike, roughly 100 workers were dead and more than 1,000 jailed….In 1913 and 1914, more than 70 people…died in battles between Colorado miners and National Guardsmen defending a Rockefeller-owned coal mine.” (“By the late 1800s, half of all National Guard actions involved labor disputes. Business groups funded many National Guard units outright.”) (Hochschild 2022, 84)
   “Not all the violence came from those in uniform. In 1899, hundreds of rebellious Idaho miners fighting police and corporate detectives hijacked a train that became known as the Dynamite Express, and then blew up a company mill….In 1910, a labor militant placed [a] bomb at the office of the antiunion Los Angeles Times, killing 21…” (Hochschild 2022, 85)
   “The organization corporate executives hated most was the Industrial Workers of the World…At the group’s peak of influence, in the summer of 1917, the IWW claimed only 150,000 members nationwide. But in the eyes of its often hysterical opponents it was gargantuan.” (Hochschild 2022, 85)
   “For anti-labor politicians and businessmen, the Wobblies were a convenient bogeyman, and [World War I provided] a welcome chance to crush them. Unfortunately, the IWW’s incendiary rhetoric all too often made things easier for its enemies. Its newspapers, for example, sometimes advocated industrial sabotage…Although workers often did fight back, no prosecutor ever convicted any IWW member of actually committing industrial sabotage.” (Hochschild 2022, 85-6)
   “The Wobblies believed in ‘One Big Union’ that would encompass all occupations. They embraced all workers: skilled or unskilled, Black or white, male or female…In one IWW strike by Philadelphia longshoremen, Black and Irish American workers walked off the job together–something extremely rare, and threatening to business, in an era when employers routinely played off different ethnic groups against each other….Many mainstream trade unions, by contrast, turned away women, Blacks, and the unskilled, and wanted to keep wages higher by curbing immigration.” (Hochschild 2022, 86)
   “[The Wobblies] were responsible for one out of every six workdays lost to strikes in the half year following the [April 2017] US entry into the First World War. One of those 1917 IWW-led strikes shut down 75 percent of lumbering in western Washington.” (Hochschild 2022, 88)

15. Why aren’t Wal-Mart employees unionized?

-“[T]he sources of union decline in America lie not in market forces but in the political climate created by movement conservatism, which allowed employers to engage in union-busting activities and punish workers for supporting union organizers. Without that changed political climate, much of the service economy—especially giant retailers like Wal-Mart—would probably be unionized today.…Much if not most of the antiunion activity that led to the sharp decline in American unionization was illegal even under existing law. But employers judged, correctly, that they could get away with it”
   “The sharpest increases in wage inequality in the Western world have taken place in the United States and in Britain, both of which experienced sharp declines in union membership.” Imagine how different worker pay would be in the US if “Wal-Mart employees were part of a union that could demand higher wages and better benefits…[While] retail prices might be slightly higher…the retail giant wouldn’t go out of business—and the American middle class would have several hundred thousand additional members.” (Krugman 2007, 150, 263-4)

-“Business interests, which seemed to have reached an accommodation with the labor movement in the 1960s, went on the offensive against unions beginning in the 1970s. And we’re…talking about hardball tactics, often including the illegal firing of workers who tried to organize or supported union activity. During the late seventies and early eighties at least one in every twenty workers who voted for a union was illegally fired; some estimates put the number as high as one in eight. The collapse of the US union movement…has no comparison in any other Western nation.” In 1960, Canada and the US had approximately the same percentage of unionized wage and salary workers (at 31%). By 1999, The US’s percentage was down to 13.5% while Canada’s was stable at 32.6%. (Krugman 2007, 150-1)

-In 1958, Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, declared Walter Reuther, the president of the United Automobile Workers from 1946 to 1970, “a ‘more dangerous menace than…anything Soviet Russia might do to America.’ In the 1950s America was a nation in which organized labor played a powerful, visible role….America’s unionization rate was higher than that of Canada, Italy, or France…Strident antiunionism was what initially gave Goldwater national prominence.…Antiunionism gave movement conservatism its first solid base in the business community. From the 1960s on, business owners who hated unions were a solid source of financial support.…[I]n the seventies and eighties America’s political shift to the right empowered businesses to confront and, to a large extent, crush the union movement, with huge consequences for both wage inequality and the political balance of power.” (Krugman 2007, 138)

-“Undermining and destroying collective bargaining rights is one of the most important structural reforms that any right-wing government in a developed country can win. And it is not just because…unions contribute money to the campaigns of Democratic candidates. It is much deeper than that. Organized labor is relatively weak now, but for more than a century it has been the most important force for positive economic reforms in the United States, from the eight-hour work day, to health insurance and Medicare, social security, pensions and minimum wages….[President Reagan, in the early 1980s, began] a new era of labor suppression in which private sector workers all but lost their rights to organize unions….Unions were 20 percent of the private sector labor force when Reagan was elected; they are 6.9 percent today [2011]….[P]resident Obama…did have a mandate for change as the majority of the electorate finally rebelled against nearly four decades of right-wing reforms and the pain and anxiety caused by the Great Recession. One structural reform that Obama had promised in his campaign to support was the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have gone a long way toward restoring the collective bargaining rights that Reagan had destroyed. President Obama quickly backed off from this promise.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/weisbrot03142011.html

16. What was the federal US minimum wage (in 2006 dollars) in 1966? 2006?

-The US federal minimum wage in 1966 (in 2006 dollars): $8.00; 2006: $5.15. Thanks to the 2009 Democratic majority in Congress, the minimum wage is now $7.25. (It should be noted that many states have minimum wages that exceed the federal amount.)

-A classic study, by highly respected labor economists, “found no evidence that minimum wage increases in the range the United States has experienced led to job losses.…[This study] has stood up very well to repeated challenges, and new cases confirming its results keep coming in.” Therefore, the evidence is clear that minimum wage hikes don’t have major negative effects on employment, while they do raise workers’ incomes and reduce poverty. (Krugman 2007, 79, 261)

-Raising “the minimum wage doesn’t only cut into profits, it also increases demand in the economy by moving income to workers who spend more than those who receive profit. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that the proposed increase in the minimum wage would actually increase employment.” As of August 2012, there is legislation before the US Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour to $9.80, over three years. After that it would be indexed to inflation. “In Brazil, the minimum wage was raised by 60 percent in real terms by the country’s most popular president, Lula da Silva…as Brazil’s economy moved toward record-low levels of unemployment. Across South America, other left governments including Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and more have significantly reduced inequality while increasing economic growth.”
https://cepr.net/minimum-wage-raise-is-the-least-we-can-do-to-civilize-america/

-Working full-time at the minimum wage in 1970 kept a worker out of poverty. Such is no longer the case.

-“The median inflation-adjusted earnings of men working full-time in 2005 were slightly lower than they had been in 1973.” (Krugman 2007, 127)

17. True or False: American top managers of large companies are actually underpaid when compared to their counterparts in other rich countries.

-False. US top managers “are paid, depending on the measure we use and the country we compare with…between twice (compared to…Swiss CEOs, excluding stock options) and twenty times (compared to…Japanese CEOs, including stock options) their counterparts abroad…running similarly large successful companies. American managers are not only over-priced but also overly protected in the sense that they do not get punished for poor performance.” (Indeed, the American CEOs are running companies that perform no better, and frequently worse, than their Japanese and European competitors.) “And all this is not…purely dictated by market forces. The managerial class in the US has gained such economic, political and ideological power that it has been able to manipulate the forces that determine its pay. The [2009] average CEO compensation (salaries, bonuses, pensions and stock options) in the US is 300-400 times the average worker compensation (wages and benefits).…[This compares to] 30 to 40 to 1 in the 1960s and 70s.” (Chang, 149-153)

-“Markets weed out inefficient practices [such as excessive executive compensation], but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them. Moreover, even if they are eventually weeded out, one-sided managerial compensation packages impose huge costs on the rest of the economy while they last. The workers have to be constantly squeezed through downward pressure on wages, casualization of employment and permanent downsizing, so that the managers can generate enough extra profits to distribute to the shareholders and keep them from raising issues with high executive pay…Having to maximize dividends to keep the shareholders quiet, investment is minimized, weakening the company’s long-term productive capabilities. When combined with excessive managerial pay, this puts the American and British firms at a disadvantage in international competition, eventually costing the workers their jobs. Finally, when things go wrong on a large scale, as in the 2008 financial crisis, taxpayers are forced to bail out the failed companies, while the managers who created the failure get off almost scot-free.” (Chang, 156)

-It should be noted that CEO pay is largely determined by CEOs. Corporate boards, largely selected by the CEOs, hire compensation experts, almost always chosen by the CEO, to determine how much the CEO is worth.

18. True or False: Increased income taxes and social welfare spending necessarily come at the expense of economic growth.

-False. “Following the Second World War, there was a rapid growth in progressive taxation and social welfare spending in most of the rich capitalist countries. Despite this (or rather partly because of this…), the period between 1950 and 1973 saw the highest-ever growth rates in these countries…Before [this period]…per capita income in the rich capitalist economies used to grow at 1-1.5 per cent per year.…[From 1950 to 1973, per capita income in these economies] grew at 2-3 per cent in the US and Britain, 4-5 per cent in Western Europe…Since then, these countries have never managed to grow faster than that.” (Chang, 142)

-Americans should dismiss modern conservative claims that “no policies can appreciably raise the share of national income going to working families, or at least that none can do so without wreaking the economy….[F]ranklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman managed to preside over a dramatic downward redistribution of income and wealth that made America far more equal than before—and not only wasn’t the economy wrecked by the redistribution…[but the stage was set] for a great generation-long economic boom.” (Krugman 2007, 38-9)
   “New Deal liberalism reigned from 1932 to 1968. The New Deal did not represent…a repudiation of capitalism, but an attempt to save and reform it, after the laissez-faire, pro-business policies of Republican administrations had helped to bring about the financial crash and the Great Depression. The New Deal approach, which used government to counter capitalism’s tendencies toward unemployment, inequality, monopoly, and environmental pollution, helped produce several decades of post-World War II prosperity.” (It’s notable that Trump voters support “the universal social programs that had originated with the New Deal, while opposing programs like the Affordable Care Act that they thought primarily benefited minorities and the poor.”) (John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics, Columbia Global Reports, New York: 2016, 39, 77.)
   “After the war, President Harry Truman had proposed another major ratcheting up of the government’s role in American life, which he called the Fair Deal. The country was not in the kind of economic crisis that allowed for the institution of anything the president wanted, as it had been in 1933, so major elements of the Fair Deal did not materialize: national health insurance, federal funding of public education, new laws that would strengthen the hand of organized labor. The US declined to create the kind of comprehensive welfare state most European countries had. This meant that the corporation, when it could be successfully pushed into behaving like a social institution, was the American welfare state, at least for its many millions of employees, their families, and to some extent the much wider circle of its small-scale suppliers, service providers, and retail outlets for its products.” (Lemann 2019, 67)

-“A well-designed welfare state can actually encourage people to take chances with their jobs and be more, not less, open to changes. This is one reason why there is less demand for trade protectionism in Europe than in the US. Europeans know that, even if their industries shut down due to foreign competition, they will be able to protect their living standards (through unemployment benefits [and health insurance and housing subsidies]) and get re-trained for another job (with government subsidies), whereas Americans know that losing their current jobs may mean a huge fall in their living standards [as unemployment insurance coverage is of shorter duration than in Europe, public help with retraining and job search is limited, and losing one’s job means losing health insurance]…This is why the European countries with the biggest welfare states, such as Sweden, Norway and Finland, were able to grow faster than, or at least as fast as, the US, even during the post-1990 ‘American Renaissance’…Obviously, the size of the welfare state is only one factor in determining a country’s economic performance, but…a large welfare state is not incompatible with high growth….Were the free-market economists right about the detrimental effects of the welfare state on work ethic and the incentives for wealth creation, this kind of thing should not happen.” (Chang, 221-2, 229)

-A growing “body of economic research suggests that [income inequality] might mean lower levels of economic growth and slower job creation” for a country. According to IMF research, economic growth is more fragile “in countries with high levels of inequality like the US”; and, “the widening disparity since the 1980s might shorten the [US’s] economic expansions by as much as a third.” In fact, “[r]educing inequality and bolstering growth, in the long run, might be ‘two sides of the same coin,’…”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/business/economy/income-inequality-may-take-toll-on-growth.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general&pagewanted=all

-“There is little evidence…to back up the assertion that tax levels have a significant impact on business investment. In recent years, for instance, Canada has significantly cut taxes–particularly taxes on corporations and high-income individuals–yet business investment levels have declined. Similarly, in the US [it’s striking] how little impact tax-cutting has had on the American economy. ‘President George W. Bush’s tax cuts didn’t produce a boom; President Barack Obama’s tax hike didn’t cause a depression. Tax cuts in Kansas didn’t jump-start the state’s economy; tax hikes in California didn’t slow growth'[;] [and] Trump’s massive tax cut for the rich has failed to produce investment [as] corporations have been using the savings to buy back their own stock, enriching their shareholders.” (McQuaig 2019, 202)
   “While there’s paltry evidence of the benefits of tax cuts, there is a lot of evidence of the benefits of high taxes….In particular, the Nordic countries, which epitomize high taxes and big government, have pulled dramatically ahead in achieving greater social well-being and equality, better health, and stronger economic security for all their citizens….Strikingly, these high-tax countries have enjoyed just as good and often better economic results…as low-tax countries.” (McQuaig 2019, 202-3)
   In 2012, for instance, the European “countries with the well-developed welfare states, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands [were] doing fine. The countries that [were] in crisis, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, have the least developed welfare states among the older EU countries.”
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/steven-pearlstein-doesnt-like-the-european-welfare-states

Focus: California
-Conservatives argue “that a healthy economy depends on low taxes, few regulations and low wages. At one end of the scale are [the US states of] Kansas and Texas, with among the nation’s lowest taxes, fewest regulations and lowest wages. At the other end is California, with among the nation’s highest taxes, especially on the wealthy; toughest regulations, particularly when it comes to the environment; most ambitious health care system, which insures more than 12 million poor Californians, in partnership with Medicaid; and high wages. So, according to conservative doctrine, Kansas and Texas ought to be booming, and California ought to be in the pits. Actually, it’s just the opposite. For several years now, the rate of economic growth in Kansas has been the worst in the nation. [In 2015] its economy actually shrank. Texas hasn’t been doing all that much better….[In contrast,] over-taxed, over-regulated, high-wage…California leads the nation in the rate of economic growth — more than twice the national average. If it were a separate nation, it would now be the sixth-largest economy in the world. Its population has surged to 39 million (up 5 percent since 2010). California is home to the nation’s fastest-growing and most innovative industries — entertainment and high-tech. It incubates more startups than anywhere else in the world.”
   Why is California doing so well? “For one thing, taxes enable states to invest [in] their people. The University of California is the best system of public higher education in America. Add in the state’s network of community colleges, state colleges and research institutions, and you have an unparalleled source of research and development, and a powerful engine of upward mobility.” (25 Nov. 2016)
http://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/syndicated-columnists/article116731403.html
   “Just about every policy Donald Trump imposes to make his America great is opposed by the world’s [now] fifth-largest economy[:] California, which is growing faster and outperforming the US in job growth, manufacturing, personal income, corporate profits and the total return of its bonds.” (“Per capita income since 2013 grew 20.5 percent, making California the perennial No. 1.”)
   “Trump attributes the prosperity of the US economy during his 17 months as president to his evisceration of environmental regulations and other consumer protections, abandoning the Paris climate accord, aggressively deporting undocumented immigrants, prohibiting people from certain nations (mostly majority Muslim)…, cutting taxes most for corporations and the rich, and appointing a Supreme Court justice who just wrote the 5-4 decision limiting the rights of tens of millions of workers.”
   “Jerry Brown, California’s longest-serving governor [as of 2018], takes the opposite approach, and his state thrives. California is the global leader among governments committed to safeguarding the planet from climate change. Corporate California’s revenues from clean energy companies dwarf those of the other 49 states or any country. The state’s auto emissions law, now contested by the Trump administration, is the nation’s most stringent. The legislature voted to become a sanctuary state, preventing police from participating in federal enforcement or asking people about their immigration status. The same assembly also made California the first state to declare a $15-an-hour minimum wage and to require solar panels on new homes. Its citizens approved Proposition 30, temporarily raising personal income and sales taxes to fund education.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-29/trump-vs-california-state-s-economy-vastly-outpaces-u-s
   As of summer 2019, California “enjoys a budget surplus, despite large increases in public investment. The state’s population has continued to grow, yet its greenhouse gas emissions have declined substantially. And despite predictions that top earners would flee the state in droves, outmigration by the top 1 percent has been lower than for any other income group.” (The NYT Book Review, 8 Sept. 2019, 10)
   “[S]tates, like Kansas and Oklahoma — both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind — have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they’re digging it deeper. And when it comes to national politics,…Trumpland is in effect voting for its own impoverishment. New Deal programs and public investment played a significant role in the great postwar convergence; conservative efforts to downsize government will hurt people all across America, but it will disproportionately hurt the very regions that put the [Republicans] in power.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/opinion/trumpland-economy-polarization.html
-Why has California’s population growth stalled. “[I]t turns out not to be affluent, highly educated residents fleeing those ‘job-killing taxes.’ People like that are still moving in. Instead, lower-income and lower-education residents are leaving, probably because housing is so unaffordable.”
   “It didn’t have to be that way. Texas has a rapidly growing population, the way California used to. But…Texas housing prices haven’t risen much at all in real terms. And the reason is obvious: Texas doesn’t have California-type restrictions that effectively prevent the construction of much new housing. And that…liberal housing policy, not low taxes, is the big explanation of Texas’s relative success.”
   “What California’s example shows is that tax rates on the rich have much less adverse effect on incentives than conservatives would like you to believe. But while blue states can do fine while raising money from the rich, they do a lot of harm by preventing the construction of new housing for ordinary people.” (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 11 May 2021)
   (Vienna: How to do public housing: https://www.ft.com/content/05719602-89c6-4bbc-9bbe-5842fd0c3693)
-In 2020, California turned out the best economic performance in the entire developed world. The state has no peers among developed economies for expanding GDP, creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-14/california-defies-doom-with-no-1-u-s-economy

Focus: Wisconsin
-Wisconsin’s century-old progressive legacy has been dismantled in virtually every area — labor rights, environmental protection, voting rights, government transparency — by Republican politicians adhering to a radical conservative agenda. Partly as a result, by 2018, “Wisconsin had seen one of the largest declines of the middle class of any state…Its poverty rate had climbed to a thirty-year high; the state’s roads were the second worst in the country; the University of Wisconsin-Madison had fallen, for the first time, out of the rankings of the country’s top five research schools. A study estimated that 11 percent of the state’s population was deterred from voting in the 2016 presidential election by Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, one of the strictest in the nation.” (Dan Kaufman, The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, W. W. Norton & Company, New York: 2018, 6. Hereinafter, “Kaufman 2018.”)
   Throughout the twentieth century, largely due to the communitarian culture of its many Scandinavian immigrants–“25 percent of Norway’s entire population emigrated to the US between 1825 and 1925”–“Wisconsin led the country in devising pioneering legislation that aided the vast majority of its citizens. In 1911, the state legislature established the nation’s first workers’ compensation program, a progressive state income tax, and more stringent child-labor laws….The state’s progressive spirit continued for generations, influencing the entire country: Wisconsin created the first unemployment-insurance program, and it was the first state to recognize collective bargaining rights for public employees. Indeed, much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the Social Security Act, was drafted by Wisconsinites…” (Kaufman 2018, 5, 13)
   “[W]isconsin’s progressive ethos was…often bipartisan. In 1967, Governor Warren Knowles and the Republican-controlled senate and assembly enacted legislation granting collective bargaining rights for all state employees. Even Governor Tommy Thompson, a conservative Republican, crafted a new state program in 1999 to provide subsidized health insurance for low-income families with children. But after the 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo outlawed limits on campaign spending, Wisconsin’s politics, increasingly shaped by money, started becoming more like the politics of other states…” (And in 2010 “the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United decision, allowing corporations and labor unions as well as other advocacy groups to spend unlimited sums on political advertising…Despite an equal right to spend, the annual revenue of the companies in the Fortune 500 alone is hundreds of times larger than that of the entire union movement.”)  (Kaufman 2018, 27, 29)
   “After [anti-union] Act 10 passed, the decimation of labor came quickly. In 2010, Wisconsin’s union density was 14 percent; six years later, it was 8 percent.” According to Republican Governor Scott Walker’s chief of staff, “getting rid of the automatic dues check-off” was a critical element of the Act as “[t]hat was the funnel of money from public employees to their unions.” (Kaufman 2018, 73)
   “Since Republicans passed their redistricting plan in 2011, the state assembly’s Democrats have never held more than thirty-nine of ninety-nine seats, even in 2012, when they won 175,000 more aggregate votes than Republicans.” Gerrymandering, voter ID requirements, and the Citizens United decision have had their desired effect. (Kaufman 2018, 151)
-Since the early 1970s, conservatives in Wisconsin have built a vast infrastructure to promote their agenda. “Conservative institutions such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth; Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ political advocacy arm; and the Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee-based organization focused on a state-based strategy to move the country to the right [by distributing tens of millions of dollars in grants to think tanks and other organizations promoting conservative causes], played a crucial role in attacking Wisconsin’s progressive legacy…” (When he attacked public-sector unions, Walker effectively “drew on [and] stoked” the resentment that raged in rural areas.) (Kaufman 2018, 117, 239)
   There has been “a slow, steady process of ratcheting up the eliminationist hatred of liberals year by year by year–or, at least, the increasing willingness, year by year starting with Nixon, for an entire party leadership to exploit it more shamelessly to win more power.” And having many Republican voters adopt this hatred isn’t that difficult “when enough of [voters’] basic information about the outside world comes from a…propaganda machine” like Fox News. (Rick Perlstein, Facebook comments on his post, 6 Dec. 2020)
-In contrast to Wisconsin, Minnesota in 2010 passed “a tax hike on [its] wealthiest residents–one of the largest in the state’s history–and used [the tax] revenue to fund all-day kindergarten, expand early childhood education programs, increase funding for the University of Minnesota…, and improve water quality.” (Kaufman 2018, 233)
   Compared to Wisconsin, “Minnesota has experienced higher wage growth, higher labor force participation, a lower unemployment rate, and better job growth in higher-wage occupations. Wisconsin, which has passed more than $8 billion in tax cuts since Walker took office, has a budget deficit of nearly $2 billion. The vast majority of those cuts have benefited corporations and the state’s wealthiest citizens, at a time when Walker has been forced to issue bonds to fix Wisconsin’s dilapidated roads.” (Kaufman 2018, 233-4)

