Get Out of that Wheelchair!

California's state capitol has never been known for its flowering genius, but the legislature is even dumber than usual this year. The Republicans are holding the budget hostage as usual, being totally devoid of ideas other than making govmint spend less money. There's the usual collection of demanded cuts for the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the insane. There's also cuts in lots of things that could be considered investments, which militant capitalists like Southern Cal Republican Assemblypeople are supposed to love. They want to cut:

• drug treatment programs for prisoners
• "$1 billion away from mass transit, forcing Los Angeles to put off plans for extending parts of the Expo light rail line and widening some freeways" (LA Times story).
• widening Interstate 5 at the big bottleneck on the Orange County/L.A. County line
• complete the gap in carpool lanes on the 10 Freeway in the eastern San Gabriel Valley
  
• $124 million in welfare payments to the elderly and disabled

Only the last could be considered basic maintenance (at minimally decent levels). The rest are not programs for the supposedly undeserving poor, but investments in transportation improvements that will keep the driving middle-classes from wasting millions of hours they are losing now. Same with drug treatment for prisoners, which would massively lower recidivism rates, save the state money on its self-destructive new prison-building binge, and improve thousands of lives.

But no. These representatives of their beloved middle class are too dumb to help even their own class. Forget about helping any others.

Except for Hollywood: the compromise "includes multimillion-dollar tax breaks for the film industry and other businesses."

Bye Bye Middle Class Jobs

Nice outfits! But ladies, you are WAY too expensive! We had to get rid of you and your whole damn airline too.

Why? Because you made such a huge amount of money serving our forefathers. If you worked for Southwest Airlines today, you would be making "from $23 to $58 an hour." Holy cow! 58 x 40 hours a week x 52 weeks = almost $121,000 a year. I'd like to make that much. America just can't afford pushy, uncompetitive, overpaid workers like you. So goodbye, ladies!

Ha! Though journalists like the one that said "$23-$58 and hour" are too dumb or lazy to figure it out, those "labor costs" that come from management always include health care, retirement, and any other benefits. That makes sense for management, since they need a figure for their total costs. But it has nothing to do with what their employees are actually living on.

I flew the increasingly pitiful airline United recently. As a result of a truly incompetent set of ground team reactions, much of this particular flight was heading from San Francisco to Washington DC with official assurances that we would all miss our planes to Europe, could not rebook on United, would not be rebooked by United on any other airline, would not have our hotel funded by United, and would be staying in Washington for an unknown amount of time at our own expense. As a result of all this, I got to talking to a young flight attendant, who told me, for example, that first-year salary for an international flight attendant at United is $1600 a month, gross. It goes up to $2400 / month in the second year. To work for United, he had to move back in with his parents.

Median salaries for flight attendants vary from $30,000 to $50,000, and I doubt the maximum goes much beyond $60,000. (Some union info is here.) And flight attendants have been forced at various airlines to give back both wages and benefits. Same for pilots (over 11% pay givebacks for pilots recently at United).

Now Southwest Airlines, arguably the most successful in the business, is offering buyouts to most employees with more than ten years of service. 2000 of 9000 flight attendants would be eligible. They'll get $25,000 and some continued benefits to "retire."

This is an amazing fact about US business. The top company in a vital industrial sector thinks it cannot afford its workers with more than ten years of service It can't afford workers that in some cases will be 30 years old. It's not evil management operating on its own, but a whole system of rules, starting with the need to maintain short-term stock price and to compete with the fastest risers that means Southwest would love to have a workforce consisting entirely of 20-year-olds at the rock-bottom end of the scale. gaahh! Now at 30 the parents can start to move back in with the children they were hopefully smart enough to have when they were 12. Or live by charging their children rent - until the children turn 29 and "retire."

Yesterday brought the same kind of news about sanitation and grocery workers in New York and California. A 17% raise for trash collectors! Except that it's over nearly five years, and is thus about 4% a year, which hopefully will stay about 1.5% more than government-calculated rates of inflation. Spoiled, spoiled workers! The top salary will become something over $67,000 - in 2011. It's $57,000 or so now. These are "middle-class jobs," but they are embattled, and are noticeably connected to union militancy and the public sector - two things right-wing leaders hate.

There may be a union contract for grocery workers in LA. The LA Times story included the following information:

Currently, veteran workers' wages top out at $12.17 to $17.90 an hour. The exact pay depends on job classification, such as general merchandise clerk, food clerk and meat cutter, and how often the employee works Sundays and other shifts with premium pay.

Second-tier employees currently start at $7.55 to $11.05 an hour, depending on the job classification. Their wages top out at about $1 to $3 less per hour than those of the veteran workers.

Let's say these are actual wages. So if you are an old-line worker, and you don't work all possible overtime, and aren't right at the top, let's say you make $15.00 for a 40 hour week. How much is that for a year? $31,200 gross.

If you are a second class worker, i.e. newer (and probably younger), let's say your average is more like $10.00. That's $20,800 a year. In Los Angeles.

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez had a good column last month about the reality of these kinds of wages. So we have another vital industry sector that can't pay living wages? Where you have to move back with your parents to take the job, or live with your kid in a studio apartment if you don't?

Ben Stein's shredding of United Airlines management was probably his best New York Times column ever. I've quoted him before on levels of income inequality in the US so extreme that they should make our first reaction to incessant management complaints about unaffordable workers be to laugh out loud. Let me remind you. Here's Ben:

In 2004, the top 130,500 taxpayers — roughly the wealthiest 0.1 percent of earners in this great nation, with added family members that brought their numbers to 300,000 — had more income than the 120 million Americans at the bottom. Put another way, that sliver of the population at the top of the heap was paid, as a group, more than the bottom 40 percent of all Americans combined.

Think about those numbers, rounded to 120 thousand vs. the 120 million. Each member in the first group makes in one year what each member of the much larger second group makes in a thousand years. Or in 2007, the first group has earned since New Years' the same that the second group member would have made since the Normans invaded England in 1066.

OK, no class war here. It's just market efficiency saying we can't afford meat cutters and flight attendants making $60,000 per year, or even $30,000. The top 130,000 can't afford it. Goodbye, ladies!

Mo Rich, Mo Po

Reports by the Joseph Roundtree Foundation have found that inequality in Britain is at its highest level in forty years, and that people have noticed this. Segregation by income has increased, the BBC comment notes. The second report notes that "In 2006, 55 per cent of people thought there was 'quite a lot' of poverty in Britain. Only 13 per cent thought it would fall in the next 10 years." Fatalism about inequality is growing even faster than inequality itself, insuring that both will continue to accelerate. Unfortunately the reports do not contain a leadership self-righteousness index.

Middle Class Serfdom

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom. The book acquired biblical status on the English-speaking Right for its claim that socialism equaled authoritarian centralized planning equaled serfdom - or so the Right interpreted the book to be saying.

