Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Class Warfare Page 21 of 36

Union Fear, Betrayal, and Decline

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On April 7, 2015

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Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

The 2008 primaries were a lesson to me. Neither Clinton nor Obama were particularly pro-union, but they received many of the union endorsements. I remember in particular the firefighters, who didn’t endorse any of the big three (Clinton, Obama, Edwards), but endorsed Dodd, whom they knew had no chance of winning. I called them on it and was told by their media guy that it was a case of true belief.

The other candidate they had been considering was Edwards, who actually had a chance of winning the nomination.

The thing about Edwards is that in order to win the nomination he needed the unions; it wasn’t going to happen otherwise.

He didn’t get enough of them and he lost.

Obama won and the unions didn’t get their number one priority: card check union certification.  One can argue it wasn’t doable, but there was never any sign it was a priority for Obama.

Why should it be? He hadn’t needed the unions to win, he had just needed them not to coalesce behind another major candidate.

Edwards, having won, would have owed his victory to the unions and he would have known it.  You dance with the one who brung you, as Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulrooney once remarked.

Obama spent his first four years largely ignoring unions. One he didn’t ignore was the teachers union. Instead, the Obama administration acted very favorably towards the idea of charter schools (the bulk of the research shows that charter schools perform slightly worse than public schools). So, before the deadline for nominations of democratic primary nominees for the 2012 election, the teachers national decided to support a primary candidate to send a warning shot across Obama’s—no, they didn’t do that. They endorsed him pre-emptively.

Unions are risk-averse. Extremely risk-averse. They have spent the last 35 years in decline (since 1980) and, as a group, they never make any serious attempt to make up lost ground. Internally, too many of them acquiesced to and negotiated for two-tier contracts, which favor older workers over newer ones, and split union solidarity.

They are unwilling to take a run on anyone who might actually help turn their situation around.

I was reminded of this by the way Rahm Emanuel has retained much union support in Chicago. Some unions were heavily behind his challenger, Jesus G. Garcia, but many have backed Rahm. As a result, Rahm is almost certainly going to win (unless the polls are way off). Rahm was terrible, especially for the teachers (who, to give them their due, are fighting him, hard), though he did throw some scraps to a few unions.

Still, again, Garcia would owe the union movement his victory if he won and there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t act on that debt. Rahm, on the other hand is the status quo—slow (and sometimes not-so-slow) decline.

If you won’t fight when your life is on the line (and card check was and is an existential issue for unions), then you will die. Unions have chosen, again and again, not to fight, or, more accurately, enough of them have chosen to collaborate. The first, second, and last rule of unionization is solidarity. Union members must negotiate and fight together and so must unions. Their failure to do this internally or externally is why their decline continues. It will continue, virtually irreversibly, until they learn two elemental lessons:  1) act with solidarity and; 2) never collaborate with your oppressors.

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Serfdom Is Better Than What the West is Heading For

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On March 20, 2015

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Time to be an Entrepeneur, by anoncru

Time to be an Entrepreneur, by anoncru

One of the things that we forget about Feudalism is that serfs had rights: economic rights.  They had the right to farm common land, they had the right to take wood from common forests, they had the right to live where they had lived before.

This is not to say that they were free, they certainly were not.  But they were not slaves; they had access to, as it were, capital: what they needed to grow their own food, shelter themselves and clothe themselves.

We have an overly grim view of the Middle Ages, but, in various periods and various places, serfs, let alone freeholders, lived quite well.  Much of what we associate as the worst of the Middle Ages actually happened either in the Dark Ages or in the Renaissance.  For example, torture really takes off in the Renaissance, because as Stirling Newberry has pointed out, torture chambers and so on take a lot of iron and they didn’t have it to waste in the Middle Ages.

Late serfdom (after the Renaissance) was pleasant enough for serfs that they had to be forced off their land: The factories were worse.  In factories, they lived shorter, sicker lives and worked far more.  Capitalism is based on dependency—on wage laborers needing to work for someone else, or their lives are miserable or short.  (Marx’s “whip of hunger”.)  It is voluntary only in the sense that you can offer your labor to anyone willing to pay, not in the sense that you can opt out of the system and have anything approaching a decent life.

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Today, if you lose your job and you’re an ordinary person, you can’t support yourself. If the government, friends or family don’t give you what you need, you have to beg for it.  If you don’t get it, you die.  Homesteading laws and laws which allowed people to take unused or underused property and use it to support themselves have been drastically weakened.

Absent a job, or charity, you will probably wind up dead.  If you don’t, you will be miserable.

