1) The new Sam Harris episode (#114 Politics and Sanity) is excellent, mainly because Sam Harris doesn't talk much-- he mediates a debate and discussion between two logical, well-spoken, reasonable conservative thinkers (David Frum: senior editor at the Atlantic and speechwriter for George W. Bush, and Andrew Sullivan: who edited The New Republic and founded The Daily Dish) and they discuss topics as various as Trump, hyper-partisanship, Henry Kissinger, religion, and the legalization of marijuana . . . listening to the quality of this thought and discourse among folks with different political persuasions and the fact that Harris's podcast is quite popular will give you some hope for America (Conversations with Tyler is another hopeful indicator);
2) but not too much hope . . . I just finished Brian Alexander's new book Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town and I'll be honest, I thought this was going to be an easy and clear read that would give me some insight into Middle America, like Sam Quinones' Dreamland and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy . . . but while Alexander's book has elements of those texts, it does something that's less fun to read and probably way more important to understand-- it details the exact reasons that the town of Lancaster was decimated and went from one of the most desirable places to live in America (as long as you were white) to an underfunded town with a rampant drug problem, lack of jobs and human capital, and a sharp and vast divide between the haves and the have-nots . . . he delineates the entire Anchor-Hocking glass factory story in inglorious detail: the investment from private equity, the battles with the unions, the leverages, the buyouts, the lack of maintenance, the safety issues, the methods used to turn a piece of a conglomerate around and make a quick profit, the detached executives from companies like Cerberus and Global Home Products, the debt, the gutting of salaries and pensions, and the effect of global economics on an American factory; the change from factory that could make great ware for far less than it cost to sell it, things like Pyrex bakeware and auto headlight glass, and then share that profit with skilled workers in the form of salaries and pensions, into a entity in a weird conglomerate, bought by corporate raiders, put on the books in any number of ways . . . and all this for the American pursuit of cheap stuff, something of which we are all guilty-- Americans have been shopping harder and harder for the cheapest stuff-- and though apparently, if things are working well, we can make glass products in the United States and sell them here-- mainly because glass is heavy and breakable, so it's tougher to ship from overseas-- but not with the global race to the bottom fueling things, the nadir of prices, wages, and detachment; there's a short version of this story in The Atlantic, with the reminder at the end that it's not about making a product any more, it's about making money-- I'd probably recommend reading the article over the book, which was a bear-- but there is a poignant moment at the end of the book that's worth checking out:
"Corporate elites said they needed free trade agreements so they got them . . . manufactures said they needed tax breaks and public money incentives to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them . . . banks and financiers said they needed looser regulations, so they got them . . . employers said they needed weaker unions-- or no unions at all-- so they got them . . . private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them . . . everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them . . . what did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs . . ."
and so you had the lawyers and consultants plotting the sale and break-up of the Anchor-Hocking plant and getting paid one hundred times more an hour than the lowly $12 and $14 dollar an hour glass-workers, in a town where at one time everyone rubbed elbows, the factory workers, the company board, the doctors, the lawyers, and they weren't separated by a vast economic chasm . . .
3) which brings me to The Big Short-- you should read the book, of course, but Mark Baum's speech near the end of the film really sums this up; Baum is based on a real person (Steve Eisman) and played brilliantly by Steve Carell . . . he says:
"For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short sighted thinking have never, ever worked . . . not once; eventually you get caught, things go south . . . when the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did"
and that is the final reminder: we did all this to ourselves, we created these systems, and it does not have to be like this . . . we are in control of how we run our government and our economy, we are in control of how we treat our workers and our citizens, and while it might be too late for my generation to fix things, perhaps if enough of the Millennials take advantage of all this clear, logical, and quite profound art, thought, and discourse that is readily available, they will change things.
2 comments:
The are 2 n's in millennials. The extra n is for "Not Gonna Happen"
dammit. we can only hope, right? because it's not going to be us . . .
Post a Comment