The inverse was also asserted as true (although, in logic, inverses of propositions do not follow from the proposition): if no socialism, then no serfdom. That has been taken to mean "if capitalism, then freedom." Milton Friedman was a famous exponent of this view, as were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and 25 years after their rise to power the belief that capitalism blocks serfdom while socialism makes it has become conventional wisdom.

Enter Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch retains personal control of News Corporation, which had revenues of around $24 billion last year. It has vast holdings in every mass media, from print newspapers to film studios, television, and satellite broadcasting. To describe just the original corner of this personal global empire, Murdoch owns nearly 30 Australian newspapers and nearly 30 Australian magazines, in addition to television stations. His presence is equally decisive in the rest of the English-speaking world, even if he does not control the same share of each national market. In the UK, Murdoch owns The Sun, covering the tabloid end, as well as The Times, now also a tabloid, but still high-end. Murdoch has powerful positions in emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. See how much time it takes you just to scroll through this list of his holdings (a list that some readers complain is incomplete).

All of this is not enough for Murdoch. For the last several months, he has been trying to buy the U.S.'s leading business daily, the Wall Street Journal, also controlled by a wealthy family, the Bancrofts.

Forget for the moment that Murdoch is a right-wing ideologue whose acquisitions often - though not always - become platforms for agitation against government-based social development, social spending, public investment, and egalitarian and inclusive politics of any kind. (You've probably heard of Murdoch's Fox News.) Forget too that Murdoch practices the Reagan-Thatcher politics that he preaches (News Corp paid 7% in taxes on revenues last year, and runs much of its revenues through offshore tax havens).

Just think about the structure. Thousands and thousands of journalists and other staffers work day in and day out to put out a high-quality paper like the Wall Street Journal. But one very wealthy mogul decides he wants it, and approaches the wealthy family who owns it. The families sit down and come to an understanding. The work and wishes of the families' "soldiers" are entirely irrelevant to the fate of the business they make. Finally it is the heads of the families that decide.

Why exactly is this NOT serfdom? Why isn't it serfdom when one man controls the fate of tens or hundreds of thousands? Why isn't it serfdom when there is no limit on what the one man wants, what he can have, what he can control? Is this not economic serfdom? Should we call it capitalism serfdom? Are we un-dumb enough to see serfdom and deregulated markets as compatible ? Are we un-dumb enough to have a real conversation about how capitalism doesn't equal freedom? I don't mean in China, but in the US, Australia, and the UK?

The richest man in France is trying to do the same thing. Bernard Arnault already owns the business daily La Tribune. He now wants to buy the country's other business daily, Les Echos. Then one company and one man will own the national daily business press in the country of France. Not serfdom?

The journalists at Les Echos have struck about this. Their American counterparts are completely silent. Do they think they have absolutely no rights as workers at these papers?

Not serfdom?

Bastille Conditions 1: American Royalism

A cause of the Bastille storming I mentioned yesterday is that the population was faced with "the ones who took without limit." The New York Times's labor and economics journalist Louis Uchitelle has a piece in today's Times on the personal satisfactions felt by today's very very rich.

The framing fact about American society is that "Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year." The first time was 1915-16, just before the U.S. entered World War I, and around 1929, right before the stock market crash.

How do people explain the return to a level of inequality as intense as that of the last Gilded Age 100 years ago, if not of some feudal past? Some would trace the inequality boom to new forms of exploitation of labor, new financial rules written by self-interested financial brokers to insure a huge personal slice of any financial action, and new economic institutions too complex for the untrained majority to understand.

Then there's the explanations offered by the rich themselves: Uchitelle cites self-satisfied tycoons like Sanford Weill, former CEO of Citibank, explaining that the wealth they own reflects the wealth they single-handedly made. A few examples:

• "very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”
• Weill is paraphrased as follows: "Harnessing entrepreneurial energy, deftness as a deal maker and an appetite for risk, with a rising stock market pulling him along, he built a financial empire that, in his view, successfully broke through the stultifying constraints that flowed from the New Deal. They were constraints not just on what business could or could not do, but on every high earner’s take-home pay."

And so on. The ideas area familiar. 1) the CEO personally created the value reflected in the risking market value of a company with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees; 2) the CEO could do this because he is a superior being; 3) superior beings deserve to live superior lives of greatly superior wealth.

This, it pains me to point out, is Sun King Philosophy.

Weill et al. are pure American ancien regime. They sound as righteous and invulnerable as Louis XIV the original roi-soleil or as Louis XVI, his less invulnerable and ultimately executed successor. The sense of unlimited entitlement is similar in both cases. It was divine right of rule for Louis XIV and the Bourbons. It is absolute market right for Hindrey and Weill.

I will leave aside two questions - that the "market" is not a natural system of object laws and of the uncertain social - and ultimately economic - value of what these folks create and focus on two others.

First, why not compare Weill to Gilded Age American tycoons rather than Louis XIV? Because Weill's social philosophy is much closer to the Sun King's than to a tycoon like Carnegie's.

“Carnegie made it abundantly clear that the centerpiece of his gospel of wealth philosophy was that individuals do not create wealth by themselves,” said David Nasaw, a historian at City University of New York and the author of “Andrew Carnegie” (Penguin Press). “The creator of wealth in his view was the community, and individuals like himself were trustees of that wealth.”

The big Progressive thinker in this piece is Andrew Carnegie. The U.S. did get rid of its Bourbons - Carnegie was careful not to become one. Now we have them back.

The second Bastille issue is the disorganized state of the voice of the Third Estate. The only criticism of our economic royalists comes in effect from the First Estate, the clergy, which in our case is a "professional-managerial class" some of which may have become quite wealthy while still worrying about the condition of the flock. For example, the democratic moment in the piece comes from the founder and CEO of Costco:

James D. Sinegal, chief executive of Costco, the discount retailer, echoes that sentiment. “Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company,” he said. “The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.”

So far in the U.S. economic royalism is being opposed by liberal minorities of the First and Second Estates, whose sensibilities are offended by the social Darwinism of Weill-style Sun King Philosophy. Nothing will change unless the Third Estate decides it should do something. That it can so decide is a central lesson of the Bastille.

The Bastille Today

It's not just the place of the 12 euro 50 cc beer. The Bastille is:
the revolt against the invulnerable ones
the ones who took without limit
the ones who ruled for centuries
the ones who had crushed all previous revolts
The Bastille is revolt with no expectation of help from anyone
revolt by those with no standing
revolt by the ones whom Oprah had never heard of
revolt by the ones who expected no acknowledgement
who had not planned in advance
who had never had meetings with potential donors
who would never obtain permission
and who showed that just when you thought nothing would ever happen it happened.

Photos: march at the little arc de triomphe by the Louvre today

No Ideas on the Right

I had lunch with my friend Celine at Le Pré Verre yesterday, just down the street from the College de France. We were talking about Royal's defeat by Sarkozy, lamenting Royal's weak Kerry-like performance. She said the socialists are old school, they have no new ideas. I said I thought the problem was almost the opposite: Royal, like Kerry, adopted the center-right's "new" ideas and confused their supporters, forfeiting their core vision in the process.

