“Trickled On” Economics
©2012 Douglas S. Harvey
One thing about an election year, particularly this one, is that it
reveals the fallacy that humanity has somehow emerged from “mere animal
conditions.” We may have comfortable
homes, climate-control, exo-skeletons (known as automobiles) to allow us to move
about rapidly and move objects many times our own weight, etc. But beavers, ants, and foxes have these
things. One thing that humans have the
capacity for, if they strive to use it, is being able to see life from another’s
viewpoint – we have the capacity for compassion. If anything would allow us to rise from a “mere
animal condition,” it is this compassion.
But under the capitalist model, currently the dominant paradigm in the
world, the priority is put on expropriating land and labor in order for a small
group to accumulate wealth they did not produce. In our deluded national narrative, these
people are said to be “job creators.” In
fact, their access to wealth and power has allowed them to create a sort of
neo-feudal system that can be aptly called, “Trickled-On Economics.”
In this dominant paradigm headed by Big Capital, compassion
is highly discouraged. There is a
tendency among the politicians, managers, and overseers of capitalist
institutions to live like there is no tomorrow and pretend like there was no
yesterday. After all, the working class –
those who actually produce wealth – can be depended upon for a source of
insurance in the event the gaming schemes of Big Capital fail. This attitude of borrow now (“leverage” if
you are rich), worry later, unlike the wealth itself, has trickled down, or
should I say “trickled on” the general public.
The so-called “debt crisis” currently providing
rationale for cutting social programs was created by capitalists manipulating
the housing and financial markets for short-term profit, a scheme that crashed
the global economy. While they were
doing that, working class people struggled with a steady decline in income
resulting from off-shoring American manufacturing, union sell-outs, and
outright union-busting. To make up for
this decline, they were handed credit cards, deregulated during the Reagan
years, and usurious lending became the order of the day. In addition, instead of providing education
for its citizens as some social welfare states of western and northern Europe
have done, the student loan industry was created, with student loan giant Sallie
Mae becoming a for-profit corporation by 1995.
As if this was not enough (it never is), for-profit health care,
starring Big Pharma, has become ensconced in Congress, K-Street, and Wall
Street. Also, moving in from the desert
is a dust devil known as the for-profit prison system. Examples of profiteering from others’
misfortune, or indeed manufacturing misfortune for profit, (note: I do not even
broach the war profiteering
game in this essay), has no limit in the capitalist paradigm.
With the declining share
of wealth enjoyed by the working class, it was logically reasoned that higher
education was a way out of mind-numbing, dead-end jobs and into a better life. Both
federally-insured and private loans for education skyrocketed. For some, this better life came to pass, for
others it became a trap and in some cases a death-trap. Student loans do not have bankruptcy
protection, and the collection
agency can seize your home, your social security, your disability income –
pretty much anything they want to seize.
There are numerous horror stories out there, including many
suicides. Indeed, as Alan Collinge has
written in his book The Student Loan Scam,
defaulted loans are more lucrative than those not in default because assets can
be seized.
Credit card debt, which
now ranks behind student loans in consumer debt as of the summer of 2010, is
the result of falling wages and job loss.
By 2012, there were well over a half billion credit cards in use in the
U.S. alone. That is double the total population
of the country. Bankruptcies were down
in 2011; with a mere 1.37 million filings in the U.S. (it was 1.55 in 2010). Many bankruptcies were brought about by medical
bills contracted in a system that preys on the sick.
A compassionate set of
policies that would address these issues would not include taking billions of
dollars in tax revenue from the working class and handing it over to Wall
Street bankers to cover their failed schemes and scams as has been done more
than once since 2008. In this paradigm
of the Bean-counter, we can hand $700 billion at a pop over to criminals in
suits, but we cannot help struggling college graduates or families stranded
without gainful employment.
It is not hard to see
that the issue is systemic. Capitalism
has no built-in moral code other than maximizing profits. Whatever morality exists is brought to the
table by individuals, but the system itself does not reward compassion; indeed,
ruthlessness and cruelty are central features of the game. Capital has been engaged in a long-term
struggle to deprive people of access to the resources they need to build a good
life for themselves. It creates an
environment that allows a small group or even one person to live extremely well
on the backs of those whose access to resources they control. Once people become separated from the
resources that they need to live, they must re-acquire them on terms favorable
to the capitalist. In some cases, the
result is modern-day
slavery. The separation of people
from the resource base is a central theme in the human history of the world and
at the heart of our systemic problem today.
This system has led to
the abuse of the non-human resources, as well.
Humans and their resources are, ultimately, not separate at all. Labor is the interaction of humans with the
non-human world and the results are often very beautiful, profound, poignant,
moving, powerful, and on and on – in a word: art. Forcing human beings to interact with
resources on terms favorable to the Capitalist is hardly emerging from “mere animal
conditions.” It results in environmental
degradation of both human and non-human.
Degrading and dangerous sweatshops, mines, oil rigs, etc., have
increased because of deregulation and defunding of safety oversight. Environmental oversight has been rolled back,
defunded, or ignored. These underscore
the systemic nature of the dual expropriation of labor and resources for the
sake of the wealth accumulation of a very few.
From mountain-top mining to clear-cutting rainforests, the
systemic unsustainable use of resources creates an oppositional relationship
between humans and their environment. “Man
vs. Nature” is a conflict drilled into our heads from an early age, but it is
this term “Versus” that needs to be questioned and studied. A political economic system in which
compassion features predominately would institutionalize such introspection. We have examples from our past. Agriculture, for instance, traditionally
employed the concept of “husbandry.”
Farms were once places where abundance was possible for all species
involved and sustaining this human and non-human natural order was the priority.
Under capitalism, agriculture has industrialized
and cold, hard numbers dominate decision-making processes.
Under a more humane system, labor would be an extension
of the production of nature; indeed, human labor IS an expression of
nature. But its usurpation by a few is
like the felling of the forests, the leveling of mountains, the making of war,
or the building of sweatshops: we trade our humanity – our compassion – for the
sake of accumulation by an ambitious and even sociopathic
few. If we are serious about
emerging from a “mere animal condition,” we need to “think outside the box,”
and box is the capitalist paradigm.
© 2012 Douglas S. Harvey
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