19. At the end of 2009, what was the unemployment rate among American men aged twenty-five to fifty-four?

-19.7 percent. This is the highest figure since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking this data in 1948. America has always had unemployment rates far lower than other developed nations. (Huffington, 63)

-2015: “Unlike Europe, [the US] had only 18 months of recession, until June of 2009. [Therefore, in summer 2015, unemployment in the US is] 5.3 percent, far below its peak of 10 percent in October 2009….But the economy is not as strong as it looks. Since labor force participation is far lower than it was before the Great Recession, we are still down about 3 or 4 million jobs from where we should be. Furthermore, the US has suffered from a massive, unprecedented upward redistribution of income over the past 35 years. Since the recovery began in 2009, 58 percent of the income gains from growth have gone to the top 1 percent of families. As in the case of failed economic policies in Spain and Greece, these gross inequities have spawned some grassroots movements that changed the political debate here.” (24 August 2015)
http://www.cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/u-s-and-europe-face-different-political-situations-but-common-problems

-2017: “With unemployment in the US at its lowest level in 16 years, experts are prone to talk about the economy as if it has fully recovered from the housing crash. [However, while jobs have returned, almost] “80 percent of American workers say they live paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet…That can force people to take on debt or otherwise struggle when an unexpected bill arises. It also raises questions about the stability of the broader economy given that consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of activity.”
   “Median household income is still stuck in low gear, with the US Census reporting only one year of income gains since 2007, the year the recession officially started. American households are still earning 2.4 percent below what they brought home at their income peaks in 1999. At the same time, expenses for food, fuel, education, housing and other costs have risen.” (24 Aug. 2017)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americans-living-paycheck-to-paycheck/

-2019-20: As of November 2019, “[u]nemployment is hovering near a five-decade low [3.5%], workforce participation is at the highest level in six years…” (As of Feb. 2020, the economic “expansion is 128 months old, the longest on record. Employment is strong: 80.6% of prime-age adults–those 25 to 54 years old–are working, the highest level since June 2001.”) “Yet, 44% of Americans age 18 to 64 are low-wage workers… An estimated 53 million Americans are earning low wages…Their median wage is $10.22 an hour and their annual pay is $17,950. … The demographics of low-wage workers span race, gender and geography, but women and minority groups are more likely to earn low wages. Black workers are 32% more likely to earn low wages than whites, and Latinos are 41% more likely. Nearly half of low-wage workers are concentrated in just 10 occupations, like cooks, cleaners, construction and retail sales…”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-07/53-million-in-u-s-have-low-wage-jobs-they-ll-likely-stay-there
(The New York Times, 1 March 2020, BU 3)

Black Americans: Employment, Discrimination, Crime
-“By early 2009, only 55 percent of working-age African American men were employed, the lowest level since 1983.” (Goodman, 163)

-Late 2017: “The continued strong pace of job growth pushed down the unemployment rate for African Americans to 6.8 percent, the lowest figure since these data began being collected in 1972. By comparison, the African American rate bottomed out at 7.0 percent in April of 2000.”
http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/jobs-2018-01flash

-Black Males Disadvantaged: A 2018 study “underscores just how big a gap African-American males face when it comes to moving up the economic ladder.” Its findings include: (1) “White [men] who grew up in rich households are likely to remain that way. Black [men] who are also raised at the top are more likely to become poor, instead of staying wealthy in their own adult households.” (2) “Black [men] fare worse than white [men] in 99 percent of America, even when children grow up next to each other, with parents who earn similar incomes.” (3) “[Black] men who grow up in households with two parents that are earning $140,000, [f]are about the same as a white young man who is raised by a single mother making just $60,000.” (4) “[A]reas with larger rates of father presence in homes among Black men, [h]ave better outcomes for Black [men]… So, if there are more two-parent families, particularly among [Black] households, you see better outcomes for Black [men]. [Also,] areas with lower levels of racial bias among whites tend to [show better] outcomes for Black men.” (5) “[B]lack women, conditional on growing up in a family that is at the same income level as white women, [e]nd up with very similar outcomes. They have similar levels of earnings, similar wage rates, similar college attendance rates. They work at similar rates. So, it’s really remarkable how, for women, you don’t see that much of a black-white disparity.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/black-men-face-economic-disadvantages-even-if-they-start-out-in-wealthier-households-new-study-shows

-Full Employment Impacts Wage Inequality: By 2023, the Black-white wage gap has fallen to its lowest level on record as employment rates converge. Racial wage inequality has fallen for the following reasons. “A number of states increased their minimum wages. Unions won some victories, and fear of unionization may have pushed some employers to increase pay. The main factor, however, was surely a tight labor market: Full employment greatly increases workers’ bargaining power.”
   “Full employment also did wonders for another aspect of racial disparities: high Black unemployment. Last hired, first fired is still a very real fact of race relations in America; one measure of our success in finally achieving something like full employment is that the gap between Black and white unemployment rates is the smallest it has been since the government started collecting data on the subject.”
   The above facts have “an important moral for policy: Full employment is extremely important not just because it leads to a higher GDP but also because it helps create a healthier, fairer society. And we should fight back against political forces standing in the way of job creation. In particular, a gratuitous recession could all too easily undo much of the progress we’ve made.”
   “It’s now clear that the deficit obsession of the 2010s, which delayed recovery from the 2007-9 recession for many years, was a social as well as economic tragedy. And we’re at risk of a similar tragedy if the Federal Reserve lets itself be bullied into keeping interest rates high by Republicans accusing it of cutting rates to help President Biden — not, you know, because the inflation that caused it to raise rates has subsided.” (Paul Krugman, NYT Opinion, 15 Jan. 2024)

-Migrant Advantage: Immigrants v. Natives: “When studies started to show that the median family income of African Americans was far lower than that of foreign-born Blacks and that African Americans had higher rates of poverty and unemployment, numerous commentators wondered why Black immigrants do so much better than Blacks born in America. They also answered their own questions: Black immigrants are more motivated, more hardworking, and ‘more entrepreneurial than native-born blacks’…Their success shows ‘that racism does not account for all, or even most, of the difficulties encountered by native-born blacks.’” (Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, One World, New York: 2019, 66. Hereinafter, “Kendi 2019.”)
   “Whenever Black immigrants compare their economic standing to that of Black natives, whenever they agree that their success stories show that antiracist Americans are overstating racist policies against African Americans, they are tightening the handcuffs of racist policy around their own wrists. Black immigrants’ comparisons with Black natives conceal the racial inequities between Black immigrants and non-Black immigrants.” (Kendi 2019, 66-7)
   “Despite studies showing Black immigrants are, on average, the most educated group of immigrants in the US, they earn lower wages than similarly trained non-Black immigrants and have the highest unemployment rate of any immigrant group.” (Kendi 2019, 67)
   “The reason Black immigrants generally have higher educational levels and economic pictures than African Americans is not that their transnational ethnicities are superior. The reason resides in the circumstances of human migration. Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called ‘immigrant self-selection,’ are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants. In fact, immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the ‘migrant advantage.’ [Therefore, for example,] ‘West Indians are not a black success story but an immigrant success story.’ As such, policies from those of Calvin Coolidge to Donald Trump’s limiting immigration…have been self-destructive to the country. With ethnic racism, no one wins, except the racist power at the top. As with all racism, that is the entire point.” (Kendi 2019, 67)
   Australia’s Asian Immigrants: “By the late 1980’s, nearly half of Australians were either born overseas or had at least one overseas-born parent. By 1991, Asians represented over 50% of immigrants to Australia. By 2010, the percentage of Australians actually born overseas (more than 25%) was second in the world, trailing only Israel’s percentage. The influence of those Asian immigrants has been far out of proportion to their numbers: Asian students have come to occupy over 70% of the places in Sydney’s top schools,…and Asians and other non-Europeans now make up more than half of Australian medical students.” (Jared Diamond, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis, Little, Brown and Company, New York: 2019, 285. Hereinafter, “Diamond 2019.”)

-IQ and Culture: Refuting stereotypes, according to a 1991 report, East Asian Americans “had the same average IQ as white Americans. Remarkably, though, Asian Americans still tended to score significantly higher than average on the SAT college admission tests. They were also more likely than average to end up in professional, managerial, and technical jobs. The edge they had was therefore a cultural one: their upbringing had endowed them with more supportive parents or maybe a stronger work ethic. They just tended to work harder than others.”
   “It is also interesting how…stereotypes can change over time. Asian Americans are today considered a model minority. We forget that more than a century ago, unlike today, European race scientists saw Asians as biologically inferior…In 1882 the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to ban Chinese immigrant laborers because they were seen as undesirable citizens. Now that Japan has been highly prosperous for decades and India, China, and South Korea are fast on the rise with their own wealthy elites, the stereotypes have shifted the other way. As people and nations prosper, racial prejudices find new targets.” (Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Beacon Press, Boston: 2019, 174-5.)

-Structural Racism in Baltimore: In 2015, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan canceled the Red Line, an “east-west transit route that would connect isolated Black Baltimore neighborhoods to downtown and suburban job centers and to other rail lines.” (“The same year Hogan canceled the Red Line, Baltimore ranked last in the nation on Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s rankings for social mobility of poor children.”)
   “This is what structural racism looks like and it is a product of public policy. For decades, governments have spent public funds disproportionately on white communities, particularly those that have more than enough, while excluding Black communities and Black people from government investments — in mortgages, education, infrastructure and other services.”
   “One epochal example that shaped segregation in the Baltimore region and everywhere else African Americans in the Great Migration landed: The Federal Housing Administration invented the 30-year mortgage to bring homeownership to the white masses. Under this New Deal policy created by Democrats, from 1934 to 1962 whites received 98 percent of government-insured loans. Blacks were intentionally cut out of America’s signature wealth-building policy and the suburban American dream. This explains why today, for every dollar of wealth held by a typical white family, a typical black family holds 8 cents.”
   “After a century of redlining, urban ‘Negro Removal,’ intentionally concentrating poor Black Americans in segregated housing, disinvestment, foreclosures and predation, without an insistent effort to disrupt a legacy of plunder, the modern descendants of slavery in Baltimore cannot thrive. Black Democrats are not immune to the zero-sum politics of segregation. Despite being governed by a series of Black mayors, a recent equity analysis revealed that Baltimore neighborhoods that are less than half Black received nearly four times more the investment than neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly Black.”
   “Education is supposed to be a ladder of social mobility, but education remains separate and unequal in America. Hogan recently vetoed a bill known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future that would have been a down payment on recommendations to transform Maryland public education from mediocre to world-class…”
   “Dismantling unjust budgetary habits and reducing systemic racism will require sacrifices from white communities that have disproportionately benefited from these policies for decades. In a revolutionary moment where 96 percent of Americans are acknowledging that Black Americans face discrimination, are we finally ready to readjust our spending priorities?”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/18/how-larry-hogan-kept-black-baltimore-segregated-and-poor-367930

-Republicans Imagine More Discrimination Against Whites: “[W]hite supremacist politics has been an enormously powerful force in the US in recent years. [A]n example, statistically, of how potent it is, the Pew Research Center did a [2021] study and asked who [are] more discriminated against: white Americans or Black Americans. [D]emocrats by a margin of 67 points said that Black Americans are more discriminated against. Republicans, by a margin of 9 points, said that white Americans are more discriminated against. [T]his imagined notion that America was essentially an equal country, and now it is an unequal country because its government and its key cultural institutions—the media, Hollywood,…big business—essentially discriminate against white people. This is really a kind of fantastical notion, but it’s a very powerful notion. And in understanding why this exists, the role of conservative media is really crucial. A lot of people [ask:] how did people develop these views that led them to vote for Donald Trump? These things don’t happen out of nowhere. There are…political and media entrepreneurs who fuel this again and again.” (12 Dec. 2022)
https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/how-the-conservative-media-fuels

-Black Progress: Poverty, Longevity, Literacy, Tolerance, Mobility: Significant absolute (as opposed to relative) progress for African Americans should be recognized. “Among African Americans, the poverty rate fell from 55 percent in 1960 to 27.6 percent in 2011. Life expectancy rose from 33 in 1900 (17.6 years below that of whites) to 75.6 years in 2015 (less than 3 years below whites)….The rate of illiteracy fell among African Americans from 45 percent in 1900 to effectively zero percent today….Racist violence against African Americans, once a regular occurrence in night raids and lynchings (three a week at the turn of the 20th century), plummeted in the 20th century, and has [continued to fall].” (Pinker 2018, 219)
   “[A]merica is actually a far less racist society than it used to be. In 1969 only 17 percent of white Americans approved of black-white marriage. Even during [the early 1980s] that number was only up to 38 percent. As of 2013 it was 84 percent. [Nevertheless,] racism is far from gone. And while Americans are increasingly tolerant as individuals, racial tensions continue to be exacerbated by cynical politicians, who exploit white racism to sell policies that actually hurt workers, whatever their skin color.” (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 2 June 2020)
   “The share of Black families that are upper middle class has increased from 1 percent in 1967 to 14 percent in 2016. That’s a major gain, although it still lags the White rate of 39 percent.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-rise-of-the-upper-middle-class/2020/08/16/3aa1aea4-de60-11ea-b205-ff838e15a9a6_story.html
   In 2023, “nearly half of black families…have incomes in the middle-class or higher range.” And, it should be noted, “the wealth gap is a lagging indicator, almost entirely the consequence of home ownership.”
https://josephklein.substack.com/p/affirmative-attrition

-Desegregation’s Mixed Causes: Most events have more than one cause or reason. Consider that segregation was outlawed in the 1960s because many Americans, not least members of the Kennedy administration, were morally outraged by the sight of white policemen attacking black children with dogs and firehoses. When beginning the reforms later cemented by the Johnson administration, the Kennedys also knew the Soviet Union was watching the same television, and using it to attack American claims to serve as a beacon of freedom. [The same impulse impacted President Eisenhower’s desegregation policies regarding public facilities.] Without the prodding provided by the Cold War, segregation would likely have lasted even longer. Knowing this may temper our admiration for the Kennedy brothers’ moral outrage, but it shouldn’t undermine it entirely. There is enough historical evidence to show it was real. And even were it not: how much does it matter what moved them to act? A world where all citizens have equal rights to eat, ride, and study where they want to is better than a world where they do not…Are you angry that those rights today are often merely formal…But a world where formal rights to equal treatment exist is better than a world where we have to start legislating those rights from scratch.” (Neiman 2023, 97-8)
   “By definition, progress is not whatever we have now….It’s hard to acknowledge the previous generation’s achievements as progress…A generation that grew up without racial segregation will hardly be inclined to find its absence an achievement. They’re more likely to be astonished it ever existed….Abolishing it now seems as trivial as drawing and quartering….For the next generation, progress must mean going further to extinguish subtler forms of injustice. [A]nger over the slow speed of progress is probably necessary to keep us fighting for it. Looking down occasionally at the shoulders we stand on is a way of gathering strength, for if we fail to acknowledge that real progress has been made in the past, we will never sustain the hope of making more in the future….[As well,] [r]emembering women in Iran, landless workers in Brazil…[bravely working for their rights] is [another] source of sustenance. ‘They don’t give up hope,’ says Noam Chomsky, ‘So we certainly can’t.’” (Neiman 2023, 124-5)

-Police Violence: According to self-described conservative Prof. Wilfred Reilly, “‘Black Lives Matter’ is one of the most histrionic, non-evidence-based movements ever to really influence politics in a major nation.” Particularly after watching the 25 May 2020 video of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of a prone and handcuffed George Floyd for eight minutes — including nearly three minutes after he had stopped breathing — most people find it hard not to sympathize with Black and Brown people “posting things like: ‘I am so afraid…Every time I see the blue lights of the killers!’ But, this is an example of pure media-generated fear rather than reality.” In a typical year, these are the actual numbers concerning police violence:
 -“1,200-odd people, out of 330,000,000, will be killed by police.” (In 2019, this figure was 1,004.)
 -“200-odd Black people, out of 330,000,000 will be killed by police.” (In 2019, this figure was 229.)
 -“50-100 unarmed people will be killed by police.” (In 2019, this figure was 41.)
 -“10-15 unarmed Black people will be killed by [police].” (In 2019, this figure was 9.)
 -“The slight over-representation of Black people among police shooting victims (23% vs. 14% of the population in 2019 and 2015) is due almost entirely to the victim-reported Black crime rate, which was 2.4 times the white rate in both years.”
 -“[A]bout 14,000 young Black and White men are killed gang-banging (out of 17,000-18,000 total murders).”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/
(The Washington Post’s data fits the pattern for Black-White inter-racial crime, which is 5 percent or less of total crime in most years, and 80 percent Black-on-White, as per the national crime report.)
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv18.pdf
(Prof. Wilfred Reilly, Facebook post, 2 June 2020)
-George Floyd: The Necessity of Due Process
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJlQvOgEx58
-Female Victimization: Also contrary to popular wisdom, a “2019 Congressional Research Report noted, ‘From 1993 to 2017, the rate of serious intimate partner violence victimization declined by 70 percent for females, from 5.7 victimizations per 1,000 females aged 12 and older in 1993 to 1.7 per 1,000 in 2017.’” “‘It’s a triumph of the women’s movement that fewer wives and domestic partners are killed and there is less spousal and girlfriend abuse.’”
https://reason.com/2020/07/10/steven-pinker-beats-cancel-culture-attack/

-Cops Kill Whites and Blacks: A common response to the fact that cops kill whites and blacks is that cops kill more black people proportionately than whites. According to a survey by the Washington Post, whites are 62% of the population but were roughly half of those killed by cops since January 2015, while blacks are 13% of the population but were about a quarter of those killed….[M]any would argue that disproportionate poverty levels among black people render them more likely to encounter police officers in the first place—vastly unfair, but different from the problem being simply cops’ standing racist bias.” (2016)
https://time.com/4404987/police-violence/

-Control for Employment: “A study that used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1976 to 1989 found that young Black males engaged in more violent crime than young White males. But when the researchers compared only employed young males of both races, the differences in violent behavior vanished. Or, as the Urban Institute stated in a [later] report on long-term unemployment, ‘Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.’” (Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist, One World, New York: 2019, 79.)