I also said the Right has no new ideas. They are all straight from the 18th century: free trade, no taxes, invisible hand of the market. And there's a big one from the 19th century: Social Darwinism. Competition is nature's way, and is the only conceivable mechanism of efficiency. Losers deserve to lose. Winners should take all, because it's more efficient.

In fact there is no utility in winner-take-all, or in gross inequality. The Right's main idea is a practical one: to be supported by the people at the top by helping them have even more. That's a very old idea, if you want to call it an idea.

Did anything happen in the 20th century to conservative thinking? There was one innovation, but it's none of the ones we are taught to see. All the stuff about how conservatives are no longer racist because they have discovered colorbindness, or about how "broken window" policing cuts crime, are nothing more than extensions of market ideology further into the social realm. Colorblindness means "free competition" as measured by standardized test scores, with bias and socio-effects ignored with the bland arrogance for which the Right is so beloved. "Broken window" policing is actually similar to ideas found among socialists about the value of caring for society and public life - of nurturing people's life-in-common, but with the Right's focus on squashing bad actors, meaning that the cure could be seen not as social programs but as forcing people to take "individual responsibility." Nothing new there that actually comes from conservative thinking - just some Darwinism coupled with bare attention to the "life world" that true conservatives going back to Edmund Burke should have had from the start.

The new conservative idea of the 20th century is actually also a throwback, but it was new in the post-World War II period: use mass layoffs all the time, whenever you need too, as a deliberate business strategy. Goodnight and good luck - no tears.

Louis Uchitelle's excellent history of this practice, The Disposable American, shows how laying off hundreds or thousands of long-time, loyal, and highly competent workers had once been seen as a humiliating sign of management failure that unfairly damaged lives and communities, but was rehabilitated as executive genius and later, rewarded with multi-million dollar payouts. Making more money by liquidating workers - not a new idea, but newly acceptable. And newly brilliant. Company facing better, smarter products from other companies - including ones from Korea, Japan, Germany, Singapore, China, etc.? I know, I'll fire everybody. Wow! Good "idea"!

The acceptability of layoffs, which happened while we were sleeping, is the middle-class's Big Sleep. It's the death trip that gives life to all the others.

What is Thinking?

Thinking is not instant labeling, but we get a lot of that in the United States. For example, the BBC has a story this morning called "NY Firefighters Attack Giuliani." The gist is that a firefighters union released a 13 minute video about Giuliani's deadly mistakes during and after 9/11.

It says Mr Giuliani pushed for a faster clean-up at Ground Zero before all the remains had been recovered, and placed an emergency centre in a building that later collapsed.

It also accuses the former mayor of failing to provide working radios for firefighters, saying it made it impossible for them to learn that the Twin Towers were about to collapse.

"Virtually the whole thing goes back to him with the radios," Jim Riches, a fireman whose son was killed on 9/11, says in the footage.

"He's the guy on the top, and he's the guy you yell at. He takes the hit. And my son is dead because of it."

That's probably mostly true. But who can tell? The video's language is that of the tabloid melodrama that has become standard in the US media. It's even worse on the other side. Giuliani's campaign "denounced the footage, saying the union behind it was known to support Democratic candidates." Great, thanks for the non-refutation. Why offer actual evidence or critique why you can just label? They're majority Democrat, that proves they're wrong. Tomaytoes, tomaatoes, end of story, on to the next one on the list, like "Ecuadorian doctors 'stole twin.'"

France is not utopia, but it's still possible to use its news coverage to think. That's in part because you can get a range of opinion that doesn't have crap smeared all over most of it so you can't see what's underneath. For example, the issue of Le Monde dated July 10th had a story about a conference in Aix-en-Provence called (all translations mine) Which Capitalisms for the 21st Century?

The speakers included Nicolas Sarkozy's finance minister, Christine Lagarde, who is at least as conservatively "pro-market" as her boss the new president of France. But she attacked her British counterpart Alistair Darling for accusing the Sarkozy government of "Colbertism" - statism - saying that her government wants a "pragmatic" capitalism freed of contraints and yet reconciled with the French people. This is not a progressive or even a coherent position, but at least its basic nuances were reported. "Colbertism"? Pro-market folks are using the rhetoric of heresy more than ever. And the categories are stuck in the 18th century.

The same article, by Frédéric Lemaitre, also gives lots of space to Pascal Lamy, the head of the World Trade Organization. The WTO is covered in the US like the obvious pillar of neoliberal market orthodoxy we assume it is. Here we find Lamy, an elite French businessman, graduate of not just one (ENA) but all the grandes ecoles relevant to commerce, saying this: Capitalism is very efficient and intrinsically unjust because it rests on the exploitation of labor by capital."

Hello. Exploitation of labor? The injustice of capitalism? Can we talk?

Can we? Can we have a discussion of this in the United States of America? intrinsic injustice? exploitation of labor?

Not in the US media. And even the little magazines like the Nation will only dip their toe. The left goes out of its way to avoid saying exploitation or injustice as a sign that it is "serious" and "modern" and to be taken seriously by the mainstream, which means being taken seriously by the Right.

But back to the article. The conference discussion continues, and the author reports on the outcome, one of those consensus documents that says well capitalism is the only game on earth but there are many forms of it. It is important, it says, to orchestrate a cohabitation of many capitalisms?

Capitalism - more than just the iPhone, bad public services, crap air travel, the rule of hedge funds, job loss as central economic policy, $3,000,000, $30,000,000, or $300,000,000 executive salaries, global warming, and a 15% tax rate for investors? There's a thought.

The stakes are simple: a country can't be a force for good rather than for evil unless it can think.

Brain Scan Terminal

Anyone who thinks we're not brain dead needs to explain why this was the Los Angeles Times's lead story in its California on-line edition.

The End of Integration

Schoolboy Brooks makes it clear today that the American political Right never did want integration after all, decades of sanctimonious protest notwithstanding.

You'll recall that the Supreme Court's recent decision in the Seattle and Louisville cases banned the use of race in the pursuit of racial integration. Today Brooks unleashes all the phony sorrowfulness of which he is capable, covering world history in two hundred words while shedding crocodile tears over his claim that human nature wants to live in homogeneous groups.

It is more accurate to say that most white Americans want to live in homogeneous groups. The more "conservative" you are, the more likely you are to desire overwhelming white environments, judging by the historical evidence of conservative hostility to every single stage of the civil rights movement in this century and the last. Remember in the second Austin Powers film where Scott tries to talk back to his dad Dr. Evil and Dr. Evil blocks every sentence, then the first word, then the first syllable, then the first tiny sound? Brooks's Dr. Evil is so in charge he doesn't even have to interrupt anymore.

