Royals envy: Societal class-based penis envy in America

Going by Twitter, a fair number of British people (probably greater in Northern Ireland and Scotland than England) and lots of "Black Twitter" no matter the country, said "good bye and good riddance" yesterday when Elizabeth II died.

America? Not so much. There's probably some US residents that greeted it with a yawn, but, I venture that, of people who had an "emotional opinion" of some strength on the queen's death, the percentage saddened or whatever was higher here in the States than in the UK, and probably much higher than in other outposts of the British Commonwealth.

Some political scientists have said that most Americans' veneration for, nay, semi-worship of, the US flag is a substitute for not having a monarch. 

If true, it's apparently not enough of a substitute, given yesterday's outpouring.

Didn't we secede from a distant ancestor of hers? Yes.

Aren't we supposedly egalitarian? Supposedly, yes; actually, no.

And, maybe THAT is part of the issue.

Study after study has shown that, at least since the time of Shrub Bush's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld castigating "old Europe" for not backing the US on the Iraq War, that "old Europe" has higher economic class mobility than the US. Even with the UK having less class mobility than continental Europe, it's likely still ahead of the US.

So, maybe that's it. Royals envy is part and parcel of a class-based society that the US denies it has. I mean, I don't think "working class" White folk, let alone minorities, have this. It's a middle class and upper middle class and beyond issue.

As for Elizabeth? I've already done two semi-takedown obits in a week. No need for another.

I will note that when I dropped this Tweet:

Pictures Charles slipping into visit mother Elizabeth II with something like the docs did for his great-grandfather George V:
"Here, Mumsy, it's just a small shot of morphine to make you feel better and give you a nice, looong sleep."

— TheRealSocraticGadfly (@real_gadfly) September 8, 2022

Into a "Monty Python" group on Hucksterman, the only people who liked it were British. (Hatred was from both Americans and British, even though the Beeb mentions the reality of George V's euthanasia in talking about the "London Bridge is Down" transition plan.

So, I noted that I regretted this Tweet, also posted there:

Queen Elizabeth II getting some high-grade BBC at the end of her life? Prince Philip is turning over in his grave!

— TheRealSocraticGadfly (@real_gadfly) September 8, 2022

Didn't get the same vitriol and I was sad. (A full roundup of my Twitter snark is here.)

More seriously, and yeah, we're going to go halfway into obit land, with that.

Elizabeth wasn't "as racist" as Philip. (Or as the late Queen Mother.) But, could she have done more re the former Meghan Markle? Yes. It might be one thing to visit Oceania or sub-Saharan African portions of the Commonwealth as its sovereign or its non-sovereign leader, but the "color line" in the royal family? Not so much. And, let's not even get started on Charles' brother, Andrew, and Jeffrey Epstein. Oops, I guess we just did. Yes, she stripped him of titles just a month or so ago, but, this has been festering for a long time.

Otherwise, if you want "class," there's no need to look across the pond. The Windsors are as declassé as the ... well, as the Trumps.

That said, even though she reigned without ruling, Elizabeth did "nudge" here and there. It will be fun seeing King Charles III dealing with the twat of a new Tory PM Liv Truss and her climate-hating government. With their succession to their respective roles separated by only two days, there's bound to be head-on conflict, and given the degree to which Charles has long seemed to have been champing at the bit, I'm sure he's full ready for this.

Speaking of, per Unherd, if British democracy is so fragile, and crappy, today that you're worried about its post-Elizabethan future, isn't that another argument to junk the crown and take a full plunge? Or, to put it more bluntly, in Monty Python terms: If the death of some watery tart with a sword makes you fear for the future of your democracy, then per Samwise Gamgee, you never had much democracy in the first place, did you?

(UnHerd got even worse in its Saturday email blast. Good fricking doorknob, for a bunch of allegedly outside-the-box thinkers, their British contingent is a bunch of royal hand-wringers.)

Sidebar back to the Monty Python folks ... seriously, it's a Monty Python group, not a BBC newsreaders group. You could spoof the death of any living ex-president, or if a serving president stroked out (assassination different) and I'd be OK with it.

