Answers

Phil. P., Lillian B.:  No, I have not tried to publish The Second American Revolution series as a book.  

Ernestine E.,  Salvador J.  As I noted in the preface to the series, under present conditions, which include prevailing values, The Second American Revolution cannot occur.  Indeed, do not expect a single one of the 12 parts to be realized.  And even if 1 or 2 (for example, the abolition of the Electoral College) are adopted, it would make no difference – certainly not enough to constitute a second revolution.  A part here and a part there do not make a whole.  Syndrome, a Greek word, means different elements running together.  It is the interactions among those elements which matter.

James S,  Bill E.,  Harry M.  (Regarding Parts 7 and 8 on reapportionment):  No, to my knowledge no lawsuit to date has complained that the extreme variations in votes cast across state House districts are unconstitutional because they comprise a dilution of vote weight in the higher turnout districts.  So far, all lawsuits have complained about extreme variations in population numbers across districts.  In a word, the One Person half of the One Person, One Vote principle has been tested, the One Vote half, no.

However, a lawsuit waiting to happen is lurking around the corner.  When it takes 500 votes to elect a representative in one district and 5,000 in the district next door, common sense tells you that something is wrong.  Obviously and undeniably, the weight of a vote cast in the latter district is significantly less than a vote cast in the former.  When the other shoe drops – and it will – it will land with a national thud that will cost cash-starved states, cities, and counties millions, if not billions, of dollars.  I would prefer to see that money used for schools, roads, hospitals, etc.  That money, by the way, is yours.  So, too, is the reapportionment formula presented in Part 8.  Such is my case.

Eddie L.  No, I have not changed.  I do not expect to see the reapportionment formula to be seriously considered, much less adopted.  Given zero expectations, you ask a key question:  “Why bother?”

As I wrote in The Source of Terrorism:  Middle Class Rebellion, a useful definition of corruption continues to elude us.  “I offer the following observation: competition improves the performance of a healthy competitor, whereas competition worsens the performance of a corrupt one.” (p. 367).  In the case of reapportionment, the competition is not between persons; it is between persons and realities. Those realities are:  extreme deviations in turnouts across districts prove that the weight of votes cast varies to an unconstitutional degree.  The solution is known -- the formula presents it (Part 8).  However, because the American polity has been corrupted -- i.e., changed to an oligarchy -- that solution cannot be implemented.  Simply put, corruption is why the realities just presented are worsening the nation’s performance rather than improving it.  My position throughout The Second American Revolution Series was not to deny that corruption but, to the contrary, to bring it to light, to make it conscious -- in order that it can be addressed, corrected.  In a word, then, the lack of serious consideration -- much less acceptance -- of the formula is one more indication among many that America is a corrupt state. 

Jack D, Charlie C.  Yes, I believe it is worthwhile to demonstrate to future generations that many people DID know what went wrong and why; moreover, they also knew what to do about it.  That those people did not implement the needed changes, e.g., the reapportionment formula, does not show they were lazy or inept; rather, it only proves, once again, the major theme of the Series:  we live in an oligarchy, not in a polity or a democracy.  In an oligarchic political system, it goes with the territory that people do not have the power to enact needed changes.  In America’s case; I will go further:  not even the oligarchy has the power to do what needs to be done.

The long-term decline of the middle class and the further impoverishment of the lower class will continue, deepen, worsen.  The issue is not whether or not people can change things now (they cannot) or if sometime later the unfavourable circumstances existing today will change (they will), but rather if Americans will be ready to seize the opportunity – always fleeting and rare – when and if the new situation creates it.  We saw such an opportunity -- the necessary correlation of people and events for a constructive revolution -- in America in the late 1700s.

Jerry A,  Peter M,  Roger N.  You note that on December 31, 2011, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act.  Title X, Subtitle D, “Counter Terrorism,” allows for the indefinite detention without a trial of people working for Al Qaeda or associated forces.  (An amendment proposing the exclusion of American citizens was rejected).  You don’t have to be a lawyer to know that indefinite detention without a trial of Americans is unconstitutional (see Part 8 on due process and equal protection.)  Of course, the word associated can and will be stretched to include everyone everywhere, which is why the word was put there.

President Obama claimed,   "I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. [...] My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law. [...].”  However, the Obama-sanctioned death without a trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen ( Part 8) killed on September 30, 2011, already demonstrated in bombs and blood that Obama’s claim is false.  The ACLU, among others, immediately saw through it:  "The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision...[without] temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield."  You disagree with the ACLU statement?  Think again.  A TV show put the issue nicely, bluntly:  Wha’cha gonna’ do when they come for you?

Thus, Obama’s signature of the NDAA further saps the constitutional pole of America.  Nothing surprising there.  That pole was erected in 1789; it was the center of the polity (Part 9).  It is only fitting that, with the end of the polity in 2008-2009, the pole now be taken down.  The only question was who would do the dismantling.  Just as it took Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican, to recognize China -- if a liberal Democrat had done it, a blizzard of treason allegations would have whited-out the airways and the halls of Congress -- so it took a Democrat Harvard lawyer to begin the unabashed, unabridged subversion of the Constitution.  Anybody else would have been impeached.

A necessary side note:  Obama’s signature is one amid a myriad of indications that the United States government does not understand who terrorists are and where they come from, why they think and act the way they do.  Otherwise it would not hand a handful of terrorists what a world war and countless conspiracies failed to achieve:  the destruction of the United States Constitution.

Fred. M.,  Bob B.,  Ernie M.,  Bill F.,  Ernesto S.  You want more on an issue raised in Part 12:  the creation of a (i) new economic service, (ii) new economic sector (after natural resources extraction, production and services), or (iii) fourth source (after land, labor and capital) of exchangeable wealth.  You are asking the most important economic question anybody can ask -- and nobody except you is asking it.

Or are they?  Let’s find out.  The next post picks up your concern.

General Summary. The political system founded in 1789 in America was not a democracy but a политей, a polity, a hybrid of oligarchy and democracy moderated by a large middle class and tending toward democracy.  The polity died in 2008-2009, replaced by an oligarchy. 

The polity ended because the middle class was economically weakened beyond a key threshold after which it could no longer fulfill its role as moderator of the other classes. 

The middle class is smaller; the poor poorer; the rich richer:  this overall trend, which is long term and cyclical, threatens to capsize Western civilization and push the world into chaos.  The oligarchy lacks the will, but more importantly the power, to stop it.

The Second American Revolution is a renaissance of the polity, but with more power for democracy, less for oligarchy.  That renaissance is the only way to stop the impending disaster.

Part 1.  The Despotism of An Oligarchy.   Alexis deTocqueville observed that the American upper class is found in the judiciary.  To depose the oligarchy requires starting at its head -- not Wall Street or Main Street, but the Supreme Court. 

In 1803 (Marbury v. Madison) the Court awarded itself the power to determine if laws are constitutional -- a power not granted in the Constitution.  Thomas Jefferson warned that change would lead to “the despotism of an oligarchy.”

The Second American Revolution establishes a commission to determine constitutionality.  The commission consists of members from all three branches, plus perhaps the public.

Part 2.  The Remedy.  The Second American Revolution amends the Constitution to provide for national referenda.  Switzerland, Ecuador and France, among other nations, have them.

Binding referenda are an essential part of the solution Alexis de Tocqueville identified:

“The remedy is above all else, outside constitutions. In order for democracy to govern, there must be citizens, i.e., people who are interested in public affairs, who have the capacity and the desire to participate in them. One must always return to this fundamental point.” [i]

Tocqueville’s remedy is the heart of The Second American Revolution.  An increase in the (i) capacity and (ii) desire to participate on the part of the people:  may any political candidate, public employee, party, law, government agency or policy be judged accordingly. 

National binding referenda in America will have firm but fair requirements and safeguards.  They expand the power of the people, but not indefinitely.

Part 3.  He Who Has The Money.   “To politically weaken the oligarchy = reduce the political impact of money.  To reduce the political impact of money = revolutionize political campaign funding.”

The Second American Revolution does not destroy the oligarchy.  Successful entrepreneurs are vital to any economy; they are oligarchs.  Rather, the objective is to reduce the political impact of money.  Not eliminate it (which is impossible) -- reduce it. 

The main gateway for money to acquire political influence is campaign financing.  Campaign laws are written to be evaded, which is why requiring limits and public reporting will never reduce the political impact of money.  The sine quo non of that reduction is to cut campaign expenses.

The core of soaring campaign costs is media advertizing.  The Second American Revolution requires the media to broadcast campaign ads at little or no cost as part of their public programming responsibility to acquire and maintain Federal Communications Commission licenses.  The time of day candidates’ ads are shown is set by a weekly rotation.

Part 4.  The 40% Solution:  Naura and Beyond.  About 60% of registered voters in America vote in a presidential election.  Of course, not all people qualified to vote are registered.  End result:  Bush and Obama were elected by 30% of the eligible population.  Any claim by them -- in fact by any American elected official -- to represent the majority is false.

Democracy is not government by the minority.  The Second American Revolution realizes majority rule by making voting mandatory.  A validated voting card will be required to obtain government services, e.g., a passport and social security.  As with national referenda (see above, Part 2), a variety of nations practice mandatory voting, e.g., Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Naura, France, Chile, Fiji, and Liechtenstein,

Part 5.  Suicide King.  Any system that does not recognize the popular vote as final is not democratic.  In the United States, the president is elected by the Electoral College, which on three occasions awarded the presidency to candidates who lost the popular vote.

The Electoral College is a holdover from slavery.  In a concession to southern planters, the Constitution framers allowed slaves to be counted as 3/5 human in order to increase the population counts of slave-owning states without giving slaves the right to vote.  Those higher counts gave those states more Electoral College votes.

The Second American Revolution abolishes the Electoral College.

Part 6.  Good-bye, Tweedle Dum.  In order to represent the rich and non-rich, the Founding Fathers created a bicameral legislature.  The Fathers believed that because House members represented fewer people and had to run for election more frequently than senators, House members would be closer to the general populace.

Closer, it turned out, is not close, much less close enough.  In 2008, the average net worth of a house member was $4,600,000.  240 out of 435 house representatives were millionaires -- 55%.  In contrast, only 1% of Americans are millionaires.

The Second American Revolution abolishes the House of Representatives, thereby creating a unicameral legislature.  Nebraska, most cities and counties, and approximately half of sovereign nations are unicameral.

Part 7.  Reapportionment (1):  In Search of The Silver Bullet.  The Constitution provides a pillar of democracy:  equal protection under the law.

Clearly, equal protection and hence democracy itself are hollow shells unless people’s votes legally have the same weight.  In one crucial area, that equality does not exist in America.

Equality of votes is incarnated in the principle “One Person, One Vote.”   Equal rights are unconstitutionally impaired when the weight of a vote “is in a substantial fashion diluted when compared with votes of citizens living in other parts of the state.” (Reynolds v. Sims, 1964).

In 1982, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that ordered New Mexico to reapportion its House of Representatives solely on the basis of population.  The legislature subsequently reapportioned, making warm body counts equal across districts.  This was One Person, One Person reapportionment.

The results were disastrous.  Some districts had more than double the votes of others.  Conclusion:   the court-ordered reapportionment significantly diluted the weight of votes cast in the higher vote districts.  The fatal fallacy of One Person, One Person reapportionment is that it fails to recognize that districts vary widely in their numbers of people ineligible to vote, e.g., transients, prisons.[ii]  

One Person, One Vote brings us face to face with a famous conundrum:  how to mix apples (people) and oranges (votes).

Part 8.   Reapportionment (2):  A Formula to Achieve One Person, One Vote solves the conundrum presented in Part 7.  Two different things, people and votes, are mixed so that each checks and balances the other.  

The formula:

Congressional District
Population According                   The Average of The Total
to The Last Census                      Votes Cast in A Precinct                 Derived
_________________        X         in The Previous Two            =      Precinct
                                                     Congressional General                 Population
The Average of The                     Election Years
Total Vote Cast in The
Congressional District
in The Previous Two
Congressional
General Election Years


Part 9.  The Great American Illusion presents Aristotle’s analysis of the политей or polity (see General Summary above), why it is the best government and how it ends in oligarchy.

The American Founding Fathers never declared they were creating a polity.  To openly admit that their proposed government had an oligarchic component would have antagonized the general populace; to have directly called it a democracy, on the other hand, would have antagonized the oligarchy.  To solve the dilemma, the Fathers forged a double-edged sword:  they (i) substituted the word republic for polity, and (ii) inferred that Polity = Democracy.  The latter is the unsaid Great American Illusion.  In politics it is the greatest ideological maneuver of all times.

The Great American Illusion is unraveling because the polity no longer exists.  The consequence is an emerging crisis of legitimacy not only for the American government but also for families, schools, neighborhoods, and places of work.

Part 10.  The Ultimate Taboo Question.  No large middle class, no polity.  No polity, no Second American Revolution.

Official statistics show that in 1992-93, the middle class fell below 50% of the population.  It has yet to recover; in fact, it has slipped even farther.  What is causing the decline? 

Part 10 asks the ultimate taboo question:  Is the destruction of the middle class caused by processes intrinsic to capitalism? 

Small producers were once the core of the middle class.  Their decline over the centuries is well documented.  Small producers cannot compete with large ones, which practice economies of scale. The contention that the Internet has reversed the trend does not fit the facts.

The middle class was saved by the explosive growth of the service sector.  In 2002, 80% of the American population was employed in services, versus only 60% in 1960. 

Is that salvation permanent or merely a pause?

Adam Smith identified a fundamental process of capitalism:   the specialization of labor.  Complex tasks are simplified and routinized so that eventually machines can perform them.  Overall, human work tends toward machine-tending.

Higher levels of education and training necessary to perform complex tasks are the economic foundation of the middle class in the service sector.  By simplifying and standardizing those tasks, the division of labor erodes that foundation.

Part 11:  The Oligarchy’s Solution:  “Happiness House.”   Rich richer, poor poor, middle class smaller.  Faced with a catastrophe that could engulf the world in a second Dark Ages, the American oligarchy offers three solutions:  (1) unleash the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith, i.e., cut taxes for the wealthy and remove all limits on capitalism.  (2) The division of labor is a rational process to increase profits.  In a rational/profits milieu, incompetence is counterproductive, therefore intolerable.  Nevertheless, incompetence is tolerated -- in fact heavily subsidized publically and privately.  The same acceptance of the unacceptable characterizes the third remedy offered by the oligarchy to keep the middle class afloat:  (3) corruption.

