Economics

I wrote this entry a while back and, because some vultures have furthered their commercial or pornographic agendas through my blog site through one of their lame posts, I killed the comment and killed the entry. It’s probably a worm or virus or whatever these people kill their precious time on this earth devising and such abominations will no doubt appear again but I’m going to make my original post again. As follows:

I had a debate on Sunday night (September 25^th) with my nephew John over politics and economics and it continues to be on my mind and in my mood. It’s depressing how few inroads are made into the entrenched positions of people of the persuasion opposite mine, no matter how adverse the events.

I’d thought John might have something to say about the enormous tax cuts for the rich in the face of the war and the hurricane—that perhaps they were unwise. To the contrary. He thinks that the deficit is not excessive. He thinks the economy is great. He thinks God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is at work in our economy, and job casualties are just part of a constantly changing world.

He says that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum want the same good things for everybody else, and that includes the Friedman economists who say that the only ethical duty a corporation has to the public is to make the biggest profit it can no matter what happens to the casualties—those economists too have compassion for the everyday people who are in my estimation falling further and further behind.

He thinks that the reason we are having prosperity now (lost jobs and unaffordable healthcare notwithstanding) is because the Reagan regime made tax cuts in the 1980s. Tax cuts—you see, sonny, he lectured me from his lectern at the head of the Economics 101 class—stimulate growth. There’s little else you need to know. I believe he is talking about supply-side, also known as trickle-down, economics.

By the bye, he thinks Karl Rove is ethical. Valerie Plame Wilson the CIA operative merely had a desk job and wasn’t in danger for her life bla-bla-bla the standard Fox-O’Reilly-Novak-WSJ-Ed-page party line. (You do watch Fox, don’t you?) And there is no proof that Turd Blossom trashed John McCain during the South Carolina primary or that he masterminded the swiftboating of John Kerry, turning a war hero into a war criminal. Slander isn’t the crime it used to be. I seem to recall that John said Karl Rove is ethical because he is successful. (In the name of God, in what value system?)

Now Dick Cheney, he was provoked—you’ve got to understand the context—into telling Senator Patrick Leahy, who had the unreasonable demand that Cheney not conduct government business in secret, to go fuck himself. John made the concession that Cheney had misspoken. (Mistakes were made.)

And John continues to think that Bush—who has shown glaringly, post Katrina, that he is not only pigheadedly stubborn and arrogant, but incompetent—John thinks that Bush is doing a good job.

Anything else?

My stepdaughter works for Kroger. She has a diabetic ten-year-old son and a husband who had a hip replacement and was off work for an enormous length of time—and who has other serious problems.

Susan works in the deli and stands on her feet all day in a hot environment cooking chicken. One day we stopped by and I saw Susan working and interacting with the public and I knew from her demeanor that she is all business and a credit to her employer.

Susan graduated from high school and did work for the gambling boat counting money and balancing the books. Susan had a learning difficulty associated in particular with math but she overcame it for that job. The main reason she left it was the atrocious hours that kept her away from her diabetic son.

Susan is a fulltime employee who is classified as part time for the sole purpose of denying her benefits—in particular, health insurance—but also it denies her job security while it does ensure Kroger the option of just not calling her back to work any time they decide to cut labor costs and give a little more of the work burden to those who remain.

The union collects dues from her but gives her nothing in return for her dangling situation. The government does nothing for her situation. Faith-based charities do nothing for her situation. As far as having a full-time job, she is shit out of luck. Just one of the stories in the naked city.

Regarding John, I wanted to listen to his views. That’s why I asked what he thought about going on with the tax cuts in spite of 200 billion here, 200 billion there, bridges to nowhere in Alaska, no thought of conserving energy and maybe reducing the deficit a trifle by imposing a gasoline tax.

I wanted to listen, like Charlie Rose and Jim Lehrer do—not interrupt and drown out and hector and even yell at to shut up, like the people whose TV styles I despise. I saw Bill Press, formerly “from the left” on Crossfire, interviewing Roy Moore, the Alabama supreme court chief vanquished for his insistence on posting the Ten Commandments, and although I think little of Mr. Moore, I was disgusted with Mr. Press for the rude way he treated the man. Then of course there is old Peace Corps confrere Chris Mathews, who just can’t seem to shut up while the others are talking. And the Mother of All Rude TV personalities, Bill O’Reilly.

I respect John. He is past president of the Atlanta economists’ association. He has a master’s degree. He has a record of success in the business world. He really is ethical. I told my wife that John had said years ago that he went to a church at which the preacher said that people of all political beliefs were welcome, that there would be an expectation of all kinds of candidates’ names on bumper stickers in the parking lot. “Would that still be the same?” she asked.

I said, “If it would not, John would leave. He’s principled.” And I love John. He’s my kinsman, and even so, he’s lovable in his own right.