Our forebears in the 19th century understood this. It’s why they called jobs “wage slavery.”  You do what you’re told by your boss, where you’re told to do it, when you’re told to do it, how you’re told to do it, and if you don’t, feel free to try and find another job.

Whether you can find another job is often unrelated to your personal attributes and has little to do with anything approaching virtue (those who doubt this are invited to investigate how Wall Street and Fleet Street make their money).  How well most people are paid is a market decision in the sense that it has to do with the balance between labor supply and demand, and labor power and the power of capital: For all intents and purposes labor only has pricing power if it is organized and politically powerful or if the labor market is tight.

Those who came out of the Great Depression understood this because they had seen many people, through no fault of their own, reduced to poverty, unable to find any work.  Because of this they tightened labor laws, tried to make unions more powerful and taxed the heck out of rich people so they couldn’t use their money to destroy the liberal state.

What they didn’t do was overthrow capitalism; they didn’t see a better, more practical way to organize society.  As a result, many men stayed in positions of vast private power and wealth (even if they personally were heavily taxed) and were eventually able to use that money to overthrow the liberal state in England and the US, and from there they have been able to undermine it virtually everywhere, including in most of the European socialist states.

What is on offer, then, is not neo-feudalism, with neo-serfs, but aristocrats and their slaves–slaves towards whom the aristocrats feel less and less an obligation to even feed (see all the cuts to food stamps).  In some ways it’s superior to even slavery for the master-class: Surplus labor beyond what is needed to keep wages down is now completely disposable and doesn’t have to be paid for, after all.

So understand this: What is being offered you, increasingly, is a chance to scramble for pennies from your masters and when considered superfluous to their needs, to suffer and quite probably die before your time.

Serfdom?  You should be so lucky.

A negative interest rate world? Why?

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On March 4, 2015

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Umair Haque writes:

Why are we approaching the new normal of a negative interest rate world? Simple. There’s nowhere good left to put all the money.

Umair is referring to all the countries who are now offering bonds with negative real interest rates.  You get back less money than you put into the bond.  People are buying these because they have nowhere better to put their money.

Now this isn’t entirely accurate.  There are still some better places to put money, but there aren’t enough of them.  And there is a ton of money out there chasing returns.

Why there is too much money chasing returns is important, however, so I’m going to tease apart some of the reasons.

Central Bank Policy

Look, the ECB is buying bonds.  The BOJ is buying bonds.  The US was doing so.  This is demand.  It pushes the yield of bonds down.

China is printing piles of money, Japan is printing it, etc…  That money isn’t staying in those economies, it is hunting through the world for returns or even just security.  Federal Reserve policy has put a floor under losses from various securities by accepting that at near par, and Fed policy of free money has underwritten an epic bull market in securities.

No cleanup of the banking or shadow banking systems.

Most money is created by private actors.  Banks, shadow banks (brokerages, etc…)  There is no effective oversight of these organizations, still (you’d think after 2007, but you’d be wrong.)  In fact, not only is there not enough oversight, but in most cases they’ve been effectively encourages to create more money.  We have another derivatives bubble underway, we have housing bubbles in multiple countries (e.g. Canada and the UK), and while the US doesn’t have one, parts of the US, like Manhattan, do.

Oligopolistic profits.

US broadband profits are almost 100%-annualized.  Every app store takes a 30% cut (a level which would have been shut down by regulators of the post-war liberal period.)  Copyright law makes it difficult to impossible to create generic alternatives to common items.  These have all led to very high profit levels, and those profits have largely been plowed back into stock buy backs (most corporate borrow is matched by stock buy backs).  But much of the economy is not available to be bought on the stock market, many large investors can’t invest on the stock market by law (they have to invest in high-grade bonds), and much of those profits are now priced into stock prices anyway.

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Inequality

In the United States more than all the gains of the last “recovery” have gone to the top 10% (really the top 3% or so.)  There has limited broad based demand for new goods.  Luxury goods, investment art, and London and Manhattan real-estate do not scale.  Without widespread demand, opportunities for new businesses, with new employers, are limited.

Barriers to Entry

Much of this came under oligoplistic profits. Draconic “intellectual property” laws make it difficult to compete, bringing prices down and increasing volumes while freeing up money for people to spend on other things.  30% cuts from app stores and other virtual marketplaces make many businesses simply unprofitable—first they must make 30% for Apple or whoever, then they get to make a profit for themselves.  But if you aren’t on those virtual marketplaces (and there is usually one which controls most of the business) you will not make enough sales to be viable.  This sort of “you make no money without us, so we’ll take all the profits” behavior is little different from what the railroads did to farmers in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries.