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Update: It's not just Americans, though. Punker Johnny Rotten reincarnated as a royalist ass-kisser. Part of a great takedown.

"Happy" May Day

Happy May Day in a country that refuses to celebrate it, even though the idea of May Day, not a defanged Labor Day, arose in America, as international organized labor celebrated the Haymarket Resistance with International Labor Day on the old May Day.

Happy May Day in a country that has no real, at least strong, national party of labor and hasn't for decades.

Happy May Day in a country where the more "left" of the two national parties has most national leadership opposing single-payer national health care, either directly or by stealth euphemism.

Happy May Day where that party follows the Overton Window and refuses to admit the reality of economic classes existing in the US, and generally being more firmly ensconced than in old Europe.

Happy May Day where the history of that first paragraph gets eliminated from school history textbooks.

Doubling down on the wrongness of "class-only" warriors

By "class-only" warriors, I mean the likes of Adolph Reed, who pretty much claims that all issues of race, or nearly all, are ultimately reducible to issues of socioeconomic class. I mean the likes of Reed touter Doug Henwood, who ultimately blocked me on Twitter because of this.

I am building on an old post about Reed, where I take on his claim that New Mexico is one of the whitest states in the nation. It was part of a broader effort of his to largely diss Black Lives Matter.

The meat of that, relevant to this piece, follows.

A few months about, when discussing Black Lives Matter raising police brutality issues across the country, he responded rhetorically, wondering why police brutality was so high in New Mexico when it's one of the whitest states in the country, in his claim.

And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%.

No, I don't think that's playing "gotcha." Rather, I think it — and the whole piece — was Reed playing "gotcha" with Black Lives Matter activists. The first four states on the list all have high American Indian populations. New Mexico has a high Hispanic population and Arizona a medium one.

But, that's a sidebar. New Mexico, separating out Hispanics of any race, as the Census calls it, as a separate socio-ethnic group, has long been a majority-minority state. Even without doing that, it's STILL a full one-third non-white. It has about zero in common demographically with Wyoming. I'm using Wikipedia, even if some call it "lazy-ass." (I'm also using my personal knowledge of New Mexico.)

I tie it to this new piece from High Country News about American Indians' problems with police violence, and how a "Native Lives Matter" movement has struggled more than Black Lives Matter to gain traction.

First takeaway? This:

In the West, as in the rest of the nation, Native Americans are the racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement, at a rate three times higher than whites.

And, no, socioeconomic class didn't lead to Indian marginalization. Indian marginalization led to them being poor. Indian marginalization, not poverty, led to them being considered as having few rights.

That's simple. Or, it should be. 

Here's much of the "why":

Several factors contribute to that statistic, including the lack of mental health services (nearly half of the victims had histories of mental illness) and the often-strained relationship between Native Americans and non-native police. Many tribes are under the jurisdiction of nearby non-tribal authorities, leaving cities and counties struggling to come up with the additional policing resources. According to researchers at Claremont Graduate University, 83 percent of the deadly encounters between Native Americans and law enforcement involved non-tribal police.

That's somewhat similar, in urban areas, to most police actually living in suburbs.

American Indians live largely in rural areas, so their deaths at the hands of police get even less media attention than black deaths. Also, the fact that they make up a smaller portion of the population is a factor.

First, wishing that all racial problems ultimately reduced to class ones might be nice. But, if it's not true, it's not true. And, with blacks, as the mudsill movement shows, it's often not true. The resurgence of modern mudsills as part of Trump's backers shows that. Mudsills existed in the old South before it was heavily capitalized or industrialized. Yes, the "cavaliers" had a class, and looked down at "po whites." But that class, if based on economics at all, was based on land, not capital — unless one counts slaves as capital.

Now, per this interview with Reed, it's possible that identity politics CAN have a neoliberal bent. Yeah, and so can mercantilist trade policy. Neither one HAS TO be such, though. Reed also comes very close to making this into a zero-sum game. People who are concerned about racism — and racism against people of individual racism, not a blanket word game like Reed claims — and class issues as well could argue that Reed himself is playing into other hands.

Beyond that, I'm sure Reed as an academic knows that not only women, but LTBGQ people also face economic discrimination. Oh, I could probably dig up some twisted, quasi-Marxist class-based argument.