Incompetence and corruption in their manifold manifestations -- bureaupathic behavior, inefficiency, waste, duplication of effort -- have an indisenable place in the Western world.  That world talks and acts as if they were not necessary -- but they are. The preservation of the middle class is paramount, the vexations and traumas of individuals involved therein, incidental. 

Incompetency and corruption are comingling to become inseparable, indivisible: incomcruption.  That compound, together with an oligarchy that is out of control, create the prevailing feeling-tone of America today.  Tocqueville predicted it, described it:  a state of “permanent infancy” populated by “timid and hard-working animals of which the government is the Sheppard.” [iii]  

Such is the rising Happiness House.

Part 12.  The Arena of The Heart And Head .  The triple edged sword lowering over America creates 5 fates.  None excludes the other.  (1) The middle class falls; a revolution occurs. (2) Growing absolute scarcities of absolute necessities (see below) create unprecedented world strife.  The needs of warfare, both real and potential, require higher levels of education and training, aiding the middle class.  (3)  Once separate  economic sectors and functions -- public versus private sectors, productive versus unproductive labor, and surplus versus non-surplus-financed activities -- are mixed.  That confounding and the resulting confusion thwart the revolutionary potential of a middle class fall.  (4) Major scientific and technological innovations, e.g., nuclear fusion, create new industries requiring higher levels of education and training; the middle class benefits.  (5)  Capitalism undergoes important changes, e.g., profit rates are capped except in certain areas such as new industries.  In the uncapped sector, higher levels of education and training are required, reinforcing the middle class.  In the older sector, the profit cap slows the division of labor, hence the erosion of the middle class. 

Fate is what happens.  It requires neither awareness nor conscious intervention -- unlike destiny.  In addition to the five fates, there are two destinies.  (1)  There is an important change in the creation, maintenance and/or distribution of economic value.  The development of a significant new service/s; of an entirely new economic sector (after extraction of raw materials, production, and services); or of a 4th source of economic wealth (after land, labor and capital):  any such development could forestall the decline of the middle class.

None of the above, however, stops the cyclical, long-term disaster.  The reason:  as long as capitalism is capitalism, any new scientific invention, new economic sector, etc. will eventually undergo the division of labor and hence the decline of the middle class.

The only ultimate solution is (2) the second destiny:  a post capitalist economic system.

All economies are founded on values.  The world is about to enter a new epoch quite unlike anything before it:  absolute scarcities of absolute necessities.  Not rational discussions or moralistic entreaties, but new earthly realities will force a change in values.  Those new values will allow for the creation of a post capitalist system.[iv]  That which is impossible today because of prevailing values, thereby becomes possible tomorrow. 

In 1945, when America still had a polity, Keynes predicted that “the economic problem” would soon be forced out of the driver’s seat, and “and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems…”  His prediction remains unfulfilled.  Keynes did not foresee the collapse of the polity.  He did foresee, however, that no oligarchy will risk its immediate economic interests to solve the economic problem.  That solution, therefore, awaits the solution of the political question of oligarchy versus polity. 

The Second American Revolution is that solution.
_______________

[i] « Le remède est surtout en dehors des constitutions. Pour que la démocratie puisse gouverner il faut des citoyens, des gens qui prennent intérêt à la chose publique, aient la capacité de s’en mêler et le veuillent. Point capital auquel il faut toujours revenir. »  Alexis de Tocqueville, Notes et variantes, in Alexis de Tocqueville, Œuvres, Volume II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, p. 1,019. 

There is nothing idealistic, much less utopian, about Tocqueville’s remedy. In 2005, France had a glimpse of what could be during the months preceding the national referendum on the proposed constitution for the European Community. Several books debating the subject made the best-seller list; almost daily, I witnessed an on-going, exciting dialogue.

Because it does not allow national referenda,, America has never had a comparable experience.

[ii] The other side of the coin, One-Vote, One-Vote reapportionment, would reapportion solely on votes cast and ignore populations.  It would even up votes cast, but create gigantic variations in populations across districts.  Hence, One-Vote, One-Vote reapportionment would be unacceptable.

[iii]

“I see an immense crowd of men all alike and equal who turn around themselves ceaselessly, in order to acquire small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill up their souls. Each one, marginalized, is a stranger to the destiny of all the others…, and although he may still have a family, it can be said that he has no country.  

Above all of them is an immense, titular power, which designates itself to be the sole provider of their joys and to look over their fate. That power is absolute, detailed, regular, attentive, and soft. It would be like a paternal power if it had as a purpose the preparation of men to be adults; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them irrevocably in infancy. It wants its citizens to be joyful, as long as they dream only of being joyful. It works willingly for their happiness; but it wants to be the only agent and arbitrator of happiness. It provides for its citizens’ security, anticipates and takes care of their needs, facilitates their pleasures, takes in hand their major affairs, directs their industry, regulates their successions, divides their inheritances. Can it not take away entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?  

Thus, with each day that passes, the titular power renders less useful and rarer the work of an independent arbitrator;…it does not break people’s wills, but it softens them, bends them, directs them. It rarely compels people to act, but it endlessly opposes their actions. It does not destroy, it stops from being born; it never tyrannizes, but it bothers, it upsets, it snuffs out, it creates problems, and it reduces in the end each nation to being a herd of timid and hardworking animals, of which the government is the shepherd.  

I have always believed that sort of servitude, controlled, sweet and peaceful, which I have depicted, could combine itself better than is generally imagined with some of the exterior forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to establish itself in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”[iii]  

[Je veux imaginer sous quels traits nouveaux le despotisme pourrait se produire dans le monde. Je vois une foule innombrable d’hommes semblables et égaux qui tournent sans repos sur eux-mêmes pour se procurer de petits et vulgaires plaisirs, dont ils remplissent leur âme. Chacun d’eux, retiré à l’écart, est comme étranger à la destinée de tous les autres […] et, s’il lui reste encore une famille, on peut dire du moins qu’il n’a plus de patrie.

Au-dessus de [tous] s’élève un pouvoir immense et tutélaire, qui se charge seul d’assurer leur jouissance et de veiller sur leur sort. Il est absolu, détaillé, régulier, prévoyant et doux. Il ressemblerait à la puissance paternelle si, comme elle, il avait pour objet de préparer les hommes à l’âge viril ; mais il ne cherche, au contraire, qu’à les fixer irrévocablement dans l’enfance ; il aime que les citoyens se réjouissent, pourvu qu’ils ne songent qu’à se réjouir. Il travaille volontiers à leur bonheur ; mais il veut en être l’unique agent et le seul arbitre ; il pourvoit à leur sécurité, prévoit et assure leurs besoins, facilite leurs plaisirs, conduit leurs principales affaires, dirige leur industrie, règle leurs successions, divise leurs héritages ; que ne peut-il leur ôter entièrement le trouble de penser et la peine de vivre ?

C’est ainsi qu tous les jours il rend moins utile et plus rare l’emploi du libre arbitre ; […] il ne brise pas les volontés, mais il les amollit, les plie et les dirige ; il force rarement d’agir, mais il s’oppose sans cesse à ce qu’on agisse ; il ne détruit point, il empêche de naître; il ne tyrannise point, il gêne, il comprime, il énerve, il éteint, il hébète, et il réduit enfin chaque nation à n’être plus qu’un troupeau d’animaux timides et industrieux, dont le gouvernement est le berger.

J’ai toujours cru que cette sorte de servitude, réglée, douce et paisible, dont je viens de faire le tableau, pourrait se combiner mieux qu’on ne l’imagine avec quelques-unes des formes extérieures de la liberté, et qu’il ne lui serait pas impossible de s’établir à l’ombre même de la souveraineté du peuple.]

Alexis de Tocqueville, De La Démocratie en Amérique II, in Œuvres, op.cit., pp. 836-8. (IV, VI).

[iv] Allow for, nothing more.  Just as the creation of a polity in 1789 was by no means preordained, there is no guarantee that a post capitalist system will be realized.

   NOTE to new readers:  please see prior post.



                         Part 12.  The Arena of The Heart and Head



                                                        “My wisdom is as despised as chaos.
                                                                                        What is my annihilation,
                                                    compared to the stupor that awaits you?”

                                                                -- Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations[i] --







An excruciating long, but inexorable, cyclical decline of the middle class -- a decline prolonged by massive subsidies of incompetence and corruption:  such is the cold ground beneath the sunless haze that is threatening to be America’s future. A.k.a. “Happiness House” (see prior post) owned and operated by the oligarchy.  The hush of money.

In that haze and hush, life will follow the dramaturgy of American horror movies:  long periods of stultifying, soporific routine punctured by spikes of horrific, catastrophic violence.

“Jaws”:  a poor boy’s Moby Dick?  What was written off by critics as retinal junk food could prove to be prescient.

The rising world of falling expectations;[ii] of open meetings of closed minds; of more church steeples and stop signs; of legal crimes;[iii] indeed, of a tyranny of laws:[iv] is it inevitable?

Yes, if we submit to the oligarchy’s three remedies (see prior post) to the catastrophe that could engulf the Western world in chaos. 

You don’t need official statistics[v] to see that catastrophe.  You see it every day where you live and work:  the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle class smaller.  The three-edged sword is swinging ever lower above our heads:  The Pit and The Pendelum by Edgar Allan Poe was a masterpiece of horror and, if America crashes, reality. 

The Second American Revolution is the renaissance of the system of government that characterized America for over 200 years.  That system, contrary to popular belief, was never a democracy.  Rather, it was a политей, a polity -- an oligarchy/democracy hybrid tending toward democracy and moderated by a large middle class.  The polity died in 2008-2009, replaced by an oligarchy.

That death was expected -- 2,000 years ago.  Aristotle announced it.  He warned that the major threat to a polity is posed not by outside enemies, not by the poor, not by the middle class, but by the wealthy:

“[Forgetting the claims of equity], they not only give more power to the well-to-do, but they also deceive the people [by fobbing them off with sham rights]. Illusory benefits must always produce real evils in the long run; and the encroachments made by the rich [under cover of such devices] are more destructive to a constitution than those of the people.”[vi]

If billions of freebee Bush-Obama dollars to the mega-wealthy were not encroachments made by the rich, what is?  If adult fairytales about unity and a president rockin’ around the Christmas tree with Kermit The Frog are not illusory benefits, what are?

A polity requires a middle class large enough to moderate the other classes.  Obviously, if the economic ruin of the middle class continues, no polity is possible.

If a polity is impossible, The Second American Revolution is nonsense.

In a moment, we’ll reveal the real name of Happiness House.

                                                            *          *          *

Consider the following fates.

All are remedies to the catastrophe we are simultaneously living and awaiting.  Of course, some remedies are more remedies than others.

Please do not view them as predictions, much less as visions, but rather as tools in a toolbox to be used as appropriate.  They are not mutually exclusive.

(1)  A classic Marxist revolution.  The middle class falls into the proletariat and the lumpen proletariat:  drug dealers, card sharks, pimps, burglars, welfare cheats.

There is a working class revolution.  With the backing of ambitious noncoms and generals who collect fossilized fish, it succeeds.

What happens next?  

As discussed in The Source of Terrorism:  Middle Class Rebellion, middle class rebels take over.   Here we arrive at the political fallacy of Marxism:

Lawyers and grocery store checkout girls, Marx tells us, are both working class because they have only their labor power to sell.  Well, Karl, when the two groups get together, guess who is going to end up on top.  Revolutionary ideals -- self-sacrifice, unity -- do not always prevail when politicos deal out plum jobs (“I get to be ambassador to England!” -- “Oh no you don’t!  I called it first.”)[vii]

Not tossed a single bone with any real meat attached, one by one, the checkout girls check out.  “Better shadow ‘em,” the rebel in the White House scowls; after all, they might be traitors.

Middle class rebels can’t manage national economies, so what happens is what happened all over Eastern Europe in the latter part of the twentieth century.  To wit: 

In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter[viii] noted that socialism was capitalism’s repair shop.  Of course, once the car is fixed, nobody keeps it in the garage.  Nobody.

Hence, the end product of a Marxist revolution:   an alternating system of (1) private capitalism owned and operated by a new mega-rich with an oligarchic form of government.  In a polite bow to tradition, that oligarchy will have democratic accessories:  hat, belt, gloves. (2) State capitalism under a totalitarian tyranny run by middle class rebels.

Truncated, stunted, the middle class lives willy-nilly in a world ruled by The Cult of The Contact.   And you thought religion was dead…

What we have here is not a failure to communicate -- oligarchs and middle class rebels communicate quite well -- but rather capitalism and incomcruption (see prior post) gone to seed. 

(2) Growing scarcities of natural resources and absolute necessities create unprecedented world strife. An uptick in armed conflict -- look for a mamawar between China and the U.S. -- increases demand for higher levels of education and training, notably scientific, to meet the needs of military combat. Gigantic public and private outlays foot the bill, benefitting the middle class.

A case study of this particular fate -- not of scientific socialism but of socialism for scientists -- already exists:  Los Alamos, New Mexico.  One evening, kids safely put to bed, a Lab employee whispered its mysterious, secret inner essence:  “I got mine.  You got yours?”

(3)  Mysterium Conjunctionius.  This remedy to the middle class decline is the co-mingling and confounding of (i) public and private sectors, (ii) productive and unproductive labor, and (iii) economic surplus and non-surplus-financed activities.  The political repercussions are astounding.

(i) Pubic versus private seems obvious enough (for the moment).

(ii) Adam Smith’s classic idea of productive versus unproductive labor:

“There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a [manufacturing worker] adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master’s profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing…A man grows rich by employing a multitude of [manufacturing workers]; he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.”[ix]

Smith characterized as unproductive labour[x] that of soldiers and other “servants of the public…maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people.” He found other examples in what today is the middle class core -- the service sector:  “churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc.”[xi]

Question:  if service sector employees perform unproductive labor, then where does their daily bread come from?  Clearly, if everyone has to work all day merely to feed themselves, no unproductive laborers are possible. 

Smith mentioned the answer above.  In case you missed it:

(iii)  Unproductive laborers live off the surplus created by the productive work of other people:

“[W]hen by the improvement and cultivation of land the labour of one family can provide food for two, the labour of half the society becomes sufficient to provide food for the whole. The other half, therefore,…can be employed in providing other things, or in satisfying the other wants and fancies of mankind…The desire of food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary. Those, therefore, who have the command of more food than they themselves can consume, are always willing to exchange the surplus, or, what is the same thing, the price of it, for gratifications of this other kind. What is over and above satisfying the limited desire is given for the amusement of those desires which cannot be satisfied, but seem to be altogether endless.”[xii]

The boundary separating productive from unproductive labor is vanishing, mainly because of the growing confusion of the secondary and tertiary economic sectors (production and services).  That confusion has only just begun; in fact, the transformation of services into commodities, which are the essence of the productive sector, is the defining economic characteristic of our times.

