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Rustbelt Rage
An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government.
On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.
Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.
His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.
“Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on.”
He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue to try to take away Social Security, too.
Stack decided that he couldn’t trust big business and would strike out on his own, only to discover that he also couldn’t trust a government that cared nothing about people like him but only about the rich and privileged; or a legal system in which “there are two `interpretations’ for every law, one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us.”
The government leaves us with “the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies (that) are murdering tens of thousands of people a year,” with care rationed largely by wealth, not need.
Stack traces these ills to a social order in which “a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities–and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours.”
Stack’s manifesto ends with two evocative sentences: “The communist creed: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: from each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”
Poignant studies of the U.S. rustbelt reveal comparable outrage among individuals who have been cast aside as state-corporate programs close plants and destroy families and communities.
An acute sense of betrayal comes readily to people who believed they had fulfilled their duty to society in a moral compact with business and government, only to discover they had been only instruments of profit and power.
Striking similarities exist in China, the world’s second largest economy, investigated by UCLA scholar Ching Kwan Lee.
Lee has compared working-class outrage and desperation in the discarded industrial sectors of the U.S. and in what she calls China’s rustbelt–the state socialist industrial center in the Northeast, now abandoned for state capitalist development of the southeast sunbelt.
In both regions Lee found massive labor protests, but different in character. In the rustbelt, workers express the same sense of betrayal as their U.S. counterparts–in their case, the betrayal of the Maoist principles of solidarity and dedication to development of the society that they thought had been a moral compact, only to discover that whatever it was, it is now bitter fraud.
Around the country, scores of millions of workers dropped from work units “are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity,” arousing “rage and desperation,” Lee writes.
Lee’s work and studies of the U.S. rustbelt make clear that we should not underestimate the depth of moral indignation that lies behind the furious, often self-destructive bitterness about government and business power.
In the U.S., the Tea Party movement–and even more so the broader circles it reaches–reflect the spirit of disenchantment. The Tea Party’s anti-tax extremism is not as immediately suicidal as Joe Stack’s protest, but it is suicidal nonetheless.
California today is a dramatic illustration. The world’s greatest public system of higher education is being dismantled.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’ll have to eliminate state health and welfare programs unless the federal government forks over some $7 billion. Other governors are joining in.
Meanwhile a newly powerful states’ rights movement is demanding that the federal government not intrude into our affairs–a nice illustration of what Orwell called “doublethink”: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in mind while believing both of them, practically a motto for our times.
California’s plight results in large part from anti-tax fanaticism. It’s much the same elsewhere, even in affluent suburbs.
Encouraging anti-tax sentiment has long been a staple of business propaganda. People must be indoctrinated to hate and fear the government, for good reasons: Of the existing power systems, the government is the one that in principle, and sometimes in fact, answers to the public and can constrain the depredations of private power.
However, anti-government propaganda must be nuanced. Business of course favors a powerful state that works for multinationals and financial institutions–and even bails them out when they destroy the economy.
But in a brilliant exercise in doublethink, people are led to hate and fear the deficit. That way, business’s cohorts in Washington may agree to cut benefits and entitlements like Social Security (but not bailouts).
At the same time, people should not oppose what is largely creating the deficit–the growing military budget and the hopelessly inefficient privatized healthcare system.
It is easy to ridicule how Joe Stack and others like him articulate their concerns, but it’s far more appropriate to understand what lies behind their perceptions and actions at a time when people with real grievances are being mobilized in ways that pose no slight danger to themselves and to others.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.
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Reader Comments
About the only thing I would disagree with in this article is this sentence:
“He could have added that the super-rich and their political allies continue to try to take away Social Security, too.”
It has already been taken (into the general fund) and spent. The “Special Social Security Bonds” are non-negotiable and simply amount to IOUs.
Here in Illinois I protested NAFTA’s passage in 1993 and countless times since as I watched my own business evaporate along with all the Manufacturing jobs. My city is now at 20% unemployment and people who cannot sell their homes (a huge glut) cannot leave to find work elsewhere.
The whole world’s economy is in the same mess and pretending it can be fixed by a return to massive borrowing — CRAZY!
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. “
- John F. Kennedy
Posted by whattheheck on May 5, 2010 at 5:16 AM
I love Noam Chomsky, of course. But his repeating this lie by Joe Stack is offensive: “Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was Social Security to live on.”
