I always love to peruse the photos, jobs and wages of the 150 or so people that Parade Magazine features in its annual review of people’s wages in the United States.  This year, only a sampling of the featured made it to the print addition.  To see the full survey, you have to go to the website and click through 157 slides (and thereby have a chance to ignore 157 sets of online ads!).

The print edition continued Parade’s pursuit of all things celebrity.  The one full article was about an actor in a situation comedy about a white collar workplace titled “The Office.” The three sidebar articles on the one full page of people and what they earn compared the lives of three real people with television characters with the same jobs, all from situations comedies.  Parade titled these sidebars “TV vs. Reality.”

If you wanted to learn something other than the fact that an Indiana park superintendent likes his real job as much as Amy Poehler likes her play job on “Parks & Recreation,” you had to slog through 157 slides online.

Fortunately, I’ve done the work for you.  Here is a graph that clusters the various amounts people earn in increments of $5,000, except at both ends of the graph, i.e., the amounts at the extremes are $10,000-$20,000 per year; $100,000-$110,000; $110,000-$125,000; $125,000-$250,000; to a million; and over a million. Remember that we are talking about individual, not household, income:

Based on four great divides on the graph I identified, I created four income categories:

1. Struggling: Under $40,000 in annual income
2. Today’s middle class: $40,000-$80,000
3. Today’s upper middle: $80,000-$125,000
4. Wealthy: More than $125,000

I also divided the people into four groups, as noted on the graph:
A: Artists, craftsmen, musicians, entertainers

G: Government and public employees

X: Private-sector employees

B: Business owners

I did not put anyone making less than $10,000 a year on the chart, as these were all part-timers or volunteers, with a sprinkling of a few more A-types.  Note that Parade segregated celebrities into their own article, which differs in the past when the earnings of an Oprah or a Michael Jordan made it seem as if the only way to riches was to become an entertainer or professional athlete. 

Here is the chart.

 

Before commenting, I first want to address the issue of whether the Parade list reflects reality.   Parade itself says that the median annual income in the U.S. is $28,580; median means that half of all people make less and half make more.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics tells us that mean income, what we call average, is $43,460.  When mean is significantly larger than median, it usually means that a few big numbers are driving the average up.  In income terms, that means that a very few people are making a lot of money, while most people make very little. 

 

Just looking at the chart it seems as if the Parade survey pretty much reflects reality, as far as mean and median incomes go.  While I am concerned that there are no Fortune 1,000 executives or high-powered attorneys on the list, there is a wide spread of different professions, so let’s assume that the Parade list is a reasonably accurate reflection of the current salary situation in the United States.

 

What can we learn?

 

First and least is that you better not try to earn a living as an artist, crafts person, entertainer or writer unless you intend to be very successful.

 

It’s also interesting to note that the public sector has a far more equitable distribution of wealth, with most public sector employees making what I call middle or upper middle class incomes and only one that barely makes it into the bottom echelon of the wealthy.  In the private sector, by contrast, if you want to make it into the upper middle class or be wealthy, then you had better own a business.  In fact, if we took out the artists and public employees, we are left with a graph in which there is a very uneven distribution of wealth between employees and business owners.

 

Right-wing politicians and the news media want to hammer public workers as a chief cause of our deficit problems.  Instead, perhaps we should emulate the public sector model.  We know that public workers tend to be more well-educated than private sector employees, plus the public employee is more likely to be unionized.  So the key to obtaining an upper middle class income, but not get rich, may be to get more education and join a union. 

 

Am I a delusional paranoid liberal, seeing a conspiracy in every corner?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten the subjective impression that our elected officials and other leaders on all levels of government were inundating the marketplace of ideas (AKA the news media) with demands and plans to cut budgets, especially in the areas of education, social service programs and health care. I perceive seeing very little mention of raising taxes in the media as a means to address budget deficits, even though taxes on the wealthy are at a historic low. 

How could it be, I have wondered to myself, that no one is talking about raising taxes? 

