Archive for October, 2010
Friday, October 29th, 2010
American Math: Where 74 = 19,000,000
In the United States in 2009, there were 151 million people who received wages. As reporter David Cay Johnston has begun to explain, there is a rather amazing collection of statistics being kept in this crucial area by the Social Security Administration.
Johnston explains some of the shocking, if not at all surprising, facts revealed by a bit of analysis:
[These statistics] do give us a stunning picture of what’s happening at the very top of the compensation ladder in America.
The number of Americans making $50 million or more, the top income category in the data, fell from 131 in 2008 to 74 last year. But that’s only part of the story.
The average wage in this top category increased from $91.2 million in 2008 to an astonishing $518.8 million in 2009. That’s nearly $10 million in weekly pay!
You read that right. In the Great Recession year of 2009 (officially just the first half of the year), the average pay of the very highest-income Americans was more than five times their average wages and bonuses in 2008. And even though their numbers shrank by 43 percent, this group’s total compensation was 3.2 times larger in 2009 than in 2008, accounting for 0.6 percent of all pay. These 74 people made as much as the 19 million lowest-paid people in America, who constitute one in every eight workers.
And remember: This comparison includes federally taxable wages only. It says nothing about stock options, expense accounts, or benefits.
And single-year wage data also say nothing about wealth distribution, which, in a capitalist paradise like the United States, is far more unequal than the income structure.
Finally, I would invite people to just goggle these stats. Contemplate, for instance, the pyramidal structure of the wage system. By far the most densely populated wage segments lie at the low end of the scale. And the slots get almost precisely less-filled as they ascend into the unconscionable stratosphere.
Likewise, one might examine these numbers and ask “our” politicians why the fuck they never shut up about the so-called “middle class.” Aren’t the bottom and the top really the overwhelmingly important issues? And, even without knowing the facts Johnston discusses, aren’t people thirsty for some leadership and meaningful choice in this area?
Alas, few topics are more off-the-table in our market totalitarian society. The mass media are owned by corporate capitalists who enrich themselves by serving the other corporate capitalists who are the sponsors of their fare. The ruling (R) v. (D) junta, the money-grubbing Business Party duo-mono-poly, a.k.a. our “serious” policians? The same.
Thursday, October 28th, 2010
Use-Value: A Critique of Capitalist Bias
Chuck Marx opened his magnum opus, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, by delving into commodities, by which he meant products produced in order to generate monetary profits for those spending the money to have them produced. In his painstaking dissection, Marx hoped to make it clear that, in order to make good democratic sense of capitalism, one has to be careful to maintain a distinction between the capitalist’s and the ordinary citizen’s way of looking, thinking, and talking.
As Marx explained, commodities come into existence in order to enrich capitalists, but, in the process, they must also retain some degree of “use-value,” or usefulness to the end purchaser. Despite capitalists’ ability to create and exploit irrational assessments of usefulness among prospective product purchasers, pure “exchange-value” was not enough to turn the trick. Capitalist products have to be at least somewhat useful to those who would buy them.
Why start with this seemingly arcane and even trite point? I’ve always thought it was Marx’s way of underscoring the importance of seeing just how partial and peculiar the capitalist’s perspective is. Just as capitalists must deliver some kind of use-value in order to get back the exchange-value they crave, so must every citizen trying to fathom the impact of capitalists and capitalism remain conscious of the peculiar motives and biases of those who proffer commodities.
Strange, then, I think, that, despite his discussion of “use-value” and its differing meaning to workers and capitalists, Marx never offered a critique of the word “consumer.”
Perhaps this was because, in Marx’s day, “consumer” was still a specialized term within the equally specialized and (at least before Marx) thoroughly pro-capitalist discipline of political economy. As The Oxford English Dictionary explains, at least among English speakers, the first known use of “consumer” outside economics came only in 1898, in a telling source — The Sears and Roebuck Catalog.