And while there’s tons of credit for big business and people who are already rich, a new business trying to get funding faces huge barriers to getting money. It’s boutique investment, it requires a lot of time, and most investors would rather just buy bonds, structured securities, or play the stock market.  Money may be cheap, but not for you.

Supply Bottlenecks

In a larger sense the issue is that we still haven’t dealt with supply bottlenecks like oil. Get a roaring economy going again, oil will spike to $150/barrel and the economy will crash.  The solar roll-out is underway, along with the wind one, but it hasn’t (yet) changed that reality.  The same is true of many other commodities.  If we want distributed growth in a world with constrained commodities, well, we can’t have it.  We have to remove or avoid those bottlenecks.  This requires deliberate government policy, but we have dodged the issue since the 70s (solar should have been where it is today 15 years ago, but Reagan chose an oil play, not a solar play, and chose to crush wages to crush demand.)

The absolute obsession with inflation is really about wage inflation, and the obsession with wage inflation is about widespread consumer demand causing commodity inflation.  We’re moving towards a deflationary world (for ordinary people, there is vast inflation in goods and services the rich consume), but our policy makers are still in asuterity “crush employment and wages” mode.

No Future Till The Current Rich Can Monetize It

We could have had a lot of what we have today many years ago.  But the rich control the politicians, and the politicians won’t allow it to occur.  There was great squealing for years about subsidies for solar, and corruption in how they were given out, but they were always a rounding error compared to subsidies for oil, let along the military-industrial complex, big agriculture, pharma, health insurance, and so on.  All of those industries were powerful enough to strangle subsidies to competitors (solar, generic drugs, whatever) and strong enough to insist on new laws which strangled startups and competition (every copyright extension is nothing but an anti-competitive measure intended to keep profits coming to incumbents.)

Bottom Line

We have too much money chasing too few returns because we’ve spent 40 odd years making sure that ordinary people get less and less money; the rich get more; and that oligopolies are nurtured and protected.  The rich control government, and they intend to make sure that all the money goes to them.  Unfortunately, in a mass market economy, that means the economy becomes lousier and lousier.  This doesn’t matter to the rich because they are comparatively better off. Better a Czar amidst serfs than the CEO of General Motors in 1955.

 

The Problem with Basic Income

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On February 27, 2015

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Basic income—just giving everyone a certain amount of money, is an idea with a lot to recommend it.  In any society which isn’t willing to just let people suffer or die because they don’t have money, there is a “social welfare net” with a vast bureaucracy.  Why not just give everyone enough money to live on, and wipe out most of that bureaucracy?  If you’re going to give poor people money anyway, it’s more efficient, and vastly less humiliating.

There’s a great deal of controversy around the idea of technological unemployment (economists sneeringly dismiss the idea on aggregate as the “lump of labor” fallacy), but even if you don’t believe in it en-gross, changing technology does cause specific people, often large numbers of them, to lose their jobs, and many of them never work again, or if they do, work at terrible jobs.  A basic income deals with this issue, at least somewhat, and, again, far more efficiently than welfare and unemployment insurance and so on.  And if you believe that there will be widespread technological improvement as AI and robotics improve, this will mitigate against it.

In a demand based society; a consumer society, where the economy is based on large numbers of people buying things, a basic income makes sense.  People with no (or too little) money, don’t spend it (obviously) and that’s bad for the economy.  Every dollar you give a poor person gets spent; it immediately goes to someone else, and that means that even those who are well off have reason to be for a basic income: most of it is going to wind up in their hands, and if it doesn’t (because you have a basic income which goes to everyone, not just those below a certain income), well, they still get theirs.

One might point out that we’re moving away from a demand based society, however, at least in the West. More than all the productivity gains of the last business cycle in the US, for example, have gone to the top 10% (really the top 3%).  Consumer inflation is flat, and in many countries verging on deflation, while the goods that the rich buy (investment art, Manhattan and London real-estate) are booming.  Moving away from a broad-based demand society, such as we had in the post-war liberal era was mainly done because it benefited the rich, but it also solved another problem—increased demand fed into oil and other commodity prices, and as the 70s  and early 80s showed, that lead to huge inflation and economic dislocation.

So basic income, at any level that would be equivalent to a living wage (aka. letting people live a decent life, not just barely scrape by), can be expected to spike inflation in various commodities, including oil.  This is a problem, but it’s not a huge problem, because we finally have the technology which allows us to move off oil (not completely, but enough to mitigate the effect of demand increases), and because, hey, we’re flirting with deflation anyway.