Then I remember that when “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair released a survey showing that 61% of Americans wanted to raise taxes on the wealthy to address our budget woes, it made it into a mere 44 online media, according to Google News.  Not among these brave few media outlets were the Wall Street Journal, nor the New York Times. 

In other words, it’s the will of the people to raise taxes on the wealthy. But it seems as if the news media, our elected officials and our think tank gurus are ignoring the people’s will.

Does my impression stem from my biases as an aging progressive feeling abused by the right wing?  Or is our national marketplace of ideas working to keep taxes low on the wealthy while cutting important government programs, even if that means greater unemployment, more human suffering and a continued deterioration of our infrastructure of bridges, roads, mass transit systems and schools?

As Kai Ryssdal, American Public Radio’s cheery purveyor of smiley-face capitalism likes to say, “Let’s do the numbers!”

Google News reports that over the past month, roughly February 9-March 9, 2011, there were 8,827 distinct stories in online news media that mentioned the term “cut spending.”  There were only 4,059 stories that mentioned the term “raise taxes.”

But it’s worse than that.  I estimate that on average, every story that mentioned “cut spending” was on 1,428 websites or online media outlets; stories mentioning “raise taxes,” by contrast, made it onto an average of only 80 websites or online media outlets each.

Here’s the methodology I used to determine the number of times that each story appeared: Each search revealed dozens of pages of stories.  I counted the number of media running the 20 stories on the first two pages.  I disregarded the top total for each search term and took the average total of the other 19.

Here are a few more interesting comparisons, all of which show that whatever our elected officials, economic experts, think-tank scholars are saying, reporters and editors actively seek to fill deficit reduction discussion with talk of spending cuts, with almost near silence about raising taxes:

• On the first two pages of the search results, nine of the 20 stories about cutting spending appeared in more than 1,000 Internet locations; for raising taxes, it was only one.
• The headline of the most widely-disseminated story to mention raising taxes was the wishy-washy “Obama plans to cut taxes, and raise them, too” and was in 11,090 places. No other story about raising taxes was in even 700 places.  By contrast, the headline of the most widely-disseminated story to mention cutting spending was the very aggressive “Boehner to Obama: Cut spending more,” which also made it to 11,090 places.
• If you extrapolate the results of the first 20 pages over the entirety of all the stories that Google News reports for both of these search terms over the past month, we find that someone could have seen stories about cutting government spending about 12.6 million times.  Do the same math for raising taxes and you get a total of about 325,000 stories over the past month.  In other words, for every story in which the idea of raising taxes is mentioned, there are probably about 39 mentioning the idea of cutting spending.

39 to one! Think about it!  For example, imagine being in a room.  On one side of the room one person sings as loud as she can and on the other side of the room 39 people sing a different song, again as loud as they cam.  Who would you hear?

One could argue that the results are biased because of the stories in the large number of wacky right-wing websites and groups, all funded by a number of very wealthy people, the most notorious of whom currently are the Koch brothers.  First of all, not that many of those right-wing publications are on the list of media from which Google News pulls its stories.  And the bias created by those that do make the list just proves the broader point that money now controls the outcome of most elections. 

So my impression was accurate, and the news media is for the most part in bed with those who want to cut spending on needed programs, ignoring the will and best interests of the vast majority of people.

Charles G. Koch’s justification in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal for the millions of dollars that he and his brother David throw at ultra right-wing causes, organizations and politicians reminded me of a very old “Saturday Night Live” bit: the one in which Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray and John Belushi are short-order cooks in a restaurant that only offers cheeseburgers and fries. In the article, Koch rails against the current government deficit, but like the Saturday Night Live crew, he offers only one item on the menu: cutting government programs. 

He never considers the idea of raising taxes, particularly on the wealthy who pay significantly lower taxes now than they did in 1981 after the first Reagan tax cut, which at the time represented historically low taxes on the wealthy for an industrialized democracy.

