Krugman and the Truth About the 1% That Can't Be Spoken

I have been participating in OWS with increased intensity over the course of the last two months. The defining moment for me was the illegal and brutal eviction on November, 15. One of the things that I liked about the Freedom Plaza encampment was the Think Tank discussion: people from all walks of life gathering together in a public space discussing openly about the inadequacies of capitalism.

Today's New York Times op-ed by Paul Krugman The Post-Truth Campaign reminded me of these discussions particularly in terms of certain ideological tenets that seem so engrained into our collective unconscious even in the face of the starkest of realities. In this regard, Krugman opens his essay by positing the following:

Suppose that President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”

Krugman goes on to say that such a statement would be universally condemned by almost everyone, including himself, and much of the essay is dedicated to creating a moral equivalence between the statement above and the continuous charges coming from Republicans about Obama being a redistributive socialist. He continues by wondering why the latter statements do not meet a condemnation similar to that which the former would receive if Obama, or anyone else for that matter, would dare uttering it.

As the title of his piece summarizes, Krugman describes this type of environment the Post-Truth Campaign.

While Krugman should be thanked for putting his finger on a praxis that has become pretty much the modus operandi of political discourse, his underlying ideological tenets don't seem to alert the Princeton economist to the fact that he has lured himself into an logical fallacy. If the idea of a post-truth political environment is assumed to be true – as I believe it has been for at least a decade – then Obama should be able to say that Mitt Romney, the embodiment of the 1%, wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs without causing any particular uproar in the establishment community. For this reason, the fact that he can't say it is proof that the statement is true: the 1% wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs, forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.

One of the primary goals of capitalism is to reduce labor costs. According to Marx's concept of surplus value, the lower the wages the higher the profits for capital. This is why the 1% has historically being opposed to unions or anyone and anything (i.e. minimum wage legislation) that would champion workers' wages. In the post-truth age, the increase of surplus value is called an increase in productivity. This is an euphemism for laying off workers while putting the extra work on the shoulders of remaining workers who must work longer ours without having their salaries raised.

If we take this tendency of capitalism to maximize profit by minimizing labor costs to its logical conclusion, it follows that the ideal wage from a capitalist's standpoint is zero. And what do we call someone who works for free or perhaps for simply food and shelter? That is a serf or, in other words, a slave. For this reason, it can be said that serfdom and slavery are an intrinsic tendency of capitalism because they represent the ultimate zero-level labor cost.

Yet, many in this country – including Krugman and those who I sometimes happened to converse with in the Think Tank discussions at Freedom Plaza – seem to not be able to grasp this simple reality. It's as if it is not possible for many people to accept that in America there are people, the 1%, who would have no qualms to return this country to the middle-ages or even earlier, more brutal forms of slavery. This resistance is perhaps rooted in the positivist idea of inevitable human progress, the idea that we could never go back to certain forms of barbarism. Yet, history is full of examples of regress – the middle-ages being only one the most glaring. Even Krugman admitted so much in an op-ed earlier this year when he wrote that the country was well on its way of becoming a banana republic.

The fact is that many Americans still seem unable to accept that given the chance the 1% would gladly turn this country into a Honduran style republic, where a tiny oligarchy which controls most of the wealth uses the government and death squads as a tool to repress a population of mostly peasants. Yet, the signs of this coming reality are all around us if one only cares to look:

– The absolute impunity of Wall Street executives in the greatest plunder of wealth in human history.

– A defense (sic) bill that enables the executive to deploy the military in the United States to arrest and detain Americans indefinitely.

– A 1% whose wealth has reached 1929 levels of concentration and which is thrusting the country into a depression.

I could go on and on but the point is simple: rather than being an imaginary statement, the truth about the 1% that can't be spoken is that they sense an historic opportunity and they are pursuing it with a vengeance: turning working people into serfs. Krugman even alluded to that much when he said that the Troika is now trying to destroy the European dream. On this, economist Dean Baker concurs. The truth is that, if they succeed, we are next.

Capitalism Hits the Fan

An excellent assessment and, most importantly, possible solutions to the world economic crisis by economist Richard Wolff, author of Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. This aired today on Democracy Now.