The real problem with basic income has to do with who controls our economy—with the fact that we are sold what we need, by and large, by oligopolies.  A few large companies control most industries, and effectively price set.  (Broadband profits in the US are almost 100% a year.)

This is known as pricing power. When someone needs what you sell more than you need to sell it to them; when they have little choice but to pay what you ask, you can demand a premium.  If something is scarce, either naturally or artificially, those who control it get more of the share of national income than otherwise.  In a society whose economy is not controlled by oligopolies this is usually a good thing—prices go up, more people enter the industry, prices drop.  That’s the what the economics textbooks tell you happens.  But it doesn’t happen in an oligopolistic economy where the oligopolists control government and where barriers to entry are very high.

So those who are in an oligopolistic situation, whether telecom companies, health insurers, pharmaceutical companies or landlords, are generally able to set prices: you must have medicine, you must have shelter, and in a modern economy, try and get by without a phone and internet.

What this means is that increases in income, especially at the lower end, tend to be simply taken away by those who have what you must have.  Everyone will know what the basic income is, and they will know who is surviving on just that, or just that plus a low-wage job.  And they will raise prices so that money goes to them.

Basic income which does include either oligopoly busting or regulation (or having the government, oh, just provide broadband and/or housing itself) will help many people, to be sure.  But in a not very long time, most of the gains will be eaten by those who have pricing power.

This, by the way, is far from a “socialist” theory. This comes out of bog-standard neo-classical economics.  Non-competitive markets tend towards concentration of wealth, and those who have pricing power use it (they act in their own self-interest, precisely as economics says they will.)  Markets are wonderful things. They are extremely efficient at allocating money.  And they will do exactly what they are set up to do.  In an oligopoly situation, with capture of government, they will allocate that money very quickly to the oligopolists.

So if you want basic income to work, you must also make capitalism work. You must create actual competitive markets, you must-trust bust, you must regulate and you must move, as government, to ensure that the important things people will spend that basic income on are not scarce—either naturally or artificially.

This extends far beyond basic income.  A market economy; a capitalist economy, works to the benefit of the majority only when it is competitive and when scarcities are actively managed, ideally to remove them, and when they can’t be removed, to ensure that those who provide scare necessities, do not reap outsize profits which allow them to buy up the rest of the system, including government and civic society.

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Sneering that there is no runaway inflation misses the point

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On February 11, 2015

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A lot of people though that unconventional monetary policy (aka. printing huge amounts of money) would lead to runaway inflation.

They were wrong, and the fact that they were wrong is a cudgel used to beat them.

But the reason they were wrong is important, as I noted last week: they thought that all that money would get to ordinary people rather than virtually all of it going to the rich and corporations.

In retrospect, and perhaps even at the time, naive.  But what the critics are castigating them for is believing in the good faith of policy makers: thinking that those policy makers actually wanted an economy that worked, if not for all people, then for more than the top one, five or ten percent.

They were wrong because they weren’t cynical enough or weren’t realistic enough to realize that developed world elites are so depraved that they are willing to print trillions of dollars to give almost exclusively to people who are already wealthy, in order to ensure they stay wealthy.

Monetary policy, at this point, has no other actual aim in most countries. It is meant to bail out indebted securities firms, to keep the rich rich, and to make them richer. If it happens to do anything else, that’s most likely an unfortunate side effect, since poor governments sell off crown assets cheap; and poor people work for almost nothing.

One can (and did) point out this a short-sighted policy likely to rebound on the rich, but they do not really believe it, nor do they really believe any one else deserves money.  They are the “value creators” and they are worth what they are given.  They, after all, bought up government fair and square.  Now they want a return on their investment.

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The nature of a corporation and how it changed in the 1980s

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On February 8, 2015

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By Matt Stoller

Let’s start with Pfizer, which announced the acquisition of generics maker Hospira for $17B this week. Pfizer isn’t a drug company.  Pfizer is a financial company that happens to own some labs and drug factories.  Pfizer’s business model is to acquire small companies who innovate, lay off their scientists, and ride the patent or other monopolies.  Former employees of acquired companies explain this clearly. So does Pfizer itself.

Pfizer is telling Wall Street that the acquisition will be ‘accretive to earnings’ and it will cut $800M in costs. Laying off scientists.  What this means, in reality, is that large pharma companies are actually innovation destroying machines. How did we get here?