Koch changes bogie men in the middle of his screed from cutting government entitlements to ending what he calls “crony capitalism.”  As Mother Jones has already pointed out, Koch speaks hypocritically when he criticizes politicians who bend to the will of their cronies in the private sector.  The lifeblood of the crony system is one part lobbying and one part political contributions.  The Koch Bro’s have spent more than $40 million over the past three years alone on lobbying efforts.  We also know they have contributed to a slew of political campaigns, including to elect Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  Forget about the hatred for unions that the Koch Bro’s and their Scottie share.  Scottie’s budget plan would give the governor—that means Scottie—the right to unilaterally sell off certain government assets to private interests at whatever price he wanted to get.  Of course these assets would fit neatly into the Koch’s industrial empire.

Koch closes his Wall Street Journal piece with a plaintive plea to get government out of the economy and just allow consumers to direct resources.   What that means is unfettered capitalism with no product and worker safety regulations, minimum wages, pollution controls or regulations against predatory pricing or other business practices considered unethical.   

Koch concern is that government intervention distorts the marketplace, and the marketplace in Koch’s world is holy. 

What Koch doesn’t mention is that size and money also distort the marketplace. 

For example, a small company with a product that cuts air pollution may never have a chance because a larger company floods all the airwaves with commercials for its pollution-generating product, launches websites that look like news sites that tout its product and, in an unregulated world, sells the product under cost until all competitors have gone out of business.

The government distorts the marketplace and it’s a good thing it does so.  The government distorts when it bans predatory pricing, it distorts when it sets environmental standards, and it distorts when it provides subsidies to companies that produce or consumers who buy more environmentally friendly products.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that ended limits on contributions to political campaigns created an unregulated “marketplace of ideas” for the last election cycle.  Because there were no “market constraints,” the Koch Bro’s and their ilk were able to distort the last election by throwing tons of money into political campaigns of right-wingers and paying for right-wing think tanks to flood the news media with a multitude of bogus studies and deceptive reasoning that discouraged progressives into staying home and marched other voters rightward.

Everything distorts the marketplace.  As a matter of public policy, it’s the government’s job to distort it for the public good, which in the post-industrial Western world has come to include a basic standard of living, education and health care for all, a clean environment and a level playing field in the market and society that sometimes requires constraining the largest market participants.

Among the flotilla of right-wing online publications that clog up the waterways of the Internet is the American Thinker, described by Wikipedia as “a daily conservative Internet publication dealing with American politics, foreign policy, national security, economics, diplomacy, culture, military strategy, and the survival of the State of Israel.”

A recent issue featured an anti-union diatribe title “Why I Changed My Mind About Unions,” by someone named Michael Filozof.  The article serves as a textbook case for a few shabby propaganda techniques. 

The article details how Filozof, child of a union family, evolved from being a union supporter to disliking unions. 

The article unfolds using a tried-and-true rhetorical strategy: argument from the negative.  In the classic argument from the negative, you use the premises of your opponent to prove your point.   The less rigorous form Filozof follows is to start in one position and end in its opposite.  Filozof, at least rhetorically, starts as a supporter and ends as an opponent of unions because he “has seen the negative effects of unions my entire life.”  There is nothing inherently wrong or devious with the argument from the negative—that is, if the details are right.

But all Filozof provides are anecdotes:

