On July 24, the Federal minimum wage will increase to $7.25.  That’s an improvement over the current minimum of $6.55, but still a far cry from the $9.50 that is necessary to prevent full-time workers from living in poverty.  The time has come to push for this “living wage,” and the time has come to present it as one of the central justice issues for our generation.

It will be a very difficult fight.  Not only do conservatives tend to believe that raising the minumum wage increases unemployment (which it doesn’t), many go so far as to claim that businesses bear no responsibility for the welfare of their workers.  Michael Kruse, a conservative Presbyterian blogger, writes:

It is not the function of business to sustain workers’ lives… Justice requires that we compensate each person according to the economic contribution that they make.

Kruse then offers the example of two men applying for a job doing yardwork. Both are equally skilled and do the same quality of work. One is single. The other is married with four children. The single man needs $7.50 an hour to support himself and asks for $10. The father of four needs $15.85 and asks for $16. Which man would we hire?  Kruse says:

The overwhelming majority of us are going to hire the first man. Why? Because we are heartless evil capitalists, callous to the plight of the second man? No. Because we determine wages and prices based on the value of the services rendered, not on the need of the person rendering the service. (emphasis is Kruse’s)

I can honestly say that I would hire the second man if at all possible. In fact, if I had the means, I would scrounge around to find more work so I could hire them both. And I know a lot of people who would do the same. I disagree that an overwhelming majority would look only at the value of the service rendered in making their decision.

The next time you get together with family or friends for a game night, try playing “Real-Life” Monopoly. “Real-Life” Monopoly is different from the standard version in two key ways.

1) In standard Monopoly, everybody starts the game with $1500 dollars and nothing else.  In “Real-Life” Monopoly, some players start the game with more money than others. A lot more.

Let’s say you have five players. Each player represents a fifth of the American population, based on wealth. One represents the wealthiest 20%, one the next wealthiest 20%, and so forth. To put it another way, you’ve got one upper class person, one from the upper middle class, one from the middle middle class, one from the working class, and one who lives in poverty. Based on statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, their starting amounts are: $3727, $1747, $1110, $660, $262.

2) In standard Monopoly, the rules are set in advance and cannot change during the course of the game. In “Real-Life” Monopoly, the rules change frequently. Every time he or she passes “Go,“ the wealthiest player gets to make a new rule. The rule has to be impartial. For example, if the player owns a hotel on Park Place, she can’t make the rule that all rent on Park Place hotels is doubled. She can, however, double the rent on all properties with hotels - which would benefit her if she owned the most hotels.

Standard Monopoly is a fair game. Everyone starts out on a level playing field, and everyone has equal opportunity to make money. No one can manipulate the format of the game to benefit themselves. There is a degree of luck involved, but most of the time, the person who wins is the one who plays the game the most intelligently. 

Too often, we assume that our actual American economy works by the same equitable principles. But in reality, we don’t start on anything close to a level playing field. Poor people have nowhere near the assets, the opportunities, the advantages, and the safety nets that wealthy people have to help them succeed. Not only does our system give the wealthy a huge head start, the rich also have the power to change the system to give them even more benefit. I don’t think I need to expound on the massive amount of influence that money has on our political process. The rich really do get to adjust the rules in their favor. How else would we have gotten things like HMO’s and tax cuts for the highest earning Americans?

I would like to try an experiment: Get as many people as possible to play “Real-Life” Monopoly, with the two changes I described above. Tally the numbers and see what percentage of winners come from the upper class, the upper middle, the middle class, the working class, and the truly poor. It would be interesting to compare the results with percentages of folks from each group in real life who pull off the American Dream and become wealthy.

So many of the battles that progressives are facing boil down to the issue of corporate power.  Whether it’s healthcare reform, workers’ rights, the abuses of Wall Street, protecting the environment, or looking out for the interests of the poor - too often the one thing standing in the way of justice and equality is the profit lust of large corporations and their overwhelming influence on Washington. 

Here on The Seminal and on a number of other progressive outlets, the fight is taken up daily against this oppressive corporate-government complex.  Washington politicians and the mainstream media are exposed and held accountable for the ways in which they contribute to this abusive system.   We have found, however, that it is a very difficult system to fight.  It seems to feed on itself, undeterred by even the recent populist backlash against corporate abuse.

