Rights for Me, Not So Much for Thee….

There’s plenty of information available detailing America’s troubling economic inequality; just recently, for example, Salon Magazine ran an article highlighting numbers that showed “America’s busted priorities” and their contribution to that widening gap. They presented the numbers in a variety of ways, but the summary tells the tale:

The following are averages, which are skewed in the case of tax breaks and investment income, as a result of the excessive takings of the .1% and the .01%. Details of the calculations can be found  here.

$8,600 for each of the  Safety Net recipients

$14,600 for each of the  Social Security recipients

$27,333 for each of the  Pension recipients

$54,740 for each of the  Teachers

$200,000 for each of the  Tax Break recipients among the richest 1%

$500,000 for each of the  Investment Income recipients among the richest 1%

The super-rich feel they deserve all the tax breaks and the accumulation of wealth from the productivity of others. This is the true threat of entitlement.

A recent investigative report from the New York Times confirms the suspicion that Salon’s numbers are not the result of inadvertence or accident. The subhead pretty much says it all: “The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income.”

These numbers tell an important story, but they don’t tell the whole story: economic inequality both leads to–and results from–other kinds of inequality. It’s a vicious cycle.

Less affluent neighborhoods are less safe. Schools attended by poorer children have fewer resources and poorer results. Friends and relatives of poor Americans are unlikely to benefit from the networking that the more affluent use to find job opportunities. Access to quality healthcare remains unequal even after Obamacare.

Actually, what is even more troubling than these  persistent inequities has been the hysterical resistance to Obamacare’s very modest effort to extend health care to poorer Americans. A substantial portion of the public has responded to the Affordable Care Act with hostility and a truly unhinged animus. The assault has not focused upon reasoned concerns about aspects of the law; instead, opponents have indignantly rejected the very suggestion that access to healthcare might be a human right, or at the very least, a primary good that government should provide.

It isn’t only efforts to equalize access to healthcare that have met with hostility. Increasingly, we see  substantial support for unequal rights in other areas:

Americans place a higher priority on preserving the religious freedom of Christians than for other faith groups, ranking Muslims as the least deserving of the protections, according to a new survey.

Solid majorities said it was extremely or very important for the U.S. to uphold religious freedom in general. However, the percentages varied dramatically when respondents were asked about specific faith traditions, according to a poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

This reluctance to understand that rights are different from privileges—this inability to understand that no one really has rights if government gets to decide who gets them and who doesn’t—reminded me of Nat Hentoff’s 1992 book “Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee.” If there is one area in which equality is supremely important, it’s equality before the law–and contrary to what too many Americans seem to believe, equality is not a zero-sum game.

There’s a significant “chicken and egg” component to these various manifestations of inequality—which comes first, economic deprivation or reduced social efficacy? We may not be able to answer that question, but surely we can figure out a way to break the cycle.

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That Quaint Thing Called “Ethics”…

A recent article in New America Weekly argues that we Americans need to clean up our understanding of corruption. We tend to think of corruption as the sorts of outright bribery encountered in many other countries, where “doing business” has often required greasing the hands of public servants. If no money has changed hands, Americans tend not to see an ethical problem.

The author of the article—a social anthropologist— argues that we need to expand our definition of corruption to include “rigged systems.”

According to Gallup, the notion that corruption is widespread has gained enormous traction in recent years. With results like this, it’s not hard to see why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have so much appeal. When so many people see the system as rigged and corruption as endemic, citizens are naturally attracted to outsiders, because they themselves feel like outsiders in a game they were set up to lose.

This state of affairs—with so many people self-defining as outsiders in a democratic society—makes it all the more urgent that we redefine corruption. Because unlike communist and many post-communist countries, where few believe(d) in either the system’s version of itself or its ability to deliver on it, the United States has traditionally been a country of believers—where people largely bought into the promise of their system. That is how it should be in democratic society.

The article lists several examples of systemic corruption—from the banking practices that cratered the economy, to the conflicts of interest of military figures who sit on corporate boards while advising the Pentagon on procurement—and the failure of mechanisms to insure accountability.

We need to understand how corruption manifests itself in America in 2015. We need to ground accountability in the ethics of the broader society. Democratic societies run on trust. A civic society can flourish only when the public believes the system is accountable in a real, not performative, way. Without that trust, perception of corruption will only worsen and the ranks of outsiders will swell.

