Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 29, 2019

Two things:

1) I think the ‘fear of fallling’ better explains white racism. With our neoliberal economy and its frequent “Jack Belch Welch” layoffs (‘rank and yank’) you are never secure, no matter how “good” your job. I have witnessed myself people who made $75,000, $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 or more losing their jobs in a layoff and then falling from the ranks of the well-to-do to the suddenly struggling. Studies of fascism point out that fascists tended to be people who ‘had, but lost’ or who ‘had, but fear losing’ more than those who never had in the first place. This explains Hitler, and it explains Trump.

2) On the neoliberal influence on the US military, I offer this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/future-of-work-expertise-navy/590647/

Instead of having to PAY all those extra sailors, why not staff it all capitalist-y-like (read: badly understaffed, like all US businesses are nowadays) with far fewer crewmen so that there are no experts at anything on-board!! Seriously, if this ship catches fire due to battle damage, the crew will have to evacuate the ship because NO ONE aboard is skilled in damage control!!

In WWII, damage control techniques on US navy ships became so advanced that if they had been more fully in-place earlier in the war, only one aircraft carrier would have been lost the entire war. US ships were able to recover from blows that would have sunk the equivalent ships in most other navies. But no, to achieve that all-important *short term cost advantage*, we’re willing to have the whole ship sink to save a few bucks short-term!

This is what I see every day in capitalist America. Capitalism sacrifices the future for the short-term profit of today. It risks millions in the future to save a buck today for Wall Street. Unless we’re willing to ditch it, not just tweak it, we’re doomed.

Geof:

I don’t think so. The article talks about economic “fear of falling.” If you’re wealthy, that may just mean losing your privileges.

I guess we differ on what is ‘rich’. People making $90,000, $125,00, $150,000 even $200,000 are not ‘rich’ in that they are immune to being wiped out too…it just takes longer for their savings to be drained away than someone who is the 50 % percentile. Some of these incomes don’t get you even into the top 10 %. So yes, these people are richer than most but still have a quite-legitimate fear of falling into poverty too.

To give you an idea, to be in the 1 % you need an income of at least $720,000 and a net worth exceeding $10 million. Yeah, if you’re *there* you’re relatively safe. $10 million or more would be able to let most live in reasonable comfort for the remainder of their lives even if they lost their job.

The problem with Democratic “liberalism” over much of the past forty years is that “liberal” (sneer quotes fully intended) policies involve taking money and benefits away from those making, say, $90,000 a year to give it to to those making < $20k or 30k, and usually doing it in a way that not only doesn't touch the top 1 % or 0.1 % (i.e. the donor class), but makes the very richest even richer in the process. That's why they turned against "liberalism"; and understandably so, for it cost them personally.

Yet the top 1 % and 0.1 % is where the money is, and where it can be taxed and cost the fewest votes.

@ StewartM

RE: Navy ship manning.

Very interesting article. I do not have the information to judge damage control prep and planning.

I can say without equivocation that the Burke-class destroyers had their design wrecked by a traditionalist insistence on too large a crew. The Fitzgerald and McCain — the two destroyers that suffered fatalities in collisions with commercial ships — demonstrated some of the very real hazards of having way too many people on board. Those destroyers have a theoretical complement of around 280. That is an absurd number. The Zumwalts — a procurement catastrophe that demonstrates neoliberalism’s real vice, greed and tech delirium — have 130 i believe, which would have been a reasonable design goal for the Burke ships in the 1980s.

Controlling the ship is not a process that lends itself well to multiplying the number of hands assigned to the task. The McCain got into trouble when the officer in charge of controlling the ship’s direction and speed (which he must do thru the hands of enlisted crew members) ordered one crew member to take over the helm while a different crew member retained propulsion control.
But, previously a decision had been made to separate the port and starboard propulsion shafts but no one remembered this, and one-half of propulsion went with the transfer of helm. Switching assignment control from one computer panel work station to another reset the rudder and combined with the unnoticed transfer of half of propulsion confused both officer and crew about which panel had actual control of either function. (Imagine trying to drive a car by instructing two different people, one at the wheel and one with her foot on the accelerator and not noticing that two different people had feet on two different accelerators! And, the officer trying to manage really cannot tell for certain what anyone is doing at a glance. Oh, and by the way, a whole ‘nother team is managing the process of looking ahead and in the vicinity) Mind, with the McCain nothing had actually failed electromechanically; the officer and his team did not know that.

The Fitzgerald fell afoul of a system of navigation and situational awareness that requires a fairly large team to manage several conceptually different and unintegrated systems of navigation and navigation monitoring. A team completely different and physically separated from the team actually steering the ship. (Warships have a more challenging problem than commercial ships because they cannot broadcast their own positions with the transponders used by commercial ships and are procedurally discouraged from relying on the monitoring of commercial ship transponders.). The Fitzgerald managed to miss the commercial ship’s flashing lights warning of imminent collision as well.

Back in the day, ships’s crews did have to have highly specialized craftsmen both to operate the “analogue” systems and to maintain and repair parts on board. As the electronic and electrical control systems have proliferated, and with that proliferation, a repair by swapping out spare parts philosophy, the imperative to improvise repairs while underway has resulted in routine cannibalization. As a result, important systems are routinely inoperable. One of the McCain’s radar units was not working. And i understand it the Fitzgerald’s radar was out as well — the report i saw was unspecific. If i recall correctly, on the Fitzgerald, the bridge monitoring station in the captain’s cabin was largely or completely inoperable due to cannibalization.

I have zero confidence in the Navy’s ability to design a ship to fulfill realistic military purpose. But, reducing crew size and eliminating pseudo-craft specializations is actually sensible as a direction, given the evolution of control technologies.

Brucie,

You are mashing together different theoretical formulations of the history of authoritarianism. In the 1950s, the theory had a distinctly Freudian slant, with a focus on childhood relationships and an unhappy resolution of the oedipus complex as the origin of prejudicial attitudes. It is actually Bob Altameyer’s account that relies on social learning rather than infant development, and a social constellation of authoritarian followers and SDO leaders. Problem with Altameyer’s account is it’s a bit circular. Political prejudice is present in people whose answers to survey questions reveal prejudice. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the underlying dynamic driving the prejudice. This is why it makes more sense to define authoritarian as a generalized fear of (social/cultural) difference (unlike conservatism, which is more akin to a fear of social change). What’s vitally important, but never part of the research agenda in ’empirical’
studies, is figuring out how authoritarianism is driven by the experience of living in a deeply stratified, rapidly changing capitalist society.

Re Blackrock et al, those trillions have to go somewhere. I assume the vast majority of that money comes from the upper 20%. I agree with your point about innovation. Surprisingly, Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Feynman, Hubble weren’t billionaires either.

“There is a dawning recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet. “We’re in a time when people are much more open to radical economic ideas,” says Michael Jacobs”

This is actually funny in that having an economy that is fairer and less destructive is considered radical.