BACK TO THE UK—AFTER ABOUT 35 YEARS
HAS IT CHANGED MUCH? I’LL LET YOU KNOW
I’m adopting a stepping-stone approach to my return to Europe—and where I will end up will depend upon what I find after all this time—and how matters play out.
I have started with the UK for family reasons.
My flight was uneventful but I arrived in Iceland positively starving—and there had the best roll of my life (and the priciest).
Very strange to be back in the UK.
A DECISION MUCH CONSIDERED—WHICH I AM ENTIRELY HAPPY WITH—
TO RETUN TO EUROPE
One of the great ambition of my life was to live in the U.S. for a while, but—strangely enough, and subject to brief periods of temptation—I have never particularly wanted to be an American, or even to settle in the U.S..
I identify with the country to a significant extent, and am a decidedly interested (if frustrated) supporter and observer—but I have never been seriously tempted to become a citizen (although I have certainly thought about it).
I guess I like the feeling of independence being a European brings me, my values are European, and I am entirely out of sympathy with the current U.S. business model—and the Right Wing in general.
In truth, it is more than that. Blatant social injustice and racism upset me—and they remain widespread in the U.S. That concerns me more than I can express. I was brought up to be socially aware by my much loved grandmother—herself a very wealthy woman—and I have never lost that sense of obligation. I just don’t believe in rugged individualism and blatant social inequity.
I think the richest nation in the world could, and should, do a better job of looking after its own people—all its own people. I think the fact that it doesn’t should concern a great deal more people than it seems to.
That said, I shall miss my American friends greatly—though hope we shall remain in touch. Still, it is my experience that inward-looking Americans are no great shakes at correspondence if the other party is physically outside the U.S. It’s a psychological thing.
We shall see.
I flew out from Seattle late afternoon—looking forward to a new adventure.
The last one had its ups and downs—what adventure does not—but, overall, worked out pretty well.
Thank you, America.
I’M MOVING TODAY—WITH SOME TREPIDATION
YET I LOVE NEW ADVENTURES
Fundamentally, I’m a homebody, and like nothing more than writing long and hard—leavened with the joys of a stable home. Yet, for all that, it is a great thing to be dragged kicking and screaming out of one’s immediate horizons—and to experience new and different things.
That is exactly what I’m in the process of doing right now.
Wish me luck. I’m terrified—but also intrigued.
DAVID SIMON, THE CREATOR OF THE TV SHOW, THE WIRE—SET IN BALTIMORE—DOESN’T MINCE HIS WORDS. I HAPPEN TO THINK HE IS RIGHT.
“There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.”
America is a country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy, its politics. There are definitely two Americas. I live in one, on one block in Baltimore that is part of the viable America, the America that is connected to its own economy, where there is a plausible future for the people born into it. About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It's astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.
There's no barbed wire around West Baltimore or around East Baltimore, around Pimlico, the areas in my city that have been utterly divorced from the American experience that I know. But there might as well be. We've somehow managed to march on to two separate futures and I think you're seeing this more and more in the west. I don't think it's unique to America.
I think we've perfected a lot of the tragedy and we're getting there faster than a lot of other places that may be a little more reasoned, but my dangerous idea kind of involves this fellow who got left by the wayside in the 20th century and seemed to be almost the butt end of the joke of the 20th century; a fellow named Karl Marx.
I'm not a Marxist in the sense that I don't think Marxism has a very specific clinical answer to what ails us economically. I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician. He was good at figuring out what was wrong or what could be wrong with capitalism if it wasn't attended to and much less credible when it comes to how you might solve that.
You know if you've read Capital or if you've got the Cliff Notes, you know that his imaginings of how classical Marxism – of how his logic would work when applied – kind of devolve into such nonsense as the withering away of the state and platitudes like that. But he was really sharp about what goes wrong when capital wins unequivocally, when it gets everything it asks for.
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.
We understand profit. In my country we measure things by profit. We listen to the Wall Street analysts. They tell us what we're supposed to do every quarter. The quarterly report is God. Turn to face God. Turn to face Mecca, you know. Did you make your number? Did you not make your number? Do you want your bonus? Do you not want your bonus?