Part 10 of this series explored that transition, and provided the following example:

Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles?

That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the U.S. economy.

Putting jobs at McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises in the same category as those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch…

But the presidential report points out that the current system for classifying jobs “is not straightforward.”…

“When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a ‘service’ or is it combining inputs to ‘manufacture’ a product?” the report asks.

“Sometimes, seeming subtle differences can determine whether an industry is classified as manufacturing.  For example, mixing water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as manufacturing. However, if that activity is performed at a snack bar, it is considered a service.”

The report notes that the Census Bureau’s North American Industry Classification System defines manufacturing as covering enterprises that are “engaged in the mechanical, physical or chemical transformation of materials, substances or components into new products.”

Classifications matter, the report says, because among other things, they can affect which businesses receive tax relief [sic]…

David Huether, chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, said that he had heard for several years that some economists wanted to count hamburger flipping as a manufacturing job, which he noted would result in statistical reports showing many more jobs in what has been a declining sector of the economy.[xiii]

The confusion of heretofore separate and distinct functions and sectors is expanding logarithmically…

A post office, for example, should be a clear-cut, elementary case of (i) a public sector entity (ii) performing nonproductive labor paid for by (iii) the economic surplus. However, in France the post office is a mixture of all options.  It is both publicly and privately owned, and performs both unproductive and productive work, e.g., financial services, such as banking, and the manufacture of stamps.

Could the post office remove the tripled-edged sword hanging over the Western world?  Could the guy behind the counter be what Shakespeare yearned for, the concord of this discord?[xiv]

Lenin thought so.  He wrote shortly before he took power:  “To organise the whole economy on the lines of the postal service…is our immediate aim. This is the state and this is the economic foundation we need.”[xv]

I believe history will show that the French post office is far ahead of its time, that we are witnessing the emergence of All Directions economics, the counterpart to the All-Directions politics analyzed in The Source of Terrorism:  Middle Class Rebellion:

“…the standard political ruler of Left, Center, and Right, instantly presents itself. That tool is as flat as it is narrow -- tedious, brief, in Shakespeare’s words. Not only does it show only three positions but also, because it is applicable to only one dimension, length, it cannot measure up or down, backward or forward.”  (p. 341)

Doubts about the old political ruler will expand as its sole dimension of length becomes increasingly irrelevant. The reason is that the oligarchy has learned that the best ideological camouflage to hide the death of the polity is to present its political system as one of All Directions -- Left, Right, Center. [xvi] 

As the middle class decline worsens, the confounding of economic sectors and functions will be increasingly resorted to for reasons of political expediency.  Mixing and blurring conceal crucial differences, e.g., a middle class service sector employee and a lower class worker in the production sector are more easily confused if each performs some functions of the other.  Now you see a  worker; now you don’t.  Mysterium, indeed;

The upshot is that, in the future, the revolutionary potential of the middle class decline is blunted, if not thwarted.  In an All Directions world, life goes on (sorry, Karl).  Merry and tragical:  Shakespeare[xvii] would call it.  We extrapolate:  Harder, Faster, Louder, Dumber.

(4) Modernism, with its boundless faith in science and progress, makes a roaring comeback and reinvigorates the middle class.

In the past, creations of science and technology -- notably trains and automobiles -- gave vital impetus to capitalist economies at decisive moments. In the future, equivalent creations give rise to new industries, thereby generating an enormous demand for higher levels of education and training.  The middle class decline is thereby forestalled. 

The amazing transformative power of science and technology on economics is poignantly illustrated by the following case study:

Adam Smith, writing in 1776, deigned the “tune of the musician” to be a classic example of unproductive labour -- unproductive because it “adds to the value of nothing.” [xviii]  

Two centuries later, thanks to science and technology, the unproductive tune changed tunes:

“The music industry is one of the largest in the United States, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Album sales alone bring in $30 billion a year, and this figure doesn’t even account for concert ticket sales, the thousands of bands playing Friday nights at saloons all over North America…Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.”[xix]

The transformation of unproductive into productive work is accountable to no one. We may be to scientific and technological innovations tomorrow what our shadows on the ground are to us today. Discoveries in stem cell research, in nanotechnology, of life on another planet, of nuclear fusion: all could be sources of presently-imponderable economic developments requiring massive injections of cash into higher education and training, thereby reviving the middle class.

To halfway appreciate the impact that scientific and technological discoveries could have in store:   take your Visible Hand and show Adam Smith a laptop computer.  Ask him what he thinks...

In brief:  there may be more than one 1492.

(5) Capitalism undergoes important changes.  Example:  its quest for ever higher rates of profits is permitted only in certain areas, e.g., environmental protection or the creation of new industries.  In those sectors, higher levels of education and training are required to invent and apply new processes; hence, the middle class is revived.  In the older, profit-capped areas, the division of labor and simplification of tasks slow.  There, too, an immediate benefactor is the middle class. 

There is a major practical problem with remedy (5).  The oligarchy must approve any changes in capitalism, e.g., a cap on profit rates.  To enact certain changes in -- not of -- capitalism, therefore, requires first a change of -- not in -- the American political system.  

Enter The Second American Revolution.  We will return to this issue.

                                                        *          *          *

With remedy (5) we approach the thorny border separating fate and destiny.

Fate is what happens to you.  Destiny is what you make happen to fate.

Fate requires neither awareness nor conscious intervention.  Destiny requires both.  

Hence, important changes in capitalism (remedy 5) could qualify as a destiny, depending on which changes are made and with what degree of consciousness and awareness. 

Two destinies present themselves as remedies to the capsizing of Western civilization.  They are totally unrealizable today because of prevailing values.

(6) There is a fundamental change in the creation of economic value.

Adam Smith noted that water, an absolute necessary, cost little or nothing, but a diamond, which was useless, cost a lot:

“The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expressed the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called ‘value in use’; the other, ‘value in exchange’. The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.”[xx]

Smith’s observation that water as has little or no exchange value is becoming as obsolete as his notion of the unproductive musician’s tune…

In 2007, the United Nations released its fourth Global Environment Outlook. Among its conclusions:

“Available freshwater resources are declining; by 2024, 1.8 billion people will live in countries with absolute water scarcity…Globally, contaminated water remains the greatest single cause of human disease and death.”[xxi]

Tragically, Americans seem unaware that a water crisis can occur in their nation:

ATLANTA . For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought…

Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life, for the most part, has gone on just as before.

By September, with Lake Lanier forecast to dip into the dregs of its storage capacity in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use…

Between 1990 and 2000, water use in Georgia increased 30 percent. But the state has not yet come up with an estimate of how much water is available during periods of normal rainfall, much less a plan to handle the worst-case scenario: dry faucets.[xxii]  

Safe, plentiful drinking water is not the only problem. A lower level of water in one place already is creating higher costs everywhere:

Oswego, New York . Water levels in the Great Lakes are falling: Lake Ontario, for example, is about 7 inches, or 18 centimeters, below where it was a year ago. And for every inch of water the lakes lose, the ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads by 270 tons or risk running aground…

As a result, more ships are needed, adding millions of dollars to shipping companies’ operating costs…

On average, 240 million tons of cargo travel across the Great Lakes every year. The U.S. fleet circulating in the Great Lakes has 63 ships, which have lost a total of 8,000 tons of cargo capacity for every inch of water the lakes have fallen below normal this year, said James Weakley, president of the carriers’ association. Those 8,000 tons, he said, correspond to enough iron ore to produce 6,000 cars or enough coal to provide electricity to the Detroit area for three hours, or enough stone to build 24 houses…

“If the low levels in the Great Lakes are a result of global warming, I don’t know,” said [Jonathan Daniels, director of the Oswego Port Authority]. “What I know is that we can’t control nature. All we do is hope for rain.”[xxiii]

We can’t control nature .  Values don’t exist in a vacuum. They always have a context -- social and historical, factual and ideological.  In the end, context is what counts, and it is seldom effected by pure reason or pious wishes.  To alter it requires revolutionary transformations on the order of changes in earth realities, that is to say, in nature.

With a transformation of context, values change (for better or worse.)

In what is the top selling, university economics textbook of all times, Paul Samuelson acknowledged the key role of human values.  He defined economics as “the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society.”[xxiv]

Usually, context is latent; Samuelson’s definition makes it manifest.  Note carefully that Samuelson assumes having a choice about employing scarce resources. Obviously,

(i) Samuelson’s scarce resources were not absolutely scarce. That is to say, they were scarce only at a certain price offered.  If you pay more for them, the scarcity disappears.

(ii) Those scarce resources were not absolute necessities.  Samuelson was writing in a time when water, food, etc, were not scarce on a global scale. That situation is changing, however, and most likely irrevocably. Wherever absolute necessities are lacking, there is no choice.

But what is an economic necessity? Until now, necessity has been primarily culturally determined.  A car is a necessity in some places -- many employers won’t hire you without one -- a bicycle (as Vittorio De Sica showed) in others.  

As water and other absolute necessities become absolutely scarce, the cultural determination of necessity will lose control.  In a sort of genetic throwback, necessity will be increasingly defined in terms of the raw physical prerequisites for sustaining life, e.g., daily calorie intake.

In a world of necessities so defined, Western economics and its underlying values will confront a new era quite unlike anything before it.

(i)  If Samuelson’s definition is accepted, economics in the future will become post-economics relative to the economics taught today -- including Samuelson’s.  Among other things, the market will be seen not as THE determinant of value, as a God-like, self-evident truth, but simply as a convenient medium of exchange.

(ii) If Samuelson’s definition is rejected because absolute scarcities of absolute necessities create absolutely no choice, economics on a global scale will be forced to become actually, finally, truly…economical.  John Adams’ recommendation to Thomas Jefferson, “as We our poor We ought to be Œconomists,”[xxv] will assume its full value.  And René Char’s plea quoted at the top of the prior post[xxvi] will be answered in the affirmative:  economics will finally change, for better if consciously constituted and managed, for worse if unconsciously controlled and endured. 

The coming absolute scarcities of absolute necessities will be the greatest change of context in world history.  Could that change generate values which give birth to

(i)  a new economic service?  

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador mentioned the possibility of a new service created by … doing nothing, i.e., leaving the earth alone:

“The nations of the Amazon basin are the lungs of the world, without which life on earth would be extinguished...Because fresh air is a good with free access, those nations do not receive just compensation for the service they generate.  The idea of compensating for avoiding deforestation is only part of a larger concept, which is to compensate for the net contamination avoided.  If the incentives of the Kyoto agreement are expanded to include the net contamination avoided, a revolutionary change in international exchanges could take place, permitting many nations -- above all, the developing ones -- to become exporters of environmental services.”[xxvii]

(ii)  A new economic sector?[xxviii]  This option probably exists but is marginalized in modern capitalist economies.  (In the feudal era, the service sector was small and mostly confined to nascent cities.)

More spectacular than (i) or (ii), could emerging absolute scarcities of absolute necessities create

(iii) a new source of creation of wealth?

Adam Smith identified land, labor, and capital as “the three original sources of all revenue as well as of all exchangeable value. All other revenue is ultimately derived from some one or other of these.”[xxix]

Obviously, a new service, a new sector, or a fourth source of economic value could have a momentous impact on the decline of the middle class, hence on the three-edged sword menacing the Western world.

I suspect that, as with a new economic sector, the fourth source of economic value already exists, hidden in plain sight.  We overlook it; our ideological blinders are on.  As is always the case, they are produced, maintained and distributed by the system in place. [xxx]  

I suspect, too, that as are many real remedies, the fourth source is less than an arm’s length away.

                                                        *          *          *

None of the fates and destinies mentioned so far will stop the long-term cyclical decline of the middle class.  Why?

Simply stated, because what is projected onto the screen does not change the screen. In particular, a Marxist revolution and the confounding of economic sectors do not change the underlying process of how economic value is created.  As long as that process stays in place, as long as capitalism is capitalism (be it private or state), any new scientific or technological development, any new service, any new economic sector or a fourth source of economic value -- all will eventually undergo the same division of labor and simplification of tasks, hence the same routinization and standardization we are seeing today.

Hence, the same erosion of the middle class.

Thus, no matter how many reprieves and new leases on life are granted, the three-edged sword remains in place.

I am in no way suggesting that palliative measures should not be applied; some relief is better than none.  I am saying they should be applied with full awareness that they are indeed palliative, nothing more.

 (7)  We come to the second destiny --  the last remedy.

The only long term solution to the middle class decline is a post capitalist economic system.

Karl Marx defined a commodity as “an object of human wants, a means of existence in the widest sense of the term.”[xxxi] Adam Smith gave greater specificity to widest sense: the “necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.”[xxxii]   From Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Paul Samuelson, then, there is a fundamental agreement that the key to economics is what people value.

That emphasis cuts through the deceptions, errors, and obfuscations of oligarchs and their representatives --   Washington politicos, economic advisers, TV court jesters.  Despite everything they say and do, the basic economic question will  not go away:  what do you want?  A democratic question, if there ever was one.

Which is why, they never ask it.

To the oligarchs and their spokesmen who say that a new economic system -- as well as a new economic sector or a fourth source of economic value -- are all preposterous ideas, all I can say is, given the prevailing values, you are right.  I couldn’t agree with you more.

                                                        *          *          *

Is there no alternative to the emerging Happiness House -- the caring, gently-violent state despotism Tocqueville warned about; to the stupor Rimbaud foresaw; to the empty thing-filled lives President Carter deplored?   To the All Directions political system straddling the All Directions economy of, by, and for the American oligarchy?

Let’s take a parting look at remedy (7), a post capitalist economic system. 

As the 2008-2009 meldown showed for all time’s sake, there is precious little that is economical about modern economics.  We need to look elsewhere.

To repeat, the secret to economics is no secret at all:  human values.[xxxiii] They are ultimately where the remedy is found -- in the mirror. 

With the arrival in the world of absolutely scarce, absolute necessities, a new era will unfold.  We do not know yet what transformation of economic values will occur.  It is reasonable to suppose, however, that the existing capitalist system will continue at least for a while into the new epoch.

