Partial Readings: Innovations in Corporate Welfare
Partial Readings: Innovations in Corporate Welfare
Partial Readings: Innovations in Corporate Welfare
Innovations in Corporate Welfare
Following the economic collapse of 2008, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi turned his acerbic pen to Wall Street financiers and their political allies, calling Goldman Sachs ?a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,? and Alan Greenspan ?the biggest asshole in the universe.? In his new book, Griftopia, Taibbi provides an extended analysis of the ?grifter class?made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding.? Chris Lehmann, reviewing Griftopia for the Nation, reminds us that despite Taibbi?s moral indignation, this is not a new story: ?[Throughout] the nation?s history, the lords of finance have not hesitated to ransack the economy during a national emergency.? Our own predicament, however, is not without its novelties:
The chief distinction between the present Gilded Age and its nineteenth-century forerunner is that the lines of extortion are reversed. Whereas Morgan and other private bankers used their own ample access to credit and gold reserves to shore up the public treasury on the most favorable terms they could dictate, now capital-starved lending institutions turn on one another in the scrum for government bailout money.
Not all state capitalisms are alike??and,? as Taibbi writes, ? in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch.?
A Slippery Slope, Greased with Money
Meanwhile, at Commentary, William Voegeli announces that ?Americans Don?t Hate the Rich? (Taibbi and Lehmann being, presumably, deficiently American). Voegeli accuses Democrats both of not caring for the poor (??the Democrats? craven and feckless decision not to go to the voters in November as the champions of a tax increase on well-to-do families??) and of caring about the poor, or ?the modestly compensated,” too much. In fact, their calls for progressive taxation threaten everyone:
I have an unproven, untested, and perhaps untestable hypothesis for why so many middle- and working-class Americans confound liberals by siding, often angrily, with the Stinking Rich against the Beneficent Reformers. It is [because] the trickle-down theory, in which tax increases supposed to be confined to the prosperous are going to wind up imposed on the precarious, is more broadly applicable and resonant. In this view, the ?principle? that rich people should be forced to surrender some of their wealth, just because they are deemed to have too much, is eventually going to justify policies that force non-rich people to surrender some of their wealth, just because.
It’s hard to say exactly what ?broadly applicable and resonant? means, but one can test if trickle-down economic theory did what it promised to do. As the wealthiest Americans became even wealthier (and were taxed less) over the last three decades, income stagnated for the rest. Poverty rates are up. Low interest rate loans from the Fed to large banks have failed to ?nudge? those banks into loaning it to stimulate the economy.
What is unproved, and unprovable, is Voegeli?s fantasy of punitive taxation?the Hayekian slippery slope where the plutocrat?s paranoia takes flight. Most Americans might not hate the rich; but at least some of them love taxes.
In the United Kingdom, students are letting their displeasure with the government of Cameron and Clegg, ?men of wealth and privilege whose birthright had eased their way to the top,? be loudly known. Large protests on December 9 against proposed tuition fees for British universities turned destructive, and were then violently suppressed by the police.
The following day, administrators at the University College of London brought a more than two-week long occupation, involving 200 students, to an end. At the London Review, Joanna Biggs evokes the sense of deep disappointment, and the still living hopes, that had led to the occupation:
By the entrance to the occupied Jeremy Bentham Room are the remains of an earlier vigil, all melted candles and wilting roses, Diana-like, with slogans among the tea lights: ?Cedric Diggory Was Murdered,? ?Albus Dumbledore Was a GREAT MAN? and ?EDUCATION: The Fourth Deathly Hallow?. This is the generation who grew up reading about a turreted boarding school called Hogwarts, where Harry Potter, a suburban boy from Privet Drive, could be taught to defeat Voldemort; and likewise it seemed possible for any suburban girl in Blair?s Britain, if she kept her head down, did her Sats, her GCSEs, her ASs, her A2s, to go to university and so get a good job ? or at any rate a job. They?d been told education is all there is, and now it?s been taken away. The UCL occupation has been visited by local schoolchildren, including a contingent of sixth formers from Camden School for Girls; when these nicely brought-up girls wrote to say thank you, they were rather breathless: ?It was inspiring,? they said. ?I want to come to UCL.?
Coordinated strikes of thousands of inmates at several Georgia state prisons, which began on December 9 and lasted about a week, have garnered far less attention than the protestors across the pond. The strikers’ demands included ?a living wage for work,? ?educational opportunities,? ?decent health care,? ?an end to cruel and unusual punishment,? ?decent living conditions,? ?nutritional meals,? ?vocational and self-improvement opportunities,? ?access to families,? and ?just parole decisions.?
The strike was ?assembled largely through a network of banned cellphones,? and maintained nonviolent discipline. One organizer warned that ?the next protest will be violent,? but another plans to ?go to the law library and start…the paperwork for a [prison conditions] lawsuit.?
At the Boston Review, Lance Tapley reports on the rapid proliferation of ?supermax? prisons, which make ample use of solitary confinement. ?Although the roughness in what prisoners call ?the hole? varies from prison to prison and jail to jail, isolation is the overwhelming, defining punishment in this vast network of what critics have begun to call mass torture.?
A series of articles in the latest issue of the American Prospect also takes up America?s prison problem. Writes Rebecca Ruiz,
Today, nearly 1 percent of the American adult population is imprisoned — a rate unprece-dented in this country?s history. A staggering $68 billion is spent annually on the country’s local, state, and federal corrections systems. This ?investment? in public safety has fundamentally transformed American society, removing a disproportionate number of nonviolent minority offenders from their communities while diverting much-needed taxpayer money from critical social programs. Most of these offenders will be released only to return to prison because of anemic re-entry efforts and policies.
In recent years, these and other grim statistics, as well as enormous state and federal budget deficits, have persuaded even the staunchest advocates of incarceration to reconsider how America handles crime and punishment. We can no longer justify the cost of mass incarceration or defer its moral and social consequences.
