There was a time, not so long ago, when telling a deliberate lie about the President of the United States was considered subversive and unpatriotic. Times have changed.
Even before President Obama completed his important, perhaps even historic speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, last week, the right wing propaganda machine began a smear campaign that libeled what he actually said and accused him of socialism, communism, and fomenting class warfare. One critic called it “anticapitalist” and claimed that it mirrored the views of the radical Weather Underground of the 1970s. Charles Krauthammer, described it as “channeling Hugo Chavez,” and Rush Limbaugh called it “a Marxist attack on America,” and “a second Pearl Harbor” (because the speech was delivered on December 7th).
Actually, the President’s main theme was “fairness” -- he used variations on this term no less than 14 times in his speech. I never thought fairness was an un-American idea. Here are some excerpts from what the President actually said:
“Today, we're still home to the world's most productive workers. We're still home to the world's most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people…Those at the very top grew wealthier from their incomes and their investments – wealthier than ever before. But everybody else struggled…For many years, credit cards and home equity loans papered over this harsh reality. But in 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We all know the story by now…And ever since, there's been a raging debate over the best way to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, restore fairness…
“But, Osawatomie, this is not just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what's at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement...
“I'm here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we're greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren't Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values or 99% values. They're American values…
“Theodore Roosevelt [in his New Nationalism speech in Osawatomie in 1910]…believed what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. It's led to a prosperity and a standard of living unmatched by the rest of the world. But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free licence to take whatever you can from whomever you can. He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest…
“Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. ‘The market will take care of everything,’ they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy – our economy will grow stronger…But here’s the problem: It just doesn’t work…We simply cannot return to this brand of ‘you're on your own’ economics if we're serious about rebuilding the middle class in this country…We know it doesn't result in a prosperity that trickles down. It results in a prosperity that's enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens.
“This kind of inequality – a level that we haven't seen since the Great Depression – hurts us all…A recent study [The Spirit Level] showed that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run…Yes, business, and not government, will always be the primary generator of good jobs with incomes that lift people into the middle class and keep them there. But as a nation, we've always come together, through our government, to help create the conditions where both workers and businesses can succeed. And historically, that hasn't been a partisan idea…This isn't about class warfare. This is about the nation's welfare. It's about making choices that benefit not just the people who've done fantastically well over the last few decades, but that benefits the middle class, and those fighting to get into the middle class, and the economy as a whole…In the end, rebuilding this economy based on fair play, a fair shot, and a fair share will require all of us to see that we have a stake in each other's success. And it will require all of us to take some responsibility.
That's how America was built. That's why we're the greatest nation on Earth. That's what our greatest companies understand. Our success has never just been about survival of the fittest. It's about building a nation where we're all better off. We pull together. We pitch in. We do our part. We believe that hard work will pay off, that responsibility will be rewarded, and that our children will inherit a nation where those values live on...”
The President ended his speech with a quote from Teddy Roosevelt: "The fundamental rule of our national life, the rule which underlies all others – is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together."
I urge you to read the full speech: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/.../full-text-barack-obama-speech...
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
Occupy a “Fair Society”
Capitalism is unfair. It’s time to re-write the social contract.
After the last of the Occupy Wall Street encampments was broken up by the police, David Carr wrote in the New York Times that "a tipping point is at hand. Regardless of how the movement proceeds now that it is not gathered around campfires, its impact on the debate could be lasting and significant. If the coming election ends up being framed in terms of 'fairness,' the people who took to the streets...will know that even though their tents are gone, their footprint remains."
Many in the news media and elsewhere have pointed out that the Occupy Wall Street movement did not have a specific agenda. It was energized by the innate sense of fairness that most of us share. Many of us are appalled by the extreme gap between the small number of people in our society who receive most of the income and hold most of the wealth (actually, the big winners represent about .01 percent) compared to the vast majority, even many in our shrinking middle class, who are struggling to make ends meet.
It's an economic picture that the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens would recognize. An estimated 25 million people are unemployed or underemployed (last week's down-tick in the unemployment rate was due mostly to 300,000 dropouts from the labor market last month). Some 50 million people, all told, have incomes that are close to or below the poverty line, including families with 17 million children. Meanwhile, it is reported that year-end bonuses on Wall Street will be sweetened with many millions of dollars in lucrative stock options for top executives.
Capitalism (in theory) has many positive and time-tested benefits. It encourages entrepreneurship, talent, and hard work; it provides rewards for meeting the needs and wants of our citizens; it uses competition to stimulate economic progress and to regulate the market place; it is a counterweight to the ever-present risk of abusive government power; and it generously rewards "merit" (or equity) -- one of the three basic principles of fairness that are rooted in our deep sense of fairness.
