And like it or not, I have no choice.
THE ABNORMAL NEW NORMAL
“Things are more like they are now than they ever have been before.”
—Dwight Eisenhower
“They wrote the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselves.”
—Norman Spinrad
GREENHOUSE SUMMER
What supposedly began in 2008 and was or still is called the “Great Recession” was or still is not primarily a recession, nor did it begin with the fiscal crash of 2008. One might trace it back to the post—World War II reaction to the New Deal; one might trace it back to the invention of the steam engine and the resultant Industrial Revolution; but to arbitrarily trace the beginning of what is now being called “The New Normal” to a single event that occurred within the lifetime of many Americans now living and suffering the not very indirect consequences, begin with the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981 and the resulting demolishment of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization by the administration of Ronald Reagan.
Air traffic controllers were civil service workers and therefore their union, PATCO, was legally forbidden to strike. But it struck anyway, for the usual improvements in pay and benefits, but also demanding to be freed from the status of civil service workers so that their union would not be forbidden to strike.
Reagan gave the air traffic controllers forty-eight hours to go back to work and, when they didn’t obey his order, fired over eleven thousand of them, banned them from federal jobs for life, hired scabs to replace them, and had the union decertified.
I was living in New York, but at the time the strike was called I was in Los Angeles on business and preparing to fly home. I grew up in an extended family with union connections and I had been taught from an early age that ladies and gentlemen do not cross picket lines unless they have damn good reasons. I also did not need to be told that flying across the country when the air traffic controllers had been replaced by questionably qualified scabs might not really be too swift an idea for less idealistic reasons.
Still, I really wanted to get home, so I called Gene Roddenberry, who had been an airline pilot, and asked him whether he would fly as an airline passenger under such conditions, and got the answer that was not exactly unexpected, which was, “No way!”
Not just the expected answer but the welcomed answer, because I knew damn well what was at stake here. I wanted my self-interest in personal safety to back up what I knew would have to be the politically necessary decision. Because I knew that if Reagan got away with such a blatant piece of union-busting, one that also blatantly endangered airline passengers by running the national air traffic control system with quickly scooped-up scab labor, it would only be the opening round of a campaign to break the American labor movement as a whole.
You didn’t need to be a strategic genius to know that the only way to defeat this union-breaking Pearl Harbor attack would be for the AFL-CIO to call a general strike. One of my family union connections was Jerry Wurf, president of the America Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, another union many of whose locals were legally prohibited from striking. But that didn’t prevent Wurf from calling strikes anyway, because his first nonnegotiable demand was always that there would be no negotiations about anything else, including ending the strike, until it was agreed that the union would be held blameless for striking illegally.
Why didn’t the AFL-CIO do likewise? Call a general strike and set up picket-lines that the Teamsters wouldn’t cross, meaning no truck deliveries to airports or airport support facilities, until Reagan recertified PATCO, fired the scabs, forgave the strike, and negotiated settlement terms with the union like a civilized employer. A display of union power instead of union impotence.
Well for one thing, George Meany, a hardcore son-of-a-bitch who might have had the brass balls to do it, was no longer the president of the AFL-CIO. Lane Kirkland was, and he didn’t.
And for another, the Teamsters had been thrown out of the AFL-CIO for various more or less good reasons and could not be counted on to support such a strike.
And the clincher was that PATCO had been one of the only major labor unions that had supported its current destroyer Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election, leaving them out there all alone, and the Gipper knew it, hah, hah, hah.
The rest of this sad story is the long downward slide of the American labor movement into its caponized near-irrelevance in the New Normal in which we find ourselves today.
In simplified terms, the Republican Party began as a maverick third party that elected Abraham Lincoln and then became the dominant party for decades, the saviors of the Union and champions of the enfranchised former Southern slaves, while the Democrats became the party of the reactionary white South and a minority elsewhere.
But this isn’t the whole story, since the schism between the Northern free states and the Southern slave states that precipitated the Civil War had an economic aspect too. The agrarian Southern economy was heavily dependent on plantation slave labor, and the more industrial Northern economy was not. So during the decades of Republican political domination, as the American economy became more and more industrialized, the party of Lincoln metamorphosed into the party of industrial and financial interests; and during the same period, to some extent by default, the less powerful Democratic party came to largely represent a coalition of Southern white reactionaries, family and small-scale farmers, and industrial workers whose natural self-interest conflicted with that of the owners of the banks and factories.
If this sounds as if the party of Lincoln became the party of the upper classes, that is exactly what happened. The Republican Party, which had begun as a radical party, became the party of economic conservatism, representing those benefiting from the status quo—namely what the French call the rentier class, those who don’t have to work for a living because they own the means of production, the railroads and the factories. Otherwise known as the rich.
Nor was this really democratically illegitimate. Any democratic state is going to end up with a party to represent such self-interest, and in good times it might be able to command an electoral majority as long as “trickle-down” economics allowed the good times to continue to roll.
