NORMALIZING DEVIANCE

On Monday, CNN.com posted one of those magazine-generated "100 Best Places to Live in America" lists. This, even in the context of a fluff piece, floored me:

Certainly there is more to being a great place to live than economic conditions, but please note that the alleged 5th best place to live in America has a 7.8% unemployment rate. You know McKinney, TX is doing well because that's a full two percent below the national average. Way to go, McKinney!

It is remarkable how efficiently our economic betters – including the worker ants in the media conglomerates – have normalized the 10% unemployment rate. That is, the 10% "official" (U3) rate. Nevermind the U6 rate currently over 16%, which still probably understates reality. But I digress. Arguing that 7.8% is good because it is less than 10% is like…well, let's do Katrina metaphors two days in a row. It would be like leaving New Orleans flooded rather than draining it and then selling real estate with an argument like, "Our competitors' houses are under 10 feet of water. Ours are only under seven!"

I don't like putting on the Art Bell-esque Official Crazy Guy Hattm very much, but there certainly is a concerted effort being made by the political and economic elite of the U.S. and western Europe to take advantage of the current conditions to do what they have been trying to do since the Great Depression. Lower the standard of living for the little people. Make the labor force more compliant, riddled with fear bordering on desperation, and with (even) less bargaining power. And above all else, dismantle what remains of the social safety net.

As our Bi-Partisan Pud Pulling Deficit Reduction Committee nears the end of several months of wasting time and money before earnestly telling us we need to cut Social Security and Medicare – what an unexpected outcome! – the Senate refuses to extend additional "funemployment" benefits to Americans out of work. It's like the anti-New Dealers of the 1930s are finally getting to see all of their wet dreams come true. More unemployment! Lower taxes! (Wait, I forgot – tax cuts create jobs! Except when they don't!) No more handouts! Deregulation! Huzzah! Let's all go over to Henry Clay Frick's house and beat servants to death for sport!

I knew we had it in us as a society to wearily accept 10% as the new benchmark for unemployment. After all, it's not like we can do anything about it, right?!? I have to admit that I am a little surprised how quickly the transition took place, though. The collapse of our economy is not yet 24 months old and already we're back to tax cuts being the answer, regulation being the problem, and the unemployed being Welfare Queens. We knew we would get back to this rhetoric eventually, but logically it would happen after the recovery. You know, wait for the crisis to pass before reinstating the conditions that created it. I guess I am an optimist at heart, because I didn't think the top 10% were brazen enough to double down on this rhetoric as we continue sinking. Looks like that was naive of me.

34 thoughts on “NORMALIZING DEVIANCE”

  • On my more idealistic days, I like to think that the Left hesitates to bullshit the masses in the way the Right does. Poor people arguing for tax cuts for the 1% of the nation's most wealthy? THAT is the selling of the American Dream. Without the magic of marketing, it would result in a cure by Dr. Guillotine.

  • HoosierPoli says:

    That entire list is an absolute joke. Two of the top 20 are Fishers and Carmel, parking lot towns (as thomas frank would say, Cupcake Land) suburbified onto Indianapolis, which is one of the better dying midwest steel towns but still an objectively crap place to live.

  • @HoosierPoli
    I dont know how Fishers and Carmel manage to get on about every single list like this. Every time i go through fishers to get to Indy i asked my self "why the fuck would anyone choose to live here?"
    The architecture is beyond crap. McMansions and uninspired homes everywhere, chain restaurants and as you already pointed out, ample parking.

    I will go to my grave never understanding the appeal of post war suburbia.

    P.S. I actually enjoy Indy, once you get out of Castleton or Lawrence.

  • Uh, Ed. 7.8% unemployment may be bad objectively, but can you find anywhere that it's lower?

    Accepting that the unemployment rate is 10% and that it's likely to stay that way for a while is not the same as saying that it's good and desirable. With 70% of the US economy dependent on consumer spending, not even the CEO class is going to be happy with so many people out of work.

    The problem is that nobody seems to have a way to make this number go down at the moment. Too much productivity is chasing too little money, and until consumer confidence and fiscal stability return, or the economy goes to a war footing (and not this piddling thing in Afghanistan, we need full mobilization, rationing, and a universal draft), the change in the employment picture is going to come very slowly.