And that notion that capital is the metric, that profit is the metric by which we're going to measure the health of our society is one of the fundamental mistakes of the last 30 years. I would date it in my country to about 1980 exactly, and it has triumphed.
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism by the end of the 20th century and was predominant in all respects, but the great irony of it is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure, has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of partisan or philosophical perfection.
It's pragmatic, it includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works because we don't let it work entirely. And that's a hard idea to think – that there isn't one single silver bullet that gets us out of the mess we've dug for ourselves. But man, we've dug a mess.
After the second world war, the west emerged with the American economy coming out of its wartime extravagance, emerging as the best product. It was the best product. It worked the best. It was demonstrating its might not only in terms of what it did during the war but in terms of just how facile it was in creating mass wealth.
Plus, it provided a lot more freedom and was doing the one thing that guaranteed that the 20th century was going to be – and forgive the jingoistic sound of this – the American century.
It took a working class that had no discretionary income at the beginning of the century, which was working on subsistence wages. It turned it into a consumer class that not only had money to buy all the stuff that they needed to live but enough to buy a bunch of shit that they wanted but didn't need, and that was the engine that drove us.
It wasn't just that we could supply stuff, or that we had the factories or know-how or capital, it was that we created our own demand and started exporting that demand throughout the west. And the standard of living made it possible to manufacture stuff at an incredible rate and sell it.
And how did we do that? We did that by not giving in to either side. That was the new deal. That was the great society. That was all of that argument about collective bargaining and union wages and it was an argument that meant neither side gets to win.
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to. But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
The unions actually mattered. The unions were part of the equation. It didn't matter that they won all the time, it didn't matter that they lost all the time, it just mattered that they had to win some of the time and they had to put up a fight and they had to argue for the demand and the equation and for the idea that workers were not worth less, they were worth more.
Ultimately we abandoned that and believed in the idea of trickle-down and the idea of the market economy and the market knows best, to the point where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.
That we've gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state's journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we've descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we're all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances.
Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have "some", it doesn't mean that everybody's going to get the same amount. It doesn't mean there aren't going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It's not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don't get left behind. And there isn't a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.
We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.
Socialism is a dirty word in my country. I have to give that disclaimer at the beginning of every speech, "Oh by the way I'm not a Marxist you know". I lived through the 20th century. I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth. I don't.
I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me.
And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted.
And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labour. They would want labour to be diminished because labour's a cost. And if labour is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less.
From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism.
Mistaking capitalism for a blueprint as to how to build a society strikes me as a really dangerous idea in a bad way. Capitalism is a remarkable engine again for producing wealth. It's a great tool to have in your toolbox if you're trying to build a society and have that society advance. You wouldn't want to go forward at this point without it. But it's not a blueprint for how to build the just society. There are other metrics besides that quarterly profit report.
The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?
If you watched the debacle that was, and is, the fight over something as basic as public health policy in my country over the last couple of years, imagine the ineffectiveness that Americans are going to offer the world when it comes to something really complicated like global warming. We can't even get healthcare for our citizens on a basic level. And the argument comes down to: "Goddamn this socialist president. Does he think I'm going to pay to keep other people healthy? It's socialism, motherfucker."
What do you think group health insurance is? You know you ask these guys, "Do you have group health insurance where you …?" "Oh yeah, I get …" you know, "my law firm …" So when you get sick you're able to afford the treatment.
The treatment comes because you have enough people in your law firm so you're able to get health insurance enough for them to stay healthy. So the actuarial tables work and all of you, when you do get sick, are able to have the resources there to get better because you're relying on the idea of the group. Yeah. And they nod their heads, and you go "Brother, that's socialism. You know it is."
And ... you know when you say, OK, we're going to do what we're doing for your law firm but we're going to do it for 300 million Americans and we're going to make it affordable for everybody that way. And yes, it means that you're going to be paying for the other guys in the society, the same way you pay for the other guys in the law firm … Their eyes glaze. You know they don't want to hear it. It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.
So I'm astonished that at this late date I'm standing here and saying we might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you don't mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don't embrace some other values for human endeavour.
And that's what The Wire was about basically, it was about people who were worth less and who were no longer necessary, as maybe 10 or 15% of my country is no longer necessary to the operation of the economy. It was about them trying to solve, for lack of a better term, an existential crisis. In their irrelevance, their economic irrelevance, they were nonetheless still on the ground occupying this place called Baltimore and they were going to have to endure somehow.