•  “I’d heard stories about union people who worked in the steel mill or the auto plants who would punch the clock and than find a place to sleep all day, or would get drunk at lunchtime and return to work and still not get fired…” He never offers any proof of this statement.  They are just vague rumors, so represent the worst type of arguing from anecdote, which is when you prove a point by telling a story.   Too often, though, the argument by anecdote is used when the facts are stacked heavily against a position.  If you don’t have the facts, tell a story.  People will believe the anecdote because it exemplifies what they believe to be true.  That’s why you’ll find more arguments by anecdotes proffered by those on the losing end of the “facts” battle.  In this case, the anecdote is second hand, that is, something he only heard about and did not experience.
• A union guy on a forklift drives by him and his Dad on a shop floor, yelling, “This f…ing job suuuuucks!”  Filozof said it enraged him because he knew that the guy couldn’t be fired because he was in a union and because he knew the guy was making more money than he with his three college degrees was making.  To which I say, BFD.  It’s absurd to condemn unions because one guy expressed what may only be a momentary hatred for his job in a particularly rude manner.  Everyone blows off steam and employees in workplaces in which you can never utter a word of displeasure would probably appreciate the protection of a union.  I have worked in three office environments—newsrooms, ad agencies and corporate marketing departments—and the only way I could imagine any of these workplaces without the occasional whining and the chronic whiners is if they were filled with nothing but robots.
• The same anecdote contains some twisted thinking.  You would think that the fact that the union enabled someone without a college diploma to earn a good living would be a positive attribute of unionism, which should make more educated workers want to unionize themselves. (In fact, they do: teachers, nurses, civil service professionals).  By depicting the earnings ability as a negative, Filozof reveals his anti-union point of view more than he proves his point.
• Now for my favorite: Filozof’s absolute anger at learning that a union roofer who only worked about half the time got paid unemployment for the weeks in which he didn’t work.  He goes on to paint the roofer as a malingering pothead who takes money under the table to do odd jobs in the off season while collecting unemployment.  Let’s strip away these embellishments and look at the core problem he finds—collecting unemployment during weeks when you can’t work.  This option is not limited to union members, but available to anyone with occasional work, including non-unionized accountants, bookkeepers, administrative assistants and other temp workers hired through services, free-lance writers working for agencies and corporations and lawyers staffing large legal processing centers.  I imagine that few of these workers file applications with McDonalds and Wal-Mart during the weeks they don’t have assignments.  What Filozof does is blame the union member for something that is everybody’s right.   

In all the anecdotes, a union guy acts in a way that makes Filozof angry.  But note that in all case, the union guy is doing something all employees—or should I say, representatives of all types and classes of employees—do or have done. 

The other thing to note is that the anger is often because the union guy is doing better than Filozof is doing.  It’s that kind of small-minded envy that forms the basis of the anger that the right-wing and mainstream news media want to instill in others of the middle and working class when it comes to unions.  Now I can understand why representatives of those in the business ruling elite benighted enough to think that they profit in the long run by keeping wages down would want others in the working and middle classes to envy union workers. 

But why do so many people who should look to the union model for improving their own lives instead believe these specious arguments and envy the union worker?  After all, these same media regularly have features that laud the ability of celebrities and business leaders to accumulate money.  Why is it good for business owners to do well, but not for union members?  And why do others in the middle and working class believe this nonsense?

By the way, it was hard to find any information on Filozof.  AmThink says that its contributors are “accomplished in fields beyond journalism and animated to write for the general public out of concern for the complex and morally significant questions on the national agenda.” But like all the writers for AmThink, I had never heard of Filozof.

Good thing I can google Mr. Filozof.  Let’s see now…

I would say that nowadays the major standard for “accomplishment in fields” is a Wikipedia biography.  Mr. Filozof has none. 

And nowadays, writing a book is a sign of accomplishment.  Now if a book has been published and is for sale, you’ll likely be able to find it on Amazon.com.  By this measure, we can conclude that Filozof has published no books.  In fact there is no reference anywhere online to Filozof having written a book.

Piecing together his one-sentence bio on another conservative website, National Review Online, some news reports and a court filing, I was able to learn that once upon a time Filozof was an adjunct professor of political science at the State University of New York at Brockport.  But he last surfaced academically at the prestigious Monroe Community College in the Rochester, New York area, which evidently fired him after allegations that he sexually harassed both a male and a female.  Filozof has sued the community college, claiming a conspiracy to terminate his employment because he is a conservative, and, of course, the lawsuit has gotten him a wee bit of coverage as a martyr on another right-wing website called Accuracy in Academia.

That’s a very bizarre definition of “accomplished in fields beyond journalism” that AmThink is using, don’t you think?