-BLM Largely Peaceful: During the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, sensationalist media reports led to the perception that violence was common. However, “the most complete record of the…protests shows that 93 percent of the events were peaceful, with no conflict, violence, or property destruction.” (McGhee 2021, 238)

-Food Stamps: “In April 2010…the number of Americans on food stamps grew to forty million…” “The National Center on Family Homelessness estimates that 1.5 million children in the United States are homeless—that is one in fifty children.” (Huffington, 55, 73)

-The 2010 “Census Bureau data shows that one in two Americans currently falls into either the ‘low income’ category or is living in poverty. Low-income is defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level. Adjusted for inflation, the earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have dropped from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000. Earnings for the next 20 percent have been stuck at $37,000….46.7 million Americans must now use food stamps in order to get a meal…Almost half of all US children will be on food stamps during some part of their childhood. For black children, that number is 90 percent.” (As the government does not count food stamps as income, poverty rates are overstated.)
http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/9-economic-facts-will-make-your-head-spin

-In 2013, “Two and a half million Americans are…under lock and key….The US has 5 percent of the world’s population, but [has] 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.”
http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/9-economic-facts-will-make-your-head-spin

-Constructed Racial Hierarchy: “The colonists in America created their concept of freedom largely by defining it against the bondage of the Africans among them. In the early colonial years, most European newcomers were people at the bottom of the social hierarchy back home, sent to these shores as servants from orphanages, debtors’ prisons, or poorhouses. Even those born in America had little of what we currently conceive of as freedom: to choose their own work and education or to move at will. But as the threat of cross-racial servant uprisings became real in the late 1600s — particularly after the bloody Bacon’s Rebellion, in which a Black and white rebel army burned the capital of colonial Virginia to the ground — colonial governments began to separate the servant class based on skin color.” (McGhee 2021, 10)
   “A look through the colonial laws of the 1680s and early 1700s reveals a deliberate effort to legislate a new hierarchy between poor whites and the ‘basically uncivil, unchristian, and above all, unwhite Native and African laborers.’ Many of the laws oppressing workers of color did so to the direct benefit of poor whites, creating a zero-sum relationship between these two parts of the colonial underclass. In 1705, a new Virginia law granted title and protection to the little property that any white servant may have accumulated — and simultaneously confiscated the personal property of all the enslaved people in the colony. The zero sum was made quite literal when, by the same law, the church in each parish sold the slaves’ confiscated property and gave the ‘profits to the poor of the parish,’ by which they meant…the white poor.” (McGhee 2021, 10)
   “[S]lavery provided a new caste that even the poorest white-skinned person could hover above and define himself against. Just imagine the psychic benefit of being elevated from the bottom of a rigid class hierarchy to a higher place in a new ‘racial’ hierarchy by dint of something as immutable as your skin color. You can imagine how, whether or not you owned slaves yourself, you might willingly buy into a zero-sum model to gain the sense of freedom that rises with the subordination of others.” (McGhee 2021, 11)
   “Racial hierarchy offered white people a reprieve from the class hierarchy and gave white women an escape valve from gender oppression. White women…considered their slaves ‘their freedom,’ liberating them from farming, housework, child rearing, nursing, and even the sexual demands of their husbands.” (McGhee 2021, 10-11)
-“[T]he zero-sum story of racial hierarchy was born along with the country, but it is an invention of the worst elements of our society: people who gained power through ruthless exploitation and kept it by sowing constant division. It has always optimally benefited only the few while limiting the potential of the rest of us, and therefore the whole.” (McGhee 2021, 14)
   “In decade after decade, threats of job competition — between men and women, immigrants and native born, Black and white — have perennially revived the fear of loss at another’s gain. The people setting up the competition and spreading these fears were never the needy job seekers, but the elite. (Consider the New York Herald‘s publishing tycoon, James Gordon Bennett Sr., who warned the city’s white working classes during the 1860 election that ‘if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.’)” (McGhee 2021, 14)
-“For most of the twentieth century, leaders of both parties agreed on the wisdom of [large-scale government] investments…” (Individuals can’t create, for example, their own electric grid, internet or school system, and therefore the most efficient way “to ensure that those things are created and available to all on a fair and open basis is to fund and provide them publicly.”) However, for most of its “history, the beneficiaries of America’s free public investments were whites only. The list of free stuff [is] long. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of expropriated Indigenous land west of the Mississippi to any citizen or person eligible for citizenship (which, after the 1790 Naturalization Act, was only white immigrants) if they could reach the land and build on it….Fewer than six thousand Black families were able to become part of the 1.6 million landowners who gained deeds through the Homestead Act…Today, an estimated 46 million people are propertied descendants of Homestead Act beneficiaries.” (McGhee 2021, 21)
   “During the Great Depression, the American government told banks it would insure mortgages on real estate if they made them longer-term and more affordable (offering tax deductions on interest along the way) — but the government drew red ‘Do Not Lend’ lines around almost all the Black neighborhoods in the country with a never-substantiated assumption that they would be bad credit risks. The New Deal transformed the lives of workers with minimum wage and overtime laws — but compromises with southern Democrats excluded the job categories most Black people held, in domestic and agricultural work. Then the GI Bill of 1944 paid the college tuition of hundreds of thousands of veterans, catapulting a generation of men into professional careers — but few Black veterans benefited, as local administrators funneled most Black servicemen to segregated vocational schools.” (Particularly in the South, where segregation was both the law and violently enforced social practice, Black Americans were not able to receive the benefits that they were due under the GI Bill. A Black veteran, for example, couldn’t receive an education if the college did not accept Black students.) “The federal government created suburbs by investing in the federal highway system and subsidizing private housing developers — but demanded racial covenants (‘whites only’ clauses in housing contracts) to prevent Black people from buying into them. Social Security gave income to millions of elderly Americans — but again, exclusions of job categories left most Black workers out…” (McGhee 2021, 21-2)
   “The advantages white people had accumulated were free and usually invisible, and so conferred an elevated status that seemed natural and almost innate. White society had repeatedly denied people of color economic benefits on the premise that they were inferior; those unequal benefits then reified the hierarchy, making whites actually economically superior.” (McGhee 2021, 22-3)
-“Numerous social science studies have shown that racial resentment among white people spiked with the election of Barack Obama. When the figurehead of American government became a Black man in 2009, the correlation between views on race and views on government and policy went into overdrive….[W]hites with higher levels of racial resentment and more anti-Black stereotypes grew more opposed to healthcare reform [–which would have benefited large numbers of whites–] after it became associated with President Obama.” This racial resentment has long been exploited by politicians and business. (McGhee 2021, 52-3)
   “The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character. [I]t couldn’t be a coincidence that, to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor — on a system that compensated the labor of Black people at exactly zero.” (McGhee 2021, 117)
   “After 2000, American factories began to shutter at a faster pace, but not all regions suffered equally. The number of jobs in the industrial Midwest has never recovered, while at the same time, the number of jobs in the South grew by 13.5 percent. Japanese automakers Nissan and Toyota opened factories in the US to step up competition with Detroit, but they planted them primarily in the nonunionized South. The foreign auto industry moved to the American South for the low wages, and once there, it drove worker pay down even further. From 2001 to 2013, the pay of workers at auto parts plants in Alabama dropped by 24 percent…Southern states simply lacked any countervailing force, any way for workers to push back…[And this] low-wage southern labor model is no longer contained to the geographic South nor to manufacturing.” (As it has expanded beyond its southern base, Walmart, the US’s largest private employer, has brought “its fiercely low-wage and antiunion ethos”.) “The wage differences between workers in the industrial Midwest and the South was nearly seven dollars an hour in 2008; three years later, wage cuts in the Midwest had slashed the regional difference in half….To a large degree, the story of the hollowing out of the American working class is a story of the southern economy, with its deep legacy of exploitative labor and divide-and-conquer tactics, going national.” (McGhee 2021, 118-9)
-“In a hierarchical system like the American economy, people often show more concern about their relative position in the hierarchy than their absolute status….[Accordingly,] ‘Last-place aversion suggests that low-income individuals might oppose redistribution because they fear it might differentially help a last-place group to whom they can currently feel superior[.]’” So, while “raising the minimum wage is overwhelmingly popular, people who make a dollar above the current minimum ‘and thus those most likely to drop into last place’ alongside the workers at the bottom expressed less support.” (McGhee 2021, 125)
-“‘For most of [US] history, the government was the racist. But many white people now believe…that the government has taken the other side and is now changing the ‘proper’ racial order through social spending, civil rights laws, and affirmative action. This makes the government untrustworthy. And so, racial resentment by whites and distrust of government are very highly correlated.’” (McGhee 2021, 203)
-As some white people “stop seeing racism as a factor and treat equality as a reality rather than an aspiration, [their] minds naturally seek other explanations for the disparities all around [them]….[For example, they may] rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics [and/or] imputed cultural limitations.” Such color blindness can lead some to argue, for example, that the government shouldn’t collect “racial data because isn’t that what a racist would do? Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism, unwilling to acknowledge where its effects have shaped opportunity or to use race-conscious solutions to address it.” (McGhee 2021, 229, 230)
   “Morally defending your [blind-to-racism] position in a racially unequal society requires the fierce protection of your self-image as a person who earns everything you receive. From the tradition that trade unions make a place for members’ sons, to legacy admissions at colleges, to college students who can choose career-building but unpaid or low-paying internships because families can support them, to employers who seek ‘a good fit’ by hiring younger versions of themselves, the deck is stacked on behalf of white people in ways that are so pervasive we rarely notice them….[For example,] Black job applicants who removed any indications of their race from their resumes were significantly more likely to advance to an interview.” (McGhee 2021, 233)
-The result of a 1988 study showed that, “when presented with identical symptoms, clinicians tended to identify black men as more severely ill than any other group. [And a] 2004 study showed that black men and women were four times more likely to receive a schizophrenia diagnosis than white patients in state hospitals.” (Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness, Grand Central Publishing, New York: 2019, 202.)

-Maine Helped by Immigration: “Maine is the state with the whitest and oldest population in the country…From 2011 to 2019, the state’s governor, Paul LePage, campaigned and governed on rhetoric about illegal immigrants on welfare and drug-dealing people of color….Meanwhile, he vetoed Medicaid expansion for the working class five times and delivered large tax cuts for the wealthy.” (McGhee 2021, 255-6)
   “But, in Maine, white people constitute about 95 percent of the population, and 11.5 percent of them were in poverty in 2016 — twice as many white people in poverty as there were people of color of all incomes in the whole state. The people who needed government services were overwhelmingly white.” (“The state ranks among the top ten in opioid deaths.”) (McGhee 2021, 255, 268)
   In Lewiston, the state’s second-biggest city, “everything that was once manufactured…would [come] to be made in the American South with cheaper labor, and eventually in China and Southeast Asia. By the 2000s, the loss of jobs had created a vicious circle: as young people left to find work, there was nobody to work the few service sector jobs that remained…Then, with the town losing population year after year, it was impossible to attract new employers.” (Maine and West Virginia are the only two states “where deaths now exceed births.”)  (McGhee 2021, 257, 258)
   What helped Lewiston’s revival was the arrival of Somali and other African refugees. “A bipartisan think tank calculated that Maine’s African immigrant households contributed $194 million in state and local taxes in 2018.” And “Lewiston is not alone in this new wave of new people; [since 2000], Latinx, African, and Asian immigrants have been repopulating small towns across America….Low-paid farm and food processing work is what draws foreign-born people to these small towns at first…But once there, immigrants have, as European immigrants did a century ago, started businesses, gained education, and participated in civic life (though the Europeans’ transition to whiteness offered a glide path to the middle class unavailable to immigrants of color today)….A study of more than 2,600 rural communities found that over the three decades after 1990, two-thirds lost population. However, immigration helped soften the blow in the majority of these places, and among the areas that gained population, one in five owes the entirety of its growth to immigration. In the decade after 2000, people of color made up nearly 83 percent of the growth in rural population in America.” (McGhee 2021, 259-60)
   “[T]he resistance of many white [Americans] to new people isn’t about just dollars and cents [– i.e., it isn’t only about mistaken notions of zero-sum thinking that Trump-like politicians promote]. It’s also about the fear of a loss of community, of identity, of home.” (McGhee 2021, 266)

-Rouyn-Noranda: Newcomers from Africa have become a common sight in Rouyn-Noranda, a mining city of 42,000 people, almost 400 miles northwest of Montreal. The city’s demographic “transformation followed a surge of immigrants Canada has allowed in as temporary workers in recent years to address widespread labor shortages. Many have been able to eventually turn their temporary status into permanent residency, the final step before citizenship.” “The influx of immigrants has also raised concerns, contributing to the nation’s housing crisis and straining public services in some areas…” “While African immigrants have long lived in the province’s large cities, the newcomers are a recent phenomenon in rural areas. Driven by a graying population and declining birthrates, the labor shortage has drawn many from Francophone Africa [such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Benin, and Ivory Coast] to Quebec…” “Across Canada, the number of temporary residents, a category that includes foreign workers but also foreign students and asylum seekers, has soared in recent years. It has doubled in the past two years alone to 2.7 million, out of Canada’s total population of 41 million.” “Canada’s immigration policy has traditionally focused on attracting highly educated and skilled immigrants. But many temporary foreign workers are now being hired by companies for less skilled jobs in manufacturing and the service industry…” “[A]fricans are believed to make up the largest group of temporary foreign workers in the city. About 4,000…temporary foreign workers are now in the Rouyn-Noranda region…” “Today, temporary workers from Africa often arrive as part of a ‘family project’…Supported by their extended families, they typically come to Quebec on two-year contracts with a single employer. If their visas allow, they can apply for permanent residency at the end of the contracts and sponsor their families to join them…Because many temporary workers are initially tied to a single employer, they can sometimes endure abuses, including unwarranted firings and low wages…” (The New York Times, How African Immigrants Have Revived a Remote Corner of Quebec, 30 March 2024)

-All-Black Harlem Hellfighters WWI Regiment: “In training, [the Hellfighters] mere presence had almost caused a riot in Spartanburg, South Carolina…Once on the Western Front, the Hellfighters were among the few Americans that General John ‘Black-jack’ Pershing was willing to put under French command. But first his headquarters circulated a memo among French officers, entitled ‘Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.’ ‘It is important for French officers who have been called upon to exercise command over black Americans troops, or to live in close contact with them, to have an exact idea of the position occupied by Negroes in the US’ … ‘The increasing number of Negroes in the US [about 15,000,000] would create for the white race in the Republic a menace of degeneracy were it not that an impassable gulf has been made between them.’ ‘As this danger does not exist for the French race, the French public has become accustomed to treating the Negro with familiarity and indulgence [which is of] grievous concern to the Americans. They consider them an affront to their national policy. They are afraid that contact with the French will inspire in black Americans aspirations which to them [the whites] appear intolerable. It is of the utmost importance that every effort be made to avoid profoundly estranging American opinion.’ ‘Although a citizen of the US, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible. The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence and discretion, his lack of civic and professional conscience, and for his tendency toward undue familiarity. The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.’ The French ministry ordered the memos gathered and burned. The Harlem Hellfighters went on to distinguish themselves in battle, earning two Medals of Honor and 171 French Croix de Guerre. Yet the message had been made clear to them: You are an army of the unwanted, a weapon of last resort….[T]hey must have asked themselves why they were there. For what [were they] fighting?” (Bilger 2023, 82-3)

-Woodrow Wilson: Progressive Up to the Point of Color and War: President Woodrow Wilson’s “family was dismayed by Reconstruction’s promise of full citizenship to Black Americans. ‘Universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country,’ Wilson wrote in his diary as a young man. Even as a historian and president of Princeton [University], he took a startlingly benign view of slavery, asserting, for instance, ‘Slavery itself was not so dark a thing as it was painted….The domestic slaves, at any rate, and almost all who were much under the master’s eye, were happy and well cared for.’” Wilson was president from 1913 to 1921. (Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, Mariner Books, New York: 2022, 29-30. Hereinafter, “Hochschild 2022.”)
   “Wilson was a leading figure of the Progressive Era [1896-1917] when it came to the eight-hour day, child labor, regulation of business, and the graduated income tax, but [Southern politicians] knew there was no danger of his wanting to make the Deep South safe for democracy.” (In April 1917, Wilson had declared that “The world must be made safe for democracy” when he went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany. “Wilson, however, did not share with his audience information that would have revealed less righteous-sounding motives for going to war. Only a month earlier, his ambassador to London had telegraphed Washington a warning that if the country did not enter the conflict, not only might the Allies collapse, but with them any chance that Americans who had bought British and French war bonds would ever get their money back. By this point Britain alone owed the US more than $2.7 billion–as a percentage of US gross domestic product, equal to roughly a trillion dollars a century later.”) (Hochschild 2022, 32-33)
   The US had become “a bastion of the British and French military effort. Allied purchases had made American industry boom, putting millions of unemployed people to work, igniting an unbroken economic expansion that would last nearly four years, increasing the gross national product by more than 25 percent, and rescuing the nation from a 1914 recession so severe that the New York Stock Exchange had shut down for four months.” (Hochschild 2022, 40)
   “Wilson seemed to take it for granted that an all-out mobilization for war would further empower exactly those titans of industry whom his generation of progressives had tried, for the most part rather timidly, to restrain or regulate….An array of new agencies, councils, and commissions brought to powerful posts in the capital men from corporate and financial executive suites….In its rush to increase production, the [War Industries Board] set prices at levels that gave incentives to even the most inefficient of companies. For big corporations [like Bethlehem Steel and Du Pont], this meant an unbelievable windfall.” (“However enthusiastic Americans felt about the war effort, paying for it and profiting from it only widened the country’s already severe gap between rich and poor–something that would have explosive results” as reflected in labor unrest and radical politics.) (Hochschild 2022, 44, 46)

-Reconstruction, Terror, Great Migration: “For decades, [lynching] was an unrelenting threat to Black lives. Many white southerners never really accepted the end of slavery and were determined to meet any hint of Black advancement–real or imagined–with terror. Throughout the former Confederate states, the gains made under Reconstruction [1865-77], when Black children could go to school and Black men could vote for the first time, had been largely reversed. A blizzard of killings, terror, and legal barriers now made it impossible for the great majority of Black men in those states to cast a ballot. Jim Crow laws kept schools, housing, and the rest of southern life strictly segregated; Blacks were barred from hospital wards, hotels, restaurants, and even many public libraries…” (Hochschild 2022, 107)
   “Despite all the other currents of violence in American life, nothing quite equaled the sadistic fury that met any hint of Black assertion. A man accused of something as mild as not yielding a sidewalk quickly enough to a white person faced the risk of lynching–often preceded by torture…Mobs lynched thousands of Black men over the decades, never less than several dozen per year and often more than 100. Then in 1915 came the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan…” (Hochschild 2022, 107-8)
   “All of this helped spur what came to be called the Great Migration, the exodus of millions of rural and small-town Black Americans who moved north and west in search of safety, justice, and better jobs. Those who made this trek, which began in earnest around 1910, met hostility at both ends: white southern employers were furious to see their lowest-paid laborers leave town, while the migrants often found white northerners unwelcoming–sometimes violently so. Many whites in the North were no more racially tolerant than their southern counterparts….[J]ust as Reconstruction had threatened the social order of the South, so the Great Migration began to do so for that of the North.” (Hochschild 2022, 108)
   “In the Black community there were education-first followers of Booker T. Washington, Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey, and, sometimes facing death threats, civil rights activists like the bold anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. But to most Black Americans hoping for a better life, the most important single thing they could do was to get out of the South, where the vast majority of them still lived.” (Hochschild 2022, 109)
   “[L]eading Democrats portrayed the Great Migration as a plot to import Republican voters to traditionally Democratic cities….For East St. Louis employers, Blacks might be useful as low-paid labor, but they certainly didn’t want them living and voting there. Their aim was to make the city a ‘sundown town,’ one of the thousands of such spots across the country where Blacks knew they had to get out of town at the end of the workday.” (“Some East St. Louis plants even sent recruiters south to sign up Black workers and pay their train fare. Often they hired Blacks at lower wages to undercut demands for better pay by white workers….Whites were angry, and focused their rage on Blacks, rather than management…”) (Hochschild 2022, 110, 111)

-Tuskegee: “In 1932, the US Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama began a study of how syphilis affected the human body. It enrolled 600 black men, two-thirds of whom had syphilis. Most were poorly educated sharecroppers; informed consent was not collected. They were told they were being treated for ‘bad blood,’ a local term that could describe many ills.” “In return for enrolling, the men got free medical exams, some meals, burial insurance, and a few other benefits. But in the 1940s, when penicillin was shown to cure syphilis, it was not offered to them. Instead, study leaders made the appalling ethical choice to follow the men until death, so they could do autopsies to see exactly how syphilis killed. They even asked local doctors to not treat men in the study. Only in 1972, when a horrified doctor leaked word to an AP reporter, was the study’s existence revealed. It ended abruptly, and a congressional investigation ensued. A fund for the survivors and their widows was created…” “But the damage was done. Many black Americans lost faith in the medical system. When Covid vaccines were rolled out in 2021, resistance was initially very high among black men. When doctors asked why, they often got a one-word response: Tuskegee.” (Donald G. McNeil Jr., The Wisdom of Plagues: Lessons From 25 Years of Covering Pandemics, Simon & Schuster, New York: 2024, 217-8. Hereinafter, “McNeil 2024.”)
   “The defining factor in vaccine acceptance [generally] seemed to be whether citizens trusted their governments on health issues. Cuba may jail political dissidents, but it gives its citizens health care. The US has free speech but leaves million uninsured. And trust in our pharmaceutical industry is especially low because it charges Americans the world’s highest drug prices while its lobbyists stop Congress from fighting back.” (McNeil 2024, 219)

