the culture

Moral Decay the Cause of Income Inequality Says Controversial Book »

Feb 15 2012

Just in time to add ammunition to the class wars, along comes a book that says income inequality isn’t caused by Wall Street bonuses, outsized corporate CEO paychecks or even a tax code skewed to the wealthy.

The book is “Coming Apart, The State of White America”, by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, who claims it is not the 1% vs. the 99%; rather it is the 20% at the top vs. the 30% at the bottom. The 20% is made up of educated achievers who raise their children to strive for excellence, press them to vie for entrance to the top schools, and see them graduate into the best jobs, marry other smart people, and raise the next batch of bright children to propel the 20% still higher. Meanwhile, the 30% drift ever downward and further apart.

Those in favor of the status quo, eager to deflect Occupiers’ claims that the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy, have embraced Murray’s evaluation of the 30%. Murray says it’s a values thing.

The lower social strata are ordinarily held up as the exemplar of family values, but that’s mythology. Murray says it is the upper stratum that has retained what he calls the key "founding virtues" — industriousness, honesty, marriage and religion — that the lower stratum has forsaken. The latter marry less, have higher divorce rates when they do, and bear far more children out of wedlock. They drop out of high school, are uninvolved with their communities — they even go to church less than the 20%. They lack ambition, they watch television all day, they subsist on one or another welfare program, and fall further behind. They don’t have jobs because they don’t want to work, says Murray.

The cause? He says it was the ‘60s culture and alludes vaguely to “a whole set of reforms” that “élites put in place… which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing”.

Aha. So it’s not the worsening educational system, outsourced jobs to other countries, the decline in manufacturing, the collapse of unions, the sheer lack of jobs because corporations are not hiring — these are not the reasons for the economic decline of the bottom 30%. No surprise, then, that conservatives, who oppose taking action with fiscal stimulus and social programs, have clambered on board in praise of Murray’s worldview.

Niall Ferguson of Harvard, who writes a column for Newsweek proclaims Murray has come yp with “by far the best available analysis of modern American inequality … a blessed relief”. He even works in the canard that President Obama wants to “make America more like Scandinavia”.

David Brooks, the conservative columnist at The New York Times, gushes in this piece that “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s ‘Coming Apart’”. He goes so far as to say, “the liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1% narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness”, an accusation that we are struggling to make sense of. As a card-carrying member himself of the out of touch élite, he says:

“It’s wrong to describe an America in which the salt of the earth common people are preyed upon by this or that nefarious elite. It’s wrong to tell the familiar underdog morality tale in which the problems of the masses are caused by the élites.”

What's wrong is his determination. The problem of the masses is that they would like to see opportunity restored in this country and instead see a plethora of advantages conferred on the wealthy while their world stagnates. In a final head-scratcher Brooks says what we need is a national service program.

At least David Frum, a conservative once a speechwriter for George W. Bush now writing at The Daily Beast/Newsweek, disagrees. Murray, he says, in a multi-part piece, ignores that the decline in wages and living standards is pervasive in the western countries as jobs have moved to low-paying countries in the East. What sense is it therefore to conclude that, whereas economics is the cause there, moral collapse uniquely is the cause here?

Murray is renowned for deploying reams of data but seems guilty of the sin of twisting them to fit his preconceived beliefs. Much more persuasive is how he marshalls data to present the sweeping social changes that support his “Coming Apart” title.

Whereas once those of different economic levels were commingled in smaller towns, living on the same streets or close by, chatting on the church steps after the Sunday service, the long-term trend has been for people to seek out those of their own economic level and political outlooks and cluster into communities of only their own kind. Murray is not the first to make this observation. Most recently there was “The Big Sort”, the 2008 book by Bill Bishop subtitled, “Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart”.

Murray says we need to merge again if we hope to stem this fragmentation, and has taken that step himself, moving his family to a small, rural Maryland town. Bill Clinton, after reading “The Big Sort”, sounded the same theme, saying, "Some of us are going to have to cross the street, folks". That way the 20% would be in place to transfuse their values to the 30% because “the new upper class just need to start preaching what they practice”, says Murray.

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1st amendment

Are We Becoming a Police State? »

Nov 27 2011 Don't Take Our Word for It Dec.4: In our wake The New York Times has now asked "Is this the militarization of the American police? in this article.

