#1 and #2 run together. If spam is the problem, you don’t need to block access to the Web site. However, if you are concerned that students are going to read the petition, [...]]]> In the spirit of the excellent colloquy here about Marvin’s thinking on First Amendment architectures, I bring up this news item: Arizona State University blocked both Web access to, and e-mail from, the change.org Web site. ASU students had begun a petition demanding that the university reduce tuition. The university essentially made three claims as to why it did so (below, in order of increasing stupidity):

1. It was a technical mistake;
2. Change.org was spamming ASU; and
3. ASU needs to “protect the use of our limited and valuable network resources for legitimate academic, research and administrative uses.”

#1 and #2 run together. If spam is the problem, you don’t need to block access to the Web site. However, if you are concerned that students are going to read the petition, and sign it, you do need to block access to the Web site.

For #2, sorry, ASU, this isn’t spam. Spam is unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail. Change.org is, allegedly, sending unsolicited political e-mail. And that’s protected by the First Amendment – see, for example, the Virginia Supreme Court’s analysis of that state’s anti-spam law that covered political messages. Potential political spammers have a sharp disincentive to fill recipient’s inboxes – it’s a sure-fire way to annoy them into opposing your position.

For #3, ASU doesn’t get to determine what academic and research uses are “legitimate.” If they throttle P2P apps, that’s fine. If they limit file sizes for attachments, no problem. But deciding that the message from Change.org is not “legitimate” is classic, and unconstitutional, viewpoint discrimination.

This looks like censorship. I think it’s more likely to be stupidity: someone in ASU’s IT department decided to block these messages as spam, and to filter outbound Web requests to the site contained within those messages. But: with great power over the network comes great responsibility. Well-intentioned constitutional violations are still unlawful. It would also help if ASU’s spokesperson simply admitted the mistake rather than engaging in idiotic justification.

As I mention in Orwell’s Armchair, public actors are increasingly important sources of Internet access. But when ASU and other public universities take on the role of ISP, they need to remember that they are not AOL: their technical decisions are constrained not merely by tech resources, but by our commitment to free speech. Let’s hope the Sun Devils cool off on the filtering…

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

Cybersecurity is a conundrum. Despite a decade of sustained attention from scholars, legislators, military officials, popular media, and successive presidential administrations, little if any progress has been made in augmenting Internet security. Current scholarship on cybersecurity is bound to ill-fitting doctrinal models. [...]]]> Cybersecurity is in the news: a network intrusion allegedly interfered with railroad signals in the Northwest in December; the Obama administration refused to support the Stop Online Piracy Act due to worries about interfering with DNSSEC; and the GAO concluded that the Department of Homeland Security is making things worse by oversharing. So, I’m fortunate that the Minnesota Law Review has just published the final version of Conundrum (available on SSRN), in which I argue that we should take an information-based approach to cybersecurity:

Cybersecurity is a conundrum. Despite a decade of sustained attention from scholars, legislators, military officials, popular media, and successive presidential administrations, little if any progress has been made in augmenting Internet security. Current scholarship on cybersecurity is bound to ill-fitting doctrinal models. It addresses cybersecurity based upon identification of actors and intent, arguing that inherent defects in the Internet’s architecture must be remedied to enable attribution. These proposals, if adopted, would badly damage the Internet’s generative capacity for innovation. Drawing upon scholarship in economics, animal behavior, and mathematics, this Article takes a radical new path, offering a theoretical model oriented around information, in distinction to the near-obsession with technical infrastructure demonstrated by other models. It posits a regulatory focus on access and alteration of data, and on guaranteeing its integrity. Counterintuitively, it suggests that creating inefficient storage and connectivity best protects user capabilities to access and alter information, but this necessitates difficult tradeoffs with preventing unauthorized interaction with data. The Article outlines how to implement inefficient information storage and connectivity through legislation. Lastly, it describes the stakes in cybersecurity debates: adopting current scholarly approaches jeopardizes not only the Internet’s generative architecture, but also key normative commitments to free expression on-line.

Conundrum, 96 Minn. L. Rev. 584 (2011).

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to say, never. Media sources credit the Obama administration’s opposition to some of the more noxious parts of SOPA, such as its DNSSEC-killing filtering provisions, and also the tech community’s efforts to raise awareness. (Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has been working overtime in reporting on SOPA; Wikipedia and Reddit are adopting a blackout to draw attention; even the New York City techies are holding a demonstration in front of the offices of Senators [...]]]> Thanks to Danielle and the CoOp crew for having me! I’m excited.

Speaking of exciting developments, it appears that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is dead, at least for now. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has said that the bill will not move forward until there is a consensus position on it, which is to say, never. Media sources credit the Obama administration’s opposition to some of the more noxious parts of SOPA, such as its DNSSEC-killing filtering provisions, and also the tech community’s efforts to raise awareness. (Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has been working overtime in reporting on SOPA; Wikipedia and Reddit are adopting a blackout to draw attention; even the New York City techies are holding a demonstration in front of the offices of Senators Kirstin Gillibrand and Charles Schumer. Schumer has been bailing water on the SOPA front after one of his staffers told a local entrepreneur that the senator supports Internet censorship. Props for candor.) I think the Obama administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the bill is important, but I suspect that a crowded legislative calendar is also playing a significant role.

Of course, the PROTECT IP Act is still floating around the Senate. It’s less worse than SOPA, in the same way that Transformers 2 is less worse than Transformers 3. (You still might want to see what else Netflix has available.) And sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy has suggested that the DNS filtering provisions of the bill be studied – after the legislation is passed. It’s much more efficient, legislatively, to regulate first and then see if it will be effective. A more cynical view is that Senator Leahy’s move is a public relations tactic designed to undercut the opposition, but no one wants to say so to his face.

I am not opposed to Internet censorship in all situations, which means I am often lonely at tech-related events. But these bills have significant flaws. They threaten to badly weaken cybersecurity, an area that is purportedly a national priority (and has been for 15 years). They claim to address a major threat to IP rightsholders despite the complete lack of data that the threat is anything other than chimerical. They provide scant procedural protections for accused infringers, and confer extraordinary power on private rightsholders – power that will, inevitably, be abused. And they reflect a significant public choice imbalance in how IP and Internet policy is made in the United States.