Prior to the 1980s, Americans understood that corporations were private governments of resources and people.  Large corporation consolidations in the 1890s were done under the auspices of rationalizing the economy.  Then antitrust from the 1930s to the 1970s was done to force these private governments to act in the public interest. RCA, GE, Alcoa, Dupont, Xerox, etc – all were forced by antitrust actions to put their patents into the public domain.  The US gov’t structured markets as a way of ensuring that these political entities had checks and balances on their activities.

Antitrust was a Madisonian solution to the monopoly problem of the 1890s-1920s, which was understood as political NOT economic.  This had an incredible effect. Large companies, like Dupont, were forced to spend more on R&D instead of acquiring innovation.  Because they had to compete against smaller firms and they couldn’t acquire (due to merger scrutiny).  Pfizer’s business model, in other words, would have been illegal prior to the 1970s.

Most of the laws that forced this state of affairs are still on the books. The were just reinterpreted by Reagan.  Any President can simply go back to the pre-1981 model through executive action. Every merger is still reviewed by DOJ.

In the 1980s, an intellectual revolution took hold. Corporations were no longer private governments. They became property.  They weren’t political entities, but economic entities pursuing ‘efficiency’. Corporations exist only for shareholder benefit.  This idea was radical. Prior to this, few thought large shareholders were the only stakeholders, or even the most important ones.  Eliminating all other interests – workers, managers, customers, communities, national security, small shareholders – was truly radical.

It was a political fight, but the Reagan conservatives along with Wall Street Dems of the early 1980s won.  Liberal Democrats had focused their energies on important social questions, rather than the nature of the corporation.  The result was Wall Street primacy and a massive merger boom in the 1980s. Layoffs, offshoring, globalization, monopolies, etc.

This idea that these private governments – corporations – exist solely for shareholders has led to a dangerous unbalanced politics.  In which the industrial base, worker rights, small businesses, consumers, don’t matter. Even China’s strategic threat is irrelevant.

This is changing. Net neutrality is the first significant antitrust concept to emerge and take hold since the Reagan revolution.  Because tech companies and citizens intuitively understand but can’t articulate that telecoms are private governments, not just property.

Which brings us back to Pfizer. The ability to create/sell medicine is of deep public interest. Pfizer has a state charter to do this.  That Pfizer instead is full of financial engineers who generate cash by destroying access to medicine is increasingly understood.  Same with hospital monopolies. These should not be run to maximize cash generation over patient well-being. This is a consequence of the Reagan revolution in corporate governance. It is unsustainable. And the ideas behind it are stale and bad.

All it will take to reorganize our culture is relearning that corporations are part of our political system and need to be managed through a Madisonian checks and balances system of ensuring competition and the public interest as mattering.

Antitrust is popular, Zephyr Teachout got huge applause lines on it when she ran a shoestring campaign in NYC.  Net neutralit generated 4 million comments to the FCC. People get it. It’s simple stuff. The liberal lawyer elites aren’t there yet.  But we’re beginning to understand the importance of the government protecting private property from corporate predators.  And Citizens United is opening up a new (or rather old) way to understand how political corporations really are.

And that is why these ideas are coming back. And why our political system feels deadened, but is on the verge of renewal.

(And to make the point another way: In 2008, Pfizer/Wyeth spent $13B on R&D. 2009, Pfizer bought Wyeth. In 2013, the combined company spent $6.55B on R&D. Down 50%.)

Yes Virginia all that money printing did show up as inflation

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On January 22, 2015

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One of the great “mysteries” of the last 7 years or so is why all the money from unconventional monetary policy hasn’t shown up as inflation.  Many analysts thought that printing that much money must surely increase prices, but inflation indices in most of the developed world are barely up, and in many cases are flirting with deflation.

The answer is obvious, but you’ll hardly see anyone point it out.

First, who was the money given to?

Rich people and corporations.

Ok then, what do rich people and corporations spend their money on?  Stocks, and real estate—high end real estate.

In America as a whole, let alone New York, housing prices have not returned to pre-financial crisis values.  But luxury apartment prices now exceed pre-financial crisis prices.  Real estate prices, period, in London, are now higher than pre-financial collapse.

Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Index is up about 175% off its lows of 2009. The annualized gain is therefore about 29% a year.  GDP has not risen anything like that, neither have wages.  Corporations, however, are flush with money, and they have spent a great deal of it on stock buy-backs, while rich people, of course, have bought stocks.

Inflation has, then, shown up exactly where one would expect, in the assets bought by the people who were given money.  Ordinary people did not receive the largesse from unconventional monetary policy, rich people and corporations did.