Brooks' permanent job is to make conservative preferences look like human nature and laws of physics, and this piece is a case in point. For years conservatives said they were just defending individual rights, and said they loved integration, said they were anti-racist, said there was no evidence that resegregation was happening, said their insistence on colorblindess wasn't causing it even if it did exist, said the best way to end racism was to stop using the category race. Now they can drop the facade. Brooks in effect confesses that they didn't want integration at all (while saying he's sorry the "dream" of integration has died). Unable to resist his normal hypocritical piety, Brooks says integration's death is just the way the world is, as opposed to the way conservatives said it outta be over and over while they tirelessly organized against every generation of racial remedy in each of the last fifteen generations.

I've also posted my own analysis of the Breyer dissent. I think Breyer offered a profound attack on the fundamental empirical and legal claims of the conservative "colorblindness" position. Anti-racists should be rallying right now, and his dissent could help. Are we really this apathetic? Failure to fix the racial divide in this century, like we did in all the other ones, is going to wreck all of our societies, as it already is.

Middle Class Race Drama Continues

Commentary continues to fly about the Supreme Court's banning of the use of race to achieve, yes, racial integration. At some point they will ban the category of speed in deciding how fast we are going. All commentary I've seen - except mine - ignores the importance of Breyer's dissenting opinion even though, by one count, he got as many votes as Roberts for his dogmatic colorblindness.

The law professor Jeffrey Rosen offers a clean schema for understanding the decision in today's New York Times's Week in Review section. He writes that since Brown v. Board in 1954 liberals have wanted an integrated society but that conservatives have wanted colorblindness. He goes on to say that Court decisions on race mean less than social momentum, that Brown mattered because society was more interested in reducing segregation anyway.

This last part is very true. There's been, for example, lots of recent work on the way the executive branch wanted to clean up the American racial act for competition with the Soviets among the black and brown peoples of the world.

The first part is only half-true. The true part is what Rosen does not emphasize: that colorblindness is proposed as a de facto alternative to integration and not as a means to it. Conservatives don't care about racial segregation and resegregation, as is shown one again in the Seattle decision by the way that all the actual social and historical data resides in Breyer's dissent.

This gets us to the untrue part, which is Rosen's suggestion that conservatives care about colorblindness as an end in itself. In fact they like it as a means to an end, which is their total freedom to live in overwhelmingly white institutions - almost all-white schools, universities, law firms, and corporate offices.

The other piece of this is that racially mixed spaces continue to be defined as lesser and unequal, starting with mixed neighborhoods where housing prices are always below their all-white equivalents. This is the spiral we're in: mixed or "minority majority" spaces defined (through white people's actual choices) as inferior; the majority of whites preferring almost-all -white spaces instead (80% white or more, even in cities that are minority white); this white majority letting the Right do their dirty work by making all-white alright.

Arianna Huffington nicely sums up a bad week in six lines.

I like this quick slap at Seattle.

But here's a reason never to read the Huffington Post (besides its obsession with celebrities): its featuring of clueless non-alternatives to right-wing practices like resegregation that claim to be liberal. Mr. Shaw says, "End housing discrimination now"! Wake up, Mr. Shaw - most white folks don't their kids to sit in a classroom for a few hours a day with black and brown kids much less actually live with them. Voluntary discrimination is exactly what three decades of conservative rule has made respectable again. The inequality boom has made residential segregation very easy, and the old racial covenants completely unnecessary.

The levels of denial surrounding this whole issue are truly clinical. The whole country needs to go on Adderall until the 2008 elections.

This is a big crossroads for the white middle-class. Will we keep circling the wagons and handing out the equivalent of guns to right-wing jurists so they can kill the Indians we'll feel real bad about later? Or will we figure out we need to get rid of the wagons and actually live together, literally, right next door, up the stairs, and across the street. This would mean rebuilding "inner city" schools so that we are willing to send our kids there.

"Colorblind" is guns-and-ammo - the legal solution to the threat of "social equality" between the races that a big chunk of us have been fighting since the Civil War. Put the guns down.

A Thorough Supreme Court Ass Kicking

It is a well known fact that racism is the core of the middle class's dumbness, whether you're talking the 1830s, the 1880s, 1980s, or today. After a temporary recovery in the 1950s and 1960s, our beloved m-c got stupid again during school segregation and the great busing backlashes in Boston, L.A., and lots of other places. That is, they took their eye off the economic ball. They started to think that their biggest problem was black kids in the school down the street. Yes the long bus rides were in fact terrible - leave it to us to make desegregation as nasty as possible. But the white middle-class went way overboard, started hating public school and public stuff in general and voting for Prop 13 and starving the social services that had created the middle-class to begin with, taking their kids out of public schools and then not wanting to pay for them, and deciding to get the black people off welfare and complaining about how only Mexicans used the county hospital so why should they pay for that shit? Whoops, goodbye affordable health care for you too, pal.

Today the Supreme Court majority continued the dumbness (conservative rule requires it) by declaring desegregation programs in Seattle and Louisville schools to be unconstitutional. Everyone will focus on Chief Justice Roberts majority opinion, which did win after all. But the amazing work on the case is actually Justice Breyer's dissent, which will go down as one of the great Supreme Court opinions on race in America since Brown v. Board. Breyer offers a devastating deployment of the actual history of the desegregation efforts of the districts in question (and their enemies), a relentless evisceration of the taboo against race-consciousness based on the SC's own decisions, plus a fairly amazing survey of many many desegregation plans showing how any success depends on some kind of race consciousness, and show that anyway all that crap Justice Kennedy says they should try - they already tried it.

Read it and get your brain back. (Breyer starts at browser page 109 of 185.) The m-c would do a lot better if it lined up with this.

Yes Anna Nicole Smith WAS a big Breyer fan. There she is visiting the Supreme Court.

Rule 4

Rule 4: when you are working at the top as someone from (or representing) the middle, notice when all your effort goes into keeping the worst from happening. Then stop that.

Rule 3

Rule 3 is: Fight your enemy.

The middle class doesn't know who its enemy is. And it has no idea how to fight.

Rule 2

Rule 2 is that you can't think about the good society by thinking about a strong economy.

Here's a review of a good book that explains why.

Rule 1

Rule 1 for ending a middle-class death trip: Assume that business leaders do nothing for the sake of efficiency.

Assume they do everything for an advantage. Their advantage.

Culture War Dumbness

David "Schoolboy" Brooks outdoes himself today with a particularly desparate, silly piece blaming fears of immigration on college elites. Don't ask about the logic, which would be like looking for the Sermon on the Mount in a long dribble of uncooked batter. The basic idea is that working people don't have any real economic problems after 30 years of Republican rule that has seen zero real income growth for about 80% of the population - they just don't like the liberal cosmopolitanism of college-educated elites. The essay is an aggravating five-minute escape from any known reality here on Earth One, where Schoolboy's culture-warrior pals have been helping destroy the economic base of their beloved "regular folks" while telling them their real enemies are liberals who send money to save Darfur. Gaaah!