As I have repeatedly noted, a major contributor to this lack of accountability is the current absence of genuine journalism, especially what we used to call “investigative journalism,” and particularly at the local level.

When local media report only on the “what” (new parking meters, new development projects, new public purchases) and ignore the “who” and “how” (dealmaking, cronyism, procedural shortcuts)—when columnists and reporters dismiss legitimate concerns about the “how” as partisan bickering unworthy of investigation—we fail to hold our elected officials accountable, and we feed the growing distrust that acts like sand in government’s gears.

Rigged systems are complicated, and a lot more difficult to combat than bribery and other, more blatant forms of self-dealing. It’s easy to shrug and conclude that “this is just how things get done.” But the integrity of the democratic system is ultimately far more important —and its absence far more consequential—than individual acts of dishonesty.

Quaint as it may sound, ethics matter. And ethical public behavior requires a culture of ethical accountability. “Trust me” doesn’t cut it.

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The State of Our State

Welcome to a new year, fellow Hoosiers.

Given that 2016 will be an election year, Hoosiers will hear lots of rhetoric about Indiana’s economic performance, both from the incumbent administration and those seeking to replace it; a credible analysis of that performance is thus essential if we are to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Morton Marcus is an economist who spent nearly 40 years at IU’s Kelley School of Business,  where he presided over a center that generated data about Indiana’s business climate. He is now retired (but by no means retiring), and he still writes a column carried by a number of newspapers around the state.

A recent Marcus column measured Indiana’s economic performance.

Let’s start with Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which Marcus defines as  “the value (adjusted for inflation) of all the goods and services produced in a nation or a state, over the course of a year or a quarter of the year.”  “

And how has the Hoosier state done by this measure?

The United States’ Real GDP has grown by about 13 percent in the last decade, while Indiana has added only 7 percent….If you look at the nation’s Real GDP each spring (the second quarter of the year), the progress made by Indiana every year since 2012 lags the growth of the nation. Indiana ranked 32nd with 2.8 percent compared with 5.8 percent for the U.S.

Then there is the question of jobs and wages.

The total of wages and salaries takes into account both how many people are working and what they make for their labors. Nationally, from the third quarter of 2005 to 2015 and after adjusting for price changes, wages and salaries grew by 13.2 percent. Here, in the Hoosier Holyland, the growth was 5.5 percent.

The news isn’t unremittingly negative: as Marcus tells us, “Non-durable goods were a winner; Indiana up one percent while nationally that sector was off by seven percent.”

But in durable goods, like autos, RVs and steel, the news was less cheery: “Indiana was down eight percent at the same time the country slipped six percent.”

All in all,

Over the past decade, the nation’s output and wages both grew by about 13 percent. In Indiana, however, they both trailed the U.S.; Hoosier output (Real GDP) grew by only 7.1 percent and wages by a mere 5.5 percent. Why aren’t Hoosier businesses and workers keeping pace?

As we head into 2016 and the inevitable political spin, it may be worth revisiting this analysis of actual economic performance—and considering whether we’d be better served by replacing our current Governor with someone less fixated on protecting retailers who want to refuse service to same-sex couples, and more committed to conventional economic development.

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The Year of Lost Trust

Tomorrow, we will welcome a new year. It will come with significant challenges, among them, pervasive suspicion of our social and governing institutions.

Ask the person on the street, who do you trust? and increasingly, at least in America, the answer is “no one” or “very few.”

We can debate the reasons for our sour national mood and pervasive distrust of our institutions and fellow-citizens, but the cynicism and skepticism are not debatable.

One reason: the Internet has exponentially expanded our ability to live in a “filter bubble”—a reality of our own creation, where (in defiance of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous dictum) we can indeed choose our own “facts.”

Convinced that Obama is the anti-Christ? Watch Fox News, visit right-wing websites and listen to talk radio for confirmation. Positive that bankers and evil corporations are intentionally crushing the “little guy”? Subscribe to lefty blogs, read conspiracy websites and respond to hysterical emails.

Political psychologists call this behavior “confirmation bias.” We used to call it “cherry picking”—the intellectually dishonest process of picking through information sources from the bible to the U.S. budget looking for evidence that confirms our pre-existing beliefs.