There is a third piece to the puzzle, however, which rarely gets held accountable for its contribution to the problem.  It should be called the consumer-corporate-government complex, because the whole system relies on the choices of the individual consumer.  And if enough consumers get together and change their habits, they can have an enormous impact.  I expressed this idea a couple of years ago in something I call The Disciplined Consumer’s Creed:

We as consumers have more power than we realize. Through our daily choices of where to shop, what to buy, and how much to consume, we can influence every aspect of the way corporations behave. Without our money, corporations cannot live. Not only can we influence corporations to produce what we want and what we need at high quality and low cost; we can also ensure that these products are produced, transported, and marketed in ways that preserve the environment as well as the dignity and worth that belongs to every human being. This is the often untold beauty of the capitalist system.

For a long time, I applied this creed in trying to decide between competing corporations, such as Coke and Pepsi or Home Depot and Lowe’s.  I would research their ethical records and patronize the company with the better one (or usually, the less atrocious one).  The idea was to weed out the “bad apples” from my shopping habits.  After a while, though, I realized that it’s not just a few bad apples. The whole corporate system is sick.  The entire consumer-corporate-government complex needs to be reformed if we are ever going to see true justice and social progress.

Which is why, in addition to being a voice against the abuses of politicians and corporate fat cats,  I am now contemplating a radical change in my own consumption habits.  I am considering giving up large corporations altogether, starting with the Fortune 500.  A quick glance over the list reveals a number of companies it will be very difficult for me to forsake, most notably Google, Target, Duke Energy (my local power company), and pretty much every major auto maker, gasoline supplier, and electronics producer. 

In addition, many companies’ products (such as Monsanto’s) are present in our consumption without us even knowing it.  Total abstention form the Fortune 500 might be impossible, but perhaps I could shoot for eliminating 95%.  Imagine the change in our corporate culture, and the reduction of their power in Washington, if a significant number of Americans intentionally reduced their patronage of large companies and switched it to small businesses.  

I’ve already started a Facebook group called Shopping Small that is a start in this direction, and it will be expanding in scope soon.  What do you think?  Would it be possible to boycott the Fortune 500, and what kind of effect could it have on our government and our society?

(Cross-posted at Discipline for Justice)

I’m a guitar player.  Often times, when I pull my instrument out of its case and start to strum, it sounds terrible.  The notes don’t at all go together.  This is because one or more of the strings have gotten out of tune.  Usually when this happens, I can take a few seconds to find out which string is off key, adjust its tuning peg, and bring it back into line with the others.  The solution to the problem is finding which of the strings is the “bad apple” and then fixing that particular string.

Occasionally, however, the solution is more complicated.  Every once a while, I discover that the problem can’t be isolated to one or two strings.  The whole set is worn out, and there is no amount of adjustment that can bring the guitar back in tune.  When this happens, it’s time to change the whole set of strings.  This requires a good bit more work and the investment in a new set of strings, but its the only way to get the guitar sounding good again.

In today’s society, we are like a guitar player who never invests the time or the money to put on a new set of strings.  We have bought into the idea that the solution to our problems always involves searching out and fixing the “bad apples,” and we fail to see the need to make across-the-board changes in our systems and institutions.  A few examples:

1)  The Economic Crisis.  We blame the people who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford.  We blame the banks who issued those mortgages.  We blame the government officials that loosened regulations.   We look extremely hard for a financial scapegoat that we can “fix”, so that we can avoid taking a hard look at our entire broken system of greed-based corporate capitalism.  Economically, the Bad Apple Syndrome keeps us locked in a pattern of bubbles and recessions that prevents us from advancing toward a more just and sustainable way of doing things.  

2)  The War on Terror.  All wars need a bogeyman that we can hate, a “bad apple” that if eliminated, will put an end to the threat.  First, it was Bin Laden.  Then, it was Saddam Hussein.   Hussein was killed, but Iraq is now more of a terrorist haven than ever.  Bin Laden has been somewhat marginalized, but the threat of terrorism certainly has not.  When it comes to national securtity, then, the Bad Apple Syndrome keeps us chasing the individual evildoers rather than being honest about our changing role in the world and addressing the real political, economic, and religious issues that have created the boiling pot from which terror emerges.