Surprisingly, the Obama administration has it about right: we shouldn’t reject Internet censorship as a regulatory mechanism out of hand, but we should be wary of it. This isn’t the last stage of this debate – like Wesley in The Princess Bride, SOPA-like legislation is only mostly dead. (And, if you don’t like the Obama administration’s position today, just wait a day or two.)

Cross-posted at Info/Law.

One of the toughest parts about working with the type of technologists I focus on— intelligent, opinionated, online a lot of the time—is that many will unabashedly dissect my every word, statement, and media appearance. This attribute of my research, unsurprisingly, has been the source of considerable anxiety, only made worse in recent times with Anonymous as I have to make [...]]]> Inspired by Orin Kerr’s question (“is your work focused on the internal narratives and ideologies that people use to describe/justify what they do, or is it focused externally on the actual conduct of what people do?”) below I will give a sense of how I walk the line between what we might call idealism and practice among the geeks and hackers I study.

One of the toughest parts about working with the type of technologists I focus on— intelligent, opinionated, online a lot of the time—is that many will unabashedly dissect my every word, statement, and media appearance. This attribute of my research, unsurprisingly, has been the source of considerable anxiety, only made worse in recent times with Anonymous as I have to make “authoritative” statements about them in the midst studying them, in other words, in the midst of having incomplete information.

All of this is to say I am deliberate and diplomatic when it comes to word choice, framing, and arguments. But most of the time examining practice in light of or up against idealism does not take the somewhat noxious form of “exposing” secrets, the implication being that people are so mystified and deluded that you, the outsider, are there to inform the world of what is really going on (there is a a long standing tradition in the humanities and social sciences, loosely inspired by Karl Marx and especially Pierre Bourdieu, taking this stance, not my favorite strain of analysis unless done really when needed and very well).

Much of what I do is to unearth those dynamics which may not be natively theorized but are certainly in operation. Take for instance the following example at the nexus of law and politics: during fieldwork it was patently clear that many free software hackers were wholly uninterested in politics outside of software freedom and those aligned with open source explicitly disavowed even this narrowly defined political agenda. Many were also repelled by the law (as one developer put it, “writing an algorithm in legalese should be punished with death…. a horrible one, by preference”) and yet weeks into research it was obvious that many developers are nimble legal thinkers, which helps explain how they have built, in a relatively short time period, a robust alternative body of legal theory and laws. One reason for this facility is that the skills, mental dispositions, and forms of reasoning necessary to read and analyze a formal, rule-based system like the law parallel the operations necessary to code software. Both are logic-oriented, internally consistent textual practices that require great attention to detail. Small mistakes in both law and software—a missing comma in a contract or a missing semicolon in code—can jeopardize the integrity of the system and compromise the intention of the author of the text. Both lawyers and programmers develop mental habits for making, reading, and parsing what are primarily utilitarian texts and this makes a lot of free software hackers, who already must pay attention to the law in light of free software licenses, adept legal thinkers, although of course this does not necessarily mean they would make good lawyers.

One of the the important and often overlooked disjunctures between an ideal and practice concerns the hacker idealization of decentralization/individualism/horizontalism and the fact that many have built stable and intricate organizations. When free software developers (and many other hackers) collectively labor they often do as they idealize: they keep things open-ended, flexible, and decentralized. The love of individualism is also undeniable. But they have also been astoundingly adept builders of stable institutions with forms of vertical authority and in the case of free software were doing so back when the 20^th became the 21^st century, back when the web was in its so-called less mature, web 1.0 “pre-teen” years. But the reality of institution building and social collectivism was rarely addressed by those writing on the topic—although this has thankfully started to change in the last few years. Instead the most common story told about online collaboration is that knowledge, software, etc is being created by forces of mild disorganization whereby individuals, acting in very loose coordination with each other, led to novel forms of collaboration; this vision reaching prominence, I think, for the way it so perfectly meshes with with and thus supports dominant, widespread, (and idealized) understandings of freedom, agency, and individualism. There is no better example of this sentiment than the title of Clay Shirky’s widely read 2006 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Although many of his observations about digital dynamics are illuminating, and many of the examples he draws on, such as Meetup groups, remain informal, many others he also discusses, such as Wikipedia and Linux, were by 2006, organized, and thus, some type of organization.

The new institutions built by free software developers and other groups (Indymedia was remarkably well organized by 2001) are not the large slumbering bureaucracies most often associated with governments, the post office, or large corporations. Nor do they follow the wisdom of the crowd. In building what are new institutional forms, open source developers often seek to strike a balance between stability and open-ended flexibility and individualism and collectivism. In the process of doing so, many engender particular forms of social value that include mutual aid, transparency, and complex codes for collaboration and other ethical precepts that help guide technical production. In the case of Debian—the largest and perhaps most stunningly of organized of free and open source software projects—its policies, direction, and imperatives are decided by a collective who not only create software but also have innovated, quite successfully, in institution building and much of my work has focused on this side of their practical activity, which is not always part of their ideological repertoire (but sometimes it is).

Anonymous, which so far has steadfastly avoided institution building (not a surprise as it so flies in the face of their ideological commitments and there is not always much coherence there either), presents different sorts of issues and problems when a researcher like myself gauges how and when to reconcile between their idealizations and practice; I have never been accused of suffering Stockholm Syndrome with my work on free software, but this is routinely launched at me due to my work on Anonymous. And probably meaty enough of an accusation to warrant its own post.

When we stormed the streets last January, we chanted “Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema’eya” (“Bread, Freedom, Social Justice”). . . . Ten months down the road, yesterday we chanted in Tahrir, “Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema’eya” (“Bread, Freedom, Social Justice”). Why? [...]]]> At a time of global economic crisis, the renewed centrality of two origin points of modern civilization (Greece and Egypt) is uncanny. Nagla Rizk, a professor and dean at the American University in Cairo, has courageously offered a nuanced and critical perspective on tomorrow’s elections there and the past 10 months of political turmoil. I was privileged to meet Prof. Rizk while at Yale’s Access to Knowledge Global Academy, and I highly recommend following her work and twitter feed. A few insights from her:

When we stormed the streets last January, we chanted “Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema’eya” (“Bread, Freedom, Social Justice”). . . . Ten months down the road, yesterday we chanted in Tahrir, “Aish, Horreya, Adala Egtema’eya” (“Bread, Freedom, Social Justice”). Why? . . .

Rather than tackling the root of the problem or starting a dialogue with the protesters, [the post-Mubarak SCAF regime] chose to order them to go home. To add insult to injury, SCAF and its government portrayed them as the cause of instability, turning the rest of Egypt against them.

Meanwhile, the economy has suffered gravely. Tourism and foreign investments have been the obvious casualties. Egypt’s net foreign reserves have fallen from $36 billion in 2010 to $22 billion, its credit rating has been downgraded, prices continue to rise and the budget deficit to swell. . . .

Aggravating the situation has been the perception of the business class as allies of the old regime. This has put all members of the business community in one pot: the corrupt. The anti capitalist rhetoric (global really) has fed into calls for tighter regulation of the private sector within a general anti business environment. In addition to scaring away potential investors, the sad news is that several entrepreneurs and small business owners have closed down and workers have been laid off, compounding unemployment.

I tend to agree with Matthew Stoller that what is going on in Egypt is part of a much larger global movement. We need more voices like Rizk’s to inform the US media’s portrayal of a painful transition from oligarchy to a more just distribution of political and material power.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Herman Cain had a legitimate chance of becoming the Republican nominee for President.  Now imagine that he actually engaged in unlawful behavior toward at least one female employee of the National Restaurant Association.  That employee would like to talk about what happened, but she is worried that she’ll breach a 1998 severance and nondisclosure agreement if she talks to the press.

Now, let our imagination run wild. The accuser – angered by Cain’s denials of bad conduct- decides to throw caution to the wind and go public.  Her allegations are salacious & they portray Cain in [...]]]>

Five Percent Chance of Being the Nominee. Zero Percent Chance of Recovering Damages in a Breach of Contract Lawsuit for Violation of an NDA.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Herman Cain had a legitimate chance of becoming the Republican nominee for President.  Now imagine that he actually engaged in unlawful behavior toward at least one female employee of the National Restaurant Association.  That employee would like to talk about what happened, but she is worried that she’ll breach a 1998 severance and nondisclosure agreement if she talks to the press.

Now, let our imagination run wild. The accuser – angered by Cain’s denials of bad conduct- decides to throw caution to the wind and go public.  Her allegations are salacious & they portray Cain in the worst possible light.  Notwithstanding her claims, Herman Cain actually gets a bump in the polling and becomes the nominee.  During the general election campaign, other women come forward – sparked by the original accuser’s courage.  Nevertheless, given the dominance of deterministic macro-economic factors over political strategy and common sense, Cain wins a tight election to become the next President of the United States.  At that point, emboldened, he decides to sue the woman who released the information about him for breach of contract, on a theory that he was a third-party beneficiary of the nondisclosure agreement.  (Let’s pretend that this is a doctrinal possibility.)

Last year, in a discussion with Larry Cunningham and Dan Solove, I argued that it’s exceedingly unlikely that any state court in the Union would award damages for breach of a nondisclosure agreement under circumstances like these, where (i) the information to be protected relates to sexual misconduct; (ii) the information is of immense value to the public at large; and (iii) it’s basically impossible for the promisee to prove damages with any certainty.  I am still convinced this is true, and that the media too uncritically reports that parties are “bound” by NDAs that would have almost no effect if tested in Court.

This line of thinking makes me doubt that fear of a breach of contract lawsuit is playing any role at all in the refusal of Cain’s accuser to come forward.  Rather, as her lawyer said today, she is afraid of the reputational damage that disclosure would bring, even if she’s entirely in the right.

1) “They’re just spoiled hippies who can’t get a job.” A quick glance at the “We are the 99%” tumblr could easily dispel this notion. The economic suffering in this country is deep and broad. As one news story put it, “one in three Americans would be unable to make their mortgage or rent payment beyond one month if they lost their job.” Even if the most down-and-out people are [...]]]> The Occupy Wall Street protests continue to grow, and to gain support from public intellectuals. Joe Stiglitz, Anne Marie Slaughter, and Paul Krugman are the latest luminaries to praise the cause. The movement has also provoked derision. Let’s consider the latest Norquist/Limbaugh memes as the protest nears the one-month mark:

1) “They’re just spoiled hippies who can’t get a job.” A quick glance at the “We are the 99%” tumblr could easily dispel this notion. The economic suffering in this country is deep and broad. As one news story put it, “one in three Americans would be unable to make their mortgage or rent payment beyond one month if they lost their job.” Even if the most down-and-out people are too poor or busy to get to Wall Street (or the hundreds of other actions now taking place), many of them think of the OWS crowd as speaking for them.

There is so much needless suffering going on now, and so much wealth accumulating at the very top. It is hard to understand how critics dismiss the protesters so cavalierly. I used to find the Biblical passage about God hardening Pharaoh’s heart one of the more mysterious parts of the Book of Exodus; now I feel like I’m witnessing it firsthand.

2) “They should be in Washington, not Wall Street.” Never fear, OccupyKStreet is here. More seriously, this criticism misses the entire point of the protest. Wall Street and Washington have fused. Both politicians and the Fed gave enormous subsidies to large Wall Street firms, while asking almost nothing in return. You can read Larry Lessig’s Republic, Lost, or Kwak & Johnson’s Thirteen Bankers for all the gritty details. For now, let’s just say that entities that borrow at close to zero percent, lend at 4.5 to 20+%, and pay top managers billions in salary and bonuses, are not exactly Steve Jobs-level entrepreneurs. Rather, they’re part of a corrupt revolving door system that sends a favored group back and forth between government and business. We’d do better simply to pay off this shadow elite directly than to subsidize the trillion dollar schemes that maintain the illusion that our banking system is independent.

This is not a partisan critique. Like the OWS protesters, I have focused on the role of the Democratic party in covertly supporting a system that is openly applauded by establishment GOP figures. As Matt Stoller observes, “Rubinites still dominate Democratic policymaking — Larry Summers, Jason Furman, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Gene Sperling are all Rubin acolytes. Jack Lew, the current Office of Management and Budget director, is from Citigroup; Peter Orzag, the former OMB director, went to Citigroup. White House chief of staff Bill Daley is a JP Morgan man.”

Principled libertarians have also offered Hayekian critiques of the “Government Sachs” nexus. Russ Roberts at the Mercatus Institute has perceptively recognized the close ties between the US state and Wall Street. Amar Bhide has offered a brilliant Hayekian critique of the concentration of power in large financial institutions. From the opposite end of the political spectrum, Michael Hudson pithily observes that “economic planning has passed from government to the financial sector.” Individuals with a wide range of political commitments want to break up megabanks, or engage in more fundamental reform than contemplated in Dodd-Frank. OWS is protesting a form of corporatism that privatizes gains and socializes losses. Anyone who opposes welfare for the poorest should be passionately committed to a program that would cut off the richest from the trough of implicit and explicit subsidy that is at the core of our financial system.

3) “They’re breaking the law.” Were we back in the 1960s, I could perhaps understand how a claque of law-and-order Archie Bunkers could fulminate against the Yippies trying to levitate the Pentagon. If order is your highest social goal, the spontaneous transformation of a soulless, stone-covered city block in Lower Manhattan into a festive site of music and education may spark a frisson. But what’s different today is that the targets of the protest are so clearly lawbreakers themselves. In a 1993 article, economists Akerlof and Romer proposed that “an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society’s expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success).” They called this “bankruptcy for profit,” and its main features have a depressingly familiar ring.

As William K. Black explains in his theory of “control fraud,” the key to business success on Wall Street has been speculative ventures implicitly or explicitly backed by the government or the Fed. As Black has argued repeatedly, to make the scheme work, there must be some form of insurance—–such as public deposit insurance or private policies—–that promises to “make whole” those whose funds are lost in a speculative endeavor. Second, there must seem to be, on paper, some valuation that makes the entity’s investments seem worthwhile. Insurers are not stupid; they demand some evidence that the firm has an overall net worth sufficient to permit it to meet future obligations. These demands lead to the third element: a systematic subversion of the normal tools used to assess the stability and soundness of going concerns. Accountants and auditors are supposed to impose transparency on a firm’s accounts, but can easily be coopted into “aggressive” statements of positions. The looting leadership has a variety of mechanisms at its disposal. Accounting frauds can vastly overstate the value of current holdings. Opacity hides transfers of favors that justify contracts that are irrational on their face.

In a long series of posts, I have described the shady dealings—the special purpose entities, the accounting fraud, the daisy chain of favors leading to CDO sales, the fake insurance (aka AIG-underwritten CDS’s), the epidemic of foreclosure fraud—that generated countless Wall Street fortunes over the past decade. Wall Street’s winners are now trying to leverage those gains into permanent political victories, both to entrench the system of favors that helped them succeed and to cut the “entitlements” that generate rival claims to the public weal. OWS is trying to stop the illicit gains of the past decade from permanently deforming our economy.

As the protesters watch megabanks grab thousands of properties via foreclosures, often through processes that are utterly lawless, they think it equitable and just that they get to claim some small parcel of lower Manhattan as a center for their own deliberative processes. Giving them this space is the least that New York’s increasingly plutocratic and petulant Mayor Bloomberg can do.

4) “They should be thankful for what they have. Real poverty means living on $1 a day.” Rush Limbaugh recently praised a report by one of his advertisers, the Heritage Foundation, which details how good the US poor have it. A full 99% have refrigerators! But of course, selling that refrigerator would only buy about 8 days of food for most families.

The relative inequality point initially intrigued me. As Jared Diamond has noted, “The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world.” But I no longer see a rational connection between the vast fortunes made by those at the top and a process of globalization that either balances consumption or creates rising living standards for all.

Yes, there are serious moral questions raised by global inequality that renders the average American better off than 90% of the population in poorer countries. As I noted earlier, a soi-disant Green Tory might advocate for more money circulating in the economy’s stratosphere: a luxury handbag costing $80,000 may have less of a carbon footprint than, say, 32 Tata Nanos.

But for anyone truly concerned about the environment, it would be far better to see the handbag consumption turned to sustainable energy investment, rather than continuing as a diversion of spending power away from the poor. Moreover, if domestic and international inequality continues at current levels, it will reinforce the US recession. Even for those who think the average US citizen is too rich anyway, the probable political consequences of perpetual stagnation are frightening. Money is being drained away from an ordinary economy into an economic stratosphere whose denizens appear increasingly out-of-touch with the workers who feed, defend, and otherwise serve them.

5) “They have no demands!” This is the most bizarre criticism of OWS as a social movement. As one organizer puts it, ‘We haven’t had a shortage of demands and solutions. We’ve had a shortage of mass movements.’ Moreover, it’s pretty predictable what will happen once demands get issued officially. If they’re too ambitious, the movement will be dismissed as socialism. If they’re moderate, it will be dismissed as stealth Obamaism, and the protesters will be condescendingly asked “why can’t you just participate in the political system as it is?”

The protesters’ deliberation about what demands to make (or goals to set) is laudable. It also reflects successful aspects of the pro-life movement. As Mike Konczal notes, “Beliefs about abortion are often underdeveloped, incoherent, and inconsistent until individuals become actively engaged with the movement. The process of conviction is the result of mobilization, not a necessary prerequisite for it.” Deciding how to exercise political power in a distributed and democratic way in the 21st century is a huge challenge. I am certain there will be divisions over what issues to prioritize, and how to balance global and local claims. Certainly that process is closer to a democratic ideal than a unified Jacobin cry to drown government in a bathtub.

The protesters realize that they, like much of the bottom 90% of society, are on an economic playing field that is tilted against them. They feel that normal channels of political change are blocked (especially given corporate influence over the Democratic party, the usual target of egalitarian reformist energy). Addressing these issues will take a lot of thought, reflection, and debate.

In conclusion, I just want to quote from a comment of the always thoughtful Patrick S. O’Donnell:

The protesters are participating in a “social movement,” defined as “a summary expression for a variety of collective efforts by the relatively powerless to exercise historical power.” (Richard Flacks) In protesting, social movement actors “break with, step out of, stop complying with, the terms and conditions of their accustomed daily lives.” In doing so, they attempt to influence their life circumstances and the life circumstances of those similarly situated, and this often entails considerable risks and costs. In a sclerotic democracy, we should give thanks to those willing to assume such risks and costs. These protests are in part and for some democratic forms of resistance in dramatic and urgent response to grave threats to accustomed, shared patterns of everyday living (even if some of the preconditions and conditions of such living were, and are, as we saw above, disturbing). Existing ways of life and cherished values are being undermined or threatened such that protests by social movements are the only political means available for bringing the attention needed to appreciate the gravity of such threats.

In many chilling ways, old social contracts are being broken, with nothing provided in their place. Old models of cooperation between the state and the market are breaking down, as incidents ranging from prescription drug shortages to food safety failures show. The global financial system teeters on the brink of meltdown thanks to a potential “Lehman style event” that regulators still have not managed to adequately monitor, let alone circumvent. These are urgent problems that an entrenched business-government elite has addressed listlessly, if at all. (This is not meant to criticize many well-intentioned front-line personnel, just to note that revolving door dynamics for political appointees and woefully inadequate funding often render their work a mere pantomime of effective enforcement action.) Occupy Wall Street has moral authority because it is addressing these problems. Its critics ought to be joining that process.

PS: A final reflection on the system of justice OWS is commenting on:

Image Credit (top image): Waywuwei.

One major effect of the filibuster is to expand presidential power, as I argue at pp. 41-47 of my new article draft.  [...]]]> It is no secret that the use of the filibuster has grown substantially in recent years.  (I documented the growth at pp. 1008-11 of this article.)  In the new issue of CQ Weekly, Ben Weyl notes yet another expansion of the filibuster:  Senate Republicans are currently filibustering Richard Cordray’s nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), not because they have any particular objection to him, but simply because they want changes in the underlying law (Dodd-Frank).  As Weyl’s article relates, Sen. Sherrod Brown noted at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that the Senate historian could not remember another instance of this occurring.

One major effect of the filibuster is to expand presidential power, as I argue at pp. 41-47 of my new article draft.  In the case of substantive legislation, this means that more gets done via regulation than legislation — consider the number of EPA regulations dealing with global warming (nicely documented by Jonathan Adler in this article (link is to a PDF)) — after the Senate filibustered the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009.  Likewise in the nominations arena: A President whose nominee had been voted down would find it politically nearly impossible to recess appoint that person.  Additionally, federal law forbids the government to pay the salary of someone who is serving in a position after the Senate has voted not to confirm her for that position.  But a President whose nominee has been filibustered presents a very different situation.  The President can argue that he is not disregarding the will of the Senate; rather, minority obstructionism has left the Senate unable to express its will.  This, for example, is what the President did in recess appointing Donald Berwick to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and it is what he originally did in appointing Elizabeth Warren as a Special Assistant to the President and to the Secretary of the Treasury with the responsibility of setting up the CFPB, rather than nominating her to actually run the CFPB.  Indeed, when it was still thought that the President might nominate Warren to actually run the CFPB, Katrina vanden Heuvel, writing in the Post, urged the President to use a recess appointment, noting that “[p]urblind Republican obstruction liberates the president to do the right thing.”  A masthead editorial in the Times took almost exactly the same tack.

Ah, but some will say, the House of Representatives can prevent the President from making recess appointments.  Here’s how:  Article I, sec. 5, cl. 4 of the Constitution provides that “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting.”  Since the consensus (including among executive branch lawyers) is that, at the very least, a recess must be longer than three days to allow the President to make a recess appointment, the House can prevent recess appointments simply by refusing to agree to any Senate request to adjourn.

Not so fast.  Article II, sec. 3 provides that “in Case of Disagreement between them [the houses of Congress], with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he [the President] may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”  So, in other words, if the House and Senate can’t agree on adjournment, the President can adjourn them both. (The limit on complete executive abuse of power here is the requirement in both Article I and in the 20th Amendment that Congress must assemble at least once per year, so the President cannot adjourn them for longer than that.)  Creating a disagreement between the houses would be easy for the Senate majority — a motion to adjourn is privileged and non-debatable, which means that it cannot be filibustered and must be voted upon immediately.  So, the Senate majority, by bare majority, could vote to adjourn for more than three days.  The House could either (a) concur, which would allow the President to make a recess appointment, or (b) refuse to concur, in which case the President could adjourn the houses for more than three days, and then make a recess appointment.

Now, no President has ever exercised his power to adjourn the houses, largely because there has never really been cause to do so.  But if the Senate minority continues to be indiscriminately obstructionist, pressure will continue to grow for recess appointments, and the President will have a strong rhetorical case that 40 Senators should not be able to prevent important posts from being filled.  If the House then chooses to obstruct the Senate’s ability to recess, it does not seem a stretch that the President, in consultation with the Senate majority leadership, would begin exploring the route described above.

Once again, the filibuster pushes the President to expand executive power.  Growing use of the filibuster encourages growing use of recess appointments.  A different but related form of obstructionism — the House refusing to let the Senate adjourn — could lead to the President’s unprecedented exercise of his power to adjourn.  And the houses of Congress continue to shoot themselves in the foot by making injudicious use of their constitutional powers.

(A final note: I do not have any objection per se to the Senate’s use of the appointments power as a tool to get what it wants in other substantive areas.  Indeed, I would applaud this more vigorous use of its constitutional power, just as I applaud the House for making vigorous use of its power of the purse in inter-branch conflicts.  But a Senate up-or-down vote is categorically different from a filibuster.  Senate rejection of a nominee would not “liberate” (to use vanden Heuvel’s word) the President to act unilaterally.)

Flash mobs have been eliciting wide-eyed excitement for the better part of the past decade now. They were playful and glaringly pointless in their earliest manifestations. Mobbers back then were content with the playful performance art of the thing. Early proponents, at the same time, breathlessly lauded the flash mob “movement.”

MGK leads a movement (Youtube)

Today, the flash mob has matured into something much more complex than these early proponents prophesied. For one, they involve unsupported and disaffected young people of color in cities on [...]]]>

Like Professor Zick, I am grateful for the invitation to share my view of the world with Concurring Opinions. I’d like to pick up where his post on strange expressive acts left off and, along the way, perhaps answer his question.

Flash mobs have been eliciting wide-eyed excitement for the better part of the past decade now. They were playful and glaringly pointless in their earliest manifestations. Mobbers back then were content with the playful performance art of the thing. Early proponents, at the same time, breathlessly lauded the flash mob “movement.”

MGK leads a movement (Youtube)

Today, the flash mob has matured into something much more complex than these early proponents prophesied. For one, they involve unsupported and disaffected young people of color in cities on the one hand and, on the other, anxious and unprepared law enforcement officials. A fateful mix.

In North London in early August, mobile online social networking and messaging probably helped outrage over the police shooting of a young black man morph into misanthropic madness.  Race-inflected flash mob mischief hit the U.S. this summer, too. Most major metropolitan newspapers and cable news channels this summer have run stories about young black people across the country using their idle time and fleet thumbs to organize shoplifting, beatings, and general indiscipline. This is not the first time the U.S. has seen the flash mob or something like it. (Remember the 2000 recount in Florida?) But the demographic and commercial politics of these events in particular ought to raise eyebrows.

The more disruptive the disenfranchised become, the more they provoke harsh responses from authorities, thus worsening their already marginal position. By contrast, finance and government elites have positioned themselves to gain from whatever risks they shift onto society at large, via bailouts, emergency powers, and the revolving door. As Ross Douthat observed, [...]]]> Bernard Harcourt has analyzed new forms of radicalism adopted by the most and least privileged. Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review has also identified dispositions shared by street looters and certain elites. As the chief political commentator at London’s Daily Telegraph has observed, “The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.” Yet there are very different consequences for each group’s transgressions.

The more disruptive the disenfranchised become, the more they provoke harsh responses from authorities, thus worsening their already marginal position. By contrast, finance and government elites have positioned themselves to gain from whatever risks they shift onto society at large, via bailouts, emergency powers, and the revolving door. As Ross Douthat observed, “The economic crisis is producing consolidation rather than revolution, the entrenchment of authority rather than its diffusion, and the concentration of power in the hands of the same elite that presided over the disasters in the first place.”

Rather than being grateful for public subvention, Wall Street demands even lower tax rates and less monitoring. At least in the US, this “revolt of the elites” is more of a menace to social order than the type of mass protests against inequality and corruption now sweeping India, Israel, Spain, Chile, and many other countries. Whereas the poor are swiftly punished for disruptions, the worried wealthy‘s initiatives for not-so-creative destruction are self-reinforcing.

1) From risk shift to capital strike: Jacob Hacker’s book The Great Risk Shift described forty years of policies designed to shift risk away from corporations and government and onto individuals. For millions of workers, 401(k) plans replaced defined benefit pensions. In 1979, 82% of impoverished families got TANF benefits; thirty years later, only 27% do. During the Bush Administration, there was even a vogue for “health savings accounts” to replace defined health benefits. Current GOP presidential contenders are upping the ante, attacking Medicare and Social Security, and proposing the replacement of traditional unemployment insurance with “personal accounts.” These policies and proposals all shift the risk of sudden accidents, a frail old age, child poverty, and economic slumps onto the vulnerable themselves, rather than their employers, or the larger polity.

Austerity for the poor and middle classes is only one half of the risk shift. It helps pay for lavish backing of connected companies. The same groups that benefit most from tax cuts financed by a gutting of the safety net are also pushing for “certainty” in their business ventures. Just as capital is taxed preferentially, so too must its owners’ ventures receive subsidies. Lionized on the pages of Forbes or Fast Company for “taking risks,” Wall Street’s favorite executives often avoid them at all costs. Derivatives are a favorite way of engineering away uncertainty. They do business with “too big to fail” banks, secure in the knowledge that taxpayers are on the hook if anything goes awry. Big investors, too, are keen on loan guarantees and other state “givings.” And that is just the beginning of the “certainty” they’ve been demanding, and getting, as Yves Smith argues:

Businesses have had at least 25 to 30 years near complete certainty — certainty that they will pay lower and lower taxes, that they will face less and less regulation, that they can outsource to their hearts’ content (which when it does produce savings, comes at a loss of control, increased business system rigidity, and loss of critical know how). They have also been certain that unions will be weak to powerless, that states and municipalities will give them huge subsidies to relocate, that boards of directors will put top executives on the up escalator for more and more compensation because director pay benefits from this cozy collusion, that the financial markets will always look to short term earnings no matter how dodgy the accounting, that the accounting firms will provide plenty of cover, that the SEC will never investigate anything more serious than insider trading (Enron being the exception that proved the rule).

As Smith notes, now many of the same corporations “have played their cost-focused business paradigm out.” It turns out that the same workers pressed to the wall for concessions happen to be customers, too, and they can’t pay for goods and services like they used to. (As the Wall Street Journal puts it: the same “lucky duckies” who are too poor to pay taxes can’t even go on their “dollar store splurges” any more.) The obvious macroeconomic prescription is for the state to tax those who are doing well, in order to pay for relief, recovery, and reform. But that isn’t happening, either.

Rather, the power groups that dominate the US Congress, Presidency, and courts believe that only private investment can lead to more growth. The problem is that most of those capable of investing now have so much money that they don’t need to earn anything from it. It’s a capital strike against anything but a “sure thing.” Many corporations are also cutting and hoarding. That’s a brilliant strategy for CEO’s, who may need just a few years at the top to accumulate a massive fortune.

The role of money in an economy is like that of blood in a body—it has to circulate to keep the entity that contains it alive. When a tremendous amount pools in one place, other parts suffer. Redistribution of income is vital to the health of American capitalism. Its decline presages a different type of economy on the horizon.

2) Doom Loops: So why isn’t anyone doing anything about this? Some brave protesters in India and Israel provide a model response to their own countries’ inequalities. As Rana Dasgupta notes, “taxpaying professionals working 70-hour weeks now compete unhappily for urban space with massively wealthier and more powerful businessmen and bureaucrats whose sources of wealth are opaque and, on the face of it at least, too effortlessly acquired.” “Opaque” turns out to be a bit of a euphemism:

After independence in 1947 . . . [f]ortunes were accumulated to be spent on property – in India and elsewhere – or stored abroad. The globalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s only expanded the opportunities for this corrupt . . . entrepreneurial class. “Big-ticket” deals multiplied, much as they did in Russia during the same period: businesses became involved in a scramble for the ownership of basic resources previously controlled by the state – land, mines, oil, mobile telephony spectrums etc – and this only the political class could endow.

The seamless integration of political elites with executives in finance, real estate, extractive industries, and communications is a feature of many so-called “free market” economies. But, as Harcourt notes, social disturbances in the US, Spain, and Britain have too often been unmoored from any positive political vision for change. And the most aggressive protests have themselves become the target of popular ire, rather than the conditions that sparked them.

Meanwhile, at the top of society, reckless behavior is rewarded time and again. Looting is an established business strategy, unpunished by authorities who appear far more interested in getting their own opportunity to loot rather than exposing malfeasance. Peter Boone and Simon Johnson describe how a “doomsday cycle” of privatized gains and socialized losses continues to this day:

[M]ajor private sector firms (banks and nonbank financial institutions) have a distorted incentive structure that encourages eventually costly risk-taking. Unfortunately, the measures taken in various US and European bailout rounds during 2008-2009 (and again in 2010 for the eurozone) have only worsened, and extended to far more entities, these underlying moral hazard incentive problems. . . .

This cycle of boom followed by bailouts and bust amounts to a form of implicit taxpayer subsidy that encourages individual institutions to become larger – and the system as a whole to swell. Our preparation to bail out their creditors means systemic institutions are able to raise finance cheaply in global markets. The implicit subsidy to creditors encourages greater debt, which makes the system ever more precarious.

Years after the financial crash, the chief perpetrators—be they foolish, negligent, or purposefully fraudulent—are wealthier than ever. And they continue to push for liquidationist measures that force lower living standards onto workers and citizens, rather than investment in a positive-sum future for all. In case of peak oil, today’s smart investment is to buy oil futures, rather than invest in a green energy startup. If effortless grabbing of a larger share of a shrinking pie is a bit more profitable than long-term investment to shift out the production possibilities frontier, Mr. Market endorses it. Each year, our brightest business school graduates vote with their feet: thousands opt for the financial alchemy behind a quick buck, while far fewer take part in the hard work of creating a sustainable future.

3) Expect More Stability: Several analysts have argued that the resulting flow of incomes away from the bottom 90% (whose income has gone up 1% in real terms since 1980) and toward the top 1% (which has enjoyed a nearly fourfold increase in income, with much higher gains for those in the top 0.1 and 0.01%) will generate social unrest in the US. I doubt this. First, as Dan Ariely has shown, not many people actually understand how unequal our society is. Second, our media is profoundly uninterested in discussing issues of equity or opportunity. Rather, it has bought, hook, line, and sinker, the Pete Peterson-sponsored message of endless austerity for the middle and lower classes. Third, US authorities are getting more creative in defusing protests, in actions that even a leading libertarian advocate of the First Amendment applauds for targeting “the bad people.”

Finally, and most importantly, technologies of surveillance have made dissent more costly. Sarah Jaffe has explained the consequences of the application of military-grade technology on the homefront:

As a burgeoning international protest movement takes shape, opposing austerity measures, decrying the wealth gap and rising inequality, and in some cases directly attacking the interests of oligarchs, we’re likely to see the surveillance state developed for tracking “terrorists” turned on citizen activists peacefully protesting the actions of their government. And as U.S. elections post-Citizens United will be more and more expensive, look for politicians of both parties to enforce these crackdowns. Despite growing anger at austerity in other countries, those policies have been embraced by both parties here in the States.

Citron & I have discussed several aspects of this phenomenon, including domestic intelligence collection about political action, and problematic collaborations between state and corporate “law enforcers.” Add into the mix the growing power of entities that secretly generate reputational data about individuals, and you have a variety of “chilling effects” on political activism that challenges inequality in the US. Meanwhile, the Bush-Obama war on whistleblowers has demonstrated the dangerous consequences of trying to publicize misuses of that technology. The end result is a mass “learned helplessness,” as the very idea of collective action becomes a bitter joke to a critical mass of the populace.

I only mean to predict increased stability within the US. Elsewhere, food scarcity (including that induced by our own wasteful energy use) is likely to wreak havoc. Complexity theorists in MIT’s Technology Review predict that, “If we don’t reverse the current trend in food prices, we’ve got until August 2013 before social unrest sweeps the planet.” Fortunately, the food stamps program in the US appears to have enough support from large agricultural interests to preserve it here.

History teaches that the great change agents in our society lost dozens of times before finally making a positive and lasting mark in law. As Harcourt notes, we could stay in the eye of this storm for a long time. Electoral politics, our traditional venue for gradual and constructive public investment, has been deeply corrupted by mass distraction and targeted influence. It will take years, and perhaps decades, of work to restore a party system that rewards politicians for addressing the real economic and environmental needs of their constituents. The best public intellectuals can do is follow the example of the minds who brought us to the present impasse: namely, to develop a “Mt. Pelerin Society” for those who actually believe there is such a thing as society.

Note: Given my title, I should acknowledge that Christopher Lasch identified a “Revolt of the Elites” 15 years ago.

Photo Credit: SEIU Int’l.

Cynde Soto dreads the arrival of yet another benefit notice. Her cash assistance has been cut four times in two years. State medical coverage is getting more expensive and no longer includes dental care or podiatry. And the in-home help she needs to take care of [...]]]> As Drew Westen observes today, “400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans,” and “the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically.” These extremes cry out for a theodicy, justifying mammon’s ways to man. As wealth gets more concentrated, here is one of the millions of “faces of austerity” whom policymakers must answer to:

Cynde Soto dreads the arrival of yet another benefit notice. Her cash assistance has been cut four times in two years. State medical coverage is getting more expensive and no longer includes dental care or podiatry. And the in-home help she needs to take care of basics has been cut by about 20 minutes a day.

“That doesn’t sound like a lot to people but … I’m a quadriplegic,” said the 54-year-old Long Beach resident. “I can’t even scratch my own nose.”

When TV talking heads prate about “shared sacrifice,” they might want to pause to consider stories like Soto’s. They should also reveal where a particular multimillionaire will invest gains from, say, the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, or the zeroed out estate tax of 2010. How much gold does the rotting teeth of the poor buy? Are volunteer dentists effectively subsidizing summer houses? Executive protection dogs? Private jets to summer camp?

These trade-offs become more compelling as data renders the narrative of “trickle down job creation” implausible. The most recent “recovery” saw 88% of gains go to corporate profits, and about 1% go to wages. Workers are caught in a downward spiral: unemployment reduces their bargaining power, which in turn lets bosses pile more duties onto fewer people, who effectively increase unemployment more by doing the work or 1.5 or 2 or 3 workers for the price of 1. Many women face the brunt of the transition: “When companies decide to lay off secretaries and assistants while making employees pick up the slack, women take the hit.” Every margin has to be worked to keep CEOs’ pay averaging hundreds of times that of their typical workers.

Gestalt Political Economy

In an ideal world, the S&P downgrade would jolt the US into recognition of how bizarre our economic policies have become. The very wealthy have captured more of the economy’s growth, but have seen their taxes reduced to near-record-low levels. As Juan Cole has argued, a self-reinforcing pattern of income gains at the top has left everyone else caught in a downward spiral of deleveraging, cutbacks, and austerity:

Most of our problems come from the US government coddling very rich people, which it does because the very rich pay for politicians’ campaigns and expect a payback. And as more and more of the country’s wealth has gone to the 750,000 families [at the top which have seen the fastest income gains], they have gained more and more control over Congress.

The recent budget deal accelerates the process, slashing funding for fundamental investments in the nation’s future in order to preserve the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Based on the work of Michael Perelman, Richard Seymour identifies the problems set to intensify:

The pathologies of the US economy are not exactly a secret[. . . ]: long-term underinvestment in research and development, low productivity resulting from a shift toward low wage service jobs, more financial vs productive investment, underinvestment in infrastructure, and an irrational military Keynesianism that results in the best innovation and research being conducted in secrecy . . . .

I have also commented on these trends, and I see them all as epiphenomenal of an increasingly short-termist elite angling for larger pieces of a shrinking pie. A little investment in transport, education, technology, and energy now may pay great dividends in the future. But in a world driven by quarterly profit statements, daily market fluctuations, and nanosecond-denominated high frequency trading, long-term value creation is decidedly unfashionable.

Naturalizing Penury

Still, the S&P downgrade is a call for long-term thinking. As American wealth continues to shrink, how can liquidationists justify the decline in living standards that results? That is the next big intellectual challenge for the Tea Party and its corporate funders. A few trial balloons have emerged:

1) Cutting America’s Poor Down to Size

As the fortunes at the top of society become astronomical, the most vigorous agitators for wealth-defense have seized on new strategies for justifying the fate of the economy’s “losers.” The extreme poverty prevalent in the less developed world can provoke at least two reactions. Some ask: how can we develop new technology and redistribute resources to reduce the suffering of the world’s poorest? Others say: why can’t America’s poor live as cheaply as, say, the favela-dwellers in Brazil, or the Phillipines’ poor?

That appears to be the approach of the Heritage Foundation, which thinks poverty is grossly exaggerated in the US. “[T]he typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning,” the Foundation gripes. By this logic, of course we should keep historically low tax rates on billionaires and slash aid for public housing subsidies. The poor can sell their cars and A/C units to pay for rent! Even those who live on $2 a day have funds left over for tea and saving for family funerals.

2) The Economic Construction of the Zero Marginal Product Worker

What about the unemployed, now out of work on average for nearly 41 weeks? Don’t get hysterical over hysteresis, conservative thought leaders concur. Many of these people are “zero marginal product workers,” who literally have nothing to add to the economy. Like a portable CD player in a world of iPods, they are obsolete.

Sadly, those most responsible for the ZMP theory don’t like to think much about negative marginal product workers (NMPs), like the bankers who diverted vast sums in bonuses on the way to global economic catastrophe. They also appear to be unfamiliar with James K. Galbraith’s work (recapped toward the end of The Predator State) about the role of wage floors and labor standards in encouraging innovation. (Hint: involved, stable, and decently paid workforces are a bit more committed to the overall company project than revolving battalions of disposable peons.)

3) The Promise of Prison Labor

Chalk up another concern for America’s worried wealthy: how can their profit margins match those of compatriots in countries like Mexico or China, where labor is much cheaper? One solution is to employ people whose health care is provided by the state, and who are guaranteed to show up on time for wages less than an dollar an hour: prisoners. The strategy is closer than you may think:

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs.

In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

Immigrants might also get conscripted to the same cheap labor, high-discipline programs. The more that big businesses complain about having to provide “minimum essential health benefits” to workers, the more appealing low-wage labor in prisons might be. Moreover, if a dollar crash or other macroeconomic disruption raises oil prices and makes shipping from China uneconomical, the massive prison population could rapidly step in to replicate the wages and working conditions that keep Wal-Mart and so many other retailers well-supplied.

4) The Reputation-Ruining Industry

A zero-sum economy like ours teems with the parasitic players of “gotcha capitalism.” Hidden late fees, penalties, and charges are common. Credit bureaus are happy to make many them a near-permanent “black mark” on your record if you’re foolish enough to ignore or dispute them. Now a new entrepreneurial venture is going after arrestees, trying to assure that their mugshots are near the top of Google results for their name, unless they pay a fee to have them removed. Multiply that by at least the number of embarrassments you can think of offhand, and you have a thriving new industry for the US! And one more source of “disposable people“—a class marked off as not deserving employment, and perhaps eventually many other benefits of modern life.

A Rapidly Shrinking Pie in a Divided Society

It has long been inevitable that the US’s share of critical resources would decline. Five percent of the world’s population can’t continue to consume 25% of the oil, or be home to 40% of the world’s listed shares (compared to, say, India’s 1%!), or maintain outsized “ecological footprints” we leave on the planet. Fairness demands that those who benefited most from our long hegemony contribute the most toward easing a transition to global parity. But exactly the opposite is occurring: public anger has fueled rapid political change that undermines even the few pillars of social insurance we still have left.

In Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, Rachel Sherman describes how workers in the deluxe hospitality service sector are trained to cater to every whim of guests. The workers go so far as to train the guests to want more, to be demanding, to express their every wish to strangers. This is hard cultural work, especially where patterns of social equality and self-reliance taint relations of servility with memories of royalism, unearned privilege, and oppression. But the vast inequality of resources on either side greases the transaction, as a butler angles for a tip each hour that the guest may earn in one minute.

In our society, the “naturalizers of penury” I described above are performing cultural functions similar to the luxury hotel trainers (and trainees) described in Class Acts. Are you a Walgreen’s worker who wants a longer lunch break? Sit down, be quiet, and be glad you’re not picking up garbage in a Manila slum. Thinking of quitting your job? Watch out—there are 5 applicants for every opening, and the reputation industry is quick to report any of your indiscretions to a would-be employer. Are you a chicken-patty-maker hoping for a pay raise? Why should the boss give you one when the prisoners down the road