Our title sounds alarmist and exaggerated, doesn’t it? But the uniformity of method, the rush to violence by police from New York to Oakland, from Portland to Atlanta to Los Angeles, tell us otherwise.

The Occupy movement told us something we were unsure of, after nearly half a century — that Americans would take to the streets. In 1968 it was primarily the Vietnam War. Today the self-declared 99% are angry at a distorted society that has bestowed too much on too few and left them with dim prospects.

But when they take to the streets, and mayors find reason to shut down the right of  "the people peaceably to assemble" guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, the police quickly resort to violence reminiscent of the “police riots” at the Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago. Evidence of physical provocation by Occupiers are few, non-violence being key to winning public support, but the police in several cities went straight to tear gas, pepper spray and beatings.

So in New York early in the occupation, police attacked protesters and onlookers with pepper spray as seen in the video above, in which we hear women screaming from the burn of the chemical agent.

In another New York incident police used truncheons (now given the gentler name “batons” by the media) to savagely beat the crowd captured on film here. In neither case is there evidence of provocation that justified a violent response.

Ultimately New York City Mayor Bloomberg shut down Zuccotti Park telling us hygiene had suddenly become the problem it had not been for two months. Hundreds of NYPD officers in riot gear swept through the park in early morning hours, rousting campers from sleeping bags and removing and depriving protesters of the tents and gear that had become essential with the change in weather. Police sequestered credentialed reporters two blocks distant where they could not see the action. Bloomberg said this violation of a free press was to “protect the members of the press”. If that truly was the reason, it didn't sound that way when later in a speech he would say, “I have my own army in the N.Y.P.D.”

In Oakland, an Iraq vet suffered a skull fracture and brain function damage when hit by a police projectile thought to be a tear gas canister. Police classify tear gas and other crowd control aids as "non-lethal", but rubber bullets and cans fired from launchers are dangerous at close range and can indeed be lethal. A second Oakland Occupier's spleen was lacerated by a police beating such as seen in this this film clip.

At the University of California, Davis, a campus police officer walked in front of a row of student protesters sitting on the ground with locked arms, thoroughly dousing them with pepper spray, caught in this film:

In Portland, the photo below shows police hitting a young woman directly in the face with pepper spray...

Portland

...with much the same seen in Seattle...

Seattle
...where an 84-year-old woman was a victim of the chemical agent. Pepper spray is derived from the most potent in the spectrum of chili peppers (capsaicin) and causes searing pain and temporary blindness. One student reported that the burn lasted through the night — face, hands — preventing sleep — and into the next day.

In none of these instances caught on film was there any instance of provocation that merited so violent an attack.

In a massive assault, 1,400 police officers, some in riot gear, stormed the Los Angeles Occupier encampment arresting over 200.

“60 Minutes” on November 20th ran a segment on the increasing use by police of Tasers, the brand name for stun guns that shoot into the target’s body a pair of darts at the end of wires, thus closing a circuit for an agonizing electrical shock. The segment shows the unhesitatingly rapid resort to using the weapon on a motorist who is only asking what she had done that called for putting her hands on her car. The weapon has led to heart attacks and death, which, of course, the manufacturer disputes as coincidental. Police, undeterred by its violence toward fellow citizens, seem to gravitate to its use because it is an easy shortcut to bringing a civilian to heel.

american sanctimony

These scenes, uploaded to video sites such as YouTube, show the world that the Mecca of free speech that we fashion the United States to be looks false.

The opposing view was more concerned that the protests were noisy, had inconvenienced civilian activity and might cause property damage. Occupiers were labeled unwashed “hippies” — “lice-infested, shiftless human filth” according to one offended commentator on a right wing website — a view helped along by the media's focus on the bizarre sort that street demonstrations inevitably attract. The objective is to persuade that element of society which values order above all to classify protesters as rabble rather than the jobless young people burdened by student debt who formed the core of the 99% movement. That’s the standard self-preservation tactic adopted by those who hold power to keep the public in its place in order to preserve the status quo.

will protests survive?

The status quo may be with us for good. Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon offers this troubling assessment:

Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time...

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. ... As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.

David Frum, a conservative and former Bush speech writer, has more faith in the American people to rebel. He says in this New York Magazine article, an indictment of what the Republican party has become, that “If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair”.

Will the police fan the flames or subdue all change?

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