3)  Domestic Crime and Poverty.  From tougher sentencing laws to zero-tolerance school policies to purging the welfare rolls to building a wall on the border - the trend in addressing America’s social ills has been to find the “bad apples” that are spoilng things for the rest of us and to root them out.   These “get tough” policies are blind to the oppressive social conditions that are leading to the problems in the first place.  If we take the more difficult and more costly steps that will reduce poverty, improve education, and build a new type of economy - we will find that problems like crime and immigration will naturally improve.  So when it comes to domestic issues, the Bad Apple Syndrome has us caught in a permanent rotating door.  We remove the “bad apples,” but the system we are unwilling to change guarantees that plenty more will be there to take their places.

Over the course of the coming weeks and months, I plan to dig more deeply into this concept of the Bad Apple Syndrome.  First up will be the economy.  The Obama adminstration has so far seemed unwilling to talk about the need for deep structural changes.  Instead, he is focused, like most people, on finding out what specific people and institutions are at fault.  Here’s hoping he comes to talk about the whole system being broken.

(Cross-posted at Discipline for Justice)

Signs at the “Teabag” rallies said things like “Taxed Enough Already” and “Born Free, Taxed to Death.”  Seeing as how this is the first year these rallies have been held on this scale, one could reasonably deduce that people are angry because their taxes have shot up in the last few years.  I, myself, felt a slight twinge of resentment as I wrote a big, fat check to the IRS and dropped it in the mail yesterday.  It did seem like I was paying more than I have in years past. 

So I decided to see if my anger was justified, and I pulled out my old tax returns going back to 2003.  Despite the fact that I have moved up a tax bracket, I am paying a lower percentage of my total income than I was six years ago.  Here are my percentages, year by year (including income tax and Social Security):

2003 - 17.7%;   2004 - 16.3%;   2005 - 16.2%;   2006 - 15.6 %;   2007 - 15.7;  2008 - 16.2%

And my estimated rate for 2009 is 16.6%.  As it turns out, I personally have nothing to complain about.   My tax rate has stayed pretty much the same.  My guess is that most people will find similar results if they check their old returns.  So please, all you protesters, take the “Tea Bag Challenge.”  You might be surprised. 

We can conclude, therefore, that the intense anger being expressed at these rallies is not really about higher taxes - because taxes haven’t gone up.  It’s about the bailouts and the way Obama is setting his budget priorities.  People who are hurting in these tough economic times are outraged at the trillions of federal dollars that are visibly being given to failing corporations while seemingly little is being done to directly help the little guy.  The protesters’ actual beef is not with taxes themselves, but is with the way Obama is appropriating them. 

Which, to be honest, is just too freakin’ bad for them.  When one party wins the White House and both houses of Congress, that party has control of how taxpayer money is spent.  It’s called democracy, or “taxation with representation.”  Those of us on the left had to deal with billions of dollars being spent on a war we don’t agree with, so now those on the right need to accept the fact that Obama is going to spend money in ways they don’t like.  Instead of tossing around bags of Lipton and Luzianne and acting like we’re in some sort of Constitutional crisis, how about just making a rational argument for the conservative point of view and working for a moderate amount of influence on Democratic legislation?

As it is, though, the “teabaggers” have accomplished very little other than a day’s worth of sensational headlines.  This carefully orchestrated political theater will have no effect whatsoever on Obama’s fiscal policy, and I doubt very seriously that a significant number of people will actually refuse to pay their taxes.  It was all just a harmless way for frustrated citizens to blow off some steam.  It reminds of of that famous line from MacBeth:  “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Yesterday, Christians celebrated Easter, the day that marks the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The belief is that Christ was crucified for the sins of humanity, and that by rising from the grave, he defeated sin and death forever.  The crucial aspect of resurrection faith is the fact that death was not simply reversed.  It means a lot more than restoring things to the way they were before the crucifixion.   Instead, the risen Christ brings the gift of a new and competely different sort of life.  This key concept is reflected in the words of Revelation 21.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more…  See, I am making all things new. 

In the midst of this economic crisis, our nation and our world should borrow this concept of resurrection.  As the Obama administration has sunk its teeth into the the stimulus package and its ambitious budget, there has been much talk about what we need to do to reverse the effects of the recession.  How do we bring the stock market back up?  How do we bring unemployment back down?  How do we get banks lending again?  How do we get people buying homes and cars again?  All the solutions seem to be focused on getting the economy back to where it was about two years ago.