However, capitalism is indifferent to two other fundamental fairness precepts that are also embedded in human nature - equality with respect to our basic needs (some fourteen biological survival imperatives are identified in my book, The Fair Society), and reciprocity - our strong sense of a mutual obligation to re-pay the benefits we receive from others. These three fairness precepts are strongly supported by the emergent science of fairness (I review the research in my book), and they represent the normative foundation for the implicit "social contract" that legitimizes a successful and harmonious society.
Capitalism in practice has had a mixed record. It produces both iPads and beggars who live in homeless shelters; it is all too easily corrupted by "crony capitalism," and what economist Jamie Galbraith calls "predatory capitalism," and Wall Street's "casino capitalism;" and it is rigged to make it easy for the rich to get richer and for the poor to be trapped in grinding poverty. As the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates put it, "markets only work for people who have money." Over the course of history, deeply troubled societies with extremes of wealth and poverty have opted for one of two alternative solutions to the fundamental fairness issue - reform or revolution.
Let's talk about the reform option. What would a "Fair Society" look like? In fact, it would not be so very different from some of the stellar European "welfare capitalist" societies. (The ongoing European currency/debt crisis will in time be fixed.) Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, even Germany have achieved a better balance between the three key fairness principles: equality (providing for the basic needs of everyone), equity(rewarding merit and not subsidizing undeserved wealth), and reciprocity(a more balanced system of taxes and public service). None of these European countries is perfect, but collectively they put us to shame.
Specifically, we need to undertake a national full employment program that is committed to providing productive jobs for everyone who is able to work, and with a "living wage" not our delusional minimum wage. (This would, of course, require a sustained, multi-faceted effort, including a public-private partnership.). Beyond this, we must greatly improve the economic "safety net" for the many people in our society who cannot work, including the extreme old, the very young, and those with various "no-fault" needs, like those who are severely disabled and sick. Improvements to public services like transportation and education are also imperatives, along with repairing our deteriorating infrastructure. A commitment to providing for the basic needs of all our citizens is affordable even as we are paying down our national debt, if there were the political will to do so. (There's more on this in my book.)
Our capitalist system also needs to be reformed in order to align it more closely with merit. The model going forward should be "stakeholder capitalism." As the term implies, this is a kind of capitalism in which all of the stakeholders are empowered and can influence the way a business operates - the workers, the customers, the community, the suppliers, even government (mostly through regulations and incentives), not just the owners and shareholders who predominate in our form of capitalism. Examples of companies that practice stakeholder capitalism exist even now in our society (I describe one, the farmer-owned Organic Valley food company, in the book), and there are many more examples in other countries.
To balance the scale of benefits with a comparable obligation for reciprocity, there needs to be a top-to-bottom reform of our corrupt tax system. Yes, the rich will end up paying more, but there will also be an end to the cornucopia of tax breaks, and subsidies, and loopholes, and dubious incentives. And yes, we also have to "fix" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but not with "reforms" that are in fact a hidden agenda for privatizing and destroying these programs. Beyond this, the long-simmering idea of a broad, national public service program that asks everyone to give back to our society with their time and talents could have a transformative influence.
Finally, we need major structural reforms in our dysfunctional political system - eliminating the filibuster rule in the Senate; reducing the power of money in our politics; reforms to our election campaign financing system; non-partisan redistricting to eliminate Gerrymandering; maybe even reforms to our Supreme Court with a mandatory retirement age and adding more justices. (I know, this was tried before and it failed under FDR, but it's still a good idea.)
This is, of course, just a sketch. There are many more, perhaps even better ideas out there for what we could do to affect a major course change in our society. But none of this can be accomplished without visionary and inspiring leadership and a powerful surge of public support. What we need going forward is an "Occupy Washington" movement armed with the demand for a "Fair Society." Why not start right here.
After the last of the Occupy Wall Street encampments was broken up by the police, David Carr wrote in the New York Times that "a tipping point is at hand. Regardless of how the movement proceeds now that it is not gathered around campfires, its impact on the debate could be lasting and significant. If the coming election ends up being framed in terms of 'fairness,' the people who took to the streets...will know that even though their tents are gone, their footprint remains."
Many in the news media and elsewhere have pointed out that the Occupy Wall Street movement did not have a specific agenda. It was energized by the innate sense of fairness that most of us share. Many of us are appalled by the extreme gap between the small number of people in our society who receive most of the income and hold most of the wealth (actually, the big winners represent about .01 percent) compared to the vast majority, even many in our shrinking middle class, who are struggling to make ends meet.