Or, I could just realize that society still has plenty of bigots.

I should add, per this Existential Comics issue, that it's "interesting," during the time I followed him on Twitter, that Henwood just about never, if at all, mentioned Frantz Fanon. I'm not sure Reed does a lot, either.

The cult of Adolph Reed (and maybe, of dime-store Marxism? — updated)

Earlier this week, I tackled a very problematic piece at The Atlantic, one that claimed that postbellum segregation and Jim Crow in the U.S. South was about class first — and specifically about blocking the organization of labor across color lines first — and only about race second, with the implication that race was a distance second in that second.

I rightly noted that most the South didn't industrialize much in the first couple of decades after the Civil War, that when it did, unionization had its own racial problems, that farm organizations also had segregation problems, that the South also didn't urbanize much in that time and more.

That alone was enough to set off the Doug Henwoods of the world.

But, then, I dared question the insights of Adolph Reed and the shitstorm hit.

Reed is even worse in attempts to claim that modern minority economic problems in general, and modern black economic problems in particular, are "all about class" or nearly so

A few months about, when discussing Black Lives Matter raising police brutality issues across the country, he responded rhetorically, wondering why police brutality was so high in New Mexico when it's one of the whitest states in the country, in his claim.

And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%.

No, I don't think that's playing "gotcha." Rather, I think it — and the whole piece — was Reed playing "gotcha" with Black Lives Matter activists. The first four states on the list all have high American Indian populations. New Mexico has a high Hispanic population and Arizona a medium one.

But, that's a sidebar. New Mexico, separating out Hispanics of any race, as the Census calls it, as a separate socio-ethnic group, has long been a majority-minority state. Even without doing that, it's STILL a full one-third non-white. It has about zero in common demographically with Wyoming. I'm using Wikipedia, even if some call it "lazy-ass." (I'm also using my personal knowledge of New Mexico.)

(Update: If we want to properly follow through on ethnic assortment and police brutality, Reed is even more wrong, per High Country News:

In the West, as in the rest of the nation, Native Americans are the racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement, at a rate three times higher than whites.

And, hence, the development of a #NativeLivesMatter hashtag. Rather than do too much in the way of updating on this piece, I'll do a separate one with overhauling. And, note that the Native Americans killed by cops is not only at a rate 3x higher than whites, but a rate higher than any other group, including African-Americans.)

And, now, Henwood apparently doesn't want to accept that, complete with screen grab sent to him via Twitter.

Dude? (And I use that term on purpose. And, now, perhaps for Henwood as well as Reed.)

New Mexico has been a majority-minority state for decades. It is one of four such states, and is specifically just 40 percent non-Hispanic white.

Whether Reed is that ignorant, or, just to insult BLM, he was claiming that if you're not black, you're white, in either case, I lost a lot of respect for him right there.

And, speaking of?

What if BLM is right — and we need to extrapolate from largely white cops' undue violence against blacks in particular to their violence against minorities in general? (That said, I'm not claiming that such violence IS what's happening. My claim is limited to Reed's claim about New Mexico's whiteness or not. That's contra one Reed-ite on Twitter who apparently thought — or more likely, wanted to believe — that I was making that larger claim. And, the screenshot map she sent me only included the Southwest. And, getting back to the issue of sociology vs. Marxist-based ideas of class, such data don't address the issue of how much, in a matter like policing, how much minority cops internalize attitudes toward minorities of their white coworkers.)

The last few paragraphs above, from the "Besides ..." on, are what led me to blog about this issue.

The left-liberals with a "class-only" lens seem to me to be guilty, first of all, of starting with a zero-sum approach to particular issues of labor or other socioeconomic troubles. And, because they're approaching it from the labor side, that zero-sum lens is a class-based one.

And, I think Reed himself has problems with this. Let's look at at that pull quote just above.

I think he's trying to force racism to be viewed through a class based lens. And I simply disagree.

A further sign of that?