The United Steelworkers union worked hard to preserve the pensions of all workers at failed steel manufacturers. And it did so in some cases. The USW is an honest union and has never been accused by any government or law enforcement agency of corruption.
Posted by Barbara White Stack on May 5, 2010 at 12:09 PM
Whattheheck,
The only I would disagree with in your post is this sentence:
“It has already been taken (into the general fund) and spent. The “Special Social Security Bonds” are non-negotiable and simply amount to IOUs.”
I so tire of this mindless mantra. It isn’t true and there is certainly no proof that there is. No one is claiming this to be the case; not the federal government or anyone else.
The Social Security Trust Fund earns interest on the US Treasury bonds that it owns. This interest makes the difference lately between a surplus or a deficit in its annual accounts. Here is how the SSA explains it on their website:
“Far from being “worthless IOUs,” the investments held by the trust funds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U. S. Government. The government has always repaid Social Security, with interest. The special-issue securities are, therefore, just as safe as U.S. Savings Bonds or other financial instruments of the Federal government. Many options are being considered to restore long-range trust fund solvency. These options are being considered now, over 25 years in advance of the year the funds are likely to be exhausted. It is thus likely that legislation will be enacted to restore long-term solvency, making it unlikely that the trust funds’ securities will need to be redeemed on a large scale prior to maturity.”
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/fundFAQ.html#n3
And according to a recent report;
“For the budget year that ends in September, Social Security is projected to collect $677 billion in taxes and spend $706 billion on benefits and expenses. Social Security will also collect about $120 billion in interest on the trust funds, according to the CBO projections, meaning its overall balance sheet will continue to grow. The interest, however, is paid by the government, adding even more to the budget deficit.”
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2010/03/14/social-check.html
This means that the SS Trust Fund will have a surplus of $91 billion this fiscal year. So long as the economy turns up SS will be in decent shape for the foreseeable future. Much of the hysteria is unwarrented.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on May 5, 2010 at 4:55 PM
what you folks have missed is that these retirement funds weren’t meant to last.
the concept of social security and pension funds from a persons work were invented as anti communist propaganda to help keep communism out of the west, now many of you will say this is a crock, when did the pension plans start failing and social security start talk about going bancrupt?
After the fall of the soviet union folks, 6 months after the fall of the USSR our government started talking about getting rid of the welfare system, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do the math folks!
this situation is called the rise of corporate facism folks, they no longer have the threat of communism to worry about and the are now begining to show the people the little more than serfs, with no right to a living wage, the people are being cornered onto into unending debt for ourselves and our decendants, our economy is based on debt, yet everyone wants to get out of debt and no one can figure out why we’re in a depression, its called the first step to SLAVERY folks, there is an old term ” indentured servitude”, the term used to describe the person thrown into slavery for not being able to pay off their debt, and this is something the corporate facists want back!
The REAL question here- DO YOU WANT THIS SYSTEM TO RETURN TO THE WORLD?
Posted by David Young on May 6, 2010 at 3:05 PM
I agree that we must protect entitlement spending both because it is needed by the poor and because it is the most effective economic stimulus. As far as the debt problem goes, Keynesian economist Thomas Palley provides an excellent analysis in a recent article.
“Debt provides consumers with a means of maintaining consumption despite stagnant wages and widened income inequality, while financial boom provides consumers and firms with collateral to support further debt-financed spending…The neoliberal growth model has a logic that begins with redirecting income from workers to upper-income management and profits. Workers then maintain consumption despite stagnant wage income by borrowing, while the nonfinancial corporate sector promotes financial boom via stock buy-backs and leveraged buyouts. Not only does that raise stock prices; it also transfers funds to households. These practices explain rising household and corporate indebtedness, measured respectively as debt-to-income and debt-to-equity ratios, and increased indebtedness explains the shift of profits toward the financial sector. Borrowing is facilitated and expanded by financial innovation and financial deregulation, which become essential to keeping the system going. Thus, not only does neoliberalism ideologically support financial deregulation; it also needs it, functionally.”
http://www.monthlyreview.org/100401palley.php
Financialization, entailing the growth of financial sector profits from about 17% of total corporate profits in 1965 to about 44% in 2002, was a strategy for sustaining GDP growth along with tax cuts for the rich and stagnant wages. It has led to massive debt. We can no longer afford the rich. A redistribution of income is necessary.
Posted by cabdriverinchicago on May 7, 2010 at 10:35 AM
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