  • HoosierPoli says:

    From What's The Matter With Kansas:

    "Cupcake Land is a metropolis built entirely according to the developer's plan, without the interference of angry proles or ethnic pols as in nearby Kansas City. Cupcake Land encourages no culture but that which increases property values; supports no learning but that which burnishes the brand; hears no opinions but those that will further fatten the cupcake elite; tolerates no rebellion but that expressed in haircuts and piercings and alternative rock. You know what it's like even though you haven't been there. Smooth jazz. Hallmark cards. Applebees. Corporate Woods. Its greatest civic holiday is the turning-on of the Christmas lights at a nearby shopping center — an event so inspirational to the cupcake mind that the mall thus illuminated has been rendered in paint by none other than Thomas Kinkade."

  • Jimcat:

    I took Ed's points to be these:

    (1) The owner class actually wants the working class to be frantically desperate for jobs because that enables the owner class to exploit workers even more crassly–lower pay, fewer benefits, crappier working conditions, etc. If that happens at the expense of purchasing power, well, nobody ever said the owner class was full of geniuses.

    (2) To borrow a term from Roland Barthes, the outrageously high unemployment numbers are becoming "naturalized," that is, we're losing our sense of the history that led to this moment. Reaganomics, Clinton's caving to the "centrists" on almost everything, a "war" of choice that's cost out the wazoo, a "Democratic" president who won't take on corporate power…

    10% is the new 5%.

  • Aslan Maskhadov says:

    @Seth

    Point number 1 is a fundamental part of capitalism- workers are locked in dire competition with each other over jobs. Unemployment is a positive thing from the standpoint of the ruling class; fewer jobs means the workers work harder and complain less.

  • Seth- capitalists never take the long view. Their goal is to accumulate as much wealth as quickly as possible, no matter what the consequences. The much maligned planned economy, naturally loathed and slandered by the owner class, is much more beneficial to the people as a whole. What a capitalist fears about the planned economy is not that it threatens " freedom" but that it eliminates his ability to rip- off the rest of us.

  • Seth, I still fail to see your second point in the news that I am reading. News articles are just reporting the 10% unemployment rate as the current, factual state of the economy. It's not the place of every news article to provide a detailed analysis of how it got there. Nor is it the place of any news article to add built-in outrage at this number. That's the province of the editorial commentaries.

    And who is this "we" who are losing "our" sense of recent history? I never lost it, and apparently neither did you. Many people never had it to begin with.

  • #2 on the list is Columbia/Ellicott City, MD. Ellicott City is nice – an old 19th century mill town which was close to hell on earth when built but today is loaded with beautiful old brick homes, tree lined streets, good locally owned restaurants, etc.
    Columbia is the most soulless place I've ever been. A corporate, sterile laboratory founded on some good ideas which were jettisoned as soon as property values went up. How anyone could look to it as a model place to live is beyond me.

  • Jimcat, that depends on how you understand the responsibilities of journalists. I don't think it's correct to say that it isn't their job to explain situations, only to "report" them. Any report is, by definition, a selection of certain items and a deflection of others (for any of you rhetoric scholars out there, yes, that's Kenneth Burke). Whether they choose to make their rationales for those choices explicit is another question. But they make them nonetheless, and when they choose not to remind people that the current situation isn't just natural or inevitable (unless you're a really doctrinaire Marxist, in which case it's entirely predictable), they're complicit in creating the sense that nobody is to blame.

    @everybody else: Yes, that's how capitalism (at least post-Fordist corporate capitalism) works. That's the problem.

  • Seth, sorry for not being more clear, but I said that it's not the place of EVERY news article to provide a detailed background on the unemployment picture. News analysis is as important a part of journalism as news reporting, but they are two different things.

    I hope you can understand that including in-depth analysis of US economic policy history in every article that mentions the unemployment rate would not serve the readers well. There are some cases in which the story that is being written simply needs a mention of what the unemployment rate is, but further expounding on that point would distract from the story that the particular article is telling.

    Unless I misinterpret your point, you seem to think that simply saying "The current unemployment rate is 10%" without a massive historical disclaimer indicates that the speaker approves of this rate. I don't agree with this.

  • McKinney, Texas: surely a modern Shangri-La.