I am a populist, I guess. My father did heavy labor most of his life and as far as I understand it, became an FDR New Deal Democrat when those programs turned the economy around. Daddy thought that business, all business, was pretty much how John Steinbeck described it in The Grapes of Wrath—namely, “curious ritualized thievery.”

At the time I read that book, in about 1954 when I was a very impressionable fifteen, I agreed wholeheartedly with that poetic phrase. I have seen the light since then! Steinbeck wrote it in a mid-book essay on the cigar-chomping predators who sold defective cars and trucks to the “Okies”—the poor farmers made poorer by the Dust Bowl—who bought junk in order to migrate to California in the thirties. (“Look at that rube. See if he got any jack in his jeans. Jesus! Wish I had a thousand jalopies to sell these suckers!”)

I also read Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, and old Red too was pretty uncharitable to businessmen, with ridicule and caricature of the fictitious person, George F. Babbitt of Zenith, in the Midwestern prairie state of Winnemac.

Those two books, just novels, and by lefties of sorts, were about the extent of my readings in the dismal science, it seems. When I finally had to take econ, the textbook was by Paul Samuelson, an old standby with boring graphs of supply-and-demand curves, taught by a new prof at old Hangover U, before it became a conservative arts college. I seem to have managed to eke out C’s in those courses, probably mainly because the new prof was a nice guy and not because of any merit on my part.

I have always been stung by the saying, “If you’re so damn smart, why aren’t you rich?” Good question. I’m not smart and I’m not rich either, and there is probably a relationship between those two variables. About the only thing I’ve ever been good at is doing without and saving money and living on a shoestring. My parents were good at that.

But as I said above, I have seen the light that is possible to be involved in commerce and be ethical. No good Presbyterian (and I am still a Presbyterian, never as far as I know having yet had my name purged from the rolls of the Deer Creek Presbyterian Church in north central Indiana) takes seriously—certainly not literally—the sayings of Jesus about wealth and service to God, to wit, “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other … You cannot serve God and wealth,” and “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 6:24; 19:24).

I know some awfully nice Presbyterians and Baptists and Episcopalians and what-not who seem to be ethical and really get righteously incensed about some truly sleazy things but they don’t take those Biblical sayings all that seriously, as I say. Even the Episcopalians, who in their worship stand and face the priest with the Bible for the readings from the Gospels, crossing themselves before and after and making some other gestures and verbal responses and remaining at attention while the priest and his entourage walk the Bible, held high, back to its altar.

And Jesus’ teachings reprimanding the rich and advocating the poor are in the Gospels.

In Indiana, too, we have had two well-known publicly confessing Christians who have had big business empires, the one being Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical magnate; the other, Irwin Miller, the CEO of Cummins Engine Company. I worked for Mr. Miller’s company, and I have taken many drugs over a lifetime that were manufactured by the Lilly company.

I did see that both men behaved a little differently from many of their business-as-usual counterparts—most notably, both have treated their employees well. Cummins succeeded at least once in meeting environmental standards for their diesel engines while General Motors was whining that they just couldn’t do it. (And got away with it.)

I don’t know how enamored J.I. Miller was of Milton Friedman’s Nobel-prize-winning commandment to make just as much goddamn profit as you ever can regardless of the cost to the little guy. I know that after J.I. was out of the chairman’s chair his minions stepped in and whacked the unions and laid them off and started over with a nice wage that a competitive company could live with. And although J.I. saved the company from a hostile takeover he so far as I know didn’t save the grunts from an impecunious wage from now on.

As for Lilly’s drugs, they are damned expensive, and Lilly has not exactly been a standard-bearer of ethicality as regards lobbying, wining and dining docs and whisking them away to conventions in the Bahamas, authorizing slanted studies, repackaging drugs to renew patents, or making their drugs available to the poor.

But, as I say, both have treated their employees really nice.

So it is possible to be ethical in business. Not easy. But possible.

Well, another of my rants. I don’t like George Bush as president or just about anybody in his regime as executives of the government. It has a lot to do with his hypocrisy. “Compassionate Conservative”—NOT. Molly Ivins talked about his lack of compassion. Which is not to “impugn motives.” It’s plainly there in the behavior. And in the contradictory utterances. People may doubt what you say, but they will always believe what you do.

The behavior is in the form of giveaways to the ultra-rich—corporations and individuals. It is in allowing ravaging of the environment. It is in lying and keeping secret what should be in the public domain because the truth will plainly show the rewards to the haves and the harm to the have-nots and the true agenda that will enrage the American people if it is made known. It is sending people—poor people—to be targets in a shooting gallery—for the sake of oil. It is in ruling against paying for work-related conditions. It is in speeding up assembly lines and intimidating federal meat inspectors. The list, as we say, goes on and on. I’m still at the top of it.

Molly said, “Hell’s own conservative. And dick for compassion.”

Amen.