It's an economic picture that the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens would recognize. An estimated 25 million people are unemployed or underemployed (last week's down-tick in the unemployment rate was due mostly to 300,000 dropouts from the labor market last month). Some 50 million people, all told, have incomes that are close to or below the poverty line, including families with 17 million children. Meanwhile, it is reported that year-end bonuses on Wall Street will be sweetened with many millions of dollars in lucrative stock options for top executives.
Capitalism (in theory) has many positive and time-tested benefits. It encourages entrepreneurship, talent, and hard work; it provides rewards for meeting the needs and wants of our citizens; it uses competition to stimulate economic progress and to regulate the market place; it is a counterweight to the ever-present risk of abusive government power; and it generously rewards "merit" (or equity) -- one of the three basic principles of fairness that are rooted in our deep sense of fairness.
However, capitalism is indifferent to two other fundamental fairness precepts that are also embedded in human nature - equality with respect to our basic needs (some fourteen biological survival imperatives are identified in my book, The Fair Society), and reciprocity - our strong sense of a mutual obligation to re-pay the benefits we receive from others. These three fairness precepts are strongly supported by the emergent science of fairness (I review the research in my book), and they represent the normative foundation for the implicit "social contract" that legitimizes a successful and harmonious society.
Capitalism in practice has had a mixed record. It produces both iPads and beggars who live in homeless shelters; it is all too easily corrupted by "crony capitalism," and what economist Jamie Galbraith calls "predatory capitalism," and Wall Street's "casino capitalism;" and it is rigged to make it easy for the rich to get richer and for the poor to be trapped in grinding poverty. As the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates put it, "markets only work for people who have money." Over the course of history, deeply troubled societies with extremes of wealth and poverty have opted for one of two alternative solutions to the fundamental fairness issue - reform or revolution.
Let's talk about the reform option. What would a "Fair Society" look like? In fact, it would not be so very different from some of the stellar European "welfare capitalist" societies. (The ongoing European currency/debt crisis will in time be fixed.) Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, even Germany have achieved a better balance between the three key fairness principles: equality (providing for the basic needs of everyone), equity(rewarding merit and not subsidizing undeserved wealth), and reciprocity(a more balanced system of taxes and public service). None of these European countries is perfect, but collectively they put us to shame.
Specifically, we need to undertake a national full employment program that is committed to providing productive jobs for everyone who is able to work, and with a "living wage" not our delusional minimum wage. (This would, of course, require a sustained, multi-faceted effort, including a public-private partnership.). Beyond this, we must greatly improve the economic "safety net" for the many people in our society who cannot work, including the extreme old, the very young, and those with various "no-fault" needs, like those who are severely disabled and sick. Improvements to public services like transportation and education are also imperatives, along with repairing our deteriorating infrastructure. A commitment to providing for the basic needs of all our citizens is affordable even as we are paying down our national debt, if there were the political will to do so. (There's more on this in my book.)
Our capitalist system also needs to be reformed in order to align it more closely with merit. The model going forward should be "stakeholder capitalism." As the term implies, this is a kind of capitalism in which all of the stakeholders are empowered and can influence the way a business operates - the workers, the customers, the community, the suppliers, even government (mostly through regulations and incentives), not just the owners and shareholders who predominate in our form of capitalism. Examples of companies that practice stakeholder capitalism exist even now in our society (I describe one, the farmer-owned Organic Valley food company, in the book), and there are many more examples in other countries.
To balance the scale of benefits with a comparable obligation for reciprocity, there needs to be a top-to-bottom reform of our corrupt tax system. Yes, the rich will end up paying more, but there will also be an end to the cornucopia of tax breaks, and subsidies, and loopholes, and dubious incentives. And yes, we also have to "fix" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but not with "reforms" that are in fact a hidden agenda for privatizing and destroying these programs. Beyond this, the long-simmering idea of a broad, national public service program that asks everyone to give back to our society with their time and talents could have a transformative influence.
Finally, we need major structural reforms in our dysfunctional political system - eliminating the filibuster rule in the Senate; reducing the power of money in our politics; reforms to our election campaign financing system; non-partisan redistricting to eliminate Gerrymandering; maybe even reforms to our Supreme Court with a mandatory retirement age and adding more justices. (I know, this was tried before and it failed under FDR, but it's still a good idea.)
This is, of course, just a sketch. There are many more, perhaps even better ideas out there for what we could do to affect a major course change in our society. But none of this can be accomplished without visionary and inspiring leadership and a powerful surge of public support. What we need going forward is an "Occupy Washington" movement armed with the demand for a "Fair Society." Why not start right here.
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