I wanted to pose a question that only time will answer:

Will the energy nationwide among progressives aroused by the Wisconsin public union fight grow and lead to a truly national movement that would sweep not Democrats, but progressives into office?

Will it happen?  Only if we—meaning you, me and everyone we know—make it happen. 

In the abstract that means three great demographic migrations:

1. Working class to Democrats or small progressive parties:  The long-alienated white working class, once called “Reagan Democrats,” must realize that the right-wing anti-government nonsense they bought into actually hurts their economic interests.
2. Young and minorities to polls: The non-voting young and minority must realize that they have to show up at the polls for every election, including all the primaries.
3. Everyone to activists: All of us should make it clear in emails and letters to all candidates and potential candidates where we stand on the issues. 

For those elected to federal offices, here are the demands I would propose that people make of those seeking their votes or funds in the primaries:

• Oppose anti-union measures, especially those that curtail bargaining rights or raid pensions.
• Propose funding the minor Social Security gap by removing the cap on wages that pay the Social Security tax (called FICA).  Right now, people only pay on a maximum of $106,800 in wages.  Robert Reich recently said that if the cap were raised to $180,000, Social Security would be fully funded.    
• Support legislation to raise the minimum wage and tighten the exemptions from it.
• Support a multi-billion-dollar investment program in mass transit in cities and between cities; getting high-speed Internet into every household; improving our existing roads, bridges, tunnels and public parks, and developing alternative fuels and industrial processes, all with the objective of creating jobs and erecting the infrastructure for future growth.
• Call for an immediate withdrawal from both Iraq and Afghanistan and a 40 percent reduction in military spending.
• Support legislation to raise federal income taxes to the levels of 1979, which were historically low at the time but much higher than today, and use the funds to lower the deficit and return social services, education and healthcare programs to full funding.
• Support gay marriage, a woman’s right to an abortion, a fair immigration policy, accurate science teaching in the schools, and greater controls on owning and carrying guns.

Let’s not let our energies dissipate.  Let’s let our oligarchy (or should I say “nobility”) of elected officials and candidates know that they have to begin doing what’s in the best interest of all Americans, not just the wealthy.

Every once in a while I read a news story that’s so slimy and in which civilized humans act so poorly that it makes me want to take a shower or disinfect. 

The latest skin-crawler comes from Dr. Phil Haeck (probably pronounced “hack”!), president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), who has advised plastic surgeons not to label as “cancer” a rare type of cancer linked to breast implants.  Instead, the good doctor wants his fellow plastic surgeons to call it “a condition,” and by all means avoid such terms as malignancy, tumor or cancer.

Now I’m inclined from the get-go to dislike anything plastic surgeons say.  Plastic surgery has its uses, for example, after severe burns, an accident or a mastectomy.  But most plastic surgery, and all plastic surgery that’s advertised in upscale local magazines all over the country, targets vain and insecure people who don’t like their own looks.  That makes plastic surgeon a particularly expensive, painful and pernicious part of the great American dream machine that establishes an ideal of beauty and then tries to make people feel insecure enough about not achieving the ideal to buy the products and services of the cosmetic, love advice and related industries.  Of course it’s not just looks and sexuality that are commoditized in contemporary America, but all emotions and emotional expression.

It’s bad enough to brazenly manipulate the emotions of insecure people to get them to have their noses reshaped, their breasts enlarged or the wrinkles stretched out of their faces.  But to hide a potential cancer that could arise from perhaps the most popular of such procedures—breast implants—is unethical and immoral. 

The unctuous seriousness with which the organization explained away Dr. Haeck’s comments by saying they were taken out of context only made it worse.  The context that the organization supplied was a discussion of a more dangerous type of cancer than the one that the breast implants actually cause.  Of course, both the more dangerous type and the less dangerous type linked to the implants are both typically called “cancer.”

If the good doctor had advised breast-builders to play down the risk, which the Food and Drug Administration recently called quite small, I would not be up in arms.  But Dr. Haeck didn’t play down the risk; he changed the name of the risk from “cancer,” something that makes everyone break out in cold sweats, to “condition,” something ambiguous and only potentially dangerous. 