That's the great horror show. What are we going to do with all these people that we've managed to marginalise? It was kind of interesting when it was only race, when you could do this on the basis of people's racial fears and it was just the black and brown people in American cities who had the higher rates of unemployment and the higher rates of addiction and were marginalised and had the shitty school systems and the lack of opportunity.
And kind of interesting in this last recession to see the economy shrug and start to throw white middle-class people into the same boat, so that they became vulnerable to the drug war, say from methamphetamine, or they became unable to qualify for college loans. And all of a sudden a certain faith in the economic engine and the economic authority of Wall Street and market logic started to fall away from people. And they realised it's not just about race, it's about something even more terrifying. It's about class. Are you at the top of the wave or are you at the bottom?
So how does it get better? In 1932, it got better because they dealt the cards again and there was a communal logic that said nobody's going to get left behind. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get the banks open. From the depths of that depression a social compact was made between worker, between labour and capital that actually allowed people to have some hope.
We're either going to do that in some practical way when things get bad enough or we're going to keep going the way we're going, at which point there's going to be enough people standing on the outside of this mess that somebody's going to pick up a brick, because you know when people get to the end there's always the brick. I hope we go for the first option but I'm losing faith.
The other thing that was there in 1932 that isn't there now is that some element of the popular will could be expressed through the electoral process in my country.
The last job of capitalism – having won all the battles against labour, having acquired the ultimate authority, almost the ultimate moral authority over what's a good idea or what's not, or what's valued and what's not – the last journey for capital in my country has been to buy the electoral process, the one venue for reform that remained to Americans.
Right now capital has effectively purchased the government, and you witnessed it again with the healthcare debacle in terms of the $450m that was heaved into Congress, the most broken part of my government, in order that the popular will never actually emerged in any of that legislative process.
So I don't know what we do if we can't actually control the representative government that we claim will manifest the popular will. Even if we all start having the same sentiments that I'm arguing for now, I'm not sure we can effect them any more in the same way that we could at the rise of the Great Depression, so maybe it will be the brick. But I hope not.
David Simon is an American author and journalist and was the executive producer of The Wire. This is an edited extract of a talk delivered at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney.
THINGS HAVE COME TO A PRETTY PASS
WHEN PROFESSORS ARE ON FOOD STAMPS. BUT SUCH IS THE CASE IN THE U.S. TODAY
THE AMERICAN BUSINESS MODEL IS BROKEN
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Number of Adjunct Professors on Public Assistance Is Shocking
By Zaid Jilani [1] / AlterNet [2]
April 17, 2015
Academia was once a secure job track, that offered both the opportunity to explore your research interests and the ability to maintain your livelihood. ew research out from UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education shows that for many who teach at universities, economic security is a thing of the past.
The report [3] shows that part-time—adjunct—faculty at colleges and universities are on some form of public assistance at about half the rate of fast-food workers:
The recession, which lasted from 2007 to around 2010, was particularly severe on this population. During that time, “the number of people with master’s degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.’s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655.”
“Everyone thinks a Ph.D. pretty much guarantees you a living wage and, from what I can tell, most commentators think that college professors make $100,000 and more,” said Michael Bérubé, the president of the Modern Language Association, who was interviewed for the report. “But I’ve been hearing all year from non-tenure-track faculty making under $20,000, and I don’t know anyone who believes you can raise a family on that. Even living as a single person on that salary is tough, if you want to eat something other than ramen noodles every once in a while.”
Zaid Jilani is an AlterNet staff writer. Follow @zaidjilani [4] on Twitter.
AMERICAN ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS IN DECLINE
FRANCHISES HAVE LONG BEEN TOUTED AS OFFERING A BALANCE BETWEEN BENG ENTREPRENEURIAL AND CORPORATE
IT ISN’T WORKING OUT TOO WELL
Though I will freely confess to liking consistency as much as anyone, I have long been skeptical of franchises. By and large, they seem to take the variety out of life and to impose a relentless homogeneity—while treating their employees badly into the bargain. Doubtless, there are exceptions to this, but, if there are, I am not aware of them.