Pepper Spraying Cop Iconized

As he was pepper spraying University of California Davis students, police lieutenant John Pike certainly could not have imagined that his torturous act would propel him to international infamy. Instead, he has become the psychopathic face of the corporate police state; so much so that his callous image as he is pepper spaying UC Davis students has become a meme – "a kind of folk art or shared visual joke that is open to sharing and reinterpretation by anyone" – which is growing with increasing momentum. Here are just a few examples of the creativity and beauty of the occupy movement with new images of the casually pepper spray everything cop keep popping up as people all over the world continue to paste Pike's instantly iconic figure into every type of imaginable scenery.

33K in NYC Nearly Silence Corporate Press

Last night I was at the OWS rally in Foley Square in downtown New York City and this is what I saw:

The square was packed with people, 32,650 according to official NYPD estimates. As a matter of fact, by the time I circled around City Hall and reached the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge there were still people left in the square who had not yet begun their symbolic encirclement of the City Hall block.

And yet, when this morning I searched for news of the event in the corporate press, I could barely find any mention of it. Most of today's coverage on yesterday's day of protest in NYC centers around the earlier disruption and arrests. If the rally is mentioned at all, it is done in a passing paragraph toward the bottom of the page and not one single outlet reports the NYPD crowd estimate. The most one is likely to see in terms of estimates is "thousands."

The New York Times, the city's newspaper of record, did not find the event worthy of front page news. This is how it covered the rally in less than a paragraph at the very bottom of an article on page A24:

At 5 p.m., thousands of protesters and members of about a dozen unions converged on Foley Square. “It’s magnificent,” Laurel Sturt, 55, who teaches elementary school in the Bronx, said as she gazed at the crowd. “All great movements of the past started like this.” (Cara Buckley, 200 Are Arrested As Protesters Clash With the Police, The New York Times, November 18, 2011)

The New Jersey Star-Ledger managed to acknowledge the rally with the headline "Thousands gather near Foley Square as Occupy Wall Street protests swell," except that it was not near Foley Square but in Foley Square.

A NY Post editorial while describing Foley Square as "full to overflowing," still managed to give a negative spin to the event, starting with the headline "Loud, but lame," and by writing

that "there were nowhere near the “tens of thousands” of demonstrators who were supposed to fan out across the five boroughs and convulse New York." Talking about lame, here is a precious piece of lame propaganda by in the same editorial which should be a candidate for the overstatement of the year:

Government employees in New York enjoy health-care and pension benefits that even millionaires might envy.

The near silence and the occasional disparaging propaganda of the corporate press is the clearest sign that the growth of OWS protests is starting to frighten the 1% and its corporate elites. Until now, protesters had been treated with a somewhat patronizing attitude, but now that our numbers are swelling and that the support for the protests is going mainstream, at least when it comes to labor, the corporate propaganda machine is gearing up for a smear campaign intended to discredit the movement.

This reaction was to be expected and, as I said, it is a positive development. As the movement continues to grow, the entrenched forces of corporate power will react more and more desperately and perhaps violently; in doing so, they will put their hypocrisy and contempt for democracy in full view and by the time next year comes around, they won't not even know what hit them.

To Serve and Protect the 1%

Today the NYPD decided to show the world on which side they are on; they decided to stand on the side of greed, because it is their narrow minded greed for a paycheck today that made them follow the immoral orders of Mayor (sic) Michael Bloomberg and evict and destroy the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti park. The NYPD decided that it was more important to uphold the interests of those billionaires who are pillaging the future of humanity rather than look a little further than their wallet and to the future of their own children, a future that those who are occupying Wall Street are trying to protect.

Had this happened at Tahrir Square, the corporate media would have been criticizing the undemocratic tactics of the Egyptian military, and this is how the duplicity of ideology comes in full view: what is possible and just in a dictatorship is strangely impossible and unjust in a so called democracy. This disconnect between reality and ideology is so glaring that very few people can muster the will to openly acknowledge it. To do so would undermine the entire ideological edifice upon which we stand and the moral void that such an act of honesty would produce is apparently too big for most people to bear. And so the 1%, in concert with the politicians and the corporate media, go on pretending that we live on a shining city on a hill while the 99% of the people have – for all practical purposes – lost the right to peacefully assemble as stated in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

The good news is that rather than stifling the movement, the latest autocratic action by Mayor (sic) Michael Bloomberg has shown the emptiness of his ideological platitudes: it was only three days ago when he boasted that NYC is "the freest city in the freest country in the world," and as the gulf between reality and the propaganda by the 1% widens we, the 99%, are more galvanized than ever; the more the 1% – as embodied by Bloomberg and protected by the NYPD – tries to stifle the movement, the more we will keep coming back in greater numbers until a more just and sustainable world is realized.