James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 13, 2011
REFERENCE:
This is a series of exchanges regarding this missive with a ninety-two-year-old reader with a perceptive and agile mind. The original missive:
THE ECONOMIC REALITY IN THE UNITED STATES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 12, 2011
I don’t care whether you are Republican or Democrat or Independent, the fact remains, and it has been this way for some time, the top 4 percent of American earners pay 50 percent of the Federal Income Tax, the next 50 percent pay 47 percent of the Federal Income Tax, the bottom 46 percent of taxpayers pay 3 percent of the Federal Income Tax.
Be always well,
Jim
PS It came out today that Americans that make $33,000 or less a year represent 3 percent of the collected Federal Income Tax, while those that make $350,000 or more represent 40 percent of the collected Federal Income Tax (April 13, 2011)
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THE READER WRITES:
Jim,
My sincere thanks for your prompt reply.
May I say thought I had matched your "shortest missive ever" in responding to it, but your comment on Krugman's "failure to put the bottom 50 percent in the right context" provides the premises for a huge socio-economic debate.
My take remains much simpler: this remarkable change in income share (toward greater income inequality) is paralleled by a concerted effort to weaken labor.
Beginning with Reagan's administration, organized labor unions have declined from more than 25% to about 7% today. The process continues with state after state "right to work" laws. In Texas, we now rank with Mississippi in percentage of minimum wage workers.
Reduced income share translates to reduced political power. With the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, a corporation, in campaign finance law, has the same contribution privilege as any other "person". (Yes, unions, too, have that privilege, but compare the relative political power, given their decline and possible disappearance.)
Jim, as an aside, I share with you the agonizing grief of the loss of a child; although it happened (a son) many years ago, the pain lingers, even in this 92nd year of my life.
With admiration and appreciation for your many contributions to the "net",
John
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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
John,
Thank you for your response. You are right about the unions. As I've written elsewhere, they took the Robber Barons in the late nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century on at great personal cost to establish equitable wages and hygienic and safe working conditions. I will come back to this in a surprising and disturbing way in a moment and it concerns Apple, Inc.
Somehow, no matter what the good intentions, corpocracy -- which I've also written widely about -- seeps into the mindset and comes to dominate.
Unions after WWII were strong, when nearly two out of every five men and women workers belonged to some kind of a union, from the teamsters to the garment industry, from the automotive to steel, from railroad workers to small businesses.
As unions bargained with corporations, they became increasingly mirror images of their adversaries in very telling ways. They assumed similar hierarchies, organizational structures, the same infallible authority and pecking orders, and alas, the same insensitivity to workers as persons.
Unions negotiated contracts to win wage and benefit concessions but at the expense of worker freedom and worker control of work. Worker rights became the small print between the corporations and the unions that kept workers in place. Alas, unions became corporations with the same insensitive draconian practices of corporations.
It was not the intention of unions, I’m sure, to estranged workers from what they did, to demotivate them from taking pride in their work, but it was the unintended consequences. Profits were more important than people to corporations, corporate concessions were more important to unions than workers.
Workers were treated as things to be managed and manipulated rather than as persons to be led by both corporations and unions.
In two of my books, I systematically show how corporations programmed workers into being management dependent and then counterdependent on the corporation for their total well being. This led to workers becoming suspended in terminal adolescent never having to grow up and take charge of what they did, or indeed, of their lives. It was not their problem!
When the world recovered from WWII, and was now competing with the United States, corporations attempted to go from a culture of comfort, which they had created, to a culture of contribution, which they sought to be competitive by out-of-sight wage and benefit concessions and cosmetic changes. The intention was to give workers the impression they were involved in the decision-making, when, of course, they weren’t. This was the bonehead strategy of the 1980’s or a quarter century after WWII.
If these workers wanted to be contributors, they didn’t know how. You can’t say one day, “wait for orders from headquarters, “ and the next day, “take charge of what you do.” Increased pay and benefits, and slogans, drove workers not into the Culture of Contribution, but the Culture of Complacency.
This complacent culture went on through the 1980’s and 1990’s until corporations could no longer afford it.