Schoolboy's New York Times pals wrote a good editorial on Monday that he obviously didn't read. The editorial reported that accoreding to a study by Frank Levy and Peter Temin, two MIT economists, the top 1 percent of Americans (average income, $1.1 million) took almost a quarter of the nations income, "their largest share since 1929." There's a connection between the Republican's happy inequality boom and the anger of Brooks' "nationalists," which someday may finally focus on the real cause - conservative economic policies that reward the destruction of jobs.

A better account of growing inequality appeared in the same paper on Sunday. "The orthodoxy surrounding income inequality is being undermined by research that looks at institutional issues: changes in the way the corporate world measures the performance of workers, the decline of unions, and government wage and tax policy." Doh!

And for a sad tale of the king of Clintonian economics, Larry Summers, now suprised by inequality, see a short Sunday Magazine piece. "I'm finding my way," Summers says about the effects of his own policies. Far better is an interview with the producer of "Entourage," Doug Ellin, with his jaundiced desire to exploit the dumbness of Beemer lust and related more expensive desires. He doesn't make the Schoolboy mistake of confusing the desire to be rich with a noble vision for a red-state America.

Squeeze Them While They're Young

Today's Sunday New York Times has a good front-page piece on the role private loan companies are playing in creating the current crisis in student indebtedness. Meet Lucia De Poi, for example, a first-generation college student who went to Tufts and now pays $900 a month in student loans, some to private companies at 13% interest.
College was supposed to be the gateway to the middle-class. It's increasingly the gateway to a treadmill of debt. There goes your savings for the down payment on the house college was supposed to help you buy. While we were sleeping, the middle-class forget to maintain the pipeline for its next generation of members. Doh!

Dumbness and the Fight Against It

Today's New York Times has a nice illustration of the battle for what's left of the middle-class mind. There's Paul Krugman fighting dumbness by showing how the media has turned politics into a beauty contest that prevents people from voting on the basis of issues. "listening to what candidates say about substantive issues offers a much better way to judge potential presidents than superficial character judgments. Mr. Bush's tax lies [in the 2000 campaign], not his surface amiability, were the true guide to how he would govern."

In the other corner, representing dumbness, is David "Schoolboy" Brooks, with another of his grandiloquent philosophical frameworks leading to Reaganite cliches. Painting himself as a "Hamilitonian" in an epic battle with "mainstream liberals" and populists, he concludes, "Government is really bad at rigging or softening competition. It can do some good when it helps people compete." This distinction rests on a Schoolboy contrast between job retraining, job protections, and jobs programs (where gov is bad), and portable pensions and health insurance and skill-based immigration and encouragement of marriage (where gov is good). In fact all Schoolboy does is slam programs for workers and praise programs for the middle-classes. Blue-collar is bad, white-collar is good. Programs that make blue-collar people like white-collar people are good. Schoolboy wants a world in which gated commuters are subsidized and nobody else is - a paradise of bobos, paid for by everybody else.

If we don't start catching on to this classic middle-class dumbness, were not going anywhere except down.

Which reminds me: in March I blogged about Pakistani lawyers in revolt; this past week the U.S. press has realized that the protests have spread widely enough to be threatening to the Musharraf regime.

Green Truckers in LA

One of the dumbest ideas of the past 25 years is that blue-collars folks are, well, dumb - by comparison to white-collar managers and middle-class folks in general. The implication has been that college folks were the future and the working-class was the past. The latter couldn't keep up with modernity and took up regressive positions. They were the backbone of the Reaganite anti-feminist backlash against women in the workplace - remember the stereotype of the wolf-whistling construction worker - and didn't care about the environment.

Today's Los Angeles Times has a good piece about independent port truckers coming out in support of environmental regulations. They explain why they didn't come out before, and it ain't what you've been told.

Article Begins Here:

Port drivers steer toward clean-truck program
'On this issue, we stand with the authorities,' one worker says of the push to curb pollution.
By Louis Sahagun and Ronald D. White

June 6, 2007

About 300 drivers of the dirtiest and oldest trucks serving the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex gathered in Wilmington on Tuesday to support a program that would impose stricter pollution standards on harbor vehicles.

Port authorities and environmentalists were encouraged by the strong show of support for the program, part of a plan designed to cut air pollution 80% within five years by allowing only newer, low-emission diesel trucks to work the ports.

"It's a surprising turnout," said Rafael Pizarro of Coalition for Clean Air, an advocacy group. "You don't see this many truck drivers agree on anything outside of a strike."

Many of the mostly immigrant, Spanish-speaking independent drivers who filled an auditorium at Banning's Landing stepped up to a lectern and personally urged a joint panel of Long Beach and Los Angeles port commissioners to approve the program.

The proposed clean-truck program is part of the Clean Air Action Plan, which was approved in November. The program would scrap and replace the oldest trucks, and retrofit the others, with the assistance of a port-sponsored grant subsidy.

Among the speakers was Edgar Sanchez, 48, of Long Beach who said he could not afford to clean up his rig without a subsidy. Sanchez, who is among the area's 16,000 mostly low-income drivers who service the ports, said he was emboldened to speak his mind on the issue by the widespread support the program has received from environmentalists, religious workers, business coalitions and political leaders.

"Before we didn't have the courage or the confidence to tell people how we feel out of fear we'd be fired or labeled as troublemakers," Sanchez said.

"Not anymore. We see the smoke pouring out of our trucks and we breathe it all day, every day," he said. "But we also work long hours at minimum rates. We can be fired at any moment, like slaves without a voice."

Sanchez added, "Now we have the guts and the anger to say that on this issue, we stand with the authorities."

Maria Agamenon of Long Beach, 45, spoke on behalf of her husband, Raul, a port driver of 23 years who earns roughly $7 an hour, and their three children, two of whom have asthma.

"It's sad to see how my husband is mistreated; I cry with him," she said. "He can't breathe at night. Sometimes he shares the respirator we bought for the children."



The San Pedro Bay ports spew more soot and smog than half a million cars, a refinery and a power plant combined, port authorities said. Port trucks produce 30% to 40% of that pollution, which has been linked to higher risks of cancer, bronchitis and other respiratory ailments.

Jose Rayo, 43, who has worked the port for two decades, blamed much of the area's pollution on inefficiency, which forces drivers to spend hours waiting — with engines idling — to transfer loads. Rayo, a Los Angeles resident, was among a small number of critics of the program who worried that it would "sweep away the small businessman."

"The plan opens the doors for the big trucking outfits to monopolize the port business, but who's to say they will pay fair wages?" Rayo said. "If it doesn't work out, we'll have to fight it with lawsuits."

A week ago, the California Trucking Assn., which claims 2,300 members and about 250,000 trucks across the state, said that the ports lacked the authority "to completely change our industry" as the program could.

"The California Trucking Assn. does support the objective of cleaner air and would like to see reductions in pollutions and the greening of our side of the supply, but there are two problems with this plan," said Patty Senecal, vice president of sales and marketing for Transport Express of Rancho Dominguez, who spoke on behalf of the association. "We question the legality and the constitutionality of it."