Elsewhere, per Naked Capitalism, Reed has claimed that identity politics are being used to undermine class-based politics. Dude, there are plenty of people who aren't Hillbots or other DNC surrogates, and who, like me, find your "either-or" claim ridiculous. And, you don't have to be a Green to know that. Local Democrats in Ohio are on the record as rejecting any such dichotomy. And, yes, worshipers at the cult of Reed, I think he IS perpetuating a dichotomy. Deal with it.

I also disagree with the following Tweets from the Twitter interlocutor who posted the Reed quote screen grab above.

@SocraticGadfly @DougHenwood Race in the modern sense is a class construct. A ruling class construct to control labor. W/out race, no racism

— Josiah Walrus (@Josiah_Walrus) February 22, 2017

Nope.

The "without race, no racism" is, of itself trite. The claim that "race" in the modern sense is a class construct? Those people need to read some sociology, and not just about the U.S., nor about the capitalist West in general. I'll also suggest non-Western social histories, social psychology, and to the degree that it is done right, evolutionary psychology done right.

It ultimately goes back there. The quasi-xenophobia our hominid ancestors had against members of outgroups, against "otherness," existed about, oh, 2 million years before capitalism.

Ergo, no, the idea of constructing "race" did not come from capitalism. Nor, of course, is racism purely a "white" thing and certainly not a "European white" thing. Pre-capitalist Islamic empire Arabs were racist against blacks. Blacks can be racist today. Jews certainly can be, and are. (During the Sassanid Empire, a Jewish state in today's Yemen joined the Sassanids in a sack of Jerusalem, complete with pogrom [sic] against Christians.)

I have no problem seeing where class may have been an issue in segregation. But I know it wasn't the only one, and highly doubt it was the primary one. Ditto on other issues of black-white labor relations before World War II, at a minimum on a terminus ad quem.

Beyond that, I'll freely admit to being a bit of an agent provocateur, or neo-Cynic challenger of received wisdom. But, no, it's primarily that I see a certain amount of left-liberals operating with a "class-only" lens, or nearly so, on issues like this. And it's both wrong and off-putting.

To riff on an old bon mot directed against Freud? Sometimes racism is just racism.

Period.

Now, more on the idea, which led to the Reed-ites popping out of the Twitter woodwork, on the issue of how much segregation and Jim Crow were due to simple, plain old racism, no class-first claims, and how much they were due to employers trying to break up interracial solidarity of workers.

First, was an 1890s New Orleans strike an exception or not on poor race relations within organized labor in the South? I say more exception than rule. Even if blacks and whites struck together, they were kept in separate unions, in this case. Even with "relatively" enlightened miners in the early 1900s, segregated locals were maintained by the United Mine Workers! In other words, it's arguable that selfish white miners recognized they had to play ball with black miners just enough to keep them from being scabs, and nothing else, and either couldn't or wouldn't bring themselves to transcend either their own racism, societally imposed standards of racism, or both. 

"Class" in capitalistic societies may ultimately be socioeconomic, but it's never JUST socioeconomic, and even that word has "socio-" in front of "economic."

And, the fact that white workers allegedly received no material benefit over racism is itself working through a quasi-Marxist lens. Many Religious Righters get no material benefit over voting GOP, but due to pro-life issues, continue to do so. This idea of nonmaterial sociological benefits is behind the whole idea of "mudsills," also covered by Eric Foner and others.

Second, a lot of people with either a class-only or a class-first lens for these issues are getting a little butt-hurt. That's fine, or "fine." It adds to my contrarian nature on something like this. 

Related, per one Twitter commenter? I do not claim to be seeing things through a "race-only" lens. Or necessarily through a race-first lens, though, if you want my comment on that, I DO view Jim Crow that way. Let's not forget that the incident that led to Plessy was about public transportation — nothing to do with labor issues. And, I'm sure I'm far from alone about viewing Jim Crow laws, and other elements of segregation, through a race-first lens.

Seriously, while I think Reed has some insights, I 
A. Think he's wrong on this issue;
B. Think there's a cult of sorts of Adolf Reed; and
C. Think there's a cult of sorts of chic Marxism.

Well, as a good neo-Cynic, I love puncturing cults' balloons.

Also, re the background of some of the class-first scattershotters, I think "Marxism" or "communism" (at least in America) are as vacuous of terms as is "liberalism." The typical self-professed American Marxist is likely to be making that profession while grasping to a handhold of a purchase in the middle class with two claw-like hands.