A growing chorus, however, is speaking up for much more than just restoring the economy.  Many see this worldwide crisis as a unique opportunity for transformation.  For a small sampling of how different groups are trying to turn the crisis into lasting positive change, click here, here, or here.  All of these groups have different priorities and strategies, but they all agree on one thing.  Merely turning back the clock and restoring the system of Wall Street fat cats and corporate-dominated capitalism is a recipe for a quick repeat of this catastrophe.

Which is not to say that Obama should not be trying to stabilize the financial system, and that he should not be working hard to get people back to work.  These stop-gap measures are very appropriate. But both Obama and the media need to be making serious talk about making significant changes to the basic functioning of our financial system.  If all we do is stop the bleeding and slap on a bunch of band-aids, very little will actually change, and it won’t be long before our broken economy hemorhhages again.  We are caught in a myopic cycle of expanding and bursting bubbles that is slowing concentrating the wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

At this time, the public is angry and scared, but we are also galvinized and more willing to commit to change than at any time in recent history.  After all, we convincingly elected a president who ran unequivocably on that promise of change, and we might never again see this much actionable ill-will toward corporations and their greedy executives. 

This window of opportunity won’t last forever.  Sooner or later, we will come out of this crisis, and when we do, the need for transformation that is so obvious right now will be obscured by the temporary balm of economic recovery.  We cannot wait until then to demand meaningful change.  Even though we are far from a consensus on exactly what a resurrected economy should look like, at least we can agree that the old system needs to die and go away forever.  Mr. Obama and the MSM, it’s time to start this conversation in earnest.

(cross-posted at Discipline for Justice)

About a year ago (April 12, 2008), I wrote the following words on my personal blog (Discipline for Justice):

During the coming weeks and months, if you are not already doing so, please make it a point to talk about the worldwide crisis that is looming due to rising food and fuel costs…  Let us talk about the fact that in many poor parts of the world, food prices have doubled in the last few months; and about the ways in which these alarming increases are related to the policies and consumption habits of wealthier nations…  Hopefully, a conversation will bring forth many different ideas and viewpoints that will broaden everyone’s understanding and sense of purpose.

I’m ashamed to say that in a colossal example of failing to practice what I preach, this blog entry was the last time I mentioned, in any of my writings, the global food crisis.  I have written abundantly about our national economic crisis, but like they have for most people, the deep struggles of hungry people around the world have disappeared from my radar.  The bailout madness, the plunging stock market, the massive foreclosures, and the skyrocketing unemployment - all here in the United States - have made us blind to much of the worldwide suffering that is being caused by this financial crisis. 

World Bank President Robert Zoellick made the following plea on behalf of the world’s poor at the G20:

In London, Washington and Paris people talk of bonuses or no bonuses. In parts of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food…  World leaders should learn from previous economic crises in Latin America in the 1980s and Asia in the 1990s and not repeat the mistake of ignoring the plight of the most vulnerable. Developing countries need to be part of the global solution to the global crisis… Isn’t it time to institutionalize support for the most vulnerable during crises, especially those not of their own making?… A commitment to put in place structures to support and fund safety nets for those most at risk would go a long way to show that this G-group will not endorse a two-tier world, with summits for financial systems, and silence for the poor.

It’s time to challenge this natural tendency to circle the wagons and focus on ourselves when things get tough.  It’s time to tell all of the stories of these difficult times - not just the story about “Joe Six-Pack” in the USA who got laid off and is struggling to keep his health insurance, but also the story about the villager in Nigeria who has seen his grain costs triple in the past year and can’t put food on the table for his family.  Both are important, and both are interwoven in this thing we call a global economy.  May I not go another whole year neglecting an entire half of this equation.

On tonight’s Hardball, Chris Matthews said (I’m paraphrasing, because no transcript is available yet) that in the United States we count on the profit motive to get people to make the right decisions.

Actually, that’s exactly the opposite of what the financial crisis has shown us.  Oliver Stone’s Wall Street is a good movie, but the movie’s villain, Gordon Gekko is dead wrong when he famously says “greed is good”.  Greed is not good.  It leads to excess.  It leads to short-term decision-making aimed at producing short-term gains with steep costs to be borne by the people left holding the bag.

That’s what the housing crisis was about.  Greedy people made unjustifiably risky loans to unqualified borrowers but made off like bandits when they sold the loans to some other poor bastard left holding the bag (ultimately, that poor bastard is all of us).

Economics has a term for this–externality.  The classic example is pollution.  Again, greedy people bent on making a profit can rake it in while raping the environment, leaving the rest of us to clean up their mess while they get rich.