• “Twilight Zone” viewers, there’s a signpost up ahead.  Oxygen tanks.  $100.  “Wha’cha’ askin there, buddy’?” the one-eyebrowed salesman inquires, taking your money.  “Ya’ wanna new mask too?  50 bucks extra, pal.  Take it or leave it.  I’m kinda busy right now.”

You don’t see him?  He’s just around the corner.

America won’t be the only nation to have old economic principles and practices hanging around.  That fact explains why the hallmark of the dawning epoch will likely be endless wars over necessities (Fate 2). Nothing surprising there.  If Hitler had used the same mobilization of resources for peacetime purposes instead of preparing for war; if Bush and Obama had spent the same money on life at home instead of on death abroad … such what-ifs will remain what-ifs as long as the values needed to convert them into realities do not prevail.

If human history has shown anything, it is that to date economic values cannot be constructed by pure logic or reason, by faith or good will.[xxxiv] You may think that high school teachers “should” be paid more or that high flying PDGs of failing companies “should” be paid less.  You also know that in today’s world, “it” does not work that way.

Such is less the case with political values, however, which in special circumstances and for brief periods, e.g., post-revolutionary 1780s America, do allow for the creation of better systems (see Part 9 of this series).

The equivalent today of the political change rendered by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and other Founding Fathers is nothing short of The Second American Revolution.  It is the rebirth of the политей or polity, but with greater power for democracy, less for oligarchy.  The special circumstances and values needed to enact that Revolution do not exist at present, but that is not to say they never will.  The challenge, then, is to be ready when the opportunity arises.

Which brings us to the key question of this 12-part series:

Would greater power for the democratic element of a polity solve the problem of the middle class economic decline?  Can an authentic political revolution lead to an economic one? 

(1)   A polity with the powerful democratic component The Second American Revolution proposes has never existed in a large, economically developed nation. What is known is the disastrous record of the earth’s ecology under the status quo, the oligarchy.  What is known, too, is the dismal and deteriorating performance of the middle class. 

The Second American Revolution does not waste a single second preaching to the rich to be less covetous, to develop a social consciousness.  The elemental truth is, even if it wanted to, the American oligarchy could not remove the three-edged sword; it doesn’t have the power.[xxxv] 

What does?

(2)   Paul Samuelson noted that the choice of how to use productive resources can be made with or without the use of money.

Without the use of money.  Ultimately, the economic realm is not as separate and autonomous as it has been throughout history.  To those why say the economy innately is now and forever will be independent of human plans and dreams, that the three-edged sword can never be removed, I have a three word response:  John Maynard Keynes.

The end to a sovereign economics that hits with the full force of natural disasters:  that is not only what Keynes hoped and worked for -- in 1945, he predicted it.  "The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems -- the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion."[xxxvi]

What went wrong?

Keynes made his prediction when a polity still existed.  And nobody incarnated a polity better than the president Keynes knew personally, Franklin Roosevelt.  The polity no longer exists, which is why we are now farther away from removing economics from the driver’s seat than when Keynes made his prediction.  I doubt he would disagree with that statement and the cause/effect hypothesis it contains.  In fact, Keynes indicated why the rich cannot be expected to put economics in the back seat. [xxxvii]

Keynes did not foresee the change of political systems.  Based on hard experience, then, we will say here what he did not:  Solving the economic problem requires first solving the political one. 

If that is true, then the gateway to the arena of the heart and the head Keynes cherished is The Second American Revolution. Oligarchs, of course, want  you to believe that no such option exists, that the only choice is them or chaos.  Since The Second American Revolution definitely is not them, they equate it with chaos. 

At bottom is this simple truth:  the oligarchs do not want any choices made without money.    The oligarchy thereby makes manifest the latent conflict in the two alternatives Samuelson observed:  (1)  with and (2) without money.

We end where we began -- looking at them.

An oligarchy legitimized by an All Directions political ideology sitting atop an All Directions economy, is rapidly consolidating its rule.    Life under the new regime was cogently summed up in 1873,  by Arthur Rimbaud:

“One must be absolutely modern.  Keep up the pace.  No religious hymns.  Hard night.”[xxxviii]

Let´s go ahead and call that hard night what it is:  The Fourth Reich.

Fascism as we know it.
_______________

[i] « Ma sagesse est aussi dédaignée que le chaos. Qu’est mon néant, auprès de la stupeur qui vous attend ? » Arthur Rimbaud, « Vies : I », Illuminations in Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p. 128.

[ii]   This article was published shortly before the economic meltdown of 2008 hit:

New York . America’s self-confidence is on the wane. That is something that has happened two, or perhaps three, times in recent decades, as fear grew that the country was on the wrong course and that the economic situation was unlikely to improve…

Evidence for the loss of confidence came this week when the Conference Board released its consumer confidence survey for March [2008]. What stood out was how far economic expectations have fallen.

The amount of pessimism -- as shown by people who forecast that things will get worse -- is not quite at record highs. But the amount of optimism that things will get better is as low as it has been in the four decades that the Conference Board has been asking questions…

It was in December 1973 that the Conference Board’s consumer expectations index hit its lowest level ever, of 45.2.

The reading disclosed this week, of 47.9, ranks second.

In some ways, there is even less optimism now than there was then.

A lower proportion of those surveyed [ 8.1%] said they expected business conditions to improve. The percentage of people who think their own income will rise [14.9%] is much lower than it was then. Only in jobs is there more optimism now than there was then, and the difference is small.

Floyd Norris, “In America, less-great expectations,” International Herald Tribune, March 28, 2008.

[iii] Montesquieu asked if it was possible to “causing the law to be broken by the law?” (« faire violer la loi par la loi ? ») Charles de Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois,  in Œuvres complètes II, Bibliothéque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1994. p. 444. (Book XII, Chapter XIV).

Today, the most blatant legal crimes in America are political campaign financing laws. Nowhere are those crimes more evident than in Wisconsin, a state renowned for its political reforms:

Madison, Wisconsin . Even before this state approved one of the most rigorous campaign finance laws in the country 20 years ago, Wisconsin was known as the pioneer in enacting political changes, from inventing the direct primary to establishing a civil service system for state employees.

But now the trend-setting is pointing in the opposite direction…

The unintended effect of the clean-government mentality is that Wisconsin’s stringent laws governing campaign donations and spending have led determined donors to be even more resourceful.

The state was a pioneer in offering public subsidies for candidates who limited their spending. Now, Wisconsin has become a breeding ground for organizations to perfect techniques for bending or evading restrictions on how much political action committees and parties can contribute directly to campaigns.

Richard L. Berke, “A Reform Backfires in Wisconsin. Clever Contributors Find Ways to Evade Campaign Finance Law,” International Herald Tribune, July 27, 1998.  To mention only one technique:  issue advocacy. Groups are formed to pay for ads which they claim are not political, but which in fact favor certain candidates. In such cases, donors and methods of fund raising do not have to be reported.

Make no mistake, campaign laws were written to be evaded.  Those who put pen to paper are fully aware of what they were doing:  use the law to break the law.  I challenge any lawyer or lawmaker engaged in the process to meet with me behind closed doors and, face to face, deny that conclusion.

Almost a decade after the above article was published, nothing essential had changed:

Over the last decade, former President Bill Clinton has raised more than $500 million for his foundation, allowing him to build a glass-and-steel presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas, and burnish his image as an impresario of global philanthropy. The foundation has closely guarded the identities of its donors -- including one who gave $31.3 million last year.

The secrecy surrounding the William J. Clinton foundation has become a campaign issue as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton seeks the Democratic presidential nomination with her husband as a prime source of strategy and star power.

Some of her rivals argue that donors could use presidential foundations to circumvent campaign finance laws that are designed to limit political influence…

The New York Times has compiled the first comprehensive list of 97 donors who gave or pledged a total of $69 million for the Clinton presidential library in the final years of the Clinton administration.  The examination found that while some $1 million contributions were longtime Clinton friends, others were seeking policy changes from the administration. Two pledged $1 million each while they or their companies were under investigation by the Justice Department.

Other donations came from supporters who had been ensnared in campaign finance scandals surmounting Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign...

In raising record sums for her campaign, Hillary Clinton has tapped many of the foundation’s donors. At least two dozen have become “Hillraisers,” each bundling $100,000 or more for her presidential race…

To limit the influence of any single donor, U.S. election law prohibits foreign donations to presidential campaigns and limits individual Americans to $2,300 an election.

But presidential foundations are free to accept unlimited and anonymous contributions, even from foreigners and foreign governments. For instance, the Saudi royal family, the king of Morocco, a foundation linked to the Untied Arab Emirates, and the governments of Kuwait and Qatar have made contributions of unknown amounts to the Clinton Foundation…

William Brandt Jr., a bankruptcy lawyer in Chicago and prolific Democratic fund-raiser, pledged $1 million in May 1999. At the time, the Justice Department was investigating Brandt’s testimony to Congress about a $10,000-a-couple fund-raiser he had held for the president’s 1996 re-election campaign. At issue was whether he lied when he denied promoting it as an explicit opportunity to lobby a top bankruptcy official at the event.

In August 1999, the Justice Department determined that “prosecution is not warranted.” Brandt, who is now a Hillraiser, did not respond to several phone and e-mail messages.  

Don Van Natta Jr., Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, “Bill Clinton’s foundation haunts campaign,” International Herald Tribune, December 21, 2007.

Reforms of campaign financing will always fail as long as what is normal is viewed as abnormal. And what is normal is the dominance of the oligarchy, which manifests itself in laws that are illegal. Of course, the prevailing resistance to recognize the American system as an oligarchy is also part of what is normal.

[iv]   That expression comes as an oxymoron to most American readers who are taught in high school that “there are governments of laws and there are governments of men,” and that the latter are tyrannies. However, as Montesquieu noted: “One can kill by laws as surely as one kills by swords. In a period of 150 years the Roman emperors destroyed all the old Roman families. One of Rome’s greatest tyrannies was that of its laws.” (« On peut exterminer par les lois, comme on extermine par l’épée. En 150 ans de temps, les Empereurs romains détruisirent toutes les anciennes familles romaines. Une de leurs plus grandes tyrannies fut celle de leurs lois. ») Charles de Montesquieu, Dossier de l’esprit des lois, in Œuvres complètes II, op.cit., p. 1,054. See also De L’Esprit des lois, p. 397 (Book XI, Chapter VI), p. 558 (Book XIX, Chapter IV), p.564 (Book XIX, Chapter XIV).

Montesquieu did not stop there in demystifying laws: “An abuse can become the law, and the correction can become an abuse.” (« un abus peut devenir la loi, et la correction, devenir un abus ».) Dossier de l’esprit des lois, op.cit., p. 1,111.

Alexis de Tocqueville found tyrannies of laws in treaties with Indians and the treatment of slaves. Alexis de Tocqueville, De La Démocratie en Amérique I, in Œuvres, Volume II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, pp. 377-8, 388-90, 393, 407. (Part II, Chapter X). 

[v] We presented them in Part 10 of this series and in the post “No We Can’t” of August 15, 2011.

[vi] Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, translated and edited by Ernest Barker, Oxford University Press, New York, 1962,, op.cit., p. 186. (Book IV, Chapter XII).  Brackets made by the translator.

Tocqueville foresaw the same crossroad.  “Is it possible that, after having destroyed feudalism and defeated kings, that democracy will retreat before the bourgeoisie and the rich? Will democracy stop now that it has become so strong and its adversaries so weak?” (« Pense-t-on qu’après avoir détruit la féodalité et vaincu les rois, la démocratie reculera devant les bourgeois et les riches ? S’arrêtera-t-elle maintenant qu’elle est devenue si forte et ses adversaires si faibles ? » » Alexis de Tocqueville, De La Démocratie en Amérique I, Œuvres, Volume II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, pp. 6, 7. (« Introduction »).

The answer to Tocqueville’s prescient question arrived 180 years later in the form of billions of Bush-Obama dollars doled out to America’s oligarchy.

[vii] You think no adult would engage in such disputes?  I personally witnessed many of them.  No capitol building is without them.

[viii] Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper Collins, republished in1975, ad passim.

[ix] Adam Smith, pp. 429-30. There are initial indications that, due to the technology of the Internet, Smith’s menial servants could become what Smith said the servants were not -- productive in the sense that their work can be the source of profit:

New York .  The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office operations like accounting and billing have all migrated abroad to some degree, and mainly to India. The Internet makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make it desirable for corporate America.

The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services… [They predict] a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations. They foresee a host of potential services beyond tutoring and personal assistance like health and nutrition coaching; personal tax and legal advice; help with hobbies and cooking; learning new languages and skills; and more. Such services, they say, will be offered for affordable monthly fees or piecework rates.

Steve Lohr, “E-mail to India: ‘Reserve table for 2’,” International Herald Tribune, October 31, 2007.

[x] Unproductive labor should not be confused with unnecessary labor.  Policemen provide necessary services; however; in and of themselves, they are unproductive because they do not add value.

[xi] Adam Smith, pp. 430-1.

[xii] Ibid., pp. 268-9.

[xiii] David Cay Johnston, “Should burger-flipping be a heavy industry?,” International Herald Tribune, February 21/22, 2004.

[xiv] William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, in William Shakespeare, The Comedies of Shakespeare, Random House, New York, undated, p. 533.

[xv] V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Volume 2, International Publishers, New York, 1967, p. 304.  To which one can respond: all that suffering and all those sacrifices, all those famines, all those purges, imprisonments, tortures, firing squads, hangings, beatings, wars, in order to have…a post office.

In 1994, I saw V.I. Lenin, or rather his mummy, appropriately attired in a formal black suit, stretched out in his cathedral-quiet, air conditioned tomb on Red Square.  He remains in death what he was in life:  a classic middle class rebel (Father was a bureaucrat).

Surprisingly, a large percentage of Russians have never been in the tomb.  Not surprisingly, the Lenin mummy is adored mainly by other middle class rebels, for whom -- when the dust settles -- the only good revolutionary is a dead one. 

[xvi] The All Directions system already exists albeit in embryonic form: 

Arnold Schwarzenegger was first elected Governor of California in 2003:

Los Angeles. Rarely has a person assumed so high an office with so little known about his political philosophy and so few clues to his governing style…

In his first post-election visit to Sacramento in late October [2003] a reporter asked Schwarzenegger what to expect from his first days in office.

“Action, action, action, action,” Schwarzenegger said, repeating a word he must have heard often during his movie career. “That’s what people have voted me into the office for.”