On the face of it, franchising seems like a good idea, in that it allows expertise to spread at speed, and lessens risk,. However, it has long seemed to me that, in practice, franchising tends to end up as something of a perversion of the entrepreneurial spirit.
The best entrepreneurs are rarely in business just for the money. They want to be profitable, of course, but primarily are driven by the idea—and a desire to break new ground. In short, the best entrepreneurs are innately creative.
Franchising would appear to be the antithesis of this. It is somewhat disconcerting to find that it is not particularly financially rewarding either. The statement that “The survey also found that 91 percent of franchisees were in debt, and about two-thirds of them operated at a loss or zero profit,” taken from the following piece is fairly chilling.
This is all of a piece of my core argument—the current American Business Model needs to be re-thought. It clearly isn’t delivering for most workers—and now it appears you can include many franchise owners as well.
I’m not arguing against capitalism as such. I’m debating our current version of it.
My underlying principle is very simple: Does it work? If it doesn’t, let’s try something else.
U.S. Franchise Owners Say They Can’t Make a Decent Living
bloomberg.com · by Leslie Patton · April 30, 2015More than half of U.S. franchisees can’t earn a decent living from their business, according to a survey.
About 52 percent of U.S. franchisees don’t think they make a fair profit, according to a survey of 1,122 franchisees across industries including fast food, lodging and real estate. The poll, released Thursday by FranchiseGrade.com, was paid for by Change to Win, a federation of unions that includes the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Franchisees sometimes face conflicts with their parent companies over rent, royalties and other fees they’re required to pay. Restaurant chains in particular are struggling with pressure to raise wages and provide better benefits for employees.
McDonald’s Corp. said earlier this month that it would increase hourly wages and offer paid vacation at U.S. company-owned stores, putting pressure on franchisees to follow suit. McDonald’s, which is 90 percent franchised in the U.S., is trying to turn around six straight quarters of slumping domestic sales and placate some upset operators.
“We would love to be in a position where we could pay workers more,” Keith Miller, a Subway restaurant owner in California, said during a conference call to discuss the survey results. While fast-food franchisees have been under “extreme pressure” to maintain profit, parent companies have been able to keep money coming in, he said.
The survey also found that 91 percent of franchisees were in debt, and about two-thirds of them operated at a loss or zero profit.
Subway, Burger King, Wendy’s Co. also are mostly franchised in the U.S.
bloomberg.com · by Leslie Patton · April 30, 2015
ARE WE WRITERS (ENTREPRENEURS AS WE ARE) FREQUENTLY NUTS?
THE WASHINGTON POST SEEM TO THINK IT IS A DEFINITE POSSIBILITY
Michael A. Freeman had long noticed that entrepreneurs seem inclined to have mental health issues.
The clinical professor of psychology at UC-San Francisco’s medical school spent a decade at a company where his clients were the founders of businesses. He estimates that about a third of them seemed to have some type of mental health condition. He still notices the trend today in his work coaching executives.
Freeman and California-Berkeley psychology professor Sheri Johnson decided to take a deeper look at the issue. They begun polling entrepreneurs and found a strong link between mental health conditions and entrepreneurship.
“The people that we admire for being entrepreneurs seem to come from the same gene pool as the people who are kind of socially stigmatized because of mental health conditions,” Freeman said. “They must confer some adaptive advantage otherwise they wouldn’t be so highly represented in the population.”
Forty-nine percent of entrepreneurs surveyed reported at least one mental health condition. Nearly a third reported having two or more mental health issues, such as ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety or substance use conditions. And half of the entrepreneurs who reported no mental-health conditions identified themselves as coming from families with a history of mental illness.
This may seem counterintuitive. Why would an unstable person be most attracted and suited to launch a business?
[Why shades of Asperger’s Syndrome are the secret to building a great tech company]
Freeman points out that there’s a beneficial side to these mental health conditions. Those weaknesses come with corresponding strengths that the average healthy person doesn’t have.
For all of its ills, depression also brings empathy and creativity. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi attempted suicide as teenagers. Uncommon levels of empathy can allow a businessman to better understand a customer’s need. And a creative mind won’t be satisfied on the corporate ladder, but instead in a fast-moving start-up where he or she can unfurl ideas and dreams.