The association questioned the program's constitutionality, saying that it would illegally supercede interstate commerce laws. The group also said it was unfair to single out port trucks. Studies have shown that the average age of a California cargo truck is 12.2 years, or just seven months younger than a port truck.

But German Merino, 53, said that his 1996 Freightliner Condo, which has several hundred thousand miles on it, was a heavy polluter. "I smell the oil burning and the diesel all day, and I work 14 to 16 hours a day," the Bellflower resident said. "For 23 years I have been part of this awful system. It has to change."

louis.sahagun@latimes.com
ron.white@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-truckers6jun06,1,2593982.story

See another example of working folks getting screwed - this time, in construction.

Dumbest of Death Trips

About six months after the invasion of Iraq, around November of 2003, I had dinner with my father, who lives in Los Angeles and was in Santa Barbara for the day. He's voted Republican ever since I could remember, so I was surprised when all of the sudden he said, "I hate Bush." "Why, dad," I asked? And mentally finished the sentence - you voted for him in 2000, and he cut your taxes. Dad replied, "because he kills people for no reason."

That pretty much sums up the situation. We're still stuck in the DMPWE (Dumbest Most Pointless War Ever, though "ever" should really be "recently."). The death on all sides is disgusting, and I am sorry to have to remind us that we are going to pay and pay and pay for the dumb guys' unbelievable, heartless, brainless errors.

The only bright spot is that the press is running some good obituaries, and the LA Times had several today, including this particularly wrenching one, about the death of a perfect son, Felix Gonzalez-Iraheta from Sun Valley, CA. I call this a bright spot only because it has forced big newspapers to talk about regular folks for a change, meaning we can read about the invisible ones, the non-rich and non-famous who keep going and keep everything going at the same time. When we forget who works - quite different from who runs things - we have collectively lost our souls.

R.I.P Sgt. Gonzalez-Iraheta, and Steven Packer, and Christopher Moore, and the other 37 of you that DOD announced as dead in the DMPWE. We will honor you by getting our souls back.

Wake Up - We're Brown

There's all this focus on immi- gration, and then there's the population that's already here. The National Bureau of Education Statistics issued a good report on the racial and ethnic composition of the country's schools. Two highlights, based in part on Sam Dillon's good piece in the New York Times yesterday:

• the "minority" share of the school population has gone from 22% to 42% since 1972. In the West, whites fell from 73% to 46%. Latino enrollments went from 6% in 1972 to 20% in 2005. Black enrollments stayed about the same (14.8% to 15.6%). Rock the continent!
• Students study more now than they did then, and more kids of every race take Advanced Placement courses. For example, "in 1980, 7 % of 19th graders reported spending 10 hours a week or more on homework, but by 2002 that number had risen to 37%, more than a fivefold increase."

Anyone ready to freak out about the browning of America might stop for one second to wonder if there's link between more minority students and more studying and achievement. It's not linear, but it's fun to think about. Asian American students have an eligibility rate for the University of California that is three times higher than that of whites. A study by Dick Flacks at UC Santa Barbara showed that students of color spend many more hours a week studying and working for fee and rent money than do their white counterparts. There's more where those facts came from.

But there's a big gap between the people who vote (overwhelmingly white) and the people who have kids in public school (much less white). Stereotypes die hard, and mere facts aren't going to keep voters from voting to cut their own taxes with the excuse that those ghetto kids can't or won't learn anyway so why fix their falling-down schools?

That's too bad, because as this blog loves to point out, there's never been a middle class in the history of the world that didn't depend on good public services. Meaning roads, hospitals, schools and the rest of the new deal. So we can either vote to tax and spend and lift everybody up, or let racial suspicion continue the current decline. Plan A or Plan D - there are no other plans.

Don't be dumb.

College Admissions Blues

The New York Times ran a decent article a couple of weeks ago about how hard it is to get into college these days. The hook was the crunch at the sub-Ivies, that is, at the safety schools of yesteryear that are now over the heads of a lot of good students who at one time may have felt entitled to Princeton or Yale. Lehigh now gets ten times as may applicants as it has spaces for. Its acceptance rate has dropped from 47% to 31% in just six years. "The admission rate at Pomona, in Claremont, Calif., was about 15 percent this spring; it was 38 percent 20 years ago. Bowdoin's rate was 18.5 percent this year and 32 percent eight years ago." This crunch is taking place all over the country.

What's going on? At least two things. The American middle-class is getting torn into pieces, with income rising steady and quickly only at the very top. There is a growing divergence between the fate of someone who goes to UT-Austin with the goal of a career in marketing and someone who goes to Duke with the goal of Harvard Business School and a major corporate career. Hence more students fight for Duke and Harvard, and more are at least trying to hang onto Lehigh and the University of Rochester. A good public BA isn't the gateway to a secure and prosperous middle class life in the way that it was at least for white folks a generation ago.

Secondly, the country hasn't been expanding the number of places in high-level universities. The elite private universities have had approximately the same sized first-year classes for decades, a period in which the country's population went from 200 million to 300 million people. Public universities did expand, but didn't expand at the top or in the middle as much as they stuffed lots of new college entrants into the bottom of the pyramid, especially the community college system. By the late 1990s, community colleges had 44% of all college enrollments. States did not spend enough after 1980 to make the new seats great seats at great schools. The "senior" public campuses - Michigan-Ann Arbor, Cal-Berkeley, Virginia-Charlottesville, etc. got much harder to get into. My school, the University of California system, was supposed to make all ten campuses as good as the original flagship campus, Berkeley. All the campuses were supposed to offer elite-quality education to state's masses of qualified students, meaning top quality for all. The newer campuses have succeeded to some extent, but never with enough money and by scrimping in all sorts of ways. Class size is massively larger at UC than it is at, say, Pomona College, and that's just one difference in the student experience. So more students are slotted lower in the quality ladder, and access to the top carries even more of a premium in an increasingly stratified society. Hence the rat race at the top.

The middle classes will not rise and expand as they have in the past until they start demanding a major reinvestment in higher ed. And they will have to do it for middle classes that are more diverse racially than at any time in US history. Middle classes of America, wake up!

PS. Universities are supposed to offer objective, unbuyable research. For a good look at how independent financial analysis is attacked by corporations, see Joe Nocera's good column a couple of weeks ago.

In Memorium

Memorial Day: in memory of the lost ones, the dead ones, the ones made dead for no reason, the ones made dead by the dumbness of the living, made dead by the dumbness of the living leaders, by the dumbness of the brain-dead ones who tolerate the leaders. In memory of the ones our dumbness kills and has killed all over the green earth. May we stop digging the green earth for the bodies of the ones our dumbness killed. May we stop killing them. May we stop being so dumb before so much more time passes, and we get to the next memorial day, and the many more acres of open graves that must be dug because we are so compulsively dumb.

Dull but Important

Hilary Clinton offered a piece of a health care plan this week. The LA Times reporter didn't actually know enough to avoid saying a dumb thing - that Clinton is distrusted by the industry because she believes in big government. Actually, her 1993-94 fiasco of a health care plan was a giant circuitboard love letter to the managed care industry, offering them millions of tiny jacks to pull money out of every single wallet in the United States. So don't expect anything good from her now.