But action toward what end?…

..[T]he new governor’s agenda is rather vague. The clearest indication of the direction in which he intends to lead the state is the 20 appointees to senior posts in his administration he announced over the last three weeks. The nominees were from across the political spectrum.

For example, Schwarzenegger nominated Terry Tamminen, a Democrat and a staunch environmentalist, as head of the California Environmental Protection Agency. But on the same day, he nominated James Branham, a Republican timber company executive, as Tamminen’s deputy.

“The obvious lesson is that he will govern the way he has appointed, the way he campaigned and the way he came into politics -- from left, right and center,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former speechwriter for Pete Wilson, the former Republican governor…

“You will see a blend of ideologies -- that’s Arnold in a nutshell,” said Whalen, who is [among] close former Wilson aides who have been advising Schwarzenegger.  “…Like a sailing ship on the ocean, he will tack left and right but ultimately try to find a course down the middle.”

John M. Broder, “Testing time begins for Schwarzenegger,” International Herald Tribune, November 18, 2003.

There is no better representative of All Directions politics than Barack Obama:

After eight weeks in Office, Mr. Obama has managed to satisfy or outrage nearly everyone on the ideological spectrum. But his once-murky governing philosophy is coming into sharper…

Obamaism…appears to be an amalgam of philosophies -- a strong belief in the role of an activist government in shaping the economy and redistributing wealth, and a more centrist view of national security and at least some cultural issues…

He has rallied liberals behind efforts to overhaul health care, tackle climate change and raise taxes on the rich. But he has challenged liberal orthodoxy on issues like linking teacher play to performance and has won Republican support for sending 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and pulling out of Iraq more gradually than the left wanted…

“He’s not an ideologue,” said David Axelrod, his senior White House adviser.  “He’s a pragmatist. He’s someone who’s interested in ideas that will work. Some may have their roots in one doctrine; some may have roots in another. But he’s not concerned about that.”

In a recent interview with The Times, Mr. Obama rejected the “socialist” tag, arguing that he was only returning top tax rates to where they were before Mr. Bush. Asked if “liberal” or “progressive” better defined his philosophy, he said, “I’m not going to engage in that.”

Peter Baker, “Obama defies easy political labels by melding philosophies,” International Herald Tribune, March 16, 2009.

[xvii] William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,”Act V, Scene 1

[xviii] Adam Smith., pp. 430, 431.

[xix] Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, Dutton, London, England, 2006, p. 7.

[xx] Adam Smith, pp. 131-2.

[xxi]   See in particular Chapter 4: “Water.” The bottom line of the report -- “the final wake-up call to the international community”:

Paris . “The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns,” Achim Steiner, the executive director of the [UN Environmental Program] said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are “among the greatest challenges at the beginning of the 21st century,” he said…

Steiner said environmental tipping points, at which degradation can lead to abrupt, accelerating or potentially irreversible changes, would increasingly occur in locations like particular rivers or forests, where populations would lack the ability to repair damage because the gravity of a problem would be far beyond their physical or economic means .

James Kanter, “Planet stretched to breaking point, UN says,” International Herald Tribune, October 26, 2007. For the report:  http://www/unep.org./geo/geo4. 

[xxii] Shaila Dewan and Brend Goodman, “A slow-motion response to drought in U.S. South,” International Herald Tribune, October 24, 2007.

In facing ecological problems, Americans have chosen the road more traveled:

                                    "I swear ´tis better to be much abus´d
                                    Than to know´t a little."

                                                    --   William Shakespeare, Othello,  Act III, Scene 3 --

[xxiii] Fernanda Santos, “As Great Lakes shrink, a high price to pay,” International Herald Tribune, October 24, 2007.

[xxiv] Paul A. Samuelson, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, fifth edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1961, p. 7. Words italicized by Samuelson.

[xxv] John Adams, “Adams to Jefferson, Grosvenor Square Nov. 1. 1785,” in Lester J. Cappon, Editor, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2005, p. 88.

[xxvi]                                             “Source, where are you?
                                            Remedy, where are you?
                                            Economics, are you finally going to change?”

[xxvii] “[L]os países de la cuenca amazónica constituyen el pulmón del planeta, sin el cual la vida en la Tierra sencillamente se extinguiría […] por ser el aire puro un bien de libre acceso, dichos países no reciben la justa compensación por el servicio que generan […] La idea de compensar la deforestación evitada es sólo parte de un concepto más amplio, que es compensar la contaminación neta evitada.  Si se amplían los incentivos de Kyoto hacia dicha contaminación neta evitada, se podría dar un giro revolucionario en los intercambios internacionales, al permitir convertir a muchos países – sobre todo a los que están en vías de desarrollo -- en exportadores de servicios ambientales.”  Rafael Correa, Ecuador: de Banana Republic a la No Repúblic, Random House, 2011, pp. 204, 205.

[xxviii] The primary sector is the extraction of raw materials, such as mining; the secondary is production, e.g., manufacturing; the tertiary is services. 

Some economists add

Sector 4.  Intellectual activities.  Culture, government, education, R & D.
Sector 5.  Voluntary activities as well as executive functions in all sectors.

I disagree with the latter two categories.  In order for a typology to have explanatory power, its categories must be mutually exclusive.  Sectors 4 and 5 are services, hence are already covered in the tertiary sector.  I present their two options here because they reflect in thought the confusion and confounding occurring in practice:

[xxix] Adam Smith, pp. 155, 356.

[xxx] One ancient river worth exploring:  the gift process . See Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (1925), in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2004; Jacques T. Godbout, L’Esprit du don, La Découverte, Paris, 2000; and Maurice Godelier, L’Enigme du don, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2004.

[xxxi] Karl Marx, A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy, Edited by Maurice Dobb, S. W. Ryazanskaya, translator, International Publishers, New York, 1970, p. 27. 

[xxxii] Adam Smith, p. 133.

[xxxiii]   Instead of the instrumental spirit of The Thrifty Scotsman haunting Western economic textbooks, could the true heart of economics, i.e., its values, be quasi-religious -- irrational -- in origin?

Émile Durkheim’s definition of religion begins with the words: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things…” (« Une religion est un système solidaire de croyances et de pratiques relatives à des choses sacrées […]. ») Émile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2007, p. 65.

How does a thing come to be sacred?  Durkheim: “It is relative to a totem that things are classified as sacred or profane.  The totem is the prototype of something sacred.” (« c’est par rapport à lui [le totem] que les choses sont classées en sacrées et en profanes. Il est le type même des choses sacrées. »  Ibid;, p. 167.)

Durkheim observed of various Australian aboriginal tribes that it was forbidden for them to eat the plant or animal which was the group’s totem except under exceptional circumstances and with economy, i.e., “when it is permitted to eat the plant or animal that was the totem, the consumption is not entirely free; one cannot eat it except in small quantities at a time [sic]. To eat too much constitutes a ritual fault that can have grave consequences.” (« là où il est permis de manger de la plante ou de l’animal qui sert de totem, ce n’est pourtant pas en toute liberté ; one ne peut en consommer qu’une petite quantité à la fois.  Dépasser la mesure constitue une faute rituelle qui a de graves conséquences. »  Ibid., 182.  See also pp. 184-5.) 

[xxxiv]   The prevailing value in America:  fear.  Marine Corps General Anthony C. Zinni, former commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, reflected on the meaning of being a military officer 1960-2000:

“The Cold War was a 40-year attempt to refight World War II if ever the need arose. We were energized to engage in a global conflict against the evil Red Menace. The problem was that we never could figure just how this particular war would actually start…

The Cold War was ever present, and it was great for justifying programs, systems and force structure -- but no one seriously believed that it would actually happen. Still, it drove things. It drove the way we thought, it drove the way we organized and equipped, and it drove the way we developed our concepts of fighting.”

Anthony C. Zinni, “For The U.S. Military, War Isn’t What It Used To Be,” International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2000. 

But what is “wrong” with using fear as a mobilizing force for a country?

Answer:  the means becomes the end. Jules Henry: “A nation that will respond only to fear cannot govern itself wisely, for it has no destiny but fear…”  Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, Random House, New York, 1963, p. 113.

[xxxv] The prior post discussed why power expands only to the extent it is shared:

“Today, nobody in Western governments knows how to increase power -- real power, that is. As long as that lack of recognition exists, the United States, as well as other Western nations, will sink further into the quicksand that is power without power. The cause of the sinking is that power cannot be created mechanically by elections or by laws, by organization charts or by military force. Power must be exercised -- increased, that is to say, shared -- in order to exist. The same is true for human rights. ( “A right is only born by exercising it.” (« Le droit ne naît que par l’exercice. ») Alexis de Tocqueville, Notes et variantes, in Œuvres, Volume II, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, p. 957.)

However, Western nations are unable to admit that they do not have democracies, much less recognize that power is increased by sharing it. As long as that admission and recognition are not made, a re-evolution of political values -- and of economic values inextricably tied to them -- is impossible, and gradually but inevitably, the middle class will be forced to give up its place on the quiet side of the fire.”

That admission and recognition are secrets no one reveals to anyone, not even to themselves.

[xxxvi] John Maynard Keynes, "First Annual Report of The Arts Council" (1945-1946).

[xxxvii] John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in John Maynard Keynes, Essays In Persuasion, W.W. Norton & Co., 1963, pp. 358-73.

[xxxviii] « Il faut être absolument moderne. Point de cantiques : tenir le pas gagné. Dure nuit ! » Arthur Rimbaud, « Adieu », in Une Saison en enfer, Œuvres complètes, p. 117.

NOTE to new readers of this Second American Revolution series:  please see the Unfortunate But Necessary Introduction, Part 1, post of August 22, 2011.




                            Part 10.  The Ultimate Taboo Question

                                                                          “Source, where are you?
                                                         Remedy, where are you?
                                                         Economics, are you finally
                                                         going to change?”

                                                          -- René Char, Feuillets d’Hypnos[i] --





The goal of The Second American Revolution is to resurrect the political system the Founding Fathers created and which governed America for over 200 years, but on a new, better basis.

That basis:  greater democracy.

Contrary to popular belief spread around the world, the American political system was not a democracy but a политей -- a polity.  A polity is a hybrid of oligarchy and democracy that tends toward more democracy.  The polity died in 2008-2009, replaced by an oligarchy with democratic accessories, illusions.

A polity is moderated by a large middle class.  And there’s the rub...

The American middle class has been declining economically since the 1970s.  For official economic data, see below.

Economics, are you finally going to change?   That is the issue.  If economics do not change, the American middle class is doomed. 

If the middle class is destroyed, a polity is impossible. 

If a polity is impossible, The Second American Revolution is impossible.

Source, where are you? What is ruining economically the middle class?  This post examines the calamity of our times.  It could engulf the Western world in chaos.

You cannot create a constructive change of -- not in -- economics without knowing the source of the middle class decline.  And you will never arrive at the source without asking the ultimate taboo question.

The American middle class is caught in a double play.  No, they won’t show it at Harvard or Yale.  Forget CNN or PBS; forget Fox or Democracy Now.  Teacher or student, please don’t bring it up in any class at any school.  If you work for the government, do what you always do:  keep silent; confound and confuse; collect paychecks.  If you are granted an interview and mention the double play, George Soros and Bill Gates will politely, firmly, look at their watches.  To show it’s nothing personal, their bodyguards will gently close your car door for you with sweet Southern hospitality.  Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?

Why the national silence? 

Because of a national fear. 

Nobody in government, academia, the media, or any other cultural maximizer[ii] can seriously pose vital forbidden questions.  That is not their job.  Maximizers create and maintain the culture as it is, propagate it and integrate it -- including the national fear and the silence feeding it.

To the contrary, The Second American Revolution asks straightaway the ultimate taboo question:

Is the middle class being destroyed by processes intrinsic to capitalism?

That question takes us directly to Karl Marx, the pioneering author on middle class decline.  Karl Marx:  talk about an American taboo.  All cultural maximizers reading these words:  I do not wish to create problems for you.  I don’t want your university president to take a call from his off-campus bosses, telling him…  So, for your wife’s and kids’ sake, stop reading this post.  Go fishing with other Lake People, walk the dog.  Have fun -- good-bye.

On the middle class, Marx was right/wrong.

For him, the economic foundation of the middle class is inexorably destroyed as capitalism matures:

“…the small tradespeople, shopkeepers and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants -- all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production...”[iii]

For over a century, two indisputable socio-economic tendencies have held sway: (i) the enlargement of the scale of enterprise, notably via mergers,[iv] and (ii) the disappearance of small producers, of which the most publicized example is the decline in small farms.[v] Joseph Schumpeter, no Marxist, summed up: “[T]he capitalist process unavoidably attacks the economic standing ground of the small producer and trader...Here of course Marx scores.”[vi]

Also beyond dispute: the middle class in the United States and other developed Western nations was not destroyed.   Why?

A revolution occurred in the twentieth century -- a revolution so monumental on an everyday level that it took place virtually unnoticed.  For the first time in recorded history, increased productivity allowed for more people to live off the maintenance and distribution of wealth -- soldiers, priests, doctors, lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats, stockbrokers, real estate agents, accountants -- than from the creation of that wealth.

In the United States the service sector furnished 80% of all jobs in 2002, versus only 60% in 1960.[vii] 

America isn’t alone.[viii]  In the 13 developed Western nations comprising the OECD, in 2005 over 70% of all employment and value added was contributed by the service sector, as well as nearly all employment growth.[ix]

Marx didn’t foresee that explosive expansion.  In fact, he missed it entirely.

The undeclared revolution -- the spectacular growth of the service sector -- saved the middle class. That extraordinary salvation is why those who discount the evidence of an economic erosion of the middle class in the latter part of the twentieth century, are not to be discounted. Their premises and conclusions have a solid ground that continues to impress.

But is that salvation permanent or merely a pause?

The core of the service sector middle class consists of craftsmen, tradesmen, and professionals. The foundation of their economic existence is higher levels of training and education necessary to perform tasks that are more complex.

How secure are those higher levels and greater complexity?

Writing in 1776, Adam Smith identified a fundamental characteristic of capitalism:  the division of labor. 

“The quantity of materials which the same number of people can work up, increases in a great proportion as labour comes to be more and more subdivided; and as the operations of each workman are gradually reduced to a greater degree of simplicity, a variety of new machines come to be invented for facilitating and abridging those operations.”[x]

Thus, the division of labor begets simplification which in turn begets routinization/standardization of work.  Concomitantly, the levels of training and education needed to perform tasks are lowered.  