Beyond that, Marxists who put hammer-and-sickle combos on their Twitter bios, or nom-de-plumes, probably are unaware that the sickle comes from the Bolsheviks forcibly incorporating the Russian peasants' party, the Social-Revolutionaries.

Finally, no, I don't claim "some of my best friends are ..." I do state that I've spent a clear majority of the last 15 years in not just majority-minority cities (ever more big cities in America are majority-minority in the central city, and a fair amount in the broader metropolitan areas), but in majority-minority communities or neighborhoods, or suburbs or small towns. 

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At the same time, having run into social justice warriors, or SJWs, repeatedly online, and now, more and more, within Green Party activism groups, I am halfway sympathetic to some of Reed's worries about Black Lives Matter, and other identity politics-based activism groups.

Halfway sensitive.

But not all the way sensitive.

And, still not really sensitive at all to the idea of needing to see nearly all issues of the left through a class-first lens.

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Update: This led me to write a blog post about Twitter protectionism by myself or others, kind of like a miniature version of concern trolling. Well, sometime between writing the Reed piece and it, Henwood blocked me. Good-bye. Just to make it formal, even though he wasn't following me, I blocked him back.

I should add, per this Existential Comics issue, that it's "interesting," during the time I followed him on Twitter, that Henwood just about never, if at all, mentioned Frantz Fanon. I'm not sure Reed does a lot, either.

#Hitchens, #BillClinton and snobbery

While I agreed with many of the political criticisms of Bill Clinton that Christopher Hitchens wrote in his book about the two, Scott McLemee of The American Prospect wonders if there wasn't another angle behind this: snobbery.

In the context of Hitch's one-time (and always, psychologically) "Trotskyite" affiliations, he wonders:

Was his shift to the right already unmistakable in the 1990s, with l’affaire Blumenthal as the equivalent to Kronstadt? That would make the ferocious and protracted campaign against Bill Clinton as something like the Russian Civil War. To my mind, this is plausible. Despite agreeing with almost every political criticism Hitchens lodged against the administration, I could not help noticing the tone of upper-class loathing for Clinton as pushy plebian upstart. (Such an attitude suggesting that Hitchens was more of a Czarist officer than a Bolshevik.)

Interesting indeed. That could also explain part of why he rounded so much on Gore Vidal when Vidal dissolved into 9/11 Trutherism -- it wasn't just that Vidal was wrong, but that "civilized people don't engage in such things."

Beyond that, McLemee notes, we have Hitchens "outing" himself in his autobiography:

(I)n Hitch 22, Hitchens confessed that in the late 1960s he was a leftist militant by day and guest at posh dinner parties by night.

But, that was apparently no surprise:

As it happens, his double life was no secret from the comrades, according to the literary critic Terry Eagleton, who was one of them. They nicknamed him Hypocritchens.

So, the World Socialist was onto something itself:

Hitchens was the sort of private school “leftist” that British society regularly turns out, essentially snobs and careerists, who ditch their former “comrades” as soon as the wind shifts or more tempting opportunities present themselves. His autobiography is an exercise in shameless name-dropping and self-promotion. ...

In the late 1990s, by which time Hitchens had largely given up his leftist pretensions, the Washington Post bluntly portrayed the circles he belonged to in the US capital as “an elite subset of Washington society—the crowd of journalists, intellectuals, authors and policymakers, mostly in their thirties and forties, who regularly dine together and dine out on each other.”  

Too bad there's no Hitchens left any more, to turn in his grave after it being pointed out that he was filleted by an "establishment" newspaper.

And, maybe we should, like Ross Douthat, in light of this, even question the motivation for his atheism.  Douthat suggests that Hitchens' atheism was more rebellion against the ultimate authority figure:

At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find. 

This air of rebellion did not make him a believer, but it lent his blasphemies an air of danger and intrigue, as though he were an agent of the Free French distributing literature deep in Vichy. Certainly he always seemed well aware of the extent to which his writings traded on the unusual frisson of saying “No!” to a supposedly nonexistent being.