This is not hard, this is not difficult, this is not complex.  The fact that mainstream analysts and pundits do not connect the dots on this is because they do not want to.

That inflation has not shown up in much (though not all) of the rest of the economy is simply based on the fact that no one else except the rich and corporations has received (I can’t call it “earned”) more money.  Nothing more, nothing less.

This economy is entirely artificial. It is based on giving money (in various ways) to those who already have a lot of it.  This is in no way a competitive market, certainly not a free market, and barely deserves to be called a market at all.  It is pure oligarchical abuse of the power of printing money in all its modern guises.

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In Light of Eric Garner

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On December 5, 2014

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Understand this, if you understand nothing else:

the system is working as intended.

It is true that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a sandwich, and it is tempting to blame the prosecutor, Donovan.  Certainly he made a decision, but he made the decision that the system wants: police are almost never prosecuted for assault or murder and on those rare occasions that they are, they almost always get off.

Donovan did what the legal system wanted him to do.

As for the police in question, well, they did what the legal system wants them to do, as well:

“Get away [garbled] … for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. Why would you…? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.”

” I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” he said, as officers restrained him.

What you will hear defenders of the police say is “he was non-compliant.”

Non-compliant.

If a police officer tells you to do anything, you do it immediately.  If you do not, anything that happens to you, up to and including death, is your problem.

The legal system exists, today, to ensure compliance.

Graph of incarceration in the US over time

From Wikipedia

American oligarchical society rests on people not effectively resisting.  All gains now go to the top 10%, with the rest of society losing ground.  Incarceration rates blossom in 1980, which is also the year that the oligarchical program is voted in and becomes official.  (Trickle down economics can be understood no other way.)

Any part of the population which is inclined to resist, must be taught that it cannot resist.  Get out millions to demonstrate against the Iraq war: it will not work. Protest against police killings of African Americans, it will not work.

Nothing you do will work.

You will comply, and you will learn that resistance is futile.

strikes over 1000The more outside the mainstream you are, the more you will learn it.  African Americans, Latinos, poor whites (in that order.)  Those who are fundamentally authoritarian, but somewhat opposed to the system (like the Bundy ranch) are treated more carefully (though the militia movement has its martyrs).  But the fundamental lesson of life is to do what your lords and masters tell you to, and to not protest any law or order, no matter how nonsensical, trivial, or unjust it is.

Three strikes laws and the end of judicial discretion are about this.  During the 80s the legal system was taken away from the judges and given to the prosecutors and the police. Almost all sentences are plea-bargained: the person with almost all the power in the system is the prosecutor.  He or she is judge and jury for the vast majority of cases, and even when a case does go in front of a judge, the judge’s discretion is extremely limited.  Your third crime stealing a bike?  Too bad, we’re throwing the key away.

Compliance when given specific orders and learned hopelessness about protest or organizing are the aims.  Ordinary citizens must understand that they cannot change the system if elites do not agree with the changes they want made.  If they try, they will be arrested and receive a criminal sentence, meaning they can never again have a good job.

In this system the wolves or goats identify themselves.  An injustice is committed, people protest and the most aggressive protestors (which doesn’t always mean violence) are arrested.  Certainly the organizers are.  Those people are, as a result, usually destroyed economically even if they aren’t locked up for years.

The system is doing what it is meant to do.  It teaches compliance, it teaches hopelessness and it identifies those who will not obey laws that don’t make sense (marijuana possession, for example), or who will fight or organize against the system and then it destroys them economically and often psychologically through practices like solitary confinement and prison rape.

The system will not change until those who want it to change have the raw power to force it to change, because it does serve the interests of its masters by destroying or marginalizing anyone who is actually a danger to oligarchical control of the system.

Race is an effective tool in this system, dividing the lower classes (and almost everyone is lower class now) against each other.  No matter how bad a poor white’s life is, well hey, he ain’t black.  He or she can feel superior to someone, can have someone to kick down at.

And understand this, most of what police are paid in is social coin: the right to demand immediate obedience and fuck people up; the solidarity of the blue line; the feeling of belonging and power, is what makes the job worth having for (probably most) of the people who are now attracted to it.

Being a thug; having social sanction to be a thug, is enjoyable to a lot of people. Since that’s what cops get to do, those are the sort of people who tend to be attracted to the job.  The police are the biggest toughest gang around, and belonging to them has most of the rewards of gang life, without the dangers of going to jail.

Working as intended

 

 

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