Post by kim on Dec 18, 2011 12:03:35 GMT -7
A deal with the Devil. Paul Street, ZCommunications.org
find the rest of the article here: www.zcommunications.org/a-deal-with-the-devil-a-happiness-that-harms-by-paul-street
"[....] Despite the relative weakness of welfare policy and unions and other social and institutional forces that “conservatives” like to blame for sapping the work ethic in the U.S., America actually provides considerably less intergenerational upward economic mobility than most other industrialized nations do. At the same time, polling data has long shown that poor Americans are no less dedicated to hard work than other Americans; they just happen to possess fewer inherited and present day advantages and opportunities than more affluent citizens do.
Black Americans are no less committed to hard work and savings than white Americans. But as a group they enjoy far less wealth than whites – and I mean far less: the average black U.S. household currently possesses 7 cents of net worth for every dollar of wealth owned by the average white U.S. household – and suffer unemployment and poverty rates double those experienced by whites. The differences reflect a vast and overlapping, interrelated panoply of barriers to equality imposed by past and present cultural and institutional racism.
Of course, as Monbiot recently noted, “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of what Monbiot calls “the self-attribution fallacy….crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible.” Monbiot cites the findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics. When he examined the comparative “earnings” of 25 wealth advisers across eight years, Kahneman found that the results “resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply gotten lucky. “Such results have been widely replicated,” showing, Monbiot notes, that “traders and fund managers across Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin."
[...............]
"The wealthy do not simply benefit from society; they accumulate fortunes at the expense of it. They profit from: mass unemployment’s depressive impact on wages, which cuts their labor costs; regressive tax cuts and loopholes, which increase with wealth while shutting down social services for the poor; the evasion and undermining of environment regulations, which reduces their business costs while spoiling livable ecology; wars and giant military budgets that feed the bottom lines of the giant high-tech “defense” corporations they own while stealing money from potential investment in social uplift; a hyper-commercialized mass consumer culture that despoils the environment and assaults peoples’ capacity for critical thought; deals with corrupt dictators who provide natural resources at cheap prices while depressing wages and crushing democracy in “developing countries;” the closing down of livable wage job in the U.S. and the export of employment to super-exploited low-wage peripheries; a health care system that privileges the profits of giant insurance and drug companies over the well being of ordinary people; exorbitant credit card interests rates that lead to millions of bankruptcies each year; predatory lending practices that spread and perpetuate poverty and foreclosure; agricultural and trade practices that destroy sustainable local and regional food cultivation and distribution practices at home and abroad; the imposition of overly long working hours that keep employee compensation levels down while helping business maintain a large “reserve army” of unemployed workers; exorbitant public business subsidies and taxpayer incentives and bailouts paid to the rich at the expense of the rest; and from….the list goes on and on. As the left political scientist David McNally notes, profits have been restored in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis “largely because working class people have paid for them, through layoffs, wage cuts, reduced work hours, and the decimation of social services. In the words of a poor rebel in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” McNally observes, ‘our misery’ is the source ‘their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.’"
The rich, it should be recalled, are capitalists for the most part. And under modern marketplace and corporate capitalism, the generator of private fortunes, the wealth of the Few is more than just coincidentally related to the impoverishment of the Many. Indeed, the exploitation of the latter by the former is the essence of what passes for reasonable and normal economic activity under the norms of the capitalist system."
find the rest of the article here: www.zcommunications.org/a-deal-with-the-devil-a-happiness-that-harms-by-paul-street
"[....] Despite the relative weakness of welfare policy and unions and other social and institutional forces that “conservatives” like to blame for sapping the work ethic in the U.S., America actually provides considerably less intergenerational upward economic mobility than most other industrialized nations do. At the same time, polling data has long shown that poor Americans are no less dedicated to hard work than other Americans; they just happen to possess fewer inherited and present day advantages and opportunities than more affluent citizens do.
Black Americans are no less committed to hard work and savings than white Americans. But as a group they enjoy far less wealth than whites – and I mean far less: the average black U.S. household currently possesses 7 cents of net worth for every dollar of wealth owned by the average white U.S. household – and suffer unemployment and poverty rates double those experienced by whites. The differences reflect a vast and overlapping, interrelated panoply of barriers to equality imposed by past and present cultural and institutional racism.
Of course, as Monbiot recently noted, “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of what Monbiot calls “the self-attribution fallacy….crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible.” Monbiot cites the findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics. When he examined the comparative “earnings” of 25 wealth advisers across eight years, Kahneman found that the results “resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply gotten lucky. “Such results have been widely replicated,” showing, Monbiot notes, that “traders and fund managers across Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin."
[...............]
"The wealthy do not simply benefit from society; they accumulate fortunes at the expense of it. They profit from: mass unemployment’s depressive impact on wages, which cuts their labor costs; regressive tax cuts and loopholes, which increase with wealth while shutting down social services for the poor; the evasion and undermining of environment regulations, which reduces their business costs while spoiling livable ecology; wars and giant military budgets that feed the bottom lines of the giant high-tech “defense” corporations they own while stealing money from potential investment in social uplift; a hyper-commercialized mass consumer culture that despoils the environment and assaults peoples’ capacity for critical thought; deals with corrupt dictators who provide natural resources at cheap prices while depressing wages and crushing democracy in “developing countries;” the closing down of livable wage job in the U.S. and the export of employment to super-exploited low-wage peripheries; a health care system that privileges the profits of giant insurance and drug companies over the well being of ordinary people; exorbitant credit card interests rates that lead to millions of bankruptcies each year; predatory lending practices that spread and perpetuate poverty and foreclosure; agricultural and trade practices that destroy sustainable local and regional food cultivation and distribution practices at home and abroad; the imposition of overly long working hours that keep employee compensation levels down while helping business maintain a large “reserve army” of unemployed workers; exorbitant public business subsidies and taxpayer incentives and bailouts paid to the rich at the expense of the rest; and from….the list goes on and on. As the left political scientist David McNally notes, profits have been restored in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis “largely because working class people have paid for them, through layoffs, wage cuts, reduced work hours, and the decimation of social services. In the words of a poor rebel in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,” McNally observes, ‘our misery’ is the source ‘their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.’"
The rich, it should be recalled, are capitalists for the most part. And under modern marketplace and corporate capitalism, the generator of private fortunes, the wealth of the Few is more than just coincidentally related to the impoverishment of the Many. Indeed, the exploitation of the latter by the former is the essence of what passes for reasonable and normal economic activity under the norms of the capitalist system."