I'd have to say he's at least pretty much right on the insight about Hitchens himself. Picture Byron as atheist, British class/style and sometimes shallowness of thought, all in one. But, I think many a Gnu Atheist, like many an old "village idiot atheist," is looking to pick the same fight with the same nonexistent tyrant, only with less romantic mood and less literary style.

Per a friend of mine, who (like me) longs for the "sweet spot" of triple Venn diagram intersection of skeptics, atheists and liberals, Hitchens was spotty on all three.

Now, McLemee may be wrong. But, given World Socialist, I don't think so, on the class issues. Maybe that's even part of the rebellion against god; how dare this (non)-figure not open the first-class cabin section to talk to him?

I think, though, that the snobbery issue doesn't explain as much as the pure rebelliousness issue. Hitchens the Trotskyite, like Churchill's Stalinist USSR, was a mystery inside a riddle inside an enigma, in some ways, possibly even to himself.

At the same time, if he was known to be such a political poseur, why did the Nation "hang on to him" for another half a decade, until the post-9/11 final break? There's other riddles and mysteries connected to his life, too.

And, otherwise, yes, I'm done with Hitchens. Any new insights by me, or revelations to other pundits I think worth passing on, I'll add to what I've already written in one post or another.

Better political discourse: More than empathy is needed

What's left of the mainstream media illustrates again the Peter Principle on today's politics, with this naive and insipid column by Gregory Rodriguez of the L.A. Times.

His "takeaway"? This:

The solution to the corrosive spirit of U.S. politics is not more politics. With 8 in 10 Americans saying the lack of civility is a serious problem, we should consider that the answer isn't in the system but in ourselves.

First, Mr. Rodriguez, I'll bet a majority of the 8 in 10 blame "the other side." Certainly, I'll bet a majority of conservatives do, even though they're primarily to blame for the lack of civility, primarily through attacking the "other," whether that "other" be gay, Muslim, atheist, global warming scientists or somebody else.

Second, the rich like it that way. As a friend of mine notes, most of the social safety net was passed, in part, because the rich, during the Depression, began to fear mob action or the rise of so-called demagogues like Huey Brown.

Today? With the astroturfing of the tea party movement, the rich now sic the middle class downward on the working and nonworking poor alike and have their dirty work down for them.


As the book "Payback" (5-starred by me) notes, it's part of human psychology to want to pass on stress and aggression by taking it out on those lower in the ranks. So, the middle class, as it stresses more, looks to the poor as targets. The GOP side of the rich encourage this for the reason my friend notes. The Democratic side of the rich diffuses it by being libertarian on social issues, and maybe wanting to raise taxes on themselves, but still avoiding more fundamental structural issues.

Most of the little class have little to no desire to be empathetic to those below them. It's almost like an addiction of sorts; it becomes good to kick the poor, if only verbally. (As well as gays, atheists, Muslims and other "others.")

It will take a massive reworking of social psychology, not just civics or empathy, to even begin to change this. It will require Warren Buffett to be more friendly to organized labor, not just to want to pay more taxes. It will require rich of both parties to want to change the economic structure of America. It will require them on the GOP side, and their flunkie economists, to stop preaching at the poor and to admit the greed, and power-lust, that lies behind their own acquisitiveness.

Finally, Rodriguez himself approaches this issue from a duopoly insider's perspective, per his column:

Four weeks ago, I attended a daylong meeting at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hosted by former Clinton White House domestic policy advisor Eric Liu. A small group, including former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Bill Gates Sr., discussed how to "revive and reinvent civics" in the U.S. 

And you never did even an approximation of "man on the street" interviewing? Nuff said. A simplistic solution offered as a Band-Aid for a gaping wound.

No, Obama, college won't help

From a long, insightful article in the Atlantic about the hollowing out of the middle class comes this observation that the normal BA or even BSBA won't help a person's bottom line so much any more, nor will it offer so much unemployment protection:

But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993, more than half of the nation’s income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, and the gains have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. ...

“It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” (MIT economist David Autor) told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral [degrees], in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.” ...

College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”

Takeaways, to shorten Autor?
1. A Harvard degree is worth more than ever, rightly or wrongly, due to "branding."
2. Finding the LinkedIn/CareerBuilder "hot field" is important, but ... what he doesn't say, is a matter of luck as much as anything else.