Overall, work tends toward machine-tending.  Although Adam Smith no doubt overstated his case, his essential point remains valid:

“Long apprenticeships are altogether unnecessary. The arts, which are much superior to common trades, such as those of making clocks and watches, contain no such mystery as to require a long course of instruction. The first invention of such beautiful machines, indeed, and even that of some of the instruments employed in making them, must, no doubt, have been the work of deep thought and long time, and may justly be considered as among the happiest efforts of human ingenuity. But when both have been fairly invented and are well understood, to explain to any young man, in the completest manner, how to apply the instruments and how to construct the machines cannot well require more than the lessons of a few weeks; perhaps those of a few days might be sufficient.”[xi]

A few days .  It was Karl Marx who first made the connection between the corrosive impact of the specialization of labor on what today is the core of the middle class, i.e., those with specialized skills. Marx emphasized that not only production but also education and training are sapped. He wrote of the “commercial worker [who] belongs to the better-paid class of wage workers -- to those whose labour is classed as skilled and stand above average labour,” that his wage

“tends to fall, even in relation to average labour, with the advance of the capitalist mode of production. This is due [first] to the division of labour...Secondly, because the necessary training, knowledge of commercial practices, languages, etc., is more and more rapidly, easily, universally and cheaply reproduced with the progress of science and public education…The universality of public education enables capitalists to recruit such labourers from classes that formerly had no access to such trades and were accustomed to a lower standard of living. Moreover, this increases supply, and hence competition. With few exceptions, the labour-power of these people is therefore devaluated with the progress of capitalist production. Their wage falls, while their labour capacity increases.”[xii]

The erosion Marx observed has not disappeared.  60 years ago, when a polity existed and one could say such things and not be fired, the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote:

“[T]he rationalization and down-grading of the work operations themselves and hence the lessening importance of education and experience in acquiring white-collar skills, the levelling down of white-collar and the raising of wage-worker incomes, so that the differences between them are decidedly less than they once were; the increased size of the white-collar labor market, as more people from lower ranks receive high-school educations, so that any monopoly of formal training adequate to these jobs is no longer possible;…the increased participation of white-collar people, along with wage-workers, in unemployment...All the factors of their status position, which have enabled white-collar workers to set themselves apart from wage-workers, are now subject to definite decline. Increased rationalization is lowering the skill levels and making their work more and more factory-like.”[xiii]

A highly visible sign of the simplification of work and the tendency of skill and wage levels to fall is  the general para-lyzation occurring today throughout developed economies -- the emergence of paramedics for doctors, paralegals for lawyers, etc.

More factory-like .  You would think that institutions of higher learning would be leading the charge against the downgrading of education.  Guess again.  Their turf was sapped years ago.  Downgrading in universities is observable every time an instructor is replaced by a graduate student teaching assistant or adjunct.[xiv]  Beware:  the downsizing movement has only just begun.

In point of fact, professors don’t understand the basic economic process Smith identified as well as does  the first unemployed guy you meet living under a bridge or the most illiterate Mexican fruit picker or assembly line worker pulling double shifts in a border town bluejeans maquiladora.  It is not that the professors are stupid; rather, as cultural maximizers, they are paid to study certain things -- which means they are paid NOT to study others.

As did the middle class in the production sector, will the middle class in the service sector decline?  The service sector revolution is too recent a phenomenon to be adequately understood. An answer can be drawn inferentially, however, and it is frightening.

In 1996, the economist Edward N. Wolff sounded the alarm:
 

“Between 1983 and 1992, real incomes have fallen for all households except the top 20 percent of the income distribution. Median net worth has also fallen. Median financial wealth was the same in 1992 as in 1983 -- still only $10,000. The average indebtedness of American families relative to their assets continued to rise between 1983 and 1992…There has been almost no trickle down of economic growth to the average family: almost all the growth in household income and wealth has accrued to the richest 20 percent. The finances of the average American family are more fragile in the 1990s than in the early 1980s. It is not surprising that there is a growing sense of economic insecurity in the country.”[xv]

The picture has deteriorated since Wolff’s warning.  A prior post to this blog (“No We Can’t,” August 15, 2011) presented the harrowing realities of the new America:

“No, we can’t ignore them and escape chaos.  

To see them in naked black and white, go to www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/families/index.html.  Table F-2.   

What you will see:  

Our census bureau periodically takes the U.S.A. population and divides it into five parts.  The bureau then reports the size of the slice of the national income pie going to each fifth of the population.  Thus, in 1947, the poorest one/fifth of the population received 5.0% of our nation’s income.  In 2009, that same fifth received only 3.9%.  

Undoubtedly, a poor German or American today is well off compared to a poor Chinaman in the 1600s.  Poor, middle, and rich are phenomena that exist not in absolute terms but rather relative to the total wealth of the society in question.  

Once that nonabsolute definition is accepted, the figures cited above for the lowest fifth of the American population speak for themselves.  No, we can’t and won’t ignore them.   

So, how are American families doing?  

(1)    The richest, top fifth of all families received 43.0% of the national income in 1947.  In 2009, their share had grown to 48.2%.  First conclusion:  the rich are getting richer.  Two facts worth noting:  (i) the super rich benefited the most.  The slice of the pie going to the top 5% of all families grew from 17.5% in 1947 to 20.7% in 2009.  (ii) The rise of the rich is relatively recent.  The share going to the top 5% actually declined after 1947 until 1989, the first year of the Bush Sr. administration, when it reached 17.9%.  Thereafter, the climb continued, consolidated.

(2)   The rich and their spokesmen like to say a rising tide raises all boats.  Sorry, not in this case.  The rise of the rich took place at the expense of those least able to afford it.  The share of national income going to the lowest two fifths of the population fell from 16.9% in 1947 to 13.3% in 2009.  Second conclusion:  the poor are getting poorer.

(3)   1947?  Old stuff, you sniff.  O.K., let’s run the clock back only to 1995, Bill Clinton’s third year as president.  As of 2009, (i) the lowest, poorest fifth of the population’s share of the income pie fell from 4.4% to 3.9%; the share of the second lowest fifth, from 10.1% to 9.4%; of the third fifth (the middle) from 15.8% to 15.3%.  The slice going to the fourth fifth stayed at 23.2%.  The share going to the remaining fifth, the richest, rose from 46.5% to 48.2%. (ii)  If middle class is defined as the second, third, and fourth fifths of the population, then the share of the national income going to the middle class in 1995-2009 shrank from 49.1% to 47.9%.  Third conclusion:  the middle class is declining.

(4)    The fall of the middle class, like the rise of the rich, is a relatively recent phenomenon.  In 1981, Ronald Reagan’s first year as president, the middle class (second, third, and fourth fifths) received 53.5% of America’s income.  In 2009, the middle class’s share slipped to 47.9%.  (During the same period, the slice going to the richest 5% of the population ballooned from 14.4% to 20.7%).

(5)    In 1992, the middle class’s share of the income pie was 51.0%.  In 1993, its share slipped to 48.9%, and never again rose above 50%.  Poor poorer; rich richer; middle class smaller.  The triple play is as disastrous as it is undeniable.”

Unfortunately, analyzing the service sector is extremely difficult because that sector is in the contentious and litigious category of subjects on which billions of dollars and immense political power are riding on definitions.  Organic, national security, pornography, sanity:  the category is huge.  The definition of poverty serves as an instructive example.  In 1999, the United States Census Bureau began

"to revise its definition of what constitutes poverty in the United States…

The bureau’s new approach would in effect raise the income threshold for living above poverty to $19,500 for a family of four, from the $16,600 now considered sufficient. Suddenly, 46 million Americans, or 17 percent of the population, would be recognized as officially below the line, not the 12.7 percent announced last month, the lowest level in nearly a decade…

Sociologists and economists who study what people must earn to escape poverty in the United States place the line even higher... [T]hey put the threshold for a family of four somewhere between $21,000 and $28,000…

In opinion polls, Americans draw the poverty line above $20,000…

But a higher threshold means government spending would have to rise to pay for benefits that are tied to the poverty level, like food stamps and Head Start programs. That would require an incursion into the budget surplus that neither Republicans nor Democrats seek."[xvi]

Further complicating any analysis, a transition is taking place in services (see below), and transitions are inherently difficult to define. The ongoing dispute over defining service sector illustrates the problem:

"Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles?

That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the U.S. economy.

Putting jobs at McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises in the same category as those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch…

But the presidential report points out that the current system for classifying jobs  ‘is not straightforward.…  When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a "service" or is it combining inputs to "manufacture" a product?’ the report asks. Sometimes, seeming subtle differences can determine whether an industry is classified as manufacturing.  For example, mixing water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as manufacturing. However, if that activity is performed at a snack bar, it is considered a service.

The report notes that the Census Bureau’s North American Industry Classification System defines manufacturing as covering enterprises that are  ‘engaged in the mechanical, physical or chemical transformation of materials, substances or components into new products.’

Classifications matter, the report says, because among other things, they can affect which businesses receive tax relief [sic]…

David Huether, chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, said that he had heard for several years that some economists wanted to count hamburger flipping as a manufacturing job, which he noted would result in statistical reports showing many more jobs in what has been a declining sector of the economy."[xvii]

Given such complications and lack of clarity, we are compelled to proceed neither inductively nor deductively but abductively from hard economic data to the following axiom:

Our era is characterized by the conversion of services into commodities.  In the process, services are being subjected to the same standardization/routinization characterizing commodity production in general. As in the production sector in the past, in the service sector today those two processes are eroding the complexity of tasks and the higher levels of education and training needed to fulfill them.

What took capitalism so long to enter the service sector?

Professions, tradesmen, craftsmen:  the heritage of those middle class service sector groups comes from the feudal guilds, not from the working class. The two are decidedly different. In fact, an essential role of the guilds in the Middle Ages was to lock out the emerging urban proletariat. Adam Smith portrayed in stark terms the fierce, anti-capitalism nature of the feudal guilds in his discussion of how, if a trade were too easily learned, the apprentice

“would have more competitors, and his wages, when he came to be a complete workman, would be much less than at present. The same increase in competition would reduce the profits of the masters as well as the wages of the workmen. The trades, the crafts, the mysteries, would all be losers. But the public would be a gainer, the work of all artificers coming in this way much cheaper to market.

It is to prevent this reduction of price, and consequently of wages and profit, by restraining that free competition which would most certainly occasion it, that all corporations [i.e., guilds], and the greater part of corporation laws, have been established…

The inhabitants of a town, being collected into one place, can easily combine together. The most insignificant trades carried on in towns have accordingly, in some place or other, been incorporated, and even where they have never been incorporated, yet the corporation spirit, the jealousy of strangers, the aversion to take apprentices, or to communicate the secret of their trade, generally prevail in them, and often teach them, by voluntary associations and agreements, to prevent that free competition which they cannot prohibit by bye-laws.”[1]  

Secret books, secret machines, secret networks -- in brief, the education and training necessary to perform higher level tasks: those were the economic bases of the feudal guilds. Today, those same bases provide for the economic survival of the service sector middle class.

With time, capitalism degrades and weakens those bases because higher rates of profit are found in commodities, not in the corporation spirit and other feudal residues. The constant search for more profits is why the division of labor and its impersonal routinization and standardization of work characterize capitalist production, as opposed to personalized feudal mercantilism. [xviii] Against the desperate quest for higher profits, the service sector, insulated for centuries by feudal guild principles and practices -- the mysteries -- could not hold out indefinitely.[xix]

Because socio-economic forces are causing the decline of the middle class, it is reasonable to suppose that decline will take place in conjunction with those forces, i.e., move cyclically and over the very long term, as a result of economic cycles inherent to capitalism. That basic assumption -- and only The Second American Revolution has it -- is opposed not only to the perennial Marxist prediction of an imminent middle class crash but also to the conservative, often fanatical faith of status quo defenders who see the middle class as immortal.

What does long term mean?

Again, the service sector revolution is so recent we have little or no historical precedent for guidance. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, wars and other unforeseeable catastrophes have a tremendous impact on economic inequality trends. Nevertheless, as a probative point of departure, one economic study found that income inequality in the United States in 2002 reached levels last seen some eighty years ago.[xx] If experience bears out that time frame, the decline of the middle class could take place over centuries.

So, how long is long?  Nobody knows.

For the meantime, two conclusions of The Second American Revolution are reasonable:

(i)  In the course of its economic decline that started in the latter part of the 1900s, the American middle class slipped below the critical 50% threshold of all households (see “No We Can’t” and Part 9 of this series).  The middle class simply no longer has the economic strength to moderate the other classes.  That weakness is why the polity was replaced by an oligarchy.

(ii) The polity and a large middle class are hallmarks of Western civilization.  Without them, that civilization ceases to exist as we know it.

Overall decline, cyclical swings:  the most poignant expression of the middle class’s present and future trajectory is not found in economics.  Edgar Allan Poe expressed it in five words, The Pit and The Pendulum, his 1842 novel.

The terrors of the Spanish Inquisition that Poe feared, however, are microscopic indeed compared to those which would result from the collapse of the Western world.

Source, where are you?  The Second American Revolution found it -- the ultimate taboo answer, capitalism’s double play against the middle class.

Two outs, nobody on base.  Home team losing.

Next post:  Remedy, Where Are You?
_______________

[i] « Où êtes-vous source? Où êtes-vous remède? Économie vas-tu enfin changer ? »  René Char, Feuillets d’Hypnos, Gallimard, Paris, 2007, p. 18. (Fragment 37).

[ii] The anthropologist Jules Henry :

“All great cultures, and those moving in the direction of greatness, have an elite which might be called the cultural maximizers whose function is to maintain or push further the culture’s greatness and integration…The functions of a cultural maximizer include organization (i.e., maintaining the level of integration of the culture as it is) and contributing certain qualitative features necessary to the continuance of the cultural life. His function is never to alter the culture radically. He may help to give more intense expression to features that already exist, but he never wants to bring about a fundamental change. Thus, those who have the capacity to maximize culture in this sense are among the elite in all highly developed civilizations.”  

Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, Random House, 1963, p. 31.  Cited in The Source of Terrorism:  Middle Class Rebellion, p. 65.  Truth in lending:  Jules Henry was a close family friend. 

[iii] Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Dirk J. Struik, Editor, Birth of The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore, International Publishers, New York, 1971, p. 97.

[iv]  In politics, appearance and reality seldom coincide.  You think Republicans are more pro-big business than Democrats?