But of course no party can win elections by openly admitting that it is the political champion of the self-interest of the rich minority. So the Republicans did their rather successful best to mask this simple and democratically legitimate but politically poisonous truth by declaring that America is a “classless society” and that “class” itself is an “un-American” concept synonymous with Godless Atheistic Communism. By thus demonizing the Democrats as akin to socialists and socialists as akin to anarchists and anarchists as nihilistic terrorists, the Republicans managed to win the majority of presidential elections and dominate most Congresses until the economic shit hit the fan in 1929.
In Germany, the economic collapse and mass unemployment destroyed the liberal democratic Weimar Republic and ended up electing the Nazis, a racist, dictatorial, chauvinistic party to be sure, but one whose full name was the National Socialist Party, and was not a true conservative party in economic terms.
In the United States, this dire crisis in conservative economic capitalism discredited not liberal democracy but the politically bankrupt, economically conservative Republican Party which had presided over the catastrophe; and elected, perhaps to a large extent at first merely by default, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Democrats.
Roosevelt was no socialist and the Democrats were not a socialist party, but the New Deal—with its government-financed Works Projects Administration employment program, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, farm subsidies, support for unions, graduated income tax, and so forth—was indeed a liberal democratic revolution that saved the American market economy from its own self-destructive excesses, kept the presidency in Democratic hands for an unbroken twenty years, and maintained a Congressional majority almost u
nbroken for the same length of time.
After these twenty years in the political wilderness, the Republicans were so marginalized that the only way they could finally win an election was to nominate Dwight Eisenhower for president, a war hero so popular and so politically neutral that there was speculation that he might run as a Democrat instead. Moreover, for much of his eight years as president, Eisenhower confronted, and that was not exactly the correct term, a Democratic Congress, and when his vice president, Richard Nixon, ran to succeed him, he lost to the Democrat John Kennedy.
When Kennedy was killed, and Lyndon Johnson became president, he rammed the Civil Rights Act through Congress, even though he openly admitted that it was going to cost the Democratic Party the so-called “Solid South” for at least an entire generation. Which it did. But even so, Johnson was reelected over Barry Goldwater by a landslide.
The Republican Party was dead in the water, or so it seemed. But the Vietnam War, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the ruthless pragmatic cynicism of Richard Nixon saved it from the tar pits. The Republican Party had been incapable of winning an election on its economic policies at least since Herbert Hoover, and its stock in trade (e.g., Joe McCarthy) had been to run against commies, pinkos, and the Soviet Union, to pretty indifferent results.
The Vietnam War and the rise of the counterculture split the Democratic Party between its center and its left wing, the center being led by Johnson, and the left being led by Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, who in the 1968 primaries presumed to challenge a sitting president of their own party as well as each other. When Johnson pulled out of the race and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, the Democratic nomination came down to a contest between Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, a onetime passionate liberal constrained to support a war and a cultural conservatism he really didn’t believe in, and McCarthy, the fair-haired boy of the moderate counter-cultural Left who had no chance of being nominated and less of being elected.
Humphrey was still an economic liberal and the Republicans still the party of the class self-interest of the economic power elite; but Nixon and his vice presidential running mate and hatchet man, Spiro Agnew, made sure that the election of 1968 was contested on noneconomic grounds. In order to win a national election, the Republicans had to get voters to vote against their own economic self-interest, and this time they didn’t have a neutral war hero to do it with, they only had Tricky Dick.
But Dick proved tricky enough. And down and dirty enough. Really down and really dirty. Nixon and Agnew anointed themselves and the Republican Party the cultural warriors of the so-called “Silent Majority,” which they invented for the purpose and which, riled up around race, religion, and reaction, has been the party’s demographic electoral base ever since.
Thus the party of the established economic power structures and the just plain rich pandered to Bible Belt fundamentalists, cultural reactionaries, closeted and not so closeted racists, generating a paranoid fear of whoever they could brand as the Other in order to con folks into voting against their own economic self-interest.
In 1968 and 1972 and some distance beyond, the Other meant hippies, pinkos, peaceniks, Godless Atheistic Whatevers, Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, and in some Northern as well as Southern quarters, “uppity niggers.” In 2004, thanks to Osama bin Laden, it became “ragheads” and has been ever since. Plus fetus murderers, wetback illegal immigrants, gays and their sympathizers, tree-huggers, the federal government itself, the UN’s Black Helicopters, and the aliens in Area 51.
In Weimar Germany, the economic powers made a deal with an anti-Communist National Socialist Party and a nutcase named Adolf Hitler, who they were confident they could control as the puppet masters.
But the lunatics took over the asylum.
Welcome to the Third Reich.
In the United States, the Republican economic puppet masters made a deal with the paranoid Right in order to win elections.
The lunatics do have a tendency to take over the asylum, now don’t they?
Welcome to the Republican Mad Tea Party.