Autor then and also notes, as I've blogged elsewhere, that more and more paralegal work, or first-year post-law-school grunt work, can be done by computer. Other work like that, which he doesn't directly note, can and will be outsourced to India with a growing English-speaking middle class wanting to do more than call center/customer service work.

And, some of the social decline that started happening to "just high school grad" families in decades past is now starting with "just college" families.

And, going beyond Peck, I'll even say that some grad degrees will get "hollowed out."

Take "service" degrees in psychology and social work. People who know anything about MIT and Weizenbaum's famous ELIZA program, and who are as sardonic, or worse, as I am about the future of America at times, has to wonder why a Fortune 500 EAP program doesn't seriously say, "Why are we sending people to human counselors instead of something like this?"

But, there's yet more to ponder, and to refute:

An MD's Hypocritical Oath in action

OK, what's wrong with this picture? A hospital professional possibly violates HIPPA while perpetuating racial (it seems) and socioeconomic stereotypes. All to attack so-called "Obamacare."

Via the Snopes link, this was an actual letter to the editor Dr. Starner Jones had run in the Jackson, Miss. newspaper. I will quote the first graf in full:

During my last night's shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with a shiny new gold tooth, multiple elaborate tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid. She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.

The obvious racial stereotypes, as well as socioeconomic ones, bleed out of this doctor's letter.

First, how do you know her "shiny new gold tooth" is new? Fact is, precisely because it's so "visible," gold as a filling material has always been the poor person's filling. That's the first fact our good doctor won't let stand in the way of medical compassion, or his alternate world.

Second, how do you know the tennis shoes were "a very expensive brand"? How do WE know, even more, if you won't tell us what the brand is? Fact is, at a discount shoe store, "Docccccctttoooooorrr" Jones (to riff on Rush), Nikes can be bought for under $50.

Third, a cell phone is NOT a luxury. Depending on her rate plan and such, it may be cheaper for her than a landline.

Fourth, a "costly" pack of cigarettes? They're all kind of costly. That said, why don't you complain about Philip Morris, American Tobacco, Lorillard, etc., all of whom deliberately targeted minorities for decades? And, if you're spilling the beans, how do you know how much a day she smokes?

Fifth, buying beer isn't a sin.

But, the biggie, the "Medicaid" status.

Hey, "Docccctttooooorrrrrrr" Jones, your GOP-type buddies who own Wally-World had it as their corporate policy to push employees into Medicaid if they couldn't afford company insurance. Plenty of other people are on Medicaid who are employed. So are people on Social Security Disability Income.

Instead of complaining about her as a "cheat," let's look at rich, white present and former CEOs at Big Tobacco, the ones who targeted people like your stereotyped welfare queen.

Or, let's look at Dwayne Andreas at Archer Daniels Midland, who, via the "farm bills" that boost Big Ag companies like his, peddle junk-food crack to lower-income people.

And, to my family that lives in a state, Missouri, that lets junk food be bought with food stamps: Whose fault is that? Probably your rich white legislators being bought off by richer-yet lobbyists for folks like ADM!!! Get a fucking clue.

Oh, I'm sorry, I'm not that smart myself, supposedly.

That said, I've looked at a couple of other liberal blogs, and the conservative numb-nuts go batshit over the slightest insinuation this guy is a racist.

Well, as for the religious conservative numbnuts, and the Doooocccctttttttoooooooorrrrrrr, read Ecclesiastes about how chance comes to all before you talk about reaping what you sow. (Then, realize there is no such thing as "a unitary theology of the Bible," because it was written by dozens of people over several hundred years. Hell, Muhammad changes his mind more than once as the sole author - theoretically, in reality probably not - of the Quran.)

As for the claim that he's not talking about a black person? Sure, you can point to individual items and say, no that one, or this one, isn't necessarily a "black" thing. But, add them togethr and 2 + 2 = 4. Especially in the light of this seventh-generation Mississippian (who probably went to an all-white private school) protesting "Obamacare" behind this all.

Oh, and raise your hand if you believe Haley Barbour didn't come from "this Mississippi."