“ ‘We’re in the greatest merger wave in history …,’ said John Shepard Wiley Jr., a professor of antitrust law at the University of California at Los Angeles.   ‘There has been a sea change in attitudes toward large mergers. It’s a much different philosophy from the 1960s when the polestar was the protection of small business.’

During the 12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations, which are widely viewed as among the most permissive antitrust periods of the century, there were 85,064 corporate mergers valued at more the $3.5 trillion, according to Securities Data Co. Under nearly seven years of the Clinton administration, there have so far been 166,310 deals valued at more than $9.8 trillion."

Stephen Labaton, “Clinton Legacy Still Remains Merger Friendly,” International Herald Tribune, November 9, 1999.

[v] Agriculture is the economic base of Iowa.  A native Iowan provided this case study:

"The percentage of the population over 80 is larger in Iowa than in any other U.S. state. Iowa is the only one besides Florida with more people over 75 than under five.

The population problem in Iowa is not merely that its residents are getting old and its young people are leaving. The problem is tied directly to the character of agriculture in the state. In 1960 there were 174,707 farms in Iowa, down from a peak of around 215,000 in 1930. Last year there were about 96,000 farms, though the amount farmland in cultivation had barely changed. There are 15 million hogs in Iowa, but they are raised on fewer than half as many farms as just a decade ago.

It can be hard to grasp the implications of a shift that large.

Think of a farm, for a moment, not as a tract of land or so many acres of corn and soybeans. Think of a farm instead as a constellation of people, each of whom has ties to a local community, to churches and schools, to banks and farm implement dealers, to co-ops and Lions Clubs.

In 1960, small towns were thriving not on the prosperity of town residents alone but on the prosperity and the population of farms in the adjoining countryside.

Now half of those farms are gone, their groves cut down, their houses bulldozed, their constellations of people dispersed. Year by year, the size of farms increases and their work force diminishes.  School districts have consolidated, and small town business is just a ghost of itself.  It is not uncommon to come across a sense of disinheritance among Iowans, especially those in small towns.

The bond that tied them to the farmland around them, a bond that was social as well as economic, has to a striking degree been severed.

There is no one on the farms, and the towns have no one to serve except their aging residents.

All of this has come about because of a faith, an unproved faith, that the only way for agriculture to prosper is for farms to become bigger and bigger.

There is no question that Iowa raises vastly more corn and soybeans than it did in 1960. But at what cost? Farm prices are as low as they have ever been, and farmers now pray for emergency funding from Congress the way they pray for rain..."

Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Bigger Farms Don’t Make For a Contented Iowa,” International Herald Tribune, September 5, 2000.

It is necessary to dynamite a popular urban illusion:

"The idea that the United States is a nation of entrepreneurs and self-starters has become almost accepted wisdom.

 ‘Welcome to the free-agent nation,’ declares Tom Peters, one of the world’s best-known management gurus. Thirty million Americans -- and counting -- are now some form of freelancer, recent articles in business magazines have proclaimed. This is the era of the ´e-lance economy,´ experts say, with the Internet allowing millions of people to bid goodbye to corporate life and become their own bosses.

There is a problem, however, with this futuristic, seemingly sensible vision:  It does not appear to jibe with reality…

Since 1994, the number of self-employed Americans outside agriculture has fallen by 146,000, to 12.9 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The period from 1994 to 1999, hailed as a golden age for entrepreneurs, is actually the first five-year span since the 1960s in which the number of self-employed fell…

 ‘We have this idea that everyone’s out there working for themselves,’ said Robert Fairlie, an assistant professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who has studied the history of self-employment.  Instead, he said, millions of Americans have joined the working economy during the decade-long boom and almost all of them were employed by existing businesses.

And, contrary to an earlier trend, most of them have taken jobs with big companies. Those with a least 1,000 employees have grown the fastest since 1994, while the percentage of people working for companies with fewer than 25 workers has slipped to 29 percent from 30.1 percent.

In fact, running a small business or acting as an independent consultant has in many ways become more difficult than it once was, analysts say…

The decline in self-employment has accelerated since 1997, and it has occurred in most industries, including construction, finance, retail and services in general. The drop has also taken place in every region…"

David Leonhardt, “Shattering The Myth of ‘E-Lancers,’” International Herald Tribune, December 2/3, 2000.

[vi] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper Collins, 1975, p. 140.

[vii]  David Leonhardt, “History Points to a Relatively Small U.S. Economic Rebound for 2002,” International Herald Tribune, January 3, 2002.

[viii] France provides another case study: Professor François Chatagner wrote that the most spectacular development of the past 50 years has been the explosion in the number of white-collar workers. The French service sector contained only 15% of the working population in 1936, versus over 50% in 1997. As for small producers, after World War II, farms in France became more concentrated; and non-agricultural independent producers -- artisans, small commercial and industrial enterprises -- were reduced from l7.5% of the working population to 7.5%. François Chatagner, Les Classes sociales:  pertinence et permanence, Le Monde Éditions, Paris, 1997, pp. 53, 54, 55, 58.

[ix] OECD, resume of “Enhancing The Performance of The Service Sector,” 2005. 

[x] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Penguin Books, London, England, 1997, p. 372.

[xi] Ibid., p. 226.

[xii] Karl Marx, Das Kapital, translator unknown, Volume III, International Publishers, New York, 1970, pp. 300-1.

[xiii] C. Wright Mills, White Collar:  The American Middle Classes, Oxford University Press, New York, 1956, pp. 249, 297.

[xiv]

"WASHINGTON.  Compared to other industries, universities’ product -- knowledge -- may be more abstruse, and their function more complex than turning out widgets. The way they have reshaped their work force, however, is taken right from the pages of Corporate America’s handbook.

The  ‘casualization’ of labor -- allowing the attrition of full-time staff, then replace them with cheaper part-timers -- has become commonplace in business, and just as much so in higher education…

Part-time professors make up nearly half of the faculty in America’s institutes of higher education, compared to one-fifth 30 years ago, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

The hardscrabble existence of part-timers who piece together a living course by course (usually getting between $1,500 and $2,000 for each) generally includes no health insurance, or phone number, or cost-of-living raises. They often commute between several colleges. Their schools don’t pay their way to conferences, or their journal subscriptions. In some cases, they don’t even get a library card…

An adjunct typically teaches twice as many classes and three times as many students as a full-time, tenure-track professor. Only 59 percent hold office hours, compared to 91 percent of full-timers, according to the American Association of University Professors…

With less time to spend, adjuncts give fewer assignments and essay exams, and they are less likely to be able to nurture a long-term mentoring relationship with students, write recommendations or serve as an adviser.

Adjuncts rarely get to do the research that would keep them on top of their profession. Part-timers complain, too, that they lack what is the bedrock of the concept of university:  intellectual and creative freedom.

And, many part-timers say, they can’t afford to truly challenge their students. Unlike tenure-track professors, whose performance is measured against detailed criteria, adjuncts are generally judged solely by students’ evaluations.  Woe to the professor who gets on the wrong side of the 18-year-olds."

Linda Perlstein, “Can Adjuncts Do the Job?,” International Herald Tribune, February 15, 1999.

Today, the most controversial form of downgrading of tasks is outsourcing.  The legal profession is a case in point:

"NEW YORK:  Bruce Masterson, the chief operating officer of Socrates Media, asked his outside counsel to customize a residential lease for all 50 U.S. states in 2003. About $400,000 was the firm’s estimate. He rejected that cost and hired QuisLex, a firm in Hyderabad, India, that did the work for $45,000.

 ‘It was good quality,’ said Masterson, whose company, which is based in Chicago, publishes legal forms on the Internet.  ‘We’ve been working together ever since.’

Clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India, where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The firms are part of a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, said Forrester Research in Boston."

Cynthia Cotts and Liane Kufchock, “U.S. legal work is moving overseas, and India wins a big part,” International Herald Tribune, August 22, 2007.

[xv] Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy:  The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can be Done about it, The New Press, New York, 1996, pp. 73-4.

Wolff’s disturbing picture was still relevant over a decade later:

"WASHINGTON:  On Capitol hill and on the presidential campaign trail, Democrats are increasingly moving toward a full-throated populist critique of the economy under President George W. Bush…

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York calls it  ‘trickle-down economics without the trickle.’…

[T]he latest resurgence of populism is deeply rooted in the current economic realities of stagnated wages and fears about losing jobs, analysts say, and it is framing debates over tax policy, education, trade, energy and health care…

[There is] a striking contrast with the approach taken by Democrats during much of the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton asserted that trade would create American jobs and that paying attention to the concerns of Wall Street would help the economy by lowering interest rates…

Democrats say they are responding to economic trends that the statistics in the headlines do not capture, including middle-class insecurity about job loss, the affordability of health insurance and the costs of education. The times have changed, those Democrats argue, and six years of Republican tax and economic policies have heightened the inequities…

[A]ll the major Democratic candidates for president are promising to use government to ease the insecurity of the middle class, on issues from education to health care."

Robin Toner, “Democrats lean left on economy,” International Herald Tribune, July 17, 2007.

For the record, the Census Bureau’s historical income tables show that between 1992 and 2000, the Clinton presidency years, the poorest fifth of the American population’s share of the national income fell from 3.8% to 3.6%; the richest fifth’s share rose from 46.9% to 49.8% (the top 5%’s share rose from 18.6% to 22.1%); and the share of the middle class -- the middle 60% of the population -- fell from 49.4% to 46.7%.

[xvi] Louis Uchitelle, “More Cash in Hand, but Poorer,” International Herald Tribune, October 19, 1999.

[xvii] David Cay Johnston, “Should burger-flipping be a heavy industry?,” International Herald Tribune, February 21/22, 2004.

[xviii] Michel Foucault identified

"the defining characteristics of guild apprenticeship: a relationship of dependence simultaneously individual and total vis-à-vis the master; a fixed duration of training that is completed by a qualifying proof, but that cannot be broken down into a precise program; a wide exchange between the master who should give his knowledge and the apprentice who should give his services, his aid, and often a remittance. A form of domesticity is mixed with a transfer of knowledge. "

[les caractères propres à l’apprentissage corporatif : rapport de dépendance à la fois individuelle et totale à l’égard du maître ; durée statuaire de la formation qui est conclue par une épreuve qualificatrice ; mais qui ne se décompose pas selon un programme précis ; échange global entre le maître qui doit donner son savoir et l’apprenti qui doit apporter ses services, son aide et souvent une rétribution. La forme de la domesticité se mêle à un transfert de connaissance.]

Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Gallimard, Paris, 2000, pp. 183-4.

[xix]

"Paris. Thomson is a French electronics company that was close to bankruptcy in the 1990s when it was state-owned, no longer able to make money manufacturing televisions, video players and other consumer gizmos in the face of fierce competition. Then, it made an unusual move…

 ‘We’ve completely changed the nature of our activities,’[Frank Dangeard, Thomson’s chief executive] said… ‘Our business today has nothing to do with consumer electronics.’...

Manufacturing also still accounts for a sizable -- though dwindling -- portion [i.e., about 30%] of European employment…

But providing global services, like managing vast amounts of information and technology, has become as important as the act of manufacturing a product in the developed West. In fact, often  ‘it’s more lucrative to provide those services than to continue making things,’ said Peter Daniels, director of the Service Sector Research Unit at the University of Birmingham in England.

 ‘Ten years ago, you invested in the local Coca-Cola bottler when a country liberalized,’ said Charles Elliott, an analyst with Goldman Sachs in London.  ‘Now you invest in services providing digital entertainment services.’…

 ‘There is a big question mark over whether services and solutions are a viable long-term escape route,’ said Yves Doz, a professor of global technology and innovation at the business school Insead."

James Kanter, “European firms bloom by shifting to services,” International Herald Tribune, June 7, 2005.

[xx] Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income inequality in the United States, 1902-2002.”

Usually, new posts are made every Monday.  However, given an unexpected amount of interest in the reapportionment formula presented in the prior post, I will hold the next post for another week or so.

Bob B., you asked if I could put the formula on one line.

Congressional District
Population According                   The Average of The Total
to The Last Census                      Votes Cast in A Precinct                 Derived
_________________        X         in The Previous Two            =      Precinct
                                                     Congressional General                 Population
The Average of The                     Election Years
Total Vote Cast in The
Congressional District
in The Previous Two
Congressional
General Election Years

Bernard K., no, I have no special ability in math.  If you got an A in algebra, you´re ahead of me.  But, in the end, math had nothing to do with inventing the formula.  As the prior post explained, the formula was not derived inductively or deductively, but abductively.  Which means, there´s still hope for us who have no gift in math.

Yes, Phil C., if there is interest, in another post I will go into the exceptional set of circumstances that led to the creation of the formula.

NOTE to new readers:

Before continuing, please read the prior post of October 3, “In Search of The Silver Bullet.” 

Part 8.  Reapportionment (2):  A Formula to Achieve One Person, One Vote.

                                                            There is nothing new under the sun.
                                                                                                            -- Ecclesiastes 1:9 --



They got him.

Anwar al-Awlaki,  Islamic cleric-terrorist, was killed on September 30, 2011  in a drone attack in Yemen.  The good news was so good, President Obama announced it.

As for the bad news …

This blog discussed al-Awlaki on numerous occasions (see posts of 4/4/11, 11/23/10, 11/12/10, 10/31/10, 10/15/10).  The reason for so much attention:  he was a textbook case of middle class rebellion.  If you are interested in what al-Awlaki did and why he did it, go to Amazon  or Barnes and Noble . After 30 years of researching the subject, I came to conclusions you won´t see on the nightly news.[i] 

What could Anwar al-Awlaki possibly have to do with reapportionment?

Answer:  everything.

In both cases, what is in play is the 14th amendment[ii] to the United States Constitution:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen.  Thus, the 14th amendment applies to him. 

Or does it?

Don’t expect CIA, FBI, or Homeland Security officials to read the Constitution, much less understand it or enforce it.  Yes, I am serious.  The reason is simple:  they don’t have to.  They are agents of the status quo, whatever that status quo happens to be.  Such is their job.  Fidel Castro, Obama, Nixon, Lincoln, Bush, Kennedy, Kaddafi, Reagan, Elvis:  whoever the president happens to be, executive branch agents serve him.  His political tendencies or personal attributes make no difference.  You may think it should be otherwise -- but it isn’t.  Such a transformation awaits The Second American Revolution.[iii]

As for what the status quo is today …

In 2008-2009, America underwent a revolution -- a change of, not in political systems.  We no longer have a polity, the oligarchy/democracy hybrid created by Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, and the other Founding Fathers.  The moment Bush-Obama gave away billions of dollars to the American archi-rich, the polity went the way of all polities.  It was replaced by an oligarchy.[iv] 

The continental plate shift in 2008-2009 is the second reason why the 14th amendment is ignored.  Under an oligarchy, citizens are not equal.  Inequality is, in fact, a defining characteristic of oligarchy.  Now, it is often enjoyable but it is never rational to spend time on things that make no difference.  Hence, given America’s new oligarchic political system, there is no rational reason for the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security -- indeed, for any government official -- to know or care about the 14th amendment and equal protection.  Such is the new order.  Get used to it, you who are reading these words.