That’s called a lie, and the ASPS should have met it by terminating Dr. Haeck’s employment.

The Republicans in state offices are taking the fact that their supporters voted in the last election whereas the Democrats’ supporters stayed home as an absolute mandate for change.  I’m not the first and hopefully won’t be the last to point out that in every state it seems, the Republican governors and legislatures are shoving extreme right-wing positions down the throats of citizens, ignoring the fact that surveys show that voters wanted one thing and one thing only—more jobs.

Most notorious at the moment is the attempt of the new Wisconsin Republican governor Scott Walker to unilaterally end collective bargaining with public unions, but Walker is the mere tip of an iceberg of anti-public union activity. New Jersey, Connecticut (Democratic governor), Ohio and Florida are just some of the states in which governors want to balance the budget on the backs of public unions. 

Side note: In going after public unions, these governors are taking advantage of the low esteem in which the average voter currently holds unions.  The anti-union feeling which today is so prevalent among the non-wealthy is a text book case of media brainwashing overcoming the best interests of individuals.  Studies show that unions raise the overall income of most people because they lead to higher incomes both for members and for other employees whose employers have to keep up with union wages and benefits to compete.  But despite this fact, many employees remain adamantly against unions.  The impact of the news media in shaping anti-union opinions since 1980 has been two-fold: 1) Thirty years of anti-union coverage and sub-textual messages in the main stream and right-wing news media; 2) Constant promotion of the Reagan ideology, summed up by the phrase, “the politics of selfishness,” which makes people more inclined to take away from others instead of wanting to emulate why those others are doing well or doing better.

But it’s not just in union-bashing that Republicans are unabashedly pursuing a right-wing agenda:

• Privatization, which leads to a net transfer of wealth from employees to owners while gutting future state revenue: In Pennsylvania, the new Governor Tom Corbett is fast-tracking privatization of hard liquor sales, which will help the state short term but lead to a long-term loss in revenues.
• Loosening gun control laws: Legislators in Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, New Hampshire and other states have all introduced legislation that makes it easier to either own a gun or carry it in public.
• Ending a woman’s control over her own body: Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are trying to end all funding for abortions.  Republican legislators and governors in several states have introduced bills that curtail abortion, make it harder to get or cut funding for women who have them.  The weirdest bill, of course, is the one in the South Dakota legislature that would expand the definition of justifiable homicide to include protection of unborn fetuses.  In other words, it would be open hunting season on abortion providers and women who have abortions in the state of “great places and great faces.”

The Democrats are not immune to pulling these right-wing grand stands.  As the American political establishment has moved increasingly right since the late 70’s, Democrats have picked up the bad habits of Reagan, Bush II and other Republicans to fund government by creating risk-free and often tax-free investment opportunities for the wealthy.  In Illinois, for example, instead of raising taxes on the wealthy to meet a budget shortfall, Democratic Governor Pat Quinn wants to float a bond, which means borrowing money and repaying with tax-free interest. 

Who would have paid more if Illinois raised taxes?—everyone, but primarily rich folk, especially if the new taxes were progressive. 

Who is going to buy the bonds?  Mostly rich folk. 

What were the rich folk going to do with the money that could have been paid in taxes? Mostly invest it in fixed assets like real estate and art or in financial instruments, stocks that are not initial public offerings (the only time the money made in the stock market actually helps a company) and bonds. 

History suggests that raising taxes, especially on the wealthy, always helps the economy, because the government always recirculates the money to recipients of benefits, government employees and government contractors.  It worked for Clinton and it also worked for Reagan!  Keeping taxes on the wealthy low (and remember that taxes on the wealthy in the United States are at a historic low for an industrialized country) hurts the economy because the wealthy rate of recirculation is much less.  And yet the news media and politicians of all mainstream persuasions continue to say the exact opposite.

Welcome to a land ruled by naked oligarchs whose clothes are ideological messages with no basis in reality.