-Farrakhan and Hate: While African Americans have suffered from grossly unfair conditions throughout American history, this does not justify excusing Louis Farrakhan’s hateful rhetoric. In fact, Manning Marable’s definitive biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention makes it virtually impossible for any decent person to admire Farrakhan or the Nation of Islam.
   For a description of Farrakhan by someone who knows him well, watch the 2-minute segment between 8:00 and 10:00 in the following video:
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/55947
-In mid-2020, “[DeSean] Jackson is among several Black celebrities who have defended or praised Farrakhan and echoed his anti-Semitic rhetoric…That includes former NBA player turned talking head Stephen Jackson, TV star Nick Cannon and rapper and actor Ice Cube. All but Ice Cube apologized.”
   “Farrakhan, 87, is known for his anti-Semitic and homophobic rhetoric. He has praised Hitler, accused Jews of controlling the US government and railed against what he calls the ‘Synagogue of Satan.’”
   “But he’s also known for empowering Black activism, organizing social service programs in low-income Black neighborhoods and advocating for Black self-reliance…[This is] why Black leaders are often reluctant to condemn Farrakhan. … [In fact,] Black commentators have pointed out for years that it’s difficult to be involved in social activism in Black communities without encountering the Nation of Islam. The group has been particularly active in helping formerly incarcerated people, and also has worked on anti-poverty campaigns and making neighborhoods safer.”
   Farrakhan “knows his outrageous statements will raise his profile, so he keeps making them….’Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic ramblings only succeed in riling up some folks (including journalists) who vastly overestimate his impact.’”
   For Farrakhan, Jews “‘represent a kind of bogeyman, this conspiracy theory that provides a simple and easy explanation for oppression’…White supremacists have long portrayed Jews as a nefarious force in society, and…that’s an idea that has seeped into Black leaders’ rhetoric when they are looking for someone to blame.”
https://www.jta.org/2020/07/20/united-states/why-celebrities-keep-quoting-louis-farrakhan-despite-his-anti-semitism
-An ugly lie Farrakhan promotes is that Jews controlled the slave trade. However, regarding the US, “Jews, who made up a small portion of the population, also made up a small portion of slave owners…[I]n the American South in 1830, of the 45,000 slaveholders who owned 20 or more enslaved people, 120 were Jewish; of the 12,000 who owned 50 or more enslaved people, 20 were Jewish.” (It is true that “Judah P. Benjamin, who was born to Sephardic Jewish parents…became a rich slave owner, a senator from Louisiana, and eventually the Confederacy’s attorney general and secretary of state, making him the first Jewish person to rise to a cabinet position in North America.”) (Emily Tamkin, Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities, Harper, New York: 2022, 15. Hereinafter, “Tamkin 2022.”)
-If Jews have been so powerful, as Farrakhan maintains, why were Jews so powerless during the Holocaust? For example, in November 1938 was Kristallnacht, “a pogrom carried out against Germany’s Jews by paramilitary forces. [President] Roosevelt continued to reject proposals to help Europe’s Jews. The American public did not want more Jewish immigrants [and] did not want to go to war for Jews. Roosevelt abided by their wishes.” “By the most generous estimate, between 1933 and 1944, the US admitted only 250,000 Jewish refugees.” “According to opinion polls, in 1944, antisemitism in the US was at the highest point it had ever been.” (Tamkin 2022, 45, 46, 50)

-Antisemitism is Highest Among Conservative Blacks and Hispanics: “[Research] confirms that controlling for ideology, Black and Hispanic Americans are more antisemitic than white [Americans]. But it also finds that controlling for race, conservatives are much more antisemitic than liberals. [Therefore, the] epicenter of antisemitic attitudes in the US…is the conservative Black and Hispanic population that has often voted Democratic in the past due to identity politics but has trended toward the GOP in recent cycles. Liberal African-Americans are slightly less antisemitic than white conservatives, and Black and Hispanic conservatives are substantially more antisemitic than white conservatives.” (15 Nov. 2023)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/antisemitism-in-america

-Jews, Whiteness, and Civil Rights: In the early 1900s, for every American Jew concerned about civil rights for Blacks, there were Jews “arguing that Jews should be counted as white for immigration purposes[;] seeing how little money [they] could offer to a Black woman to clean; discriminating against Black customers. Whiteness, malleable though it is, has a constant, which is that it must always be defined in opposition to something. Precisely because race is a construct, the boundary between ‘white’ and ‘not white’ is slippery and inconsistent. And so there was a perceived benefit, if not tangible then emotional, to these American Jews discriminating against other immigrants and against Black laborers and customers. So long as they could discriminate, they could prove, if only to themselves, which side of the boundary they were on.” (Tamkin 2022, 59-60)
   Nevertheless, one of the most famous photographs in American Jewish history is of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walking alongside Martin Luther King Jr. as they and others led a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965. “In the narrative of American Jewish postwar history, few episodes hold a place of as much pride…as Jewish support for the civil rights movement….The photograph endures in part because it encapsulates one of the most enduring stories of American Jewish history: That American Jews understood the importance of civil rights and staunchly supported the movement in the 1950s and ’60s, or at least until Zionism and Black nationalism [and affirmative action] drove Jewish and Black Americans apart. That American Jews viewed achieving civil rights for all, including Black Americans, not only as a cause worth fighting for in and of itself, but as a necessary part of securing a free society for themselves.” (Tamkin 2022, 98-9)
   (“[W]hile many American Jews supported the concept of affirmative action, Jewish institutions had hang-ups about quotas, pointing to their own early-twentieth-century history in which quotas were used to keep Jews out of white elite institutions.” Regarding Israel, Black activists identified with the occupied Palestinians and labelled the 1967 War as an “imperialist Zionist war.” More generally as a source of friction, some Black activists “did not believe that white people–including American Jews–should participate in the civil rights movement. ‘Get off the bandwagon,’ Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) told white Americans in 1965…” (Tamkin 2022, 103, 110))
   “American Jews made up roughly 3 percent of the population and constituted two thirds of white Freedom Riders (activists who rode interstate buses to protest the segregation of public transport in the segregated South) in 1961 and one third of the white student volunteers who went down to Mississippi to register voters in 1964. That summer, two Jewish men, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered along with James Chaney, a young Black man.” “The 1964 killings…sparked national outrage and helped spur passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” (Tamkin 2022, 99-100)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mississippi-burning-murders-case-files-public-james-chaney-andrew-goodman-michael-schwerner/
   “American Jews got involved in the civil rights movement on both an individual and an organizational level. The American Jewish Congress in particular worked closely with the NAACP…and invested so heavily that it had more civil rights lawyers on its payroll than the Justice Department.” (Tamkin 2022, 101)

-A Radical Document: “[O]n July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’”
   “For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous slavery by defining ‘men’ as ‘white men,’ and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators on the edges of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other.” “America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-3-2022
-“Democracy stands on the principle of equality for all people, and those who are turning away from democracy [in 2023], including the right wing in the United States, object to that equality. They worry that equal rights for women and minorities—especially LGBTQ people—will undermine traditional religion and traditional power structures. They believe democracy saps the morals of a country and are eager for a strong leader who will use the power of the government to reinforce their worldview. But empowering a strongman ends oversight and enables those in power to think of themselves as above the law. In the short term, it permits those in power to use the apparatus of their government to enrich themselves at the expense of the people of their country. Their supporters don’t care: they are willing to accept the cost of corruption so long as the government persecutes those they see as their enemies. But that deal is vulnerable when it becomes clear the government cannot respond to [serious] crises.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-10-2023
-“Once you give up the principle of equality, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that people are unequal, and that some people are better than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, you have stamped your approval on the idea of rulers and subjects. At that point, all you can do is to hope that no one in power decides that you belong in the lesser group.”
   “In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men and excluding black Americans were the same arguments ‘that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world….Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.’”
   “Either people—men, in his day—were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on: ‘I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?’”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-10-2023
-“The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled propaganda and religion to defend their dominance.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-21-2022

20. True or False: The US has the highest per capita income in the world.

-False. According to World Bank data, the “per capita income of the US in 2007 was $46,040. There were seven countries with higher per capita income…starting with Norway ($76,450) at the top, through Luxemburg, Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland and ending with Sweden ($46,060).…[And] the US is much more unequal than the European countries…” “[A]mericans work considerably longer than Europeans. Per hour worked, their command over goods and services is smaller than that of several European countries.” (Chang, 103-5)

   “In 2014, Luxembourg, Norway, Qatar, and Switzerland reported the highest gross domestic product per capita…”
http://www.statista.com/statistics/270180/countries-with-the-largest-gross-domestic-product-gdp-per-capita/

-“French GDP per worker is only 10 percent lower than in the United States. And that difference in GDP per worker, in turn, is entirely because French workers get much more time off: On average French workers put in only 86 percent as many hours each year as US workers.” (Krugman 2007, 254)

21. Who said the following? The government “should cultivate the view also among the propertyless classes of the population, those who are the most numerous and the least educated, that the state is not only an institution of necessity but also of welfare. By recognizable and direct advantages they must be led to look upon the state not as an agency devised solely for the protection of the better-situated classes of society but also as one serving their needs and interests.”

 -In this 1881 statement, Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s powerful chancellor, was providing a rationale for a welfare state: a means to pacify the lower classes and secure the Kaiser’s rule. With Bismarck’s Germany leading the way, Europeans had begun to develop New Deal-like policies well before the US. In particular, Britain introduced a limited old-age insurance system in 1908 and a health insurance system in 1911. In the US “the gospel of free enterprise remained dominant.” What changed everything in the US was the Great Depression, which made FDR’s New Deal possible. (Krugman 2007, 33, 35)

-“[T]he Western European welfare states created after 1945 were not products of wild idealism….People understood that the political extremism of the 1930s was ‘born directly of economic depression and its social costs. Both Fascism and Communism thrived on social despair, on the huge gulf separating rich and poor.’ The welfare state was a means to keep the black-shirts and brown-shirts in the past. One reason, perhaps, that America built so much less of a welfare state was that it was not left so shattered by the war. Obamacare was a very late, partial effort to fill in the most glaring gap, the lack of a national health-care system.” 
https://prospect.org/article/donald-trump-golan-and-return-old-world-disorder  (29 March 2019)
   “When ideas have influence, it’s rarely just because of their singular force. Instead, there has to be a confluence between the ideas themselves, the spirit of the times, and the interests of powerful players who find the ideas congenial. For [the public intellectual] Adolf Berle, it was the Great Depression and the election of FDR that gave [his book] The Modern Corporation and Private Property its impact. For [the pro-market economist] Michael Jensen, it made all the difference that Theory of the Firm was published in 1976, rather than, say, 1956, the apogee of the American industrial corporation.” (Lemann 2019, 115)

-France’s Economic Success: The strong welfare benefits of France will lead to an upper-middle-class or higher Frenchman having significantly less disposable income than an American receiving the same market income. However, French citizens know that they will never lose their health insurance, and if they ever hit a rough patch during their lives their standard of living will remain quite decent due to government programs. (Krugman 2007, 252)
   As of 2019, “The jobs gap [between Europe and the US that existed in the 1990s] has largely vanished; adults in their prime working years are actually more likely to be employed in Europe, France included, than they are in America. [Likewise,] [a]ny gap in the adoption of information technology has also long since vanished; households in much of Europe are as or more likely to have broadband than their US counterparts, partly because the US failure to limit providers’ monopoly power has led to much higher prices for internet access. It’s true that European nations have lower GDP per capita than [the US], but that’s largely because, unlike most Americans, most Europeans actually have significant vacation time and hence work fewer hours per year. This sounds like a choice about work-life balance, not an economic problem.”
   “And on that most fundamental of indicators, life expectancy, the US has fallen far behind: French residents can expect, on average, to live more than four years longer than Americans. Why? Universal health care and policies that mitigate extreme inequality are the most likely explanations.”
   “[T]he problem with Europe is not that its social programs are too generous and its governments too intrusive.” (“Modern European experience actually vindicates progressive claims that [the US] can do a lot to make America fairer without destroying incentives.”) “If anything, it’s almost the opposite: Europe’s economy is vulnerable because a combination of political fragmentation and ideological rigidity has left its politicians unwilling to be Keynesian enough.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/opinion/europe-economy.html
   “[B]usiness and economic discourse in the US is strongly shaped by conservative ideology — and given that ideology, France, with its huge social expenditure, high taxes and extensive economic regulation should have been a basket case. So reporting about France seized on every negative development as a sign that the long-awaited disaster was finally arriving.” However, the disaster never comes. “In fact, among major advanced economies, the star performer of the [coronavirus] pandemic era, arguably, is France.”
   “When the pandemic forced economies into a temporary lockdown [in 2020], Europe, France included, and the US took divergent routes toward supporting workers’ incomes. We offered enhanced unemployment benefits; France offered subsidies to employers to keep furloughed workers on the payroll. [I]t seems clear that the European solution was better, because it kept workers connected to their employers and made it easier to bring them back once vaccines were available. France also has universal child care, which reopened relatively early in the pandemic, as did schools — freeing parents, largely mothers, to return to work.” (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 14 Jan. 2022)

-Bill Clinton Leaned Right: In 1996, “the Clinton administration joined with Republicans in Congress to end the days of guaranteed cash assistance for poor people.…The [Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation] act imposed a five-year federal time limit on cash benefits for recipients. It allowed states to set much stricter deadlines, as many did. For poor single mothers, government aid was no longer guaranteed.…By 2007, the number of children in poverty reached 13.3 million, up from 11.6 million in 2000.” (Goodman, 75, 78-79)
   By 2000, in their quest to beat Republicans at their own game, Clinton and right-leaning Democrats undermined the core identity of their party. “Clinton—who passed free-trade deals, deregulated the financial markets, cut welfare benefits, signed legislation against gay marriage, and helped fill America’s jails—won two presidential elections. But toward the end of his tenure, Democrats controlled fewer Senate seats and fewer state legislatures than they had in 50 years, and fewer governorships than they had in 30 years. Clinton had won; the Democratic Party had lost.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/futility-bidens-china-hawkery/610285/

-Democrats Reduce Deficits and Improve the Economy: From 1977 to 2018, “the presidential administrations that have overseen the deficit increases are the [four] Republican ones.” (Even before the fiscal effects of the coronavirus, Trump’s tax cut was virtually assured to make him the fourth of four.) “And the three administrations that have overseen deficit reductions are the three Democratic ones, including a small decline under Barack Obama. If you want to know whether a post-1976 president increased or reduced the deficit, the only thing you need to know is his party….One party has now spent…40 years cutting taxes and expanding government programs without paying for them. The other party has raised taxes and usually been careful to pay for its new programs.” (The New York Times, 16 Apr. 2018, A21)
   Biden Mar. 2024: While the federal deficit decreased to $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2022, it “then rose in 2023, to about $1.7 trillion.” (“And the deficit actually grew larger than the official numbers suggest: When adjusting for a student-loan forgiveness program that was factored into the numbers, but then struck down by the Supreme Court, the deficit in 2022 was actually closer to $1 trillion and $2 trillion in 2023.”) “The deficit remains higher than it was before the coronavirus pandemic. In fiscal year 2019, the deficit was about $984 billion and lower in years prior. And the national debt has grown to about $34.4 trillion today, from about 27.8 trillion in January 2021.” (The New York Times, Fact-Checking Biden’s 2024 State of the Union Address, 8 March 2024)
   Biden Feb. 2023: “The federal deficit did decrease by $1.7 trillion, from $3.1 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year to $1.4 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, though Biden’s fiscal policies are not the sole factor. In fact, much of that decline can be attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era spending…In February 2021, before the Biden administration enacted any fiscal legislation, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit would have reached $1.1 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, less than what ended up happening. Coronavirus stimulus funding from 2021 added nearly $1.9 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, the budget office estimated. The budget agency also estimated that the infrastructure package added $256 billion to the deficit…The Inflation Reduction Act [which empowers Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices]…trimmed [the deficit] by $238 billion over the next 10 years.” (The New York Times, Fact-Checking Biden’s [2023] State of the Union Address, 8 Feb. 2023)
   1949-2009 Record: “For the years 1949-2009, unemployment has been lower and GDP has been higher under Democratic presidents. Political scientist Larry Bartels has also shown that inequality has increased greatly under Republican presidents and decreased slightly under Democrats….Republican presidents have also added far more to federal debt levels than Democrats have, as a percent of GDP; since 1945, Reagan has added the most, with an almost 60 percent increase in federal debt to GDP. Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton all managed to reduce debt as a percentage of GDP.” (Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, The New Press, New York: 2016, 261. Hereinafter, “Hochschild 2016.”)
   “The persistence of the myth that Democrats are bad for the economy is an interesting example of the endurance of political rhetoric over reality.” In fact, “The economy has performed better under Democrats than Republicans since at least World War II. CNN Business reports that since 1945, the Standard & Poor’s 500—a market index of 500 leading US publicly traded companies—has averaged an annual gain of 11.2% during years when Democrats controlled the White House, and a 6.9% average gain under Republicans. In the same time period, gross domestic product grew by an average of 4.1% under Democrats, 2.5% under Republicans. Job growth, too, is significantly stronger under Democrats than Republicans.” “Republicans tend to cling to abstract theories about how the economy works—theories about high tariffs or tax cuts, for example, which tend to concentrate wealth upward—while Democrats are more pragmatic, willing to pay attention to facts on the ground and to historical lessons about what works and what doesn’t.” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-5-2022?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share
   As of February 2020, what lies behind the fairly strong US economy “is an explosion in the federal budget deficit, which exceeded $1 trillion [in 2019,]…up from less than $600 billion in Obama’s last year. Most of that rise can be attributed to Trump’s policies, mainly a tax cut rammed through Congress using exactly the hyperpartisan tactics Obama balked at in 2009. In a way, the surprising thing about Trump’s deficitpalooza is that it hasn’t boosted the economy even more, a shortfall that can be attributed to bad design. After all, the corporate tax cuts that were the biggest driver of rising deficits did nothing to increase business investment, which has actually declined over the past year. And while the Obama stimulus included significant investments in the future, helping in particular to jump-start revolutionary progress in green energy, Trump has never delivered a penny on his promise to rebuild America’s infrastructure.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/economy-republicans-deficit.html
   In October 2020, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz warns of the consequences for ordinary taxpayers of the most profligate spending presidency in US history. “The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/opinion/republicans-biden-taxes.html
   Trump’s big decrease in the tax rate on corporate profits, which ultimately benefited wealthy stockholders, had a largely ignored “twist: Many of those wealthy stockholders weren’t even American. A recent report from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that 40 percent of the equities in US corporations are foreign-owned, which means that to a first approximation foreigners received 40 percent of that corporate tax cut.” (Paul Krugman, Newsletter, 23 March 2021)
   “As ProPublica reported in 2021, a ‘study by Treasury economists found that the top 1% of Americans by income have reaped nearly 60% of the billions in tax savings created by [Trump’s tax reform]. And most of that amount went to the top 0.1%.’” https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/jamie-dimon-joins-the-trump-normalizers

-“Despite the tax cuts and the military appropriations, [President] Reagan insisted he would still balance the budget because the tax cuts would so stimulate the economy as to generate new revenue. Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief remarked dryly: ‘[I] personally guarantee that it will not happen.’” (Zinn 2003, 577)

-“When Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, some politicians and economists predicted economic disaster, but the economy instead boomed, with twenty-three million jobs added during the Clinton years.” (Myers 2022, 112)

-“Since the 1980s, Republicans have attracted voters by harping on the ‘takers’ in Democratic areas….[It is true that] the federal government redistributes wealth from richer states to poorer ones. [However,] The four top ‘giver’ states–New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut—tend to vote Democratic, while three of the four biggest ‘taker’ states—Kentucky, Mississippi, and West Virginia—lean Republican. For every dollar New York puts into the federal government in taxes, it gets back $0.91. For every dollar Kentucky puts in, it takes out $2.41.”
   “This rhetoric that labels Democrats as fiscally irresponsible, eager to redistribute wealth from hardworking Republicans to their own lazy constituents, has been a staple of GOP politics since the 1970 midterm elections, when President Richard Nixon’s crumbling popularity after the Kent State shootings made him try to shore up his party by dividing the American people.”
   “In the past this rhetoric got little public pushback. That has changed. [M]ichigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, called [Senator] McConnell’s suggestion that states like New York should declare bankruptcy ‘outrageous’ and ‘incredibly dangerous,’ pointing out that budget shortfalls were a result of the closures because of the [coronavirus] pandemic. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, the Republican at the head of the National Governors Association, wasn’t happy either, saying that McConnell ‘probably would regret making that comment.’ Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, tweeted ‘If Florida would like to have a conversation about making sure no state gets more money from the federal government than they send to it, Connecticut is ready.’ Connecticut gets back just 84 cents for every dollar it sends to the federal government. Florida gets $1.12.” https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-27-2020

22. Which country was the most protectionist in the world throughout the 19^th century and right up to the 1920s?

-The United States: Tariffs and R&D: By 1820, the Congress increased the average tariff to 40%; such high tariffs were supported by American industrialists who wanted room for their industries to grow by impeding manufactured imports from Europe. Tariffs on manufactured imports remained at 40-50% until WWI, and were the highest of any country in the world. However, despite being the most protectionist country, the US was also the fastest growing economy.
   “It was only after the Second World War that the US—with its industrial supremacy now unchallenged—liberalized its trade and started championing the cause of free trade.…[However] even when it shifted to freer…trade, the US government promoted key industries by another means, namely, public funding of R&D. Between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, US federal government funding accounted for 50-70% of the country’s total R&D funding, which is far above the figure of around 20%, found in such ‘government-led’ countries as Japan and Korea. Without federal government funding for R&D, the US would not have been able to maintain its technological lead over the rest of the world in key industries like computers, semiconductors, life sciences, the internet and aerospace.”
   “[P]ractically all of today’s developed countries…have become rich on the basis of policy recipes that go against the orthodoxy of neo-liberal economics. Today’s rich countries used protection and subsidies, while discriminating against foreign investors—all anathema to today’s economic orthodoxy and now severely restricted by multilateral treaties, like the WTO Agreements, and proscribed by aid donors and international financial organizations (notably the IMF and the World Bank).”
   “Like the US in the mid-19^th century, or Japan and [South] Korea in the mid-20^th century, China used high tariffs to build up its industrial base. Right up to the 1990s, China’s average tariff was over 30%. Admittedly, it has been more welcoming to foreign investment than Japan or Korea were. But it still imposed foreign ownership ceilings and local contents requirements (the requirements that the foreign firms buy at least a certain proportion of their inputs from local suppliers).”
   “During the 1960s and the 1970s, when [the developing countries] were pursuing…policies of protectionism and state intervention, per capita income in the developing countries grew by 3% annually.…This growth rate…remains the best that they have ever recorded. Since the 1980s, after they implemented neo-liberal policies, they grew at only about half the speed seen in the 1960s and 1970s (1.7%).”
   “Accelerating growth—if necessary at the cost of increasing inequality and possibly some increase in poverty—was the proclaimed goal of neo-liberal reform. We have been repeatedly told that we first have to ‘create more wealth’ before we can distribute it more widely and that neo-liberalism was the way to do that. As a result of neo-liberal policies, income inequality has increased in most countries as predicted, but growth has actually slowed down significantly.” (Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, Bloomsbury Press, New York: 2008,  15, 27-30, 51, 54-55)