Then again …

As for Obama, Harvard law school professors can and do ignore the 14th amendment.  They, too, are (1) agents of the status quo in (2) an oligarchic political system.  For them, to defend the 14th amendment would be not only a waste of time and misleading, i.e., the public would think its Constitutional rights and protections still exist, but also, and more importantly for the professors, to support equal protection under the law would potentially do something far more detrimental, maybe disastrous:  jeopardize their careers.

We arrive at the third reason why the 14th amendment is irrelevant to Harvard professors.  A half a century ago -- when a polity existed and people could say such things, get them published, and not be fired -- the anthropologist Jules Henry  explained why:

“All great cultures, and those moving in the direction of greatness, have an elite which might be called the cultural maximizers whose function is to maintain or push further the culture’s greatness and integration….The functions of a cultural maximizer include organization (i.e., maintaining the level of integration of the culture as it is) and contributing certain qualitative features necessary to the continuance of the cultural life. His function is never to alter the culture radically. He may help to give more intense expression to features that already exist, but he never wants to bring about a fundamental change. Thus, those who have the capacity to maximize culture in this sense are among the elite in all highly developed civilizations.”[v]

Given their social role, cultural maximizers’ lack of consideration of fundamental change is not subject to “rational” argument or moral “improvement.”  Today, fundamental change is nothing less than replacing the reigning oligarchy with a polity.  Given that reality, and because The Second American Revolution is rational and doesn’t waste time on things that don’t matter, it doesn’t look to Harvard for help, much less salvation. 

Strange isn’t it, though, how despite everything it keeps coming back.  There it is again -- the 14th amendment:  you can’t “deprive any person of life … without due process of law…”  No need to tell you what those words mean; they are in the heart of America.

The best testimony to due process’s status of a self-evident truth is the latest display of the oligarchy’s secret inner essence:  naïve, clumsy.  No sooner was al-Awlaki’s death announced than White House and Justice Department pronunciamentos spilled forth defending the drone attack.  Watch the officials closely, note their tone of voice and eye movements; you are witnessing an archetypal manifestation of the Blivet Trick, i.e., trying to put 10 pounds of horse shit in a 5 pound bag.  Overcompensation is the first refuge of the guilty.

The oligarchs and their agents are clearly panicked by the large, loud, and growing number of people decrying Anwar al-Awlaki’s death without due process.  The protestors were especially outraged at the good news announcement by Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, of all people.  Hopefully, the above comments will explain the contradiction; i.e., Obama´s disregard of the 14th amendment is entirely in keeping with his triple role of (1) agent of the status quo, which is (2) an oligarchy, and of (3) a cultural maximizer.  Incidentally, that the 14th amendment was enacted to fight racism is of no interest to Obama.  As his refusal to abolish another residue of racism, the Electoral College (see Part 5) demonstrates, when out on the country club links with his golfing buddies, besieged by hooks, slices, bogies, and sandtraps, Obama can’t ponder incongruities.  No time.  Besides, gosh, it’s not nice to bring up stuff like that.

Today, a fundamental change would be to NOT disregard the 14th amendment, but to respect and enforce it.  For the three reasons noted above, Barack Obama cannot participate in that fundamental change.  Consequently, don’t expect him to participate in The Second American Revolution.

Anwar al-Awlaki’s death will create lawsuits and other actions, notably demonstrations.[vi]  I wish the very best to all people everywhere who fight for equal legal protection of citizens no matter how despicable those citizens’ words or actions may be.  In fact, out of respect for you and your fight, I would like to address you directly: 

Victory in the judiciary should not be expected.  Your ultimate failure at the hands of the Supreme Court will prove, once more and again, that (1) America now has an oligarchy, not a polity, much less a democracy.  (2) At the top of the oligarchy sits the Supreme Court (see Part 1). 

Despite your impending legal defeat, your cause is just; your battle, courageous.  Equal protection under the law is the sine qua non of democracy.  I hope, therefore, you will not let your eventual and inevitable disillusionment shut you up:  such is the goal of the oligarchy, i.e., to get you to repress yourselves.  However, the simple fact is you can’t be disillusioned without having had an illusion in the first place.  It’s impossible.  And you certainly had an illusion about America.

Next time, don’t try the Supreme Court; don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut.

You, Dear Reader, no doubt are starting to conclude that, in defending equal protection under the law, we are beating a dead horse.  You are right -- the horse is dead.  It is only with that awareness, however, that fundamental change can occur.  The Second American Revolution entails nothing less than a resurrection, and in more ways than one.

In the meantime, as public awareness builds, here’s a message for Obama and his golf cronies:

Remember that horse you killed?

When you wake up tomorrow, you’d better have somebody look you over. You may have hoof marks running up and down your back.

                                         *          *          *

                                          The Formula

There is a paradox in the One Person, One Vote principle:

Reapportioning solely on the basis of warm bodies counted in the census makes district vote totals vary to an unacceptable degree.  When districts A and B both have 18,000 people, and 8,000 votes are cast in A versus only 2,000 votes in B, something is wrong.  Picture a scale, perfectly balanced, with 8,000 grains of sand in pan A and only 2,000 in pan B:  how can the weight of each grain be the same?  For the same reason, It is patent nonsense to say the weight of a vote in A has the same weight as a vote in B; in truth, each vote in B has more than twice the weight of a vote in A.  Despite that fact, making populations equal -- one person, one person reapportionment -- is the law of the land. 

But reapportioning solely on the bases of votes cast would make district populations vary to an unacceptable degree.  If districts A and B are redrawn so that each casts 5,000 votes, but 30,000 people live in A and only 6,000 in B, something is wrong.  In the balanced scale image, 30,000 people in one pan would weigh the same as only 6,000 in the other:  how can the weight of each person be the same?  B wins again.  So outrageous is this discrepancy, to my knowledge no one vote, one vote reapportionment has ever been practiced, much less allowed, in America.

The cause of the paradox is simple but fundamental.  The census population and voters are two different groups.  The former includes children, nonresidents, and other people ineligible to vote.  The latter excludes them.

BOTH people and votes must be counted to reapportion in a manner that truly, fully, finally operationizes the One Person, One Vote principle.  That operationalization is the only way that, in accordance with the Constitution -- with democracy, too -- the weight of every person’s vote will be equal.

The solution to the One Person, One Vote paradox requires first that a 2,000-year-old dictum be disproven.  We can -- in fact, must -- mix apples (people) and oranges (votes).

That dictum has endured for two millennia because to disprove it requires neither inductive nor deductive but abductive logic.  As Charles Peirce showed, abduction  is inherently deep-seated, disruptive; its results cannot be anticipated much less controlled, which is why Harvard professors don’t practice it.  That omission is ensconced in their cultural maximizer role:  His function is never to alter the culture radically.

Even though equal protection under the law, equality of votes, and democracy are irrelevant today in America, we as citizens should strive to finish what the Founding Fathers left undone.  The watchword of The Second American Revolution:  Do It Anyway.

Consider the following formula for equalizing vote weights:

Congresional District* Population
According to The Last Census

Divided by

The Average of The Total Vote Cast
in The Congressional District
in The Previous Two Congressional
General Election Years**

X

The Average of The Total Votes Cast
in A Precinct in The Previous Two
Congressional general Election Years

=

Derived Precinct Population

The “Derived Precinct Populations” are the new building blocks for constructing districts.  Their physical boundaries, registered voters, voting machine locations, etc., are exactly the same as those of existing precincts.

When added up there is nothing abstract whatsoever about derived precinct populations.  More on that in a moment.

The formula, it must be emphasized, does not omit actual, real life people.  They are at the top of the first column:  “Congressional District Population According to The Last Census.”  People ineligible to vote -- children, out-of-state students and soldiers, foreign nationals -- are absolutely, definitely included.

The mechanics of the formula will not be intuitively obvious to many readers.  Hence, I offer a clarifying, hypothetical case:

(1) Assume a congressional district has a population of 800,000 people.[ix]  Assume, furthermore, that the average turnout in the last two congressional general election years was 400,000 votes.

The contents of the first column in the formula:

Congressional District Population
According to The Last Census = 800,000

Divided by

The Average of The Total Votes Cast
In The Congressional District
In The Previous Two Congressional
General Election Years = 400,000

For obvious reasons, the result of the first column will always be greater than 1.  In our example, that figure is:  total census population (800,000) divided by total votes cast (400,000) = 2.

(2) We come to the second column of the formula:  “The Average of The Total Votes Cast in A Precinct in The Previous Two Congressional General Election Years.”

Let us assume that the congressional district consists of five precincts.  Moreover, assume our task is to build two state house districts from those five precincts.  Finally, assume the averages of the total votes cast in the two elections in question were the following:

Precinct 1.    50,000 votes.
Precinct 2.  100,000 votes.
Precinct 3.    80,000 votes.
Precinct 4.    20,000 votes.
Presinct 5.  150,000 votes.

Before proceeding, note that the total is 400,000 votes.  That figure appears in the bottom part of the first column of the formula.

(3)  The second calculation in the formula:  multiply each precinct vote by 2.  The result is the “Derived Precinct Population.”  Thus,

Precinct 1.  2 x   50,000 = 100,000 Derived Precinct Population.
Precinct 2.  2 x 100,000 = 200,000 Derived Precinct Population.
Precinct 3.  2 x   80,000 = 160,000 Derived Precinct Population.
Precinct 4.  2 x   20,000 =   40,000 Derived Precinct Population.
Precinct 5.  2 x 150,000 = 300,000 Derived Precinct Population.

Now comes something most readers will not anticipate:

The total of the “Derived Precinct Populations” is 800,000 -- the number shown at the top of column 1 of the formula.  In other words, the total of the derived precinct populations is the same as the “real” population -- warm bodies -- counted by the census.  How can that be?

What happened is this:  precincts with large numbers of people ineligible to vote -- foreign nationals, children, etc. -- did not receive undue representation relative to other precincts.  What the formula accomplishes is not the elimination of ineligibles but the spreading of ineligibles over all the precincts in a congressional district.

(4) As mentioned, our task is to build two state house districts.  If we put precincts 1 and 5 together, we have a district composed of (i) 400,000 derived precinct population and (ii) 200,000 votes.  That decision leaves us no choice for the remaining, second district:  precincts 2, 3, and 4. Together, they form a district of (i) 400,000 derived precinct population and (ii) 200,000 votes.

End result:  two identical districts in (i) populations and (ii) votes.  What could be more equitable then that?  People and votes?  Apples and oranges?

The essence of the formula:  the votes-cast component checks the population component WITHIN congressional districts.  The population component checks the votes-cast component AMONG congressional districts.

Apples and oranges are mixed so as to control each other.  Those checks and the resulting balance are One Person, One Vote in action.
----------------------
[i] For a highly representative example of mainstream reporting, see CNN’s article   on Samir Khan  , an American citizen (New Yorker) who died with al-Awlaki.  The American media doesn’t know the difference between description and analysis, information and culture.  In Khan’s case CNN regurgitates the description spoon-fed them by … a terrorist and middle class rebel (Daddy is a communications executive).  It becomes obvious after a few wooden paragraphs that Samir Khan had no more idea why he became a terrorist than does CNN.  Had he known, he wouldn’t have done it.  

[ii] The fifth amendment, which is part of the Bill of Rights, declares:

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [sic]; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” 

Why was it necessary, some 80 years later, for the Constitution to repeat verbatim its guarantee of due process?  Obviously, there was a problem.

As the prior post explained, the 14th amendment was a

“response to the notorious Black Codes.  The 13th amendment (1865) had abolished slavery.  Nevertheless, certain states passed laws designed to keep Blacks in a condition of servitude, e.g., they were forced to enter labor contracts, did not have freedom of movement, and could not sue in court.”

This post’s subject is One Person, One Vote, which is anchored in equal protection.  Consequently, the 14th amendment is emphasized rather than the 5th.  Regarding due process, however, they say the same thing.

[iii] Who gets elected president is inseparable from how they are elected.  The election of presidents who disregard the Constitution and other laws will continue until campaign financing is revolutionized.  Part 3 observed that “it turns out that the soaring, sky-high costs of campaigns are the oligarchy’s favorite game:  heads we win; tails you lose.”  Part 3 proposed a specific, concrete change.

[iv] For more on this subject, see the Unfortunate But Necessary Introduction, Part 1 post of August 22, 2011.

[v]  Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, Random House, 1963, p. 31.  Cited in The Source of Terrorism:  Middle Class Rebellion, p. 65.  Truth in lending:  Jules Henry was a close family friend. 

[vi] Be leery of impeach Obama  talk.  Of course, the logic is impeccable:  (i) violating the Constitution is an impeachable offense.  (ii) President Barack Obama violated the Constitution.  (iii) Therefore, …  However, the syllogism assumes the polity and not an oligarchy runs America, and consequently that the Constitution is still in effect.  In reality, the House of Representatives would have to impeach Obama (the Senate conducts the trial).  The question turns on whom the House represents.  At $4,600,000 per head, house members are a cold slap in the face of America’s Founding Fathers, who intended that the House represent the little people (see Part 6). 

[vii] Why are congressional districts used as the basic population unit?  Other units, such as counties, could be employed.

There is nothing sacred about congressional districts.  However, they are convenient and appropriate.  Federal courts and other government bodies, as well as nongovernment organizations, closely scrutinize congressional districts as to their equality of populations and communities of interest.  As a result, the formula reapportions on an established political and legal consensus.

Reapportionment experts outside the United States, notably Europe, will find other units of population -- provinces, cantons, departments, etc. -- to be useful.  The basic logic of the formula, however, remains valid.

[viii] Why use more than one election year to form a votes-cast figure?  Turnout can vary significantly from year to year due to local political and weather conditions.  To reduce extreme turnout deviations up or down, the formula takes two general elections and averages them.

[ix] The real number is closer to 700,000.  I am simplifying things so that you will not need a calculator.