    What always surprises me is how surprised people continue to be that media outfits like CNN, or People, or Time, or NBC don't know what the fuck they're talking about. People somehow think that because something is published by an established media outfit, there is some legitimate research or thinking behind it. The people that work at CNN are not experts at anything. When they draw up top 100 lists, they're doing some light research and then making the rest up. They're PULLING IT OUT OF THEIR ASSES. Trust me: I've worked in the editorial department for a certain national media company. These people are not experts of anything. They're just making it up.

  • "..wait for the crisis to pass before reinstating the conditions that created it."

    But, I thought those conditions were too much taxes and regulation, and Liberal Democratic policies! That's what I keep hearing, anyway. The President is a traitor and is trying to finish destroying the country with the help of his Socialist-terrorist buddies in the Dhimmie-crat party. I keep hearing that, and it must be true because nobody important has ever said it's not.
    Seriously, how have we reached the point where major media figures and members of Congress can call for armed insurrection and (in effect) assassination of the President? And in just a relatively short time, too. This is insane. And it's getting more insane at an increasing rate; where does it end?

  • Something that also seems to be eluding the talking heads is that many people with bills to pay may opt for the variety of opportunities the underground economy provides – if the villagers like to imagine unions are gangsters, how will they handle it when some nontrivial fraction of the redundant decide that dirty money spends as well as any other. People just don't evaporate when it's convenient – everything goes somewhere.

    I'm also curious how this drive towards social austerity will affect the larger economy. Those who can rely on the support of friends and relatives wiil have to, who will effectively have less to spend themselves. Since many grocery stores operate on very thin margins for much of their merchandise, how will cutting back on things like food stamp benefits – and less discretionary spending for much of the public hit them? How will that affect retailers and the companies that supply them?

    I suppose on the bright side, we do seem to be embracing a number of very foolish ideas that seem unlikely to end any way other than badly, so we should be able to provide detailed case studies on what not to do and why for a variety of circumstances.

  • Aslan Maskhadov says:

    Seth, capitalism is capitalism. There is no good capitalism(that is not to say that it hasn't had positive effects) that will behave itself if you just dream up the right set of regulations. Given enough time, those with enormous resources will again corrupt the democratic process(as they have in the last 30 years) and get those regs removed.

  • Aslan,

    Can you offer any empirical or historical evidence that capitalism can't be modified and regulated over time by sensible regulation? Or are you just rehearsing marxist doctrine on faith? Nothing is written. I see no reason why government cannot constrain wealthy interests and still retain the benefits of a somewhat free market. There is no reason why the democratic process cannot be protected from perversion by powerful interests. After all, the history of this country is the progressive expansion of rights to underprivileged minorities (African-Americans, women). Moreover, I think that the Western European socialist democracies (particularly Sweden) are solid evidence that the democratic process can be protected from manipulation from powerful monied interests. Capitalism can be made to behave. Nothing is written.

  • Undesirable Element says:

    There's some evil and sadistic part of me that wants a group of fringe Republicans to take control and do everything they want. Drop taxes to nothing, completely eradicate social programs, dissolve unions, eliminate all gun restrictions, outlaw anything except Christianity, etc. The look of shock on their faces when the country completely implodes would amuse me greatly.

    Of course, the fact that I'd contemplate the complete ruination of the country for my own personal amusement should probably concern me quite a bit.

  • Can you offer any empirical or historical evidence that capitalism can't be modified and regulated over time by sensible regulation?

    My name isn't Aslan, but I'm pretty much guessing that the last 30 years of so of American history pretty much shows you that capitalism will always find a way around regulations. It's called campaign contributions.

  • Elder Futhark says:

    Undesirable Element,

    We ran that scenario, or are you too young?

    There will be no look of shock on their faces. They will be too busy eating Bavarian cream cake down in the bunker, and going apoplectic because the people of America have failed them.

    Now, if only they would take the black pills and shoot themselves in the head, right now, I'd be more than happy to throw their bodies in a hastily dug pit, pour gas on them, and set them ablaze.

  • Jimcat: No, I'm not saying that every news piece that mentions the unemployment rate needs to rehearse the entire history of capitalism. I agree that wouldn't help anybody except suppliers of ink and paper and bandwidth.

    My point is that the reverse (never referring to that history at all) makes it easy for readers to forget that the current situation isn't simply a natural, cyclical effect (like global warming!). No, I don't think journalists, editors, etc *approve* of high unemployment, although I agree with Ed's original point that managers/owners do approve of it.