-State Sector Financing of Basic Research Critical to Innovation and Growth: “[T]he state has consistently played the critical role of financing the basic research that has resulted in innovation and economic growth in the US. ‘From the development of aviation, nuclear energy, computers, the Internet, biotechnology, and…green technology,…the State–not the private sector–…has kick-started and developed the engine of growth, because of its willingness to take risks in areas where the private sector has been too risk averse….[For example,] without the massive amount of public investment behind the computer and Internet revolutions,’” Steve Jobs would not have been able to develop Apple’s revolutionary products like the iPad and iPhone. “‘In fact, there is not a single key technology behind the iPhone that has not been State-funded.’” (McQuaig 2019, 207)
   Drug Development: “[I]t is usually public money that funds the development of a new drug, even in the US. [M]ost important new drugs–as opposed to copycat variations of existing drugs–are developed in labs funded by the US government. ‘While private pharmaceutical companies justify their exorbitantly high prices by saying they need to cover their R&D cost,…in fact most of the really innovative new drugs, i.e. new molecular entities with priority rating, come from publicly funded laboratories.’ The same is true in Canada…” (McQuaig 2019, 140)
   Leakage Blocked: After horrible public relations and pressure from various governments, since the 2000s, it’s become “the norm for Big Pharma companies to offer ‘tiered pricing,’ including midlevel prices to middle-income countries and rock-bottom ones to the poorest. They take many precautions, of course. For example, they may change the name, the shape, and the color of a pill and its packaging to prevent leakage back into lucrative Western markets. They even compete to outrank each other on the Access to Medicine Index, which measures how much effort they make to help the world’s poor: how much they cut prices, what patents they sublicense to generics makers, what neglected diseases they research, and so on. [As a result], because of affordable drug prices and the generosity of donors — especially American donors — it’s been estimated that the Global Fund, PEPFAR, and the Malaria Initiative have saved at least 30 million lives.” (McNeil 2024, 24)
   Patents Prevent Drug Cocktails: “Combining drugs into cocktails would seem like an obvious approach” to make drugs stay effective far longer than magic bullets, as “it’s very unlikely that mutations will occur simultaneously in [say] three different genes to produce resistance to three different mechanisms of action.” “But companies resist it because it cuts into their magic-bullet profits.” (Drug companies seek to find a magic-bullet: The perfect drug to cure a disease with no danger of side effects. Yet, this is normally a chimera, as resistance develops.) And, patent “laws make cooperation almost impossible.” “Patent laws originated in the nineteenth century to protect innovation. Many brilliant inventors were wiped out when competition stole their ideas and sold cheap copies. In response, new laws granted them a period of exclusivity during which copying was blocked and the patent-holder could sell at any price. Inevitably, however, a downside to those profitable monopolies emerged: when competition was finally allowed, patent-holders would wipe out low-priced rivals by either buying them or combining with them in ‘trusts’ established to fix prices. In the late nineteenth century, trusts stifled competition in virtually everything. There were railroad trusts, oil trusts, coal trusts, even matches trusts, butter trusts, and ice trusts. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and follow-up laws changed that by making it illegal for companies to collude in any way.” “That arrangement works well for inventions like cotton gins, toasters [and] silicon chips. No one wants a cocktail toaster, they want one that grills bread and is cheap. It does not work well for lifesaving drugs. There are many situations in which cocktails are best.” (McNeil 2024, 284-5)
   Trump Saved by Antibody Monotherapy: “Regeneron, Eli Lilly, Roche, GSK, and others developed antibody infusions that could block the [Covid] virus. At the outset, they were amazingly effective. President Trump, his lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, his secretary of housing and urban development, Ben Carson, and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and others who were seriously ill got monoclonal antibodies and very likely were saved by them. But, as different variants evolved, most of those antibody monotherapies stopped working and were abandoned. Mixing them in cocktails might have been more protective, but antitrust laws made that impossible. Companies could not run joint clinical trials or discuss how to price a mixed product for fear of being charged with collusion.” “[I]t would make sense to change the law so that lifesaving drugs are treated differently from toasters. With government oversight, we should encourage pharma companies to create, test, and market multidrug cocktails.” (McNeil 2024, 285-6)
   Taxation Irony: “It would be harder for [Apple] and other companies to shirk their tax bills and to press for ever-lower corporate taxes if the public appreciated just how much of their success had been funded by the state….This corporate tax avoidance is not only unfair to the public, but has left the US government with diminished resources to fund future path-breaking research.” “Washington’s failure to invest significantly on the green front in recent years has been mostly due to the enormous clout of the fossil fuel industry, which feels threatened by the prospect of a green energy revolution….‘Leaving direction setting to the market only ensures that the energy transition will be put off until fossil fuel prices reach economy-wreaking highs.’” (McQuaig 2019, 208)

-DOE’s Risky Loans Pay Off (Tesla, For Example): The US Department of Energy (DOE) “has a program to provide low-interest loans to companies to encourage risky corporate innovation in alternative energy and energy efficiency. The program became infamous when one of its borrowers, the solar energy company Solyndra, was unable to repay its loan, but, as a whole, since its inception in 2009, the program has turned a profit. And it has been demonstrably effective: it lent money to Tesla to build its factory in Fremont, California, when the private sector would not, for instance. Every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE. Its loans to early-stage solar energy companies launched the industry. There are now thirty-five viable utility-scale, privately funded solar companies–up from zero a decade ago.” (Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk, W. W. Norton & Company, New York: 2018, 49. Hereinafter, “Lewis 2018.”)
   Fracking, Solar, Wind: “The idea that the private sector underinvests in energy innovation is part of the origin story of the DOE.” (The DOE was created in 1977 in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis.) “Existing energy businesses–oil companies, utilities–are obviously hostile to government-sponsored competition. At the same time, they are essentially commodity businesses, without a lot of fat in them. The stock market does not reward even big oil companies for R&D that will take decades to pay off. And the sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn’t pay off for decades. Plus it requires a lot of expensive science: discovering a new kind of battery or a new way of capturing solar energy is not like creating a new app. Fracking–to take one example–was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for [in the 1990s] by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The Obama administration set a goal in 2009 of getting the cost of utility-scale solar energy down by 2020 from 27 cents a kilowatt-hour to 6 cents. [In 2018 it’s] at 7 cents, and competitive with natural gas because of loans made by the DOE. ‘The private sector only steps in once DOE shows it can work’…” (It’s argued that not enough risk is taken by the DOE due to the fear of the right’s antigovernment propaganda.) (Lewis 2018, 63-4, 65)
   High Risk: There is “a small DOE program that goes by its acronym, ARPA-E….[It’s] an energy equivalent of DARPA–the Defense Department’s research-grant program that had funded the creation of GPS and the internet [and Kevlar], among other things….[ARPA-E] made small grants to researchers who had scientifically plausible, wildly creative ideas that might change the world….The idea…was to find the best of [such] ideas that the free market had declined to finance…Competition for the grants has been fierce….The people who do the approving come from the energy industry and academia. They do brief tours of duty in government, then return to Intel and Harvard.” (Lewis 2018, 77-8)
https://arpa-e.energy.gov/
   Information: Demographic, Economic, Innovation, Weather: The US Department of Commerce “has almost nothing to do with commerce directly and is actually forbidden by law from engaging in business. But it runs the US Census, the only real picture of who Americans are as a nation. It collects and makes sense of all the country’s economic statistics–without which the nation would have very little idea of how it was doing. Through the Patent and Trademark Office it tracks all the country’s inventions. It contains [an] influential agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology…which does everything from setting the standards for construction materials to determining the definition of…an ‘inch.’…But of the roughly $9 billion spent each year by the Commerce Department, $5 billion goes to NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], and the bulk of that money is spent, one way or another, on figuring out the weather.” (Lewis 2018, 159)

-Above-Average Tariffs: While President Trump bemoaned unfair trade at the June 2018 G-7 summit, “[a]mong the developed nations that make up the Group of 7…, the US has tariffs that are slightly higher, on average, across all its imported products than Canada or Japan and exactly equivalent to the four European nations in the G-7.” (The New York Times, 11 June 2018)

-Cotton Subsidies: “American subsidies to its domestic industry have seriously depressed the price of cotton. In 1990, it was about US$2 a kilo. [In June 2014] it is US$2.07. According to an Oxfam report, American subsidies in 2002 to its own cotton farmers amounted to US$3.9 billion, more than the total value of the US$3 billion harvest that year and more than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso, a country in which more than 2 million people depended on cotton cultivation. Not surprisingly, the price of cotton hit near rock bottom in 2002, just under US$0.88 a kilo. Appeals to the World Trade Organization from other cotton producers led the US to reduce its subsidies by about 10 per cent in 2007, but the collapse of the WTO’s Doha round trade negotiations on farm subsidies the following year has left developing-nation producers at a continuing disadvantage.”
http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Sock+Journey+fair+trade+sock/9978273/story.html

-Govt Funding To Maintain Dominance: In June 2021 the Senate voted “to adopt an approximately $250 billion bill to counter China’s growing economic and military prowess, hoping that major investments in science — and fresh punishments targeting Beijing — might give the United States a lasting edge.”
   “In a chamber often racked by partisan division, Democrats and Republicans found rare accord over the sprawling measure, known as the United States Innovation and Competition Act, as lawmakers warned that Washington risked ceding the country’s technological leadership to one of its foremost geopolitical adversaries.”
   “The proposal commits billions of dollars in federal funds across a wide array of research areas. It pours more than $50 billion in immediate funding into US businesses that manufacture the sort of ultrasmall, in-demand computer chips that power consumer and military devices, which many companies source from China. And it paves the way for the next generation of space exploration at a time when Washington and Beijing are increasingly setting their eyes on the stars.”
   “With it, lawmakers also approved a host of proposals that seek to limit China’s economic aspirations and curb its political influence. The bill opens the door for new sanctions targeting Beijing over its human rights practices, commissions a new study about the origin of the coronavirus and calls for a diplomatic boycott of the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics. It even authorizes $300 million specifically to counter the political influence of the Chinese Communist Party.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/06/08/senate-china-science-technology/

Focus: Canada
-Public Enterprises: “[C]anadian public enterprise has an impressive history and has made its mark in fields that are at least as complicated as vehicle manufacturing. The creation of a public hydroelectric power system in Ontario–and later in other provinces–was a stunning achievement that served as a model for President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he created highly successful public power systems, including the New York Power Authority, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Bonneville Power Administration. There was also Connaught Labs, the publicly owned Canadian drug company, which made remarkable contributions to the development of breakthrough vaccines and treatments for a wide range of deadly diseases. And the publicly owned CNR exhibited innovative business skills in creating a viable national rail network out of five bankrupt railway lines and in establishing, during the pioneering days of radio, a cross-country string of radio stations, which became the basis of the nationwide CBC broadcasting network.” (McQuaig 2019, 210)
   “And…some of Canada’s most impressive public enterprises were created during the Second World War, when twenty-eight Crown corporations contributed enormously to Canada’s war effort, manufacturing airplanes, weapons, and communications equipment. Crown corporation Victory Aircraft provided the foundation for the postwar Canadian subsidiary that developed the Avro Arrow, a state-of-the-art military fighter plane (discontinued by the Diefenbaker government for political, not technological, reasons). And Crown corporation Research Enterprises, teaming up during the war with Ottawa’s National Research Council, produced highly innovative optical and communications equipment, including radar devices, binoculars, and radio sets–equipment with countless applications that could have been successfully developed for the postwar market if our political leaders hadn’t succumbed to the notion that government shouldn’t be involved in producing such things.” (McQuaig 2019, 210)

-Auto Pact Worked: “In 1988, [Prime Minister] Brian Mulroney signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (later adding Mexico in NAFTA), which eliminated most of the force of…domestic content requirements”, which had supported auto manufacturing in Canada. The Auto Pact–“which provided automakers access to the Canadian market on the condition that they locate a specified amount of their production in [Canada]”–“was overruled by the World Trade Organization” in 2001. With NAFTA, “the auto companies began planning their migration to Mexico. In 2019, GM is expected to produce one million vehicles in Mexico, while GM’s Canadian production, with the closing of the Oshawa plant, is expected to fall to just two hundred thousand vehicles–about half of what it was producing [in Canada] a decade ago.” (McQuaig 2019, 211)
   Mexican Poverty and Unemployment: In 2017, “the percentage of Mexicans living below the poverty level–about 46 percent of the population–remains at roughly the same level it was when the trade deal [NAFTA] was passed [in 1994], and unemployment has actually risen. Almost two million Mexican farmers have been put out of work, unable to compete with their industrialized American counterparts. That has driven many of them to cross the border seeking better jobs. Cheaper goods have kept inflation down in the US, but wages have also been slow to grow. Both countries have witnessed unprecedented levels of income inequality.” (Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 2018, 292.)
   Govt Ownership of Renault and Volkswagen Impact Decisions: Public ownership can influence production decisions. France’s 15 percent interest in Renault and a German public ownership stake in Volkswagen have helped ensure that Renault and Volkswagen maintain high employment levels in France and Germany…” “It’s striking to think that [Canada was a] vetera[n] of the auto manufacturing industry by the 1960s, when Honda was just beginning its transition in Japan from making motorcycles to making cars. While Honda has gone on to produce some of the world’s most popular cars, Canada is facing the end of auto making…” (McQuaig 2019, 212, 213)

-Canada’s Strengths: “No other country offers the following as well as does Canada: political and economic stability; civility in [its] public discourse…; a strong educational system; a [high] quality of life…; a willingness and capacity to extend a helping hand to individuals, groups, and regions that have been wronged by past government policies; a willingness to recognize past wrongs [to Indigenous communities, Acadians, etc.] and to come to terms with them; and the ability to welcome new Canadians and to make a multicultural policy work.” (Savoie 2023, 246)
   “Canadians and their political leaders know how to search for solutions and how to strike the necessary compromises when confronting divides…[Canada’s Constitution] set the scene by anchoring [its] politics in ‘peace, order and good government.’ It then forced policy makers to improvise and sort things out on their own and, at times, on the fly because of its inflexibility. [T]his has given regions with more voters a much louder voice than is the case in other federations with different political institutions. For example, few other federations have a Quebec, at times ambivalent about its place in Canada [–but nevertheless exerting significant power at the federal level]. All other federations have an Upper House in their legislative branch with a clear mandate to speak to the country’s regional interests but not Canada.” (Savoie 2023, 246)

Focus: Louisiana
-Whites Vote Republican: The US South is “the geographic heart of the right [as almost] all the recent growth of the right has occurred below the Mason-Dixon line, an area that, encompassing the original Confederate states, accounts for a third of the US population….Between 1952 and 2000, among high school-educated whites in the South, there has been a 20 percent increase in Republican voters, and among college-educated whites, the increase was higher still.” In Louisiana, only 14 percent of white voters voted for Obama in the 2012 election. (Hochschild 2016, 12)

-Oil Pollution But Limited Regulation: In Louisiana a Great Paradox is readily apparent: “great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters….As an oil state with a record of going light on regulation, Louisiana has suffered decades of severe environmental damage.” (Hochschild 2016, 21)
   Louisiana is rich in oil. “Companies…have drilled over 220,000 wells, found 600 producing oil fields, and built 8,000 miles of pipelines and canals in [the] state. Over 25,000 miles of underwater pipelines connect offshore drilling platforms to onshore refineries in Louisiana and Texas.” Hence, there is the potential for serious oil spills; this risk can be mitigated with effective regulation. (Hochschild 2016, 64)
   In 2010, “the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana….The spill released the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez-sized oil spill every three to four days–for 87 days. … Some 90,000 fishermen had lost their livelihood and were offered jobs to clean up the spilled oil… [P]resident Obama ordered a six-month moratorium on deep-sea drilling…[as] other rigs were still drilling in the Gulf using similar technology [as the Deepwater Horizon].” Nevertheless, among residents of the devastated coast, opinions remained largely unchanged concerning environmental regulation. (Hochschild 2016, 64-6)
   “The coastal land of Louisiana had long been slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The state’s coast provides 40 percent of the nation’s wetlands, and its commercial fisheries provide a quarter to a third of the nation’s seafood. Experts agree that a major cause of the land’s subsidence is the extraction of oil and saltwater intrusion. Over the years, oil companies have dredged hundreds of canals and laid down pipeline through which oil drilled in the Gulf has been piped inland. Saltwater seeps in along the canals, killing grasses that once provided protection against Louisiana’s frequent tropical storms. Since 1930, the state had already lost an area equal to the size of Delaware–an average football field every hour. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration faced an astonishing new task: delisting coastal postal addresses.” (Hochschild 2016, 199-200)
   Unequal Distribution of Costs to Red States: “Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don’t all pay for it with high pollution. [R]ed states pay for it more–partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so.” The big oil companies know that those most likely to resist their industry are college educated, urban, liberal, and believers in good government; while those least resistant are high school educated only, conservative, and believers in the free market. (Hochschild 2016, 81, 232)

-Federal Govt Demonized: Typically, white Republicans from the South “seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes — through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high [and went to lazy welfare beneficiaries and over-paid government workers in cushy jobs]), and through its impact on their loss of honor…” These Republicans are too accepting of public waters, clean air and other advantages given to polluting corporations as they fear the possible job losses. Hence, they argue that companies have the freedom to pollute, but not that citizens should be free from serious pollution. (Hochschild 2016, 35)

-Energy Jobs Limited: Louisianians often overestimate the number of jobs provided by the energy industry. In fact, approximately 15 percent of Louisiana jobs are in oil and petrochemical plants. “The industry is highly automated. To build a petrochemical plant, you need many construction workers for a temporary period…To run [it], you need a small number of highly trained engineers, chemists, and operators to keep watch over panels of gauges and to know what to do when there’s trouble. Then you need a few repairmen…” (Hochschild 2016, 74, 77)
   Energy Taxes Limited: The “severance taxes–fees paid when oil or gas is taken out of the ground–from oil contributed only 14 percent of the state’s budget revenue, down from 42 percent in 1982. It was the largest single source of revenue…” “The state had made huge cuts to local [government] jobs and social services in order to bring in companies and, instead of money trickling down, a third of it was leaking out [to shareholders, head offices, and top executives].” (Hochschild 2016, 75, 131)
   Environmental Protection Net Positive: “A 2016 survey of the world’s major economies [–which was consistent with other studies–] found that strict environmental policies improved, rather than handicapped, competitiveness…” In Louisiana, however, the power and influence of the oil companies largely silences such information and prevents effective regulation. “[As a result, a] 2003 report from the inspector general of the EPA…ranked Louisiana lowest of all in Region 6” in implementing federal policies. Between 1967 and 2015, “89,787 permits to deposit waste or do anything that affected the environment were submitted…[and] only sixty…were denied [by the state].” (Hochschild 2016, 78, 109, 110)
   “[A] 2008 study found that investments in environmental protection create some jobs and displace others, but that the net effect on employment is positive. In fact, environmental protection is itself a major sales-generating, job-creating industry.” (Hochschild 2016, 258)
   Poor State: Louisiana typically “ranks 49th out of 50 on an index of human development[,] is the second poorest state, [and gets] 44 percent of its budget…from the federal government…” (Hochschild 2016, 59)

-Big Business Rules as Govt and Unions Weakened: “Feeling betrayed by the federal government and turning wholeheartedly to the free market, the right is faced with realities [their viewpoint obscures]. Giant companies have grown vastly larger, more automated, more global, and more powerful. For them, productivity is increasingly based on cheap labor in offshore plants abroad, imported cheap foreign labor, and automation, and less on American labor. The more powerful they’ve become, the less resistance they have encountered from unions and government. Thus, they have felt more free to allocate more profits to top executives and stockholders, and less to workers.” In fact, Republicans, many of whom own small businesses or work for them, fail to appreciate how they are often victims of monopoly-like big businesses which enjoy legal and other advantages. (Hochschild 2016, 150)

-Jindal (2008-16): During Governor Jindal’s reign, 30,000 state employees were fired, funding was cut for higher education by 44 percent, corporate and individual taxes were cut, $1.6 billion was spent as incentives to attract industry, state-owned parking lots and farmland were sold to raise revenue, and the state’s hospitals were put in “business-friendly hands for which costs proceeded to rise.” “Jindal’s successor…announced in March 2016 that in order to address the ‘historic fiscal crisis,’ the state would need nearly $3 billion…just to keep up regular services during the next sixteen months.” (Hochschild 2016, 231)

-Gun Regulation: “[A] gun vendor in Louisiana can keep no records, perform no background checks, and sell guns to an array of customers forbidden in other states: those with violent and firearms-related misdemeanors, people on terror watch lists…, abusers of drugs or alcohol,…criminals with a history of serious mental illness or domestic violence….Louisiana has the highest rate of death by gunfire in the [US], nearly double the national average.” (While white male residents preach individual liberty to own guns or buy what they want, female rape victims encounter serious obstacles for an abortion and black males are disproportionately monitored.) (Hochschild 2016, 67-8)

-LSU v Cal: Louisiana State University has the following student groups: Oilfield Christian Fellowship, the Agribusiness Club, the Air Waste Management Association, the Society of Petrophysics — none of which has analogues at UC Berkeley. UC Berkeley has Amnesty International and the Anti-Trafficking Coalition, Building Sustainability at Cal, Environmental Science Student Association — groups with no analogues at LSU. (Hochschild 2016, 19)

-Huey Long: In the last Louisiana oil boom, from 1928 to 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, Louisiana governor Huey Long, a progressive demagogue, made different political choices than recent governors. He “taxed oil companies, using that money to…give out free textbooks to schoolchildren, create evening literacy courses for adults, and build roads, bridges, hospitals, and schools. Long curbed homelessness and poverty. Before succumbing to the lure of oil money himself, Long embraced the ideal of an activist government that lifted the poor and added to the common good.” (Hochschild 2016, 92)

-Plantation State Endures: Louisiana has always been a plantation state. “What oil and gas did is replace the agricultural with an oil plantation culture. Like cotton, oil is a single commodity requiring huge investment and has, like cotton and sugar, come to dominate the economy.” While there are now no slave quarters and more opportunity for poor whites, “just as yeomen farmers were pressed back to [marginal lands to] make way for sugar and cotton plantations, so too has oil partly crowded out the seafood industry and tourism…” (Hochschild 2016, 210-1)

-Slave Society Impacts Democracy and Taxation: “In the more egalitarian Northern states, where slavery was less common and there was a broadly shared sense of civic purpose among the citizenry, early Americans chose to elect active governments that taxed them and used the revenues to provide roads, bridges, canals, and schools. This more egalitarian situation in the North favored the development of democracy, where people willingly pool their resources in order to pay for things they need but can’t afford on their own.” (McQuaig 2019, 41)
   “It was a different story in the Southern states, where slavery was the dominant institution, creating a small but wealthy and powerful elite of white plantation owners. Below them was a yeoman class of struggling white farmers, and beneath those farmers were black slaves and their families, who vastly outnumbered whites in many parts of the South. It was a very hierarchical, repressive society, where planters lived in luxury, but in constant fear of slave uprisings. There was little trust or sense of common purpose among the factions: none between black people and white people, but also little between rich white planters and poor white farmers. The top priority of planters was preserving slavery–the source of their tremendous wealth–and this made them conscious of their political isolation at a time when the Western world was increasingly abolishing slavery, including Britain in 1833. This sense of being on their own, lacking allies at home and abroad in their most important political cause, left them deeply suspicious of democratic government. It also left them deeply suspicious of taxation. Yeomen white farmers in the South pushed for what Northerners had: roads and schools and canals. The planters resisted, fearing that the tax burden to pay for these facilities would fall unduly on them….For them, the term minority rights referred to their right to be protected from the taxing power wielded by the majority…” (McQuaig 2019, 41, 42)

Focus: Norway
-Norway v. Louisiana: “[Norway is] a small, capitalist democracy with about the same population as Louisiana, five million people. It has a long coast and its people [also] look to the water, boats, and fishing. Like [Louisiana], Norway has oil. One difference between [them], however, is their philosophy of governance and concept of freedom. Norwegians expect–and get–a great amount from their elected officials. Norway has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund–[more than one trillion dollars]–and the vast majority of Norwegians live upper-middle-class lives. They enjoy the very high scores in health, education, and overall well-being that come with such affluence–they enjoy freedom from need.” (Hochschild 2016, 235)
   State Ownership: An important difference is that “Norway had created a state-owned oil company, Statoil (…renamed Equinor), which is the eleventh largest oil company in the world. With assets of more than $100 billion, Equinor is majority-owned by the Norwegian people…” (McQuaig 2019, 174)

-High GDP/Capita and Life Expectancy; Low Murder and Incarceration Rates: Norway’s GDP per capita of well over $70,000 exceeds the US’s by approximately $10,000. “Even when you correct for the moderately large oil sector (which accounts for a bit less than a quarter of its exports), it still has a cutting-edge, ultra-productive economy… Socially, it routinely ranks as the happiest (2017) or second-happiest (2018) country in the world….On a snapshot of other quality-of-life measures, Norway boasts: A life expectancy of 81.7 years. An infant mortality rate of two per 1,000 live births. A murder rate of 0.51 per 100,000. An incarceration rate of 74 per 100,000.”
   “How does all that compare to the United States?…America ranks in the mid-teens for happiest countries, while its life expectancy is two years behind Norway, and actually fell in 2016 and 2017. America’s infant mortality rate is three times higher. Its murder rate is over 10 times higher, as is its incarceration rate.” (10 July 2018)
https://theweek.com/articles/783700/democratic-socialism-bad-why-norway-great

-Wealth Taxes: Norway and Sweden “both have more billionaires per capita than the US — Sweden almost twice as many. Not only that, these billionaires are able to pass on their wealth to their children tax-free. Inheritance taxes in Sweden and Norway are zero…” However, while “Norway does not charge wealth taxes at death, [it does charge] them every single year. [As a result] wealth tax is over four times the size of the US estate tax.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanderss-scandinavian-fantasy/2020/02/27/ee894d6e-599f-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/02/fareed-zakaria-is-completely-ignorant-about-the-nordics/

-History Explains Norway’s Approach to Energy Industry: “The famously fearless Vikings mounted raids during the 8th and 9th centuries aimed at warding off invasion and occupation by the legendary Charlemagne as he expanded the Holy Roman Empire through Western Europe. The Vikings’ reputation as brutal, uncompromising warriors apparently paid off, and Charlemagne bypassed Scandinavia in search of easier conquests. As a result, Norwegians never experienced the top-down system of feudal domination that prevailed elsewhere in Europe. Instead of being serfs working for a landed gentry, Norwegians became yeoman farmers managing their own small homesteads, drawing freely on local water and timber resources. They developed a less hierarchical culture than existed in the rest of Europe, becoming the first, for instance, to establish legal equality for women.” (McQuaig 2019, 183)
   When Norway became an independent country in 1905 “there was strong resistance…to succumbing to control by foreign capitalists. In 1906 the Norwegian parliament passed legislation…which slowed down approval of foreign purchases of natural resources, with the aim of buying time for Norwegian business interests to assemble the capital necessary to carry out the resource development.” (McQuaig 2019, 183-4)
   “In the following years, a more left-leaning government went further, placing restrictions on Norwegian business interests as well. Under a radical law introduced in 1917, capitalists…were required to develop natural resources in socially beneficial ways, such as using Norwegian materials and workers, and providing cheap electricity to local communities. Another far-reaching aspect of the law stipulated that waterfalls and hydro dams would revert to public ownership after a period of 60 to 80 years, without any compensation being paid.” (McQuaig 2019, 184)
   “This commitment to protecting the public interest was well established in Norway by the time oil was first discovered in the North Sea off the country’s coast in 1969. By this point, Norway had evolved into a highly equitable society…with a tradition of public trust in government.” Accordingly, following national discussions, Norway’s parliament established a state oil company and decided on a principle of national governance and control of all petroleum operations. “Private corporations would also be allowed to participate in the oil patch, but preference would be given to the people’s own company….Even so, it turned out that foreign companies were eager to participate.” (McQuaig 2019, 184-5)
   “By developing independent technological expertise through Statoil, Norway ensured that it would have detailed and reliable knowledge of costs related to every aspect of the business [exploration, refining, retailing], putting itself in a strong…position to negotiate…with foreign multinationals over how oil revenues would be divided.” (McQuaig 2019, 185-6)
   In the mid-1970s, with the significant rise in oil prices, “Norway passed a new petroleum law that dramatically increased taxes on the industry, pushing them up from 50 percent to almost 90 percent. The law also specified that the taxes would be calculated on numbers determined by the Norwegian oil authorities, not the companies, thereby diminishing opportunities for the companies to juggle their books. Exxon, Shell, and the others were enraged…But their efforts had little traction, partly because Norwegians largely stuck together and the political parties declined to use the issue for political gain. [T]here was little divergence among the political parties [because] ‘Business interests have really never been integrated into Norwegian political life.’” (McQuaig 2019, 186-7)
   “[P]ublic ownership of the oil industry is common throughout the world.” (Canada and the US are among the few countries to reject public ownership.) The “private oil giants are still fabulously rich and powerful, but the vast majority of the world’s oil reserves are actually held by nationally owned oil companies, such as Saudi Aramco, Kuwait Petroleum, Gazprom (Russia), National Iranian Oil Company, and Pemex (Mexico). Exxon-Mobil, with the largest reserves among the private companies, has twenty-five billion barrels–an amount dwarfed by the massive stash of 307 billion barrels held by Saudi Aramco.” (McQuaig 2019, 190)

-Police and Prisons: In Norway, as of July 2015, “the last time a police officer shot and killed somebody was in 2006[;] [and Norwegian] police fired just two shots in all of 2014….Norway’s incarceration rate is one of the lowest in the world. In 2014, fewer than 0.08% of the population was locked up. In the US, where incarceration rates are the highest of any country, 0.72% of people were in prison…”
   Equality + Homogeneity = Trust: Two factors seem to explain Norway’s impressive record: Low levels of inequality (see question 8., where crime and inequality are discussed) and homogeneity. With respect to the latter point, “‘Trust is an extremely powerful mechanism of informal social control’…In smaller, more ethnically homogeneous countries like Norway, building that trust is easy. People feel a sense of togetherness for many reasons, including the fact that most people look similar and hold similar beliefs.” In the US, many  people “just don’t trust their police officers.” Of course, American police departments can institute policies to enhance trust and effectiveness.
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-police-kill-more-people-in-one-day-than-norway-cops-have-in-10-years-2015-7

-Nordic Economic Model: Flexible labor, Smart regulation, High taxes, Strong welfare: “In Sweden, government spending as a percentage of GDP doubled from 1960 to 1980, going from approximately 30 percent to 60 percent.” This experiment in Bernie Sanders-style democratic socialism impacted job creation and other aspects of the Swedish economy. “In 1991, a free-market prime minister, Carl Bildt, initiated a series of reforms to kick-start the economy. By the mid-2000s, Sweden had cut the size of its government…”
   “Versions of this problem and these market reforms took place all over Northern Europe, creating what is now called the ‘flexicurity’ model, combining flexible labor markets with a strong and generous safety net….In addition…countries such as Denmark stay[ed] extremely open, erecting no barriers to free trade, to gain access to markets abroad and keep their local companies competitive. [In] Northern Europe [in 2020], one finds many innovative market-friendly policies such as educational vouchers, health-care…co-pays, and light regulatory burdens. None of these countries, for example, has a minimum wage.”
   (When Danes praise their light regulatory burdens, “they are comparing themselves, not to the US, but to other continental European countries like France, Belgium, and Germany that have a much more corporatist tradition. None of the Nordic countries have employment protections as weak as the US…” Furthermore, high unionization rates in the Nordic countries coupled with sectoral bargaining, make minimum wage legislation unnecessary.)
   “It is true that these countries have a generous safety net and, in order to fund it, high taxes. What is not often pointed out, however, is that in order to raise enough revenue, these taxes fall disproportionately on the poor, middle and upper middle class….The biggest hit to the poor and middle classes in Northern Europe comes because they, like everyone, pay a national sales tax…of about 25 percent. These countries raise more than 20 percent of their taxes this way. In the US, the average sales tax rate is 6.6 percent and accounts for only 8 percent of tax revenue.”
   Less Progressive Tax Code Than US: “A 2008 OECD report found that the top 10 percent in the US pay 45 percent of all income taxes, while the top 10 percent in Denmark pay 26 percent and in Sweden 27 percent. Among wealthy countries, the average is 32 percent. The basic point is worth underlining because the American left seems largely unaware of it, and it has only become more true over the past decade: The US has a significantly more progressive tax code than Europe, and its top 10 percent pays a vastly greater share of the country’s taxes than their European counterparts. In other words, bringing the economic system of Denmark, Sweden and Norway to the US would mean embracing more flexible labor markets, light regulations and a deeper commitment to free trade. It would mean a more generous set of social benefits — to be paid for by taxes on the middle class and poor.” (However, when “you have massively compressed the distribution of market income as in the Nordics, the [bulk of the] money is not at the top. It’s in the middle. The opposite is true when you have a very unequal distribution of market income as in the US.”)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanderss-scandinavian-fantasy/2020/02/27/ee894d6e-599f-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/02/fareed-zakaria-is-completely-ignorant-about-the-nordics/ 

Focus: Alabama
-Low Property Taxes, Low Public Services, High Fees: “In states like Alabama, almost every interaction a person has with the criminal justice system comes with a financial cost. If you’re assigned to a pretrial program to reduce your sentence, each class attended incurs a fee. If you’re on probation, you’ll pay a fee to take your mandatory urine test. If you appear in drug court, you will face more fees…For poor people, this system is a trap, sucking them into a cycle of sometimes unpayable debt that constrains their lives and almost guarantees financial hardship.”
   Constitutional Cap: “While almost every state in the country…levies fines and fees that fall disproportionately on the bottom rung of the income ladder, the situation in Alabama is far more dramatic, thanks to the peculiarities of its Constitution. Over a century ago, wealthy landowners and businessmen rewrote the Constitution to cap taxes…”
   “Taxes on most property, for example, are exceptionally low. In 2019, property taxes accounted for just 7 percent of state and local revenue, the lowest among the states. (Even Mississippi, which also has low property taxes, got roughly 12 percent from property taxes. New Jersey, by contrast, got 29 percent.) Strapped for cash, all levels of government look for money anywhere they can get it. And often, that means creating revenue from fines and fees.”
   “In most of the country, if residents of a school district or county want to raise taxes to pay for a new library or electrical systems, they are free to impose a new tax on themselves. Not so in Alabama. Its cities and counties do not have home rule, so they have to go through the State Legislature, which often has to initiate a constitutional amendment allowing them to pass a law.”
   “The state has chronically underfunded schools, bad public transit, a dearth of well-paying jobs, little affordable child care and a diminishing health care system. During the 20th century, some public schools began asking students for recommended donations, or what might amount to tuition.”
   “To understand how Alabama came to be so underdeveloped, you need only look to the Black Belt, a large…agriculturally rich area that was once blanketed by cotton plantations…Much of the area is still rural and agricultural, but the product isn’t cotton; it is, among other things, timber….Much of the land is owned by multinational corporations, international investors, hedge funds, some families that live outside the Black Belt and some whose ancestors cultivated the land before the Civil War.”
   “The result of [Alabama’s] 1901 Constitution was the mass disenfranchisement and subjugation of poor people — white and Black….By 1943…an estimated 520,000 Black people and 600,000 white people had been disqualified from voting…”
   As designed, “government went about protecting the property owned by some of the wealthiest families and businesses in the state from any meaningful taxation. In 1920, property taxes accounted for 63 percent of state revenue, but by 1978, it was down to a measly 3.6 percent. In 1992, it was below 2 percent…A few wealthy families and corporations own the land, pay little tax and profit off agriculture, all while roughly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line.”
   “[A]s a source of revenue, fines and fees are incredibly inefficient — far less efficient than taxes collected by the IRS and local and state tax agencies. A study by the Brennan Center found that governments in Texas and New Mexico collect only 41 cents on every dollar of revenue brought in by fees and fines.”
   Fines and fees are inefficient partly because the type of people most likely to be fined are those who are least able to afford the court costs and fines imposed on them. “And while some law-and-order advocates may argue that fines are an important way to deter crime, a report by Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice found that fines and fees may do the opposite…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/27/opinion/alabama-fines-fees.html

-Alabama Ranks Very Low: In 2022, Huntsville, Alabama was named the best place in America to live by US News & World Report. However, using similar metrics — regarding education, health care, infrastructure, economy, crime and opportunity — the state of Alabama was the fourth-worst state in America in 2021.
   “[Alabama] was 47th in education and 45th in healthcare and 43rd in crime and corrections and 38th in overall economy and 37th in both opportunity and natural environment…”
   “But the sad reality is that US News did [Alabama] a favor by limiting the judging to those few categories. Because [it’s] drop-dead awful in way more. Like being the third-worst state in child well-being,…[as] nearly a quarter of Alabama kids liv[e] in poverty…[Alabama] also ranked near the bottom in life expectancy…, had the nation’s fourth-worst infant mortality rate[,] [and] was ranked the worst state in the South for women.”
   “There isn’t a soul in [the] state who hasn’t been affected negatively by Alabama’s decision to not expand Medicaid, or its decision not to participate in the insurance exchange established under Obamacare.”
   (“Sign-ups for the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have surged by 80 percent under Biden, with a record 21 million people enrolling [in 2023]. Trump has promised to get rid of the program, saying that…he will replace it with something better, but neither now nor in his four years in office did he produce a plan.”)
   Meanwhile Alabama’s Republican officials ignore these real issues while ranting about “government agents” taking our guns and elites forcing critical race theory into classrooms.
   Redirect to Cultural Issues: “The reality is there are a lot of people in [Alabama] suffering [from] legitimate problems that have been solved, or at least adequately addressed, in other states.” However, the reason problems aren’t solved is “[b]ecause in 2022, when [voters] had an opportunity to demand that [their] elected representatives [be] competent people who were informed on the issues affecting the state and had viable plans to address those problems, [Alabamians] instead voted for the people who vilified trans kids.”
https://www.alreporter.com/2022/05/18/opinion-theres-a-reason-alabama-always-ranks-at-the-bottom
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-24-2024

-Goodyear Moves Production, Politician Blames Union: On 8 April 2024, Alabama’s House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen falsely claimed that “unions caused [Gadsden] city’s major employer, the Goodyear tire plant, to shutter in 2020.”
   In fact, “[t]he Gadsden Goodyear plant was supposed to close in 1999. That’s when Goodyear wanted to close it, because it believed it could make its tires cheaper elsewhere. It was the United Steelworkers Union…and more specifically, the Local 12 union, which saved the plant. A decade later, the plant actually expanded. But then, in 2015, a couple of years after the Gadsden plant reached peak production numbers, Goodyear opened a plant in Mexico.”
   “Utilizing cheap labor and almost zero regulations, the company began shifting its Gadsden productions to Mexico. That included production of a tire model developed at the Gadsden plant. (During the midst of this transition, workers at the Goodyear plant in Mexico went on strike to protest unsafe and poor working conditions. Lacking the protections of American laws, the majority of the protesting workers were fired by Goodyear.)”
   “[The union] forced Goodyear into a multi-year deal in 2017 that kept the plant operational, even if running at reduced employment. And the union got guaranteed dollars, retirement plans and benefits for those employees. That’s why there was even a vote in 2020 to close the plant….It was the Local 12 union – the 400-plus remaining employees of the Goodyear plant – who voted to accept the substantial buyouts negotiated by the union and allow the plant to close.” It was the best option for the workers.
   “[In sum:] A major US company shifts production to a foreign country, turning its back on its American employees. The employees’ union negotiates to keep the plant open for years longer and gets substantial buyouts for those employees shafted by the company. And [an] Alabama politician wants you to believe that it was the union that was the bad guy.” (Josh Moon, Facebook post, 9 April 2024)

Focus: Denmark
-Unskilled Get Decent Pay and Benefits: In 2020, “[s]tarting pay for the humblest burger-flipper at McDonald’s…is about $22 an hour once various pay supplements are included. The McDonald’s workers [also] get six weeks of paid vacation a year, life insurance, a year’s paid maternity leave and a pension plan. And like all Danes, they enjoy universal medical insurance and paid sick leave….[Furthermore,] [w]orkers get their schedules a month in advance, and they can’t be assigned back-to-back shifts. American politicians speak solemnly about the dignity of work, but you’re more likely to find it in Copenhagen than in New York.”
   80% in Unions: “Americans assume that Danish wages must be high because of regulations, but Denmark has no national minimum wage…One reason [wages are good] is Denmark’s strong unions. More than 80 percent of Danish employees work under collective bargaining contracts, although strikes are rare. There is also ‘sectoral bargaining,’ in which contracts are negotiated across an entire business sector–so in Denmark, McDonald’s and Burger King pay exactly the same…”
   Another reason for high wages is that, due to Denmark’s excellent schools and health care, workers are more literate, numerate and healthy than typical Americans, and therefore more productive. (The New York Times, 10 May 2020, SR 7)

-Taxes Finance Welfare State: “Danes pay an extra 19 cents of every dollar in taxes, compared with Americans, but for that they get free health care, free education from kindergarten through college, subsidized high-quality preschool, a very strong social safety net and very low levels of poverty, homelessness, crime and inequality. On average, Danes live two years longer than Americans.”
   High Employment Rates: “Americans might suspect that the Danish safety net encourages laziness. But 79 percent of Danes ages 16 to 64 are in the labor force, five percentage points higher than in the US.”
   “Danes earn about the same after-tax income as Americans, even though they work on average 22 percent fewer hours; on the other hand, money doesn’t go as far in Denmark because prices average 18 percent higher.” (The New York Times, 10 May 2020, SR 7)

-Immigrant Challenge: A central challenge for Denmark is that its “system emerged from a homogeneous society with strong social trust, and some experts wonder whether Denmark can indefinitely sustain its high-wage, high-productivity economy as less-skilled immigrants stream in from poorer countries.”
   While “Denmark compiled a heroic record resisting the Nazis to save most of its Jewish population in World War II, [in 2020 one can] encounter strong anti-immigrant feelings.” (The New York Times, 10 May 2020, SR 7)

Focus: Finland
-Education: “In order to make productive use of its entire population, Finland’s school system aims to educate everybody well, unlike the US school system, which…educates some people well but more people poorly. Finland has egalitarian, high-quality public schools with few private schools. Astonishingly to rich Americans, even those few Finnish private schools receive the same level of funding from the government as do public schools, and are not permitted to increase their funding by charging tuition, collecting fees, or raising endowments. While US schoolteachers have low social status and are drawn predominantly from the lower-performing ranks of college students, Finnish schoolteachers go through a very competitive selection process, are drawn from the brightest…university students, enjoy high status (even more than university teachers), are well paid, have advanced degrees, and have lots of autonomy in how they teach. As a result, Finnish students score at or near the top of world national rankings in literacy, math, and problem-solving abilities.” (Counterintuitively, Finnish schools do not emphasize homework or testing.) (Diamond 2019, 90)

-Police: “Finland [also] gets the best out of its police: again astonishingly to Americans, Finnish police have to have a university bachelor’s degree, are trusted by 96 percent of Finns, and almost never use their guns. [In 2018], Finnish police on duty fired only six shots, five of them just warning shots: that’s fewer than an average week of police gunshots in…Los Angeles.” (Diamond 2019, 90)

-Economy: “[Finland’s] strong focus on education yields a productive workforce. Finland has the world’s highest percentage of engineers in its population. It is a world leader in technology. Its exports account for nearly half of its GDP, and its main exports are now high tech — heavy machinery and manufactured goods — instead of timber and other conventional forest products as was the case before World War Two….The result of [its] excellent educational system and [its] high investments in research and development is that, within just half-a-century, Finland went from being a poor country to being one of the richest in the world.” (Diamond 2019, 90-1)

-Fertility: It’s argued that birth rates are “higher in countries where mothers receive more support from governments and [spouses]. But how can we explain Finland? Finnish fathers spend more time than mothers on childcare, state-provision is world-leading, and companies accommodate flexibility. Yet in 2022, Finland’s total fertility rate was ultra low: 1.32.”
https://draliceevans.substack.com/p/depression-and-low-fertility-coincidence

-Foreign Policy: “Finland had bitter memories that, when it…was attacked by the Soviet Union in 1939, it had not been helped by the US, Sweden, Germany, Britain, or France. Finland had to learn from its history that its survival and independence depended on itself, and that Finland would be safe only if the Soviet Union felt safe and trusting towards Finland.” Accordingly, many non-Finns reveal their ignorance by using “the derogatory term Finlandization” to describe a weak neighbor making embarrassing concessions to a totalitarian superpower. (Diamond 2019, 91-2)
   “In fact, Finland’s foreign policy towards the Soviet Union [was] Byzantinely complex. The end result is that, in the [over] 70 years since the end of World War Two, Finland has come no closer to becoming a Soviet or (now) a Russian satellite. Instead, it has succeeded in steadily increasing its ties with the West while still maintaining good ties with Russia. At the same time, Finns know that life is uncertain, and so military service is still compulsory for Finnish men and voluntary for Finnish women. Training lasts up to a year and is rigorous…After that year of training, Finns are called up for reserve duty every few years until age 30-35 or older. The reserve army constitutes 15 percent of Finland’s population…” (Diamond 2019, 93)
   “The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine…swung public opinion in favor of NATO membership. Along with neighboring Sweden, the country applied to join NATO on 18 May 2022. Following ratification, Finland became a member of NATO on 4 April 2023. Finland has an 830 mile border with Russia, which upon accession more than doubled NATO’s pre-existing border with Russia.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden%E2%80%93NATO_relations
   Under a conservative government, “Sweden ended more than a century of neutrality [in March 2024] by joining NATO ….[I]n Sweden, however, the reaction is mixed. There is generally an understanding of why Finland ended its neutrality and joined NATO last year–Finland shares a long border with Russia, had been occupied by the Russian Empire for most of the 19th century, and had been invaded by the Soviets in the 1930s, resulting in the annexation of the eastern part of their country. Russia has never occupied or threatened Sweden, however. Many Swedes fear its longstanding independent foreign policy — opposing the US war in Vietnam, US intervention in Central America, the US invasion of Iraq, US support for the Israeli and Moroccan occupations, etc. (in addition to opposing Soviet and Russian aggression) — will be compromised. They fear higher military spending at the expense of Sweden’s excellent social welfare programs. They fear that Sweden will lose the high moral ground and respect it has had in much of the world.” (Prof. Stephen Zunes, Facebook post, 8 March 2024)

Evolution of Organizing the US Economy: Government-Corporate Partnership (Institutions) to Financial Markets (Transactions)
-“Within the first few months of [FDR’s] presidency [1933-45], three economic reforms…became law: the legal separation of commercial and investment banking, federal insurance of the bank deposits of working-class and middle-class Americans (along with federal regulation meant to prevent the insured banks from using their depositors’ money in ways that put them at risk of failure), and federal regulation of stock and bond offerings by corporations.” (The insurance of deposits “restored enough confidence in the safety of banks so that people would start putting their money into them again, so that banks could make loans.”) (Lemann 2019, 50)

   “[T]he New Deal had constrained banks so severely that for decades there were no financial companies on the scale of the major industrial corporations….[For example,] In 1960 the total value of the new issues [Morgan Stanley] handled was less than the total in 1935, its first full year in business. In 1970 Morgan Stanley had only 230 employees…” (Lemann 2019, 95)

-“In the 1930s the US chose…to have a much bigger central government that took responsibility for the economic life of the country on behalf of ordinary people’s welfare but rejected the big alternative ideas of the time: communism, socialism, and fascism. In the 1940s the country became the world’s leading power and chose not to become a full-dress welfare state on the European model. [And], in the 1950s, it was settling on a system built around big corporations, with labor unions and the central government as ever-hovering presences that made sure the corporations attended to their obligations.” In fact, “Quite a few corporate chief executives…began conceiving of their companies as having broad social responsibilities, with unions and government no longer their sworn adversaries. The same view pervaded business schools…” (Lemann 2019, 78)

   By the early 1970s, according to the leading economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “management, not stockholders, controlled 169 of the 200 largest corporations, which, in turn, controlled most of the economic life of the country. These corporations together comprised…a ‘planning system’ that could be further loaded up with social obligations by government because it was impervious to competition, price-cutting, customer dissatisfaction, antitrust attacks, and, most of all, its own supposed owners, who were entirely passive.” (Lemann 2019, 95-6)

   However, “as the success of the postwar American economy manifested itself in growing prosperity,…large new accumulations of capital were beginning to appear. Pension funds and mutual funds, holding the assets of people who worked for wages and salaries had gone from negligible during the Depression and the Second World War to holding hundreds of billions of dollars by the 1970s. These funds had managers who invested in the markets–so the control of stock in corporations wasn’t so widely dispersed anymore. … [In fact,] in the 1970s, pension funds controlled about $200 billion in assets and owned almost a third of the shares on the public stock markets.” (Lemann 2019, 97-8)

   Accordingly, investment banks like Morgan Stanley, which had seen their role as mainly serving the users of capital (like GM and other clients), began focusing more on the “needs of providers of capital, the people who bought the corporations’ stock and bond issues” (like pension funds and other institutional investors). As the latter became more powerful and less passive, “They were going to make demands, about pricing, timing, information, and even the behavior of corporation management, as a condition of committing their capital–in other words, [they] were going to begin acting like textbook capitalists…” As such, they’d come to expect management to have one, main goal: maximize profits; and not concern themselves with reducing pollution, preserving jobs, or other social responsibilities. (Lemann 2019, 99)

   To place pressure on management (agents) to aggressively pursue maximum profits, investors (principals) began making use of various tools. As a CEO rarely owned significant equity in the corporation he worked for, it was necessary to “create a situation in which he personally bore the financial risks of his decisions….[For example, major] shareholders could sit on corporate boards. Executives could be compensated more in stock and less in salary. Corporations could finance themselves more by taking on debt and less by issuing stock, because the need to make interest payments would put pressure on executives to find ways to make the corporation more profitable. Ideally, a corporation might even find a way to have a single, all-powerful owner rather than hundreds of thousands of powerless shareholders.” (Lemann 2019, 114-5)

   By the early 1980s “a number of new techniques in the financial world…suddenly became pervasive: a large increase in mergers and acquisitions, including hostile ones; the development of the junk-bond market, whose high-risk, high-return instruments often financed these activities; enormous raises in the compensation of corporate chief executives, often in the form of stock options; the onset of leveraged buyouts and private equity as ways for financiers to take direct, usually temporary control of formerly publicly held companies.” (Lemann 2019, 115)

   “Between 1981 and 1983 alone, there were more than two thousand corporate takeovers a year valued at more than $1 million, far more than the country had ever seen, enabled in part by Ronald Reagan’s new administration in Washington signaling that it was going to interpret the antitrust laws more loosely. The market for corporate control had come roaring to life. During the 1980s as a whole, more than a quarter of the companies on the Fortune 500 list of the country’s largest corporations were subject to takeover attempts. A third of the companies on the Fortune list in 1980 were no longer independent companies by 1990. There were thirty-five thousand of these transactions, worth $2.6 trillion, between 1976 and 1990….Hundreds of thousands of jobs at the country’s traditional, supposedly unassailable corporations disappeared: AT&T, an extreme example, went from 850,000 employees to, at one point, less than 50,000. That meant the lifetime job security that had been an unstated part of the corporate social compact was gone, and so, before long, was the old system of company-paid pensions after retirement.” (Lemann 2019, 116)

   One financial technique that emerged in the 1980s “was the leveraged buyout, now usually called private equity. A buyout firm [such as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts] would acquire control or even total ownership of a public company, financing the transaction with borrowed money; [hire professional managers;] reorient the company from whatever had been distracting it from pursuing purely economic ends; and then resell it, as a whole or broken up into parts…The total value of leveraged buyouts in the US was $1.4 billion in 1979, and $77 billion in 1988.” (Lemann 2019, 117)

-“When a challenge to financial economics–in particular, to the efficient-market hypothesis–began to emerge,…it had two major components. One was the idea of information asymmetry: markets could not price everything perfectly if all participants did not have equal access to accurate information. The other was behavioral economics, which focused on the many ways the human mind was naturally prone to misperceive reality and how that would affect people’s interactions with economic markets. Both ideas, by positing that markets behave imperfectly, were opening the door to a role for government in improving the way markets functioned [to the consternation of right-wing economists].” (Lemann 2019, 120-1)

   “[T]he efficient-market hypothesis…claims that financial markets price assets [such as stocks and bonds] precisely at their intrinsic worth given all publicly available information. [B]y the 1980s, finance economists, notably Michael Jensen…, were arguing that because financial markets always get prices right, the best thing corporate chieftains can do, not just for themselves but for the sake of the economy, is to maximize their stock prices.” However, as many investors aren’t as rational as models assume, behavioral economics explains why this is so, “by relating the apparent irrationality of investors to known biases in human cognition, like the tendency to care more about small losses than small gains or the tendency to extrapolate too readily from small samples (e.g., assuming that because home prices rose in the past few years, they’ll keep on rising).” (Krugman 2020, 135, 146)

   (A conversation between Michael Jensen, a proponent of the efficient-market hypothesis, and Amos Tversky, a founder of behavioral economics, was remembered by a third party as follows: “[A]mos asked [Michael] to assess the decision-making capabilities of his wife. Michael was soon regaling us with stories of the ridiculous economic decisions she made, like buying an expensive car and then refusing to drive it because she was afraid it would be dented. Amos then asked Michael about his students, and Michael rattled off silly mistakes they made, complaining about how slow they were to understand the most basic economics concepts….Then Amos went in for the kill. ‘Michael,’ he said, ‘you seem to think that virtually everyone you know is incapable of correctly making even the simplest of economic decisions, but then you assume that all the agents in your models are geniuses. What gives?’ Michael was unfazed. ‘Amos,’ he said, ‘you just don’t understand.’” (Lemann 2019, 121))

   By the early 2000s Jensen changed “his mind about Wall Street….[S]pectacular incidents that seemed to demonstrate deep flaws in the workings of the financial markets kept coming. There was the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, indicating that public markets actually might not be so good at pricing companies at their true value. There was the collapse of such companies as Enron, WorldCom, and Nortel, which had used fraudulent accounting to make themselves look far more successful than they were. There were the widespread complaints about even the best companies being under relentless pressure to produce ever-increasing quarterly earnings statements, because that was all the markets paid attention to.” (“By pressuring companies to keep raising their stock price, [Jensen argued, the financial markets] were creating malign incentives for executives to misstate the condition of their companies and to make bad acquisitions that would look brilliant at first glance.”) “[Jensen] had a new solution, which was to remake boards of directors so that they were composed of principals (that is, major shareholders) rather than agents (distinguished-seeming cronies of the CEO). [Nevertheless], he had now departed in a profound way from the core idea that financial markets are a healthy force because they always set prices efficiently.” (Lemann 2019, 127-8, 129)

-Some deregulation was rational by the mid-1970s. For example, “A well-established group of private airline companies was tightly regulated by a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board: the CAB had to approve every route and every fare, and as a result, tickets were expensive, planes were half-full, and competition was light.” To liberals, the system was exploiting consumers, so they were able to team up with conservatives to promote deregulation. The “main opponents were the airlines themselves and their labor unions. In 1978 the first Democratic president of the 1970s, Jimmy Carter, signed legislation abolishing the CAB entirely. Carter also deregulated trucking and railroads, and he signed the first of a series of major laws deregulating finance–giving banks, in the name of serving the consumer, the ability to pay much higher interest rates to their depositors.” Accordingly, consumer welfare became the mantra to justify government regulation. (Lemann 2019, 146-7)

   Hundreds “of changes in government policy cascaded through the financial system;…most went completely unnoticed except by the people directly involved….Taken together, they profoundly changed not only finance but American society…” (“Elite liberals had become far more kindly disposed toward markets and suspicious of economic regulation.”) (Lemann 2019, 148, 254)

   Early in the Reagan administration, “the savings and loan industry, which had lost its ability to attract deposits at its old modest interest rates, persuaded Congress to pass a major piece of financial deregulation, permitting it to acquire deposits in nontraditional ways, to offer adjustable-rate mortgages, and to make new and riskier kinds of investments–all while retaining federal insurance on their deposits. This meant the government would ultimately have to be responsible for all the new risk it was permitting the savings and loans to take on.” (Lemann 2019, 151)

-“Derivatives–financial instruments derived from the price of something else, like stocks or bonds or commodities–had been around forever; they were essentially promises to buy or sell something in the future at a preestablished price, and therefore a way of betting that the price would rise or fall. The advent of financial economics and greatly increased computer power made it possible to create ever more complicated derivatives that depended on fast, complex, dynamically adjusted calculations of the values of groups of underlying securities or other instruments. Once you could do that, the traders on the floor could buy and sell the derivatives much more quickly and with fewer regulatory constraints than they could buy or sell old-fashioned stocks…In 1986 [a Morgan Stanley derivatives trader] astonished the firm by making a $40 million profit on a single trade. By the late 1980s, derivatives trading accounted for half of the firm’s profits.” (Lemann 2019, 153)

   Morgan Stanley’s 1986 IPO raised approximately $200 million, and made the “most senior people in the firm [very rich]. From then on, Morgan Stanley was active in the markets with…other people’s money, not the partners’ own money. The firm had far less incentive to be cautious about taking on risk.” (Lemann 2019, 157)

-“In the 1980s it was becoming clear that the steady upward economic progress of the American middle class–which began with the New Deal and continued for almost half a century–was ending. Economic inequality began to increase; the idea had disappeared that…children would do better than their parents; the rewards of economic growth were going disproportionately to the people at the top. These developments coincided with the [largely politically enabled] great shift from an institution-based to a transaction-based society…”; the shift from the ethos of “New Deal”-type, senior managers of industrial corporations to that of “transaction-focused,” managers of investment firms. (Lemann 2019, 158)

   “The financial system, now roaring to life, had been essentially crisis-free for decades: low risk, low return. The failure of significant financial institutions, something that had been a constant…before the New Deal, was almost unheard-of. On October 19, 1987, financial markets around the world plunged more in one day than they ever had before…at least partly because large institutional investors had adopted some of the techniques of financial economics, such as automated, computerized trading that proceeded almost instantly in response to complex calculations about the direction of the markets…During the same period, more than a thousand savings and loans–a third of the total number in the country–failed, substantially because…deregulation…had permitted them to make highly risky investments that had gone sour. Because the savings and loans had managed to keep their federal deposit insurance…[their losses] wound up costing taxpayers well over $100 billion.” (Lemann 2019, 158-9)

-“In 1992 Bill Clinton [became president] substantially by persuading voters that he understood the economic troubles of the middle class…He promised to cut taxes for the middle class and to pass an immediate economic stimulus program. … A few weeks after the election, Alan Greenspan, by now in his second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, [proposed that in the place of tax cuts and stimulus], Clinton should focus on reducing the federal deficit that Reagan’s large tax cuts had created. That would bring down long-term interest rates, which in turn, by making borrowing easier for ordinary people, would stimulate the economy far more effectively…” (Lemann 2019, 160)

   Clinton adopted Greenspan’s proposal. “The major economic legislation of his first year…was a deficit reduction bill, which won the support of liberals by increasing taxes on upper-income people and preserving government benefits for the less well-off. … [Also during] his first year in office, over the opposition of most members of his own party, Clinton helped to push through the congressional passage of NAFTA, which permitted the loosening of trade restrictions…The next year, Clinton continued the ongoing undoing of the New Deal’s constraints on finance by enthusiastically signing a bill legalizing interstate banking, ending one of the country’s historic proscriptions on concentrations of financial power. In 1995 the World Trade Organization, meant to push the globalization of trade further forward, opened…(The key member of the WTO, China, joined in 2001, not long after Clinton had signed a bill establishing it as a full trading partner of the US.)…Freeing markets from constraint looked like the royal road to bringing a better life to people who needed and deserved one, all over the world.” Clinton sailed to an easy reelection in 1996. (Lemann 2019, 162, 163)

   “The [Clinton] administration had a ‘Working Group on Financial Markets,’ whose energies were devoted mainly to planning the further deregulation of the financial system. At the top of its list of targets was the Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark 1934 law that had put the collapsed American banking system back on its feet and established a basic system of rules that functioned successfully for decades. Like the savings and loans in the early 1980s, the biggest banks were now arguing that the old restrictions placed on their activities–no underwriting of stock and bond issues, no advising M&A, no risky investing–did not make sense any longer…[However,] they wanted to keep their federal deposit insurance and also their access to short-term loans from the Federal Reserve at special low rates.” (Lemann 2019, 165-6)

-By 1999, “Inflation was low. The federal budget deficit had become a surplus. An antiquated, industrial-age system was being replaced by a modern, information-age one, designed to serve consumers rather than bankers. … With the end of the Glass-Steagall restrictions, along with interstate banking, the globalization of trade and finance, and the management of foreign debt crises, the Clinton administration completed what it had set out to do in finance.” The last main policy push of the administration was to prevent effective regulation of derivatives, which were “the most rapidly growing part of the financial system”. (Lemann 2019, 170)

   Brooksley Born, the chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), was sidelined by senior members of the Clinton economic team–Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers–in her attempt to have the federal government regulate derivatives. “Forbidden to act by Congress, preemptively outvoted by her own colleagues…[Born] resigned in the spring of 1999.” “The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000…was one of the Clinton administration’s last pieces of legislation….[The eventual law] prohibited both the CFTC and the SEC from regulating most derivatives, and it preempted all state laws that might presume to regulate them. By [2000] the over-the-counter derivatives market had grown to $95 trillion, and it grew much more rapidly after the bill had passed.” (Lemann 2019, 174, 178)

   Born’s concerns were well grounded. “In 1994 there were three well-publicized scandals involving unregulated derivatives: the bankruptcy of Orange County, California, because of a loss of $1.5 billion in derivatives that Merrill Lynch had sold it; and losses in the tens of millions by two private companies, Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings…And a few years later, Enron…collapsed because of losses incurred from…derivatives trading…” “In September 1998…there was another big failure… Long-Term Capital Management…which was proud to be an advanced user of technical derivatives trading techniques…went out of business.” Due to LTCM’s huge debts, the Federal Reserve felt it had to organize a rescue to save the banks–and therefore the wider financial system–that were owed money. (Lemann 2019, 171, 174-5)

-“The total value of residential housing in the US doubled between 2000 and 2007, from $11 trillion to $22 trillion. That was partly because of Greenspan’s repeated cuts in interest rates, and partly because mortgage lending standards had become dramatically more lax than they had been even a few years earlier….[For example, as a result of deregulation,] most new mortgages were made at low initial rates that rose steeply after two years.” (By 2008, unpaid mortgages payments, defaults and unsellable houses led to a very serious financial crisis.) (Lemann 2019, 179)

   “The new growth in homeownership was among people with less money, many of whom didn’t fully understand how quickly their monthly payments were going to rise. Their mortgages, called subprime, had a total value of $35 billion in 1994 and $625 billion in 2005. They often originated with local mortgage brokers who approved loans quickly and immediately resold them up the financial chain; often these new mortgages wound up inside mortgage-backed securities [MBS] or other new financial products…–including derivatives that entailed betting on the directional movements of the MBS, which were derivatives themselves.” (Lemann 2019, 179-80)

   “Before deregulation, the federal government regularly inspected the institutions that made mortgage loans…After deregulation, much of the mortgage system moved outside the government’s purview. In theory, private ratings agencies were supposed to check on the quality of the mortgages that were bundled and sold as derivatives, but in practice, the agencies, which were paid by the Wall Street firms they were supposed to be judging objectively, had notoriously easy standards.” (Lemann 2019, 180)

   “In the 1990s the big commercial banks had pushed hard for the end of Glass-Steagall restrictions because they wanted to be able to participate in the new markets where the investment banks were making so much money. Now that they had succeeded, they had special advantages…[as they] could use their customers’ federally insured deposits as capital to trade in the markets–but the investment banks couldn’t take deposits. To keep up…they stepped up their borrowing [to be able] to keep playing at the highest levels in the derivatives markets. Unregulated over-the-counter derivatives were growing…but there was no [effective] system for monitoring how much institutional risk the investment banks were taking on….Between 2000 and 2007, Morgan Stanley, for example, increased its debt-to-capital ratio by 67 percent, to forty dollars borrowed for every dollar in reserve.” (Lemann 2019, 180-1)

   American banks argued “that any attempt by the government to impose restraints on them would force them simply to transfer most of their activities somewhere else, such as…London [or] Hong Kong.” (Lemann 2019, 205)

   “In late 2007 Morgan Stanley reported a $9.2 billion loss on a single trade–[likely] ‘the single greatest proprietary trading loss in Wall Street history.’” (A Morgan Stanley star trader “had made a very big bet” on the subprime mortgage market.) (Lemann 2019, 205-6)

   “[F]inancial assets based on subprime mortgages, if the mortgages themselves went bad, had the potential to take down the investment banks too. The investment banks had the potential to take down the whole financial system. The financial system had the potential to take down the economy, throwing millions of people all over the world out of work…[In fact,] In March 2008 Bear Stearns, one of the big investment banks, collapsed because of its exposure to subprime mortgages. The Federal Reserve arranged for J.P. Morgan Chase to take it over at a bargain price. And six months after that, another big investment bank, Lehman Brothers, went bankrupt for the same reason….For one terrifying week in September 2008 it appeared [that Morgan Stanley would also] go out of business.” (On September 16, 17, and 18, Morgan Stanley’s stock price fell by 28 percent, 42 percent, and 46 percent, respectively.) (Lemann 2019, 207)

   Morgan Stanley “found a rescuer in Mitsubishi, the giant Japanese financial and manufacturing company. It agreed to pay $9 billion for a 21 percent ownership stake in Morgan Stanley. The news of that arrangement persuaded the government to allow Morgan Stanley to stay in business as an independent company. In return, both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs agreed…to reconstitute themselves legally as commercial banks…which meant that…they would be regulated by the muscular Fed rather than the timorous SEC.” (Lemann 2019, 209)

   To secure Morgan Stanley and other financial institutions, “The Fed extended trillions of dollars in emergency low-interest loans…; Morgan Stanley got the most of any firm in the world, $107 billion….In the reregulation of the financial system that followed the financial crisis, Morgan Stanley was designated a ‘systemically important financial institution,’ meaning that the government was essentially guaranteeing that it would stay in business and in return was going to subject it to much stricter controls….[As a result], government employees are permanently stationed on Morgan Stanley’s trading floor…” (Lemann 2019, 209-10)

   (In 2008, the government also provided needed capital to auto companies to prevent failures–GM and Chrysler were particularly at risk. In 2009, Obama forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy. “Chrysler wound up being sold to Fiat, the Italian auto company; GM wound up being temporarily owned by the government and then made into a reconstituted public company. The advantage of bankruptcy was that it functioned as a kind of…trump card: all existing arrangements, with shareholders, bondholders, unions, suppliers, and dealers, lost their force and were open to unilateral revision.” “[T]he Democrats were still the party of labor, as diminished as labor was, and this was especially important in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, all of which Obama had carried. In the restructuring, autoworkers’ jobs and wages were protected, and the funds to pay for retired autoworkers’ health benefits got an atypically merciful treatment.” (Lemann 2019, 213-4, 215))

   Despite the financial crisis, there was no “great shift in economic power” away from finance. “A handful of large financial companies, including Morgan Stanley,…controlled a higher share of the country’s capital than ever before: more than half of all bank assets were in the hands of the top half dozen firms. The pools of investment capital that were the banks’ major customers kept growing, too, and they looked to the markets to provide high returns, not social stability.” (Lemann 2019, 211)

   (A devastating effect of the 2008 financial crisis is reflected in the fact that in 2017 the US “had four hundred thousand fewer homeowners than in 2006, although the population had grown by some eight million households since then. Homeownership rates reversed their historic pattern of steady increases, shrinking from 69 percent in 2004 to less than 64 percent in 2017….Families headed by Millennials, who entered adulthood during the Great Recession, still have 34 percent less wealth than previous generations.” (McGhee 2021, 74))

-The “Transaction Man mentality” of modern finance leads to a denigration of government and institutions in general. The US “keeps reacting to troubles produced by the deterioration of its institutional life by embracing further deterioration. In polls, faith in the core institutions of American life–government, business, religion, public schools, news organizations, the legal system–has been falling for decades. In response, we persist in thinking about solutions that would continue to weaken these institutions…We want politics and government to be taken away from career professionals, charter schools to replace traditional public schools, higher education to take place online at home, journalism to be turned over to citizens, religion to become informal and deritualized.” (Lemann 2019, 254-5)

-In the debate between government regulation and unregulated market forces, it’s informative to examine the evolution of Alan Greenspan’s statements:
   1997: “No market is ever truly unregulated. The self-interest of market participants generates private market regulation.” (Meaning that analysts and investors were sufficient to keep banks in line and that the government should more or less stay out.)
   2000: “It is largely counterparty surveillance which is our primary source of regulation.” (Meaning that the banks could be trusted to scrutinize one another. He implored Congress not to allow good intentions to spawn damaging policies that would sap vitality.)
   2008, Before the crisis is clear: “It is remarkable how much trust we have in the pharmacist who fills the prescription ordered by our physician,…[o]r the trust we grant automakers that their motor vehicles will run as certified. We are not fools. We bank on the self-interest of our counterparties with whom we trade to foster and protect their reputation for producing quality goods and services.” (The philosophy that Greenspan applied to Wall Street was akin to dismantling the Food and Drug Administration, figuring one could count on the decency of the corner pharmacist to protect Americans’ health, and never mind that the modern-day pharmacist was likely part of a conglomerate that bought and distributed its products as part of a globalized supply chain answerable to stock market investors, with the interests of the customers but one consideration among many. The banking system was run by chief executives such as WaMu’s Killinger, who could sell stock options today and remain stunningly wealthy long after the decisions that pumped up the stock prices led their companies to ruin. The long-term interests of a given institution and the immediate-term interests of the people running it often pulled in opposite directions.)
   2008, After the crisis is clear: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” (Greenspan had allowed leverage to build up to deadly proportions on Wall Street, while the very people he counted on to behave properly looted the financial system. Merrill Lynch, for example, didn’t adequately ensure AIG’s ability to pay its debts.) (Peter S. Goodman, Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy, Times Books, New York: 2009.)

Background: International Trade
-Significance: International trade isn’t as important to the US as it is for other countries. (“In 2017, exports of goods and services from the US made up just over 12 percent of its gross domestic product.”) If Bangladesh “lost the ability to sell labor-intensive goods, mostly clothing, on world markets the country might quite literally suffer mass starvation.” (Krugman 2020, 243)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/258779/us-exports-as-a-percentage-of-gdp/

-Countries Benefit: Trade economists dispel common myths with the following observations: (i) “Trade generally benefits both sides of the transaction, whether you run a deficit or a surplus (although it doesn’t necessarily benefit everyone inside each country).” (ii) “Even low-productivity countries can benefit from trade by concentrating on the things they do least badly…” (iii) “[L]ow-productivity countries necessarily offer their workers low wages, but this doesn’t hurt richer countries, since those low wages allow them to buy labor-intensive goods cheaply while producing other stuff.” (Krugman 2020, 243-4)

-Evolution to Rules-Based System: “[T]he current world trading system is one of the triumphs of international diplomacy. Before World War II, countries imposed tariffs (taxes on imports [paid by the importing companies]) and quotas limiting imports whenever they felt like it, usually claiming to be acting in the national interest but often serving domestic special interests too. After the war, however, more and more of the world joined a rules-based system in which nations negotiate tariff rates with each other, and eventually established quasi-judicial procedures to settle disputes when one country accuses another of breaking the rules.” (Krugman 2020, 244)
   Promote Prosperity and Peace: “This system was created in the belief that it would make the world richer. But that wasn’t all: it was also intended to promote peace. For the American statesmen who created the modern world trading system, notably Cordell Hull, FDR’s long-serving secretary of state, believed that commerce helped secure peace as well as prosperity. So the world trading system was part of the whole set of postwar institutions, like NATO and the UN, that did indeed seem to help the world avoid huge wars. And meanwhile, the trading system gradually created a world not of perfectly free trade, but of low tariffs on most manufactured goods.” (Krugman 2020, 244)

-Presidential Discretion to Limit Special Interests: “[US] trade law was designed to constrain special-interest politics in Congress–and achieved this by giving huge discretionary authority to the president. So Trump is in a position to wreak a remarkable amount of havoc in the world trade system.” (In other words, a critical goal of international trade agreements “is to protect us from ourselves: to limit the special-interest politics and outright corruption that used to reign in trade policy.”) (Krugman 2020, 245, 246)
   Intra-Country Group Conflict: “Some background: contrary to what some seem to believe, textbook economics doesn’t say that free trade is win-win for everyone. Instead, trade policy involves very real conflicts of interest. But these conflicts of interest are overwhelmingly between groups within each country, rather than between countries. For example, a trade war against the EU would make America as a whole poorer, even if the EU didn’t retaliate (which it would). It would, however, benefit some industries that happen to face stiff European competition.” (Krugman 2020, 246-7)
   Smoot-Hawley: “And…the small groups that benefit from protectionism often have more political influence than the much larger groups that are hurt. That’s why Congress used to routinely pass destructive trade bills, culminating in the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930: enough members of Congress were bought off, one way or another, to enact legislation that almost everyone knew was bad for the nation as a whole.” (Krugman 2020, 247)
   (US trade policy went beyond economics as it “damaged the world as a whole. Most notably, in the years after World War I, America demanded that European nations repay their war debts, which meant that they had to earn dollars through exports–and at the same time America imposed high tariffs to block those necessary exports.”) (Krugman 2020, 254)
   Exporters: “In 1934, however, FDR introduced a new approach to trade policy: reciprocal agreements with other countries, in which we exchanged reduced tariffs on their exports for reduced tariffs on ours. This approach introduced a new set of special interests, exporters, who could offer countervailing power against the influence of special interests seeking protection.” “And these [trade agreements] would be subject to up-or-down votes, reducing the ability of interest groups to buy themselves special treatment.” (Krugman 2020, 247, 255)
   WTO: “FDR’s reciprocal agreement approach led to a rapid unwinding of Smoot-Hawley, and after the war it evolved into a series of global trade deals, creating a world trading system that these days is overseen by the WTO. In effect, the US remade world trade policy in its own image. And it worked: the global deals that evolved from the reciprocal tariff approach greatly reduced tariff rates around the world, while setting up rules that constrain countries from backtracking on their commitments [except under certain conditions].” (Krugman 2020, 247)
   Flexibility: Accordingly, as “the creators of this trading system knew that it needed some flexibility to remain politically viable”, “countries were granted the right to impose new tariffs under the following conditions…: [i] Market disruption: a sudden surge of imports too fast for domestic producers to adjust to, in which case they could be given some breathing room; [ii] National security: making sure you’re not dependent on potential enemies for crucial goods; [iii] Unfair practices: tariffs to counter, say, subsidized exports; [iv] Dumping: when foreign firms seem to be selling goods below cost in an attempt to establish market dominance.” “And in the US the power to impose these special-case tariffs was vested in the executive branch, on the understanding that this power would be used sparingly and judiciously.” (Krugman 2020, 251-2, 255)
   Trump Abuses Flexibility: “Past presidents have used their authority to impose tariffs, and not always for the best of reasons. Even Obama imposed a temporary ‘market disruption’ tariff on Chinese tires. They have always, however, been circumspect: their tariff actions were limited, and the economic basis for their actions was at least vaguely defensible. But Trump has gone ahead and imposed tariffs using the national security argument, in a context that makes no sense. There is no coherent argument about why imports of Canadian aluminum pose a national security threat…In fact, his administration is barely even trying to pretend that real national security concerns are at work.” (Krugman 2020, 252-3)
   Trump’s inappropriate use of special-case tariffs has made the US “an unreliable partner, a nation whose trade policy is driven by political cronyism, and which is all too likely to default on its promises whenever it’s convenient.” “In the past, countries signing trade agreements with the US believed that a deal was a deal.” (Krugman 2020, 256)

–2024 Trump Proposal: A broad increase in tariffs on all imported goods isn’t an industrial policy — and it’s regressive. (Importers pay tariffs to their government; and most economists agree that the bulk of tariff costs are passed on to consumers. Therefore, the burden of tariffs essentially falls on US workers and consumers.) Does Trump even understand “that most stuff is made out of other stuff, so it’s not even clear that taxing imports does systematically advantage domestic producers.”
  “What we can know is that the general tendency of a flat tax on all imports is to advantage American producers of primary components, but to hurt American exporters of complicated machines. We’d be making [say] fewer cars, but more fan belts. More steel and aluminum, but fewer airplanes.”
  “Whether or not you believe it’s the case that 19th century tariffs helped the United States move up the value chain, what Trump is proposing would be the reverse — a move down the value chain that reduces productivity and wages for no reason.”
   Trump’s Tariffs Won Votes Not Benefits: “Irrational nostalgia is a powerful force in politics, and a lot of people erroneously believe that the poorer past was richer. David Autor and his co-authors have a new paper out about how Trump’s tariffs helped him win votes in trade-exposed heartland communities, even as they delivered no economic benefits.” (“Most studies indicate that the price of  [former president] Trump’s tariffs have been primarily born by American consumers.”) “The first Obama-Trump crossover voters I met in the 2016 cycle lived in Bucksport, Maine, and they told me they thought he would bring the town’s shuttered paper mill back to life by cracking down on imported paper from China. Trump won the town. The paper mill did not reopen, and in 2020, he won the town again.”
   “Most people think…that Trump flip-flopping the GOP away from its Reagan-Bush [Sr.]-Bush [Jr.] free trade positions helped him pick up votes in the Midwest. So Biden has mostly kept Trump trade policies in place, which has induced Trump to raise his ambitions in an effort to outflank Biden. And what he’s stumbled on is an idea that, if explained properly to the American people, would be politically toxic. This isn’t a huge regressive tax increase that will finance useful public services — it’s a huge regressive tax increase that will partially offset the cost of tax cuts for the rich.” (6 Feb. 2024)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-middle-class-tax-hike
   During 2018 and 2019, the Trump administration “imposed several rounds of tariffs, amounting to an $80 billion tax increase on $380 billion worth of imports (based on 2018 values), ranging from thousands of products from China to steel and aluminum and washing machines and solar panels. Other countries responded by imposing retaliatory tariffs of their own. The Biden administration has retained most of the tariffs, save for narrow exemptions or changes to certain steel and aluminum tariffs and washing machine and solar panel tariffs. Using the Tax Foundation Taxes and Growth Model, we analyze the effects of tariffs on the US economy. Tariffs damage economic well-being and lead to a net loss in production and jobs and lower levels of income. Tariffs also tend to be regressive, burdening lower-income consumers the most. According to the Tax Foundation model, the Trump-Biden tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.21 percent, wages by 0.14 percent, and employment by 166,000 full-time equivalent jobs. Other countries imposed retaliatory tariffs on US exports, which we estimate will further reduce US GDP by 0.04 percent and eliminate 29,000 full-time equivalent jobs.” (7 July 2023)
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/tariffs-trump-trade-war/
-Biden’s Trade Policy Inconsistent With His Worldview: Biden’s general approach on trade can be described as Trump-lite. “He suspended some of Trump’s tariffs but left others solidly in place. He stuffed his signature Inflation Reduction Act with numerous ‘Buy American’ requirements offensive to US allies.”
   “Trump’s worldview is of America as fortress. Biden’s is not. Biden recognizes that what happens beyond America’s borders, as in Ukraine and Gaza, is vitally important to the US. His economic nationalism [by resisting US Steel’s acquisition by the Japanese firm Nippon] is out of place with the respect he purports to show for American allies.”
   “The great lesson of the 1930s and ’40s was that trade was important beyond its economic aspect — it was vital to international security. The international economic crisis and World War II were successive acts in an interrelated nightmare, first trade barriers and currency wars, then worsening depression, aggressive nationalism and shooting war.”
   “It did no good to bankrupt rival nations, as the allies, led by France, attempted with Germany after World War I. Germany did not respond well. It did no good to enact protective tariffs because other nations would surely retaliate — but the US Congress did so anyway, enacting the Smoot-Hawley tariff (over the protests of more than 1,000 economists) in 1930, worsening the Great Depression.”
   “After World War II, the victors — led by the US — reckoned from bitter experience that the catastrophe of the war had its seeds in the economic nationalism that preceded it. The allied effort to build a new international order included not just political safekeeping organizations such as the UN and military alliances such as NATO but also economic collaboration such as the World Bank, the IMF and Bretton Woods.” “Preventing international depression was just as important as preventing war.”
   “Economists today are just as persuaded as in 1930 that trade, in general, makes all countries richer, albeit those affected in specific industries merit assistance and retraining. In recent decades trade has achieved a miracle, helping to lift millions in the developing world out of poverty.” (The New York Times, It Hurts to See Biden Imitating Trump on Trade, 21 March 2024)

2020 Coronavirus Pandemic: US Economy Saved By Govt
-Before the pandemic hit in a big way in March 2020, the US economy was doing fine. Then an outside force “turned the world upside-down.” Accordingly, there was great concern about the ripple effects. “Restaurants can’t pay waiters when they have no customers. Waiters can’t pay rent when they have no jobs. Landlords can’t pay their mortgages when their tenants don’t pay rent. Banks can’t make new loans when borrowers stop making payments. And so on and so on, until what began as an isolated crisis caused by a specific set of circumstances has turned into a general pullback in activity across the economy.”
   “Except that never really happened this time. Evictions, foreclosures and bankruptcies all fell [in 2020].” (For example, “80 percent of tenants paid rent on time [in] May [2020], and 95 percent paid by the end of the month — both comparable to [2019], despite an eviction moratorium that lowered the stakes for nonpayment.”) “The financial system…did not collapse. Perhaps the most shocking statistic[:] In what was, by many measures, the worst year since at least World War II, Americans’ income, in aggregate, actually rose.”
   “How is this possible? Because of the other reason this recovery is different: the federal government. Counting all the various Covid relief packages passed under two presidents, the US has now pumped more than $5 trillion into the economy. That dwarfs not just what the US has spent in any previous recession, but also the aid provided in almost any other large country.”
   “[T]he federal government stepped in to ban most evictions and made it easy for borrowers to delay payments on their mortgages and student loans. It expanded access to…student lunch programs and other emergency relief programs. The Federal Reserve bought hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds to keep credit flowing and avoid a repeat of the 2008 crisis. Most important, the government gave people…[l]ots of money. By April [2021], the typical middle-class family of four had received more than $11,000 through successive rounds of direct payments. That doesn’t include the expanded child tax credit that was part of the [$1.9 trillion Covid] aid bill[,] [that Congress passed in March 2021], which is worth up to $3,600 per child.”
   “[U]nlike in virtually every other recession on record, millions of people lost their jobs, but they didn’t have to stop spending. More than anything else, that is what…avert[ed] a downward spiral….Indeed, American households are, on average, in the best financial shape in decades. Debt levels, excluding home mortgages, are lower than before the pandemic. Delinquencies and defaults are down, too.” (“Averages, of course, don’t tell the full story. The wealthy, and even the merely affluent, have done exceedingly well…”)
   “The lesson of both this crisis and the [2008] one is that policy matters. In the [2008] recession, an initially fairly robust response petered out too quickly, leading to a decade of stagnation. That hasn’t happened this time, but it still could.” (The New York Times Magazine, 23 May 2021, 50-51, 69)

Jeffrey Rudolph, a college professor, was a regional representative of the East Timor Alert Network and presented a paper on its behalf at the United Nations. He was awarded the prestigious Cheryl Rosa Teresa Doran Prize upon graduation from McGill University’s faculty of law; has worked at one of the world’s largest public accounting firms; and, has taught at McGill University. He has prepared widely distributed quizzes on Israel-Palestine, Iran, Hamas, Terrorism, Saudi Arabia, US Inequality, the US Christian Right, Hezbollah, the Israeli Ultra-Orthodox, Qatar, China, and Egypt. These quizzes are available at, https://detailedpoliticalquizzes.wordpress.com/

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