But she does say a few true things:

• Premiums have almost doubled since 2000
• the nation spends 16% of its gross domestic product on health care
• 30% of the cost increase is related to the doubling of obesity among adults during the last two decades (crap I didn't know that one - we are in serious trouble)
• and administrative costs are the highest in the world

Remember that last one. The most privatized health care system in the rich world has the highest administrative costs.

Health care needs a little public sector efficiency.

Wedge In Those Pay Gaps Everywhere!

Not content to grow inequality only between executives and employees, white- and blue-collar workers, and legal-financial elites and the ordinary middle-class, business leaders are driving a wedge between the CEO and numbers 2 and 3 in their own executive offices. Since there is nothing economically efficient about these incessant and widening gaps, they have to be explained through the pure self-interest of the very top people, coupled with a bizarre neo-capitalist culture in which creating inequality is a sign of one' s viritility and special destiny. See the article for the data and charts. See the image here for the symbolic meaning.

We are circling back to the beginning.

Dumbness about Immigration

This morning's New York Times has a front-page story about how worried business supposedly is that immigration reform will cause them labor shortages. Neo-classical economic theory says that the way to cure a shortage of something is to pay more for it. So why aren't the conventional econ-heads at the Times and in corporate America saying well we should pay more for farm labor and drywallers and dishwashers and then more people will want those jobs?

The simple answer is because our leaders put our economy on the low road 30 years ago - the low-wage road where it has come to depend on rock-bottom wages to keep prices down to keep the crap raises of most Americans flowing into the stores. Things still aren't cheap enough for our crap wages: the US has had a negative savings rate since 2005, meaning we're floating our trips to Wal-Mart with credit cards, just like the country as a whole.

We could also have a virtuous cycle - remember John Maynard Keynes and Henry Ford? We could pay more wages, giving people more money to spend, causing more demand, allowing manufacturers and growers to actually raise their prices when they needed to. Supposedly that's all now impossible in the global economy. But that in turn is because we assume it's impossible.

The LA Times had a small piece on a conference about the trouble undocumented students face when they try to continue their studies. This goes under the rubric "middle classes of the world unite" - help a foreign-born kid finish school.

We should do two things at once: 1) demand living wages in all industries, with real accounting to show that in a rich country this is indeed possible; 2) offer full public services to people who work steadily and/or grow up in the U.S. If we do (1), meaning more vulnerable econ levels will be less vulnerable, it will be easier to get the public to do (2). And much economic theory says that the value created by better-educated workers will more than pay for the cost of educating them.

Average In Michigan

Look at the nice house. See the nice couple. Everything looks very normal. But normal isn't what it used to be.

The New York Times had a good piece on what it means to be normal in America these days, as opposed to being, say, married to one of the founders of LBO pioneers (sorry, we're supposed to say "private equity" firm) KKR and serving as the president of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Average means

• earning $66,000 a year with two incomes.
• spending 1/7th of your income on interest on your consumer debt (up from 1/9th in 1980).
• owing collectively $880 billion to credit card companies, up from $8 billion in 1968 (in today's dollars).
  
• owing collectively $17.1 billion in 2006 — up from $12.8 billion in 2003,
• saving less than zero since 2005.
  

Meanwhile, back in New York, Henry Kravis's firm spent $29 billion last month buying First Data, one of the country's largest credit-card processing companies. They offered 26.4% more than the market value of the firm. But what the hell - debt in Michigan is only going to grow. Kravis is worth at least $1.4 billion personally, and that's going to grow as well.

From the Democratic Party's left: Robert Reich on sharply increasing the income tax on incomes above a million a year; John R. MacArthur saying "tariff" isn't a dirty word.

Krugman Torn On Trade

Paul Krugman has become one of the few semi-egalitarian voices on economic affairs in the major media (his New York Times colleague Bob Herbert is another, along with various business journalists at that paper like the great Louis Uchitelle). But Krugman has long been a fairly orthodox free trader in the Robert Reich mold. He's worried about the social consequences of lost manufacturing jobs and global wage competition, and yet he abhors traditional government remedies. The latter always get called "protectionism," which all enlightened people naturally hate. If you support some kind of tariff or trade restriction, you must belong to a union.

Krugman's piece on Monday shows how completely Democrats have accepted Republican free trade policy even when it paralyzes their brains. There is a "dark side" to globalization, he writes, but we can't go back to "old-fashioned protectionism." NAFTA hasn't worked for Mexico, but we can't just get rid of it. After a bit of this handwringing, he flips it around a little. We do need "labor standards," but actually these don't work.

Floundering, he settles for a nice shot at the Bush Administration, which is his speciality:

The Bush administration, by the way, opposed labor standards, not because it wanted to keep imports cheap, but because it was afraid that America would end up being forced to improve its own labor policies. So the inclusion of these standards in the deal represents a real victory for workers.

That was fun. But what what do the Democrats do when they stop attacking Bush policy as the work of selfish, inefficient crooks? In Krugman's case - nothing. He winds up changing the subject. Let's move on from trade, he says: helping workers should start with universal healthcare.

True enough. But Democrats are going to have to cough up most of the Reaganite salt-water they've swallowed over the past 25 years before they will do anything of the kind. If they could talk themselves into managing market forces - i.e. HMOs - enough to provide universal healthcare, maybe they could figure out how to keep trade from sitting on average wages for the next 25 years just like it has done for the last.

Pound a Dem on the back and see what comes up.

Moneybags

How am I supposed to feel about Chrysler being sold by Daimler to a private equity firm named after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell and led by Dubya's former Treasury Secretary? A few thoughts:

• Why can't American business make money in its flagship industry of the 20th century, automobiles? Chrysler first went broke in 1979, during the Carter Administration, and has been up and down my whole adult lifetime.
• Does innovation have anything to do with profits? Chrysler has been more creative than the other Big 3 and it hasn't helped.
• Daimler is getting $7.4 billion minus some costs for a car company it bought for $36 billion in 1998. Holy cow! How much money do you have to lose before you say "sorry, we're idiots! And not just us, but all those other executives, equity kings, and M&A lawyers who think just like us!"
• Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Gregory Zuckerman et al. have probably gotten at the real story - Cerberus the 3-headed dog wants Chrysler's auto loan business. America may not make anything anymore, but we are good at charging points.
  
• Will the business press ever stop saying "synergies and efficiencies" about mergers and acquisitions and say "monopoly power" or at least "market dominance"? The euphemisms make everybody dumb.
• Will the 3-headed dog chew Chrysler employee health benefits to the bone? Several reports say Daimler didn't want to hack the company's liabilities there. Can America afford health care for the non-rich?
• Meanwhile, Bob Herbert reports in the NYT that half of all US workers have no paid sick leave, 80% of the bottom quarter by income have none, and 86% of food service workers have none. Herbert concludes that worklife for most US workers is stuck in the nineteenth century.