Welcome to the House of Representatives.
Welcome to the Congress of the United States.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of the bursting of a stock market bubble resulting in a crisis in the largely unregulated banking system that screwed up the market economy and resulted in mass unemployment, which reduced demand because consumers found themselves with less and less money, which reduced demand in a downward spiral that fed on itself.
The Great Recession which started in 2008 was the result of the bursting of a real estate bubble, resulting in a bank system crisis that was only partly eased by loans of taxpayer dollars, resulting in huge drops in homeowners’ wealth, which caused big drops in consumer demand, which caused massive unemployment, which caused more drop in demand, in a downward spiral that fed on itself.
Sounds familiar? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?
Or not.
Because the conditions into which the 2008 Great Recession was born were decades of change different from those of the Great Depression that began in 1929. True, the Clinton-era deregulation of the banking system emulated the lax regulations of the pre–New Deal era. But the concept of so-called “collateralized debt obligations” that triggered the Great Recession did not exist in 1929. Nor did the bloated growth of the virtual casino economy at the expense of the real productive economy, resulting in the extreme difference in wealth and income between the famous 1% and the dwindling middle class.
Banks indiscriminately wrote huge amounts of dodgy mortgages to people without the income to keep paying the monthlies, then bundled them into derivative bonds called collateralized debt obligations, which with the collusion of ratings agencies were bought and sold as “wealth” even though they were the financial and moral equivalent of gold-painted bricks or shares in the Brooklyn Bridge.
Yes, the mortgage writers, the bundlers, the investment banks, the hedge fund mavens, the derivatives market, the rating agencies—the whole out-of-control virtual casino economy, based on nothing but bullshit and hot air and contributing nothing to the real economy—did indeed write the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselves.
And of course it bounced.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, with unemployment rates triple those of the 2008 Recession, with a stock market crash that famously had Wall Street mavens jumping out of windows, with no such thing as unemployment insurance, Social Security, and so forth to cushion it, was such a catastrophe that it could only result in one kind of revolution or another—meaning a discontinuity, violent or not, democratic or not—a Communist revolution (which was a real fear at the time), a Fascist revolution like the replacement of the Weimar Republic by the Third Reich; or, as fortunately happened, something like the New Deal.
The New Deal was indeed a revolution. Instead of a violent uprising against the plutocrats who had created the catastrophe, there was a democratic election, which resulted in a landslide victory by Franklin Roosevelt and Congressional Democrats. Instead of the overthrow of the market economy by Marxist Communism, Fabian Socialism, or Fascist mercantilism, FDR, with an overwhelming Congressional majority, rammed through a radical reform of the American market economy.
Massive public works programs to sop up unemployment and increase consumer demand. Farm subsidies and price supports. Unemployment insurance. Social Security. Pro-union laws and regulations. Redistributive tax rates, shifting income and wealth downward from the rich, thus growing the middle class.
Roosevelt was no flaming socialist but the wealthy scion of a great establishment family. FDR saved American capitalism and the American market economy from its own greed by forging a social contract, a pragmatic deal that became the engine of the post—World War II American economic prosperity, the so-called American Dream. Which, simply put, assured that those who made the goods made enough money to also buy them.
It
may seem like lunacy for Congress to be cutting federal spending while unemployment is high; or to be blocking a raise to the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which even full time won’t lift anyone above the official poverty level. But in fact it’s normal.
It’s what’s called the New Normal. It’s the Nightmare that’s replacing the American Dream.
While unemployment is high and wages are not only stagnant but have declined in inflation-adjusted terms, while GNP growth is also stagnant and perpetually on the edge of even dropping into negative territory, corporate profits are sky-high, and the stock market is collectively feeling no pain.
The social contract that the New Deal established between capital and labor, which was the essence of the late lamented American Dream, has been severely eroded if not destroyed.
The caponization of the labor movement, high unemployment, and outsourcing to low-wage countries thanks to “globalization” have driven down American wages while increasing “productivity” and therefore profits. The lower tax rates on capital gains than for earned income further engorges the slice of the pie gobbled up by the rentier class.
If that’s you, the New Normal suits you just fine. You’re all right, Jack, now aren’t you?
In the short run. Maybe even in the medium run. However, as Malcolm X put it in a difference context, sooner or later the chickens are going to come home to roost. Because the New Normal has a singularity at its core. In the long run it won’t work because in absolute bottom-line terms it simply can’t.
As we all probably know, the prime directive of a market economy, the sacred Bottom Line, is to produce something as cheaply as you can and sell it for as much as you can get, the result being profit. Easy enough for anyone to understand in practice, but will it work in theory?
No, it can’t.
Because attaining the theoretic ultimate goal of the market economy, namely making things for nothing and selling them for a ton of money, would destroy it. If everything is produced by slave labor and robots, there aren’t going to be customers with the money to buy what you produce for nothing.
Raising Hell Page 6