    And for what it's worth, although I'm not a doctrinaire Marxist, I'm pretty damn sympathetic to Marxist theory, which I understand pretty well. And while I emphasized corporate capitalism in an earlier comment, I would certainly agree (and have argued stridently before) that capitalism is defined by inequity and exploitation, and is therefore antithetical to democracy.

    There. I said it.

  • Ugh. Anywhere, Texas is too Texas for me. With the exception of the capital, Austin (at least when I visited around the time Ed was born), an ironic liberal oasis. But it would still be in Texas. Ugh again.

  • Elder Futhark, by saying "we already ran that scenario", you seem to be implying that what Undesirabel Element described is what was done in National Socialist Germany. But that analogy fails for a couple of reasons.

    First, the policies of the Nazis were not that of a minimalist, lassiez-faire government. Far from eliminating social programs and leaving industry to its own devices, they orchestrated heavy government regulation of both private lives and corporate activity. Commercial enterprise was supposed to work in concert with government to achieve the nation's goals.

    Second, German society didn't "implode" due to its domestic policy. It was destroyed from without because of its foreign policy. Before 1939, the rest of the world had little interest in bothering Germany and the German people themselves thought that they'd never had it so good. (Which they hadn't if they'd been born after 1900, but the underlying policy of massive military spending meant that sooner or later they'd have to attack someone, go bankrupt, or radically change the path.)

    To the best of my knowledge, history has never had a real-world experiment in which anarcho-libertarians were allowed to run things to their natural conclusion. The closest things we've had to a government designed to do as little as possible were the United States under the Articles of Confederation (there were good reasons why this led to a strong Constitution and federal government) and the Confederate States of America (aside from the population and industrial imbalance, good luck winning a war if your government was planned from the start to be ineffective).

  • Elder Futhark says:

    Jimcat,

    You could not have gotten it more wrong. The Nazi association was a metaphorical vehicle used to convey the *reaction* of your standard clenched butthole type personality to conditions that do not satisfy expectations.

    But thanks for providing three paragraphs of who-gives-a-shit.

  • Crazy for Urban Planning says:

    It may be too late, but I would also like to know what you meant by "we've run that scenario". Come on think of all the developing nations around the world without a functioning government. I don't think the conservatives here in the states want to minimize to Somalia's governments size, but they never actually articulate proposals beyond cut taxes, minimize regulations, stop abortions and save guns. It would be interesting in so much that a country described as "developed" has not experimented very much in the minimum government. What would we call the Russian Federation now? Pretty crappy place to live with services for rich industrial owners? That is the closest example I can think of.

    P.S. Jimcat – I enjoyed your three paragraphs of who-gives-a-shit!

  • Aslan Maskhadov says:

    Rosalux, I can show historical evidence that capitalism cannot be regulated and tamed. It's called human history, starting from the dawn of capitalism to the present. Even in your beloved Western Europe, the gains of the labor movement(which were largely a result of Communist activity during WWII and shortly thereafter), are being taken back. The European Union leaders are using the debt crisis as an excuse to start rolling back the clock- their time has come. Sorry but a LOT has been written. You are also forgetting the fact that as long as there is capitalism, there will be imperialism. Sweden has a nice system because it has managed to stay out of wars and stay friendly with everyone. But under capitalism there will always be inequality of nations(in fact there must be), and some nations will come out on top. Eventually they start competing amongst each other for dominance and wars break out.

    @Jimcat- I think you should study the link between Germany's economic policy and foreign policy, because they are interdependent.

  • Aslan, there's no question that economic policy drives foreign policy – that was easily observable in Hitlerite Germany, Stalinist Russia, and every American government since the 1973 OPEC embargo.

  • What possible justification can we present for a Federal government telling me how the hell much salt I can eat or trans fat or blah blah blah? We don't need no stinkin' tea tasters (I think we did finally get rid of them!)

    This is not about Left and Right for me.

    Somewhere between here and Somalia there is a happy place. How about a Federal government that follows more closely to the role that the US Constitution outlined? Can we hit the re-set button here as well as in Russia?

    //bb

  • just a stab in the dark aslan.. set aside that history buffs are the demographic that would read this post to the end, 73' is a year that most people can still relate to. But God bless Manifest Dest… ahem America.

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