He's right. And so it goes.

M. Sarkozy: Govern from the Left, or Fail

There are two pieces to the prosperity puzzle for any country in the contemporary world. The first is a flexible capacity for production, one that can adapt to changing conditions. The second is a social system that apportions resources correctly, both to minimize suffering and to keep the population secure, content, creative, and, of course, flexible.

The past 25 years has seen a never-ending focus on the first part of the puzzle and the eclipse of the second. Politicians in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Chile, Poland, Ireland, and elsewhere have focused obsessively on deregulating businesses, cutting their taxes supposedly to free up investment capital, weakening labor protections, encouraging layoffs and other formers of worker recycling. This focus has been an enormous boon to the Right in each of these countries, which has collectively found in economic flexibility a recipe for short-term business gains and political success, since the policies that serve business self-interest also serve the Right's wealthy supporters.

The other half of the puzzle - proper social systems - has been allowed to decay. The quality of social services has mostly declined in the West, even as their cost has risen. Economic insecurity is on the rise everywhere, with the Right successfully making a virtue of the necessity that follows their political victories. For thirty-five years, the bottom 80-90% of the populations of these countries - the vast economic majority - has seen their living standards stagnate or decline. The fall of the Soviet Union, which should have discredited economic dictatorship and the police state, instead discredited socialism and, more generally, social democracy and the accompanying concepts of broad-based social development. The theory of social systems has been defensive and reactive - great work has been done on the concrete effects of welfare reform and dramatic increases in incarceration rates, but little of it points to a new vision of society.

France has been a partial exception to all this, but a weak one. For special historical reasons, it has done a better job than most of celebrating high-quality public services in areas like health care and public transit, and France's are among the best in the world. Its public secondary school system, battered by racial conflict and policy confusion, remains superb.

And yet even France has been unable to explain the causal connection between a strong society and a strong economy. A terrible misunderstanding - the idea that justice diminishes efficiency - has meant that even the left believes right-wing economics to be more efficient than its own. Sarkozy would occasionally concede that the French must be “protected,” but this didn't matter because he remained, from first to last, the candidate of economic vitality and competitive winners. Until the left can make the same kind of claim, founded both in better economics and better social justice, the Sarkozys of Western countries will almost always win. The excepts to this rule - Mitterrand, Clinton, and Blair - were so compromised by conceding the Right's vision of economics that their legacies will at best be dim.

The false yet pervasive axiom is that business gives life and public services drain it away. Sarkozy's victory in the recent presidential elections will have the ironic effect of showing its limitations. The reason is simple. France is not large or dominant enough economically for it to muscle its way through the inefficiencies of conservative economics as the US has done. American conservatives from Reagan on could indulge in their completely one-sided notion of development - all business, no society - only under special circumstances. The country was already wealthy, had a huge internal market, dominates the global economic system, and had military and financial power clout to win every bargain into which it enters. American financial and political leaders could conceal declining wages, benefits, and quality of life for the economic majority with massive foreign borrowing to fund domestic deficits, similar foreign subsidies to keep interest rates low, and cheap money policies that allowed rising stock and housing prices to create temporary wealth effects for the middle classes that, in the long haul, have done poorly. The Right was also helped by its incessant attacks on both people of color (as degenerate and lazy) and on blue-collar workers (as inflexible and obsolete), for these destroyed the political standing of much of the economic majority, leaving a clear field for conservatives.

None of these options are available to France. It is a medium-sized country with a second-tier economy that has no chance of competing with the US, China, or India through deregulation. No politically imaginable amount of flexibilization will make it like the US, to say nothing of countries where manufacturing workers earn 50 euros a month or less and have no health and safety protections. Nor can it imitate the U.S. immigrant labor strategy, whereby wage levels have been steadily reduced in important sectors such as hospitality, agriculture, and construction through the use of low-wage and often undocumented workers. France cannot even compete in status-quo quality industries - It lags well behind Germany in export revenues and general reputation - though that makes sense given its highly educated workforce and excellent technological capabilities. If Sarkozy lives by the neoliberal sword he will die by it - or more accurately, France will die, while his wealthy backers do as well as their counterparts in the US, England, Mexico, and Russia.

Sarkozy's only chance for success is to dump the Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism that he has ridden to victory. There are three critical strategies here. The first is to increase funding to the economically strategic public sectors that have lagged in France. This begins with education and research, and it includes languages and cultural disciplines as well as technological ones. This strategy will require a higher-quality version of the second piece of the puzzle - emphasizing public sector activities that add value in addition to maintaining those that sustain decent life.

A second key concerns the economic side. Now that he has won by hammering the inefficient state, Sarkozy will need to hammer the inefficient business world - its rigid hierarchies, its authoritarian executives, its culture of ritual and mistrust. If Nixon went to China, can Sarkozy go to the CAC-40 CEOs and say big business, reform thyself?

A third key is racial. The campaign was disgracefully silent on racism in France, on the warehousing of immigrants and their racialized French-born children, on their far worse public services, their limited life chances, the constant exclusion and hypervisibility, the general insult to republican ideals incarnated in their everyday experience. White French folks are likely to follow their American cousins in destroying the public services they associate with brown and black folks. IF French republicanism still matters today, it will matter by offering the first Western model of cross-racial negotiation and equal development. At the moment, this seems unlikely, and Sarkozy has gone out of his way to be part of the problem. If France fixes this, it will fix its society, and rebalance its society and economy. If France cannot include its own people of color, it will continue to deteriorate economically.

The French are among the most brilliant people on earth. Let's hope that they can help their new president be half as brilliant as they are.

Duelling Dumbness

The Wall Street Journal today has an example of an increasingly common kind of piece: middle-class people who wanted to ride real-estate to riches are getting caught in the housing downdraft and trying to bail out. Many of the buyers are suing developers to get out, some on grounds of trivial non-performance (a door to a common area that turns out not to be lockable), others on grounds that they, the honest middle-income folks, didn't make enough money to make the home purchase they did and should have been turned down. "You gave me what I asked you for, but you shouldn't have. Why did you? See you in court!" It's hard to know who to root for in this one, since all parties were working every angle to cash in big. One builder spokesperson summed up the other side by saying "These are not situations where a woman bought a unit and she's now a widow and can't pay," he said. "These are people who don't want to close because they can't flip and make $100,000."

The LA Times had a piece about child care that will no doubt disappear immediately. But it shows how state funding for child care would actually help the economy by freeing up parents to work longer, take better jobs, or something similar. I bring this up because every day the news has been showing the depressing shift in middle-class thinking from public services as their platform of life-and-work satisfaction and affluence to depending on price inflation in things they own. In the 1990s they looked to stocks, in the 2000s it has been real estate. Either way the middle-class now associates their own affluence with buying something cheap that they can then sell dear. They don't associate their well-being with social development or the general welfare.

The whole scheme works for a while but not for long. It works for some but not for all. Any chance we'll figure this out in time?