What are some examples of the profit motive leading people to make decisions that may be good for them but are bad for the rest of us?  Consider the alcohol and tobacco industries–again, it’s about the externalities, costs absorbed by the vast majority while a few people get very wealthy.  The companies get rich peddling a deadly product while the rest of us bear the increased health costs and, far worse, mourn the people felled by cirrhosis, lung cancer, drunk driving.  Maybe Chris Matthews sees it differently, but it seems plain to me that the profit motive leads to terrible choices in these areas.

The profit motive may be powerful but Chris Matthews is leading us on a dangerous path when he suggests we should trust it to produce good decisions.  He is essentially saying that we should trust people (when guided by the profit motive) to make decisions that will help us all.  Actually, that’s exactly the opposite of what we should have learned from the past year.  When people are left unregulated, guided only by the profit motive, they make decisions that lead to quick profits for a few but leave the rest of us dealing with the fallout.

His voice was disguised to protect his identity.  In the monasteries, chanting the scriptures is now taking second place to a Chinese government “patriotic campaign.”

“We spend most of our days in political meetings.  We are forced to renounce the Dalai Lama and call him a terrorist.  We aren’t allowed out of our monastery.  We have agents of the state security apparatus watching over our lives.  We monks aren’t allowed to stay in a room together.  We don’t have any freedom.”

Old school mind tyranny is still going on in Tibet.  In the Western born media age our challenge to freedom is much more sophisticated and seductive.  We are saturated with images and rhetoric by which we willingly morph our identity.      

Here is a brief history of the evolution and devolution of your public self.  First you were a Subject ruled by a King, Queen, or Dictator.  Then, by virtue of hard earned modern democracy you became a Citizen, one with mutual responsibility.  Next, the fossil record indicates you were a Customer, signifying a relationship between a business and a buyer for goods and services.

Somewhere along the way a mutation was engineered.  You are now a Consumer.  You have deformed into a buying machine.  A Consumer is a Subject.  In the days of Kings the Subjects had no choice.  They were ruled by superior military force.  In our day we actively accept being Subjects.

Even in the darling progressive media outlets you are uniformly labeled a Consumer.  Open your ears and eyes to the public discourse.  In the next week count how many times you are referred to as a citizen.  You will have multiple digits to spare.

In America it is manifestly clear that we have confounded democracy and capitalism.  The Catholic monk and hermit Thomas Merton offered this spiritual diagnosis over 40 years ago.

“When we call ourselves the ‘free world’ we mean first of all the world in which business is free.  In our eyes the freedom of the person is dependent upon money.  What we are really interested in is not persons but profits.  If you have nothing to buy or sell freedom is, in your case, irrelevant.  Profit first, people afterward.”

Making money is not bad.  Business is not evil.  Capitalism can be conducted with a social conscience.  The unexamined, unquestioned monoculture of consuming is leading to the collapse of of all of our ecosystems.

The spiritually awakened person and culture will be keen to preserve their fundamental identity. 

A Consumer is a Subject, a pawn to be manipulated.

A Citizen is a Participant with dignity and purpose.

The Buddha taught,

“Vigilant among the heedless, awake among the sleeping, the wise one goes ahead like a racehorse outstripping a hag.”

Seduction surrounds you.  Will you be a Consumer or a Citizen?

In his wondrous sermon “Spiritual Freedom” Rev. William Ellery Channing spoke with relevance eternal.

“I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstance, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from and inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused.”

Mike is an aspiring scientist, currently residing in Ann Arbor, MI, and blogging at michaelevan.wordpress.com

I’m really curious to see what happens with today’s new plan to fix the banks. Among people to whom I listen about the economy, opinions are sharply divided; here’s a strong argument in favor from Brad DeLong and a strong argument against from Paul Krugman. I don’t know enough to have a defensible opinion, although my instincts are with Krugman and against the banksters, so I don’t have much confidence in today’s plan.

Obviously for the sake of alleviating economic suffering I hope it works out, but I also think this is an intellectually critical moment, much like the Iraq war debate. Krugman and DeLong (and Calculated Risk, and Yves Smith and others) have all staked out clear positions on the issue based on their different assumptions about reality. The success or failure of the plan will serve as some sort of test of these assumptions, and will therefore tell us something about reality. It’s not as rigorous (or even controlled) as a scientific experiment, but clear debates like this are the closest approximation to science that real life offers.