When the realities we have constructed encounter an inconsistent “real world,” the resulting cognitive dissonance makes us uncomfortable, angry and wary.

And thanks to a media environment that no longer includes news sources with widespread credibility, non-ideological Americans who just want to know what is happening in their cities and country no longer know what or whom to believe.

As we are seeing, one of the most dangerous consequences of this widespread distrust is a growing acceptance of demagoguery.

When citizens no longer share a reality, they are susceptible to messages confirming their worst fears and most pernicious biases—and human nature being what it is, there is no scarcity of opportunists, megalomaniacs and unhinged bigots prepared to sell us their particular snake-oil.

(The willingness of high-profile political figures to make untrue, outrageous and frequently ridiculous allegations is undoubtedly one reason so many people think satirical articles posted to social media are real. Gee—it sounded like something Sarah Palin would have said…)

This retreat into an “us versus them” worldview isn’t confined to traditional bigotries based upon race, religion and sexual orientation. It is glaringly evident in our political life. In our increasingly dysfunctional Congress the villain is partisan distrust; these days, ideas are rarely considered based upon their merits, but accepted or rejected based upon who proposed them, and both parties are guilty.

A few years ago, I wrote a book titled “Distrust, American Style” in which I explored the importance of social trust to democratic self-government. One conclusion: We live in a world where globalization and technology have combined to create a complex environment in which no one person has the knowledge needed to independently evaluate foreign, regulatory or environmental policies. We have no choice but to rely on experts—and that means figuring out which experts–and which information and media outlets– we can trust.

There are many reasons for our current “trust deficit,” but as the saying goes, fish rot from the head.

When citizens don’t trust their social institutions, they become suspicious of each other. When government, especially, no longer works—when authority figures from Congress-people to Governors to Mayors to police officers are seen abusing their powers and ignoring the common good—the resulting distrust infects every aspect of our communal lives.

Add in economic inequality and rapid social change, and you have a dangerously destabilized polity—a recipe for extremism, division and constant discord—and a nearly irresistible invitation to blame it all on “those people.”

Let’s hope that 2016 is the year we begin to inch back from the precipice.

Happy New Year…..

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In Memoriam

The end of a year is a time for contemplation–for considering how the world has, or has not changed, and evaluating the apparent trajectory of our social institutions…for considering who and what has been lost….

In that vein, I share this quotation from Theodore White’s Making of the President: 1960. I came across it again recently, and was struck by its current relevance.

Read it and weep….

The Republican Party, to be exact, is twins and has been twins from the moment of its birth—but the twins who inhabit its name and shelter are Jacob and Esau: fratricidal, not fraternal, twins. Within the Republican Party are combined a stream of the loftiest American idealism and a stream of the coarsest American greed….

[I]t is forgotten how much of the architecture of America’s liberal society was drafted by the Republicans. Today they are regarded as the party of the right. Yet this is the party that abolished slavery, wrote the first laws of civil service, passed the first antitrust, railway control, consumer-protective and conservation legislation, and then led America, with enormous diplomatic skill, out into that posture of global leadership and responsibility we now so desperately try to maintain.

The fact that all this has been almost forgotten by the current stylists of our culture is in itself significant. For until this century and down through its first decade the natural home party of the American intellectual, writer, savant and artist was the Republican Party. Its men of state and diplomacy were, as often as not, thinkers and scholars; and it is doubtful whether any President, even Wilson or the second Roosevelt, made the White House so familiar a mansion to writers and artists as did Theodore Roosevelt (who, indeed, was also one of the founders of the Authors’ League of America).

The alienation of the Republican Party of today from the intellectual mainstream of the nation stems, actually, from the days of Theodore Roosevelt. For when in 1912 the twins of the Republican Party broke wide apart in the Roosevelt-Taft civil war, the “regulars” of the Taft wing remained in control of the party machinery, and the citizen wing of progressive and intellectual Republicans was driven into homeless exile.

An exile within which we remain, nearly 60 years after this was written.

Despite the fact that I consider myself an optimist, I doubt very much that 2016 will see a return to reason and moderation.

The United States desperately needs two sane, adult political parties. We don’t have them now, and the prospects for the near term are not promising.

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