Corporations were losing whole industries to foreign competition: cars, electronics, light fixtures, appliances, shoes, clothes, etc. I called it “the present panic of now,” which was caused by a reactive rather than a proactive corporate society. We still suffer for it when workers best operate as independent contractors. We are still a society of smoke and mirrors living in virtual reality and wondering why the game is being stolen from us.
The irony is that corporations when they were giving workers everything but the kitchen sink took the bacon out of the mouths of union leaders, and therefore led to the decline of unions, which had been promoted, in my view, on the wrong agenda. Workers don’t work for bread, alone.
John, over my long career, I have found the most altruistic, idealistic and humanistic of souls gradually to succumb to the intoxication of power and corporate profit, and then lose all sense of their good intentions and become like every other corporation on the face of the earth believing themselves to be invincible and infallible.
Today, on the NEWS HOUR OF PBS a report came out of China that the greatest corporate violator of worker rights, worker safety, worker welfare, and worker health is none other than Apple, Inc., the Steven Jobs store operating in China. Workers have been exposed to and forced to handle hazardous materials in order to maximize profits. Sound familiar?
I have written nine books on this subject, but no more. Corporations and corpocracy are dinosaurs, and will eventually expire because we are a knowing society and not a learning one. The irony about this is that we think we are so smart, the first key to dissolution.
Be always well,
Jim
PS I admire your longevity, but more importantly, your agile mind. Thank you for the kind words about my daughter. I know, as only a parent can know that that son you lost is never far from your mind nor is my daughter from mine.
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THE READER WROTE EARLIER:
Dr. Jim,
An obverse view of these data show a rather remarkable shift in income percentage gain and loss in recent decades: e.g., from 1983 to 1998 the top 1% enjoyed an income increase of 42%, the middle 20% a more modest 10%, and the bottom 40% an income decline of 76%. The gap in income inequality seems to be growing, viewing more current figures. (Confer Dr. Paul Krugman).
John
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DR. FISHER’S EARLIER RESPONSE:
John,
I read Dr. Paul Krugman, too, and I'm not disputing his numbers.
What Dr. Paul fails to do, and I can see why, as he is very much a Keynesian economist, and that is he has failed to put the bottom 50 percent of our society in the right context.
The bottom 50 percent has failed to keep up with the educational requirements of a progressive technological society. Nearly half of the African American students don't finish high school, more than a third of the Hispanic students don't and nearly a quarter of white students don't. This energy, this manpower, this potential has been summarily dissipated.
When you don't have job skills, you wait on tables, work at MacDonalds, or do part-time manual labor or domestic work of some type.
Our educational system has failed, but it is not only teachers, but also parents, educators, politicians, the religious and the indifference of the general public that is doing fine, thank you very much.
We are a bankrupt nation that still doesn't get it. Envy is the religion of mediocrity. It comforts, it soothes, it explains away things that worry, and for this attention it rots our collective soul, allowing sloth, and meanness and greed to be celebrated in a celebrity culture as if virtues.
We don't want to embarrass, cause pain or discomfort to people convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened to them without hitting the books, leading responsible lives, picking themselves off the ground when they are knocked down, while leaving little trace of their threadbare attempts to belittle achievers or play on achievers' guilt. It is not "their" problem it is society's, and society can no longer afford them.
Social justice is not achieved by doing everything those poor of spirit, mind and guts are unwilling to do for themselves, but by creating a climate of opportunity and consequences.
We are not all equal in talent or ability, which festers in mockery for many in this bottom 50 percent. You cannot live in virtual reality and expect palpable reality to carry you.
It has become a laughing game of students texting, checking their Facebook, and yes, cheating on tests while in school and in class with this virtual reality, not expecting to pay the consequences for this indulgence, but they do, and we do, and society does in spades.
I came from this bottom 50 percent, and I have had many failures, and a few triumphs, but at no time did I expect someone else to pick me up off the turf, or to explain away my poor performance, or the stupidity of my actions.
My children, one who recently died an untimely death by a hit-and-run driver, have been in sometimes great straits, always of their own making, but they have always worked themselves out of these straits, which has strengthened them to go forward. I am proud of all five of them for this, but I am more proud that they are pleased with themselves.
Be always well,
Jim
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