Nevertheless, to consent to calling those whose interest in commodities lies only in their qualities as use-values “consumers” is to replicate rank capitalist bias, to allow an unexamined concept to bury the all-important dual consciousness needed to realistically track the operations and effects of capitalism, to see and label the world through profit-seekers’ self-serving, humanity-shrinking eyes.
People are product users, seekers of use-values. Only a capitalist has any business calling product users “consumers.”
Nevertheless, exactly that practice rages on, with all kinds of compounding addenda, including such hopelessly discombobulating mash-ups as “consumer culture” and “consumer society,” not least among what passes for the political left…
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010
Same as it Ever Was…
Having lost its grifting, grafting hedge-fund-running czar, and having been relieved of its financial responsibility for the skein of toxic waste dumps it has left across North America, the “new” General Motors returns its attention to the true meat of its work. Yep, billion-dollar brainwashing:
Chevy television spots from Goodby featuring voiceovers from Michigan-native actor Tim Allen will air tonight when the San Francisco Giants host the Texas Rangers at 8 p.m. on Fox.
The campaign, which employs the slogan “Chevy Runs Deep” and the brand’s iconic bowtie logo, emphasizes the Chevrolet’s long history while touting new technology and safety.
Goodby called Chevy’s heritage a “tiebreaker” in competing with other automakers and said the cars are “beautiful, productive machines.”
One commercial shows a montage of old and new Chevy trucks with dogs, Hank Williams singing “Movin’ On Over” and Allen’s lone line, “A dog and a Chevy. What else do you need?”
And some say corporate capitalism has reached its senescence…
Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Sometimes I Feel Guilty…
I stand on the shoulders of giants more than most. I am a mere intellectual gnat. To the small extent I am able to notice what I notice, it is because my friends, mentors, and loved ones suggested taking a look.
My own small additions to that tradition are mainly affirmations of the degree to which existing trends are intractable and implacable: We live, from everything I can see, in a thoroughly totalitarian society, the operational success of which Stalin and Hitler could only have dreamed. The institutional pressure in this market totalitarian society never stops or even pauses. Not of its own accord, certainly. And, as it rolls us all on down the road toward the historical cliff, it has 99.8 percent of even its would-be critics bamboozled.
Advertising, which has already arrived and must arrive virtually everywhere else — shopping carts, urinals, the entirety of electoral debate — is now coming to SCHOOL LOCKERS.
If they come into decent existence, our grandchildren will be stunned that we sat by and watched this onslaught happen.
[Special Hat Tip: Douglas Pressman]
Monday, October 25th, 2010
The Capitalist Road
China’s Stalinist capitalists continue to pitch the idea that they are presiding over an “ongoing socialist modernization drive,” that the whole shebang is merely an effort to accumulate the wealth needed to eventually make China into a worker’s paradise. 
I might entertain the possibility that this claim is anything but a smokescreen, were it not for news like this:
Explosive growth of corporate marketing is a hallmark of and a vehicle for market totalitarianism/capitalist dictatorship. It is a technology that inherently stymies the communication habits and conditions required for creating democracy, socialism, and, ultimately, human survival.
Of course, so does cars-first transportation.
China’s biz-suited big boys (see any girls there?) also like that Earth-killing corporate capitalist industry quite a lot. With all the predictable effects:
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
Does the USA Really Have Public Broadcasting?
"Anchors," indeed!
One look at PBS or listen to NPR screams the answer. There are corporate sponsors on which the “public” endeavors are made to rely. These sponsors run ads in the “public” media they sponsor. In a nation of immense class and race polarity, where illegal wars, the world’s highest incarceration rate, and mass unemployment never end, we get Antiques Road Show and Nightly Business Report and the stuffedest of stuffed shirts mimicking corporate TV news on the one and only “public” television network?
In any event, the obviousness doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to analyze the beast’s behaviors.
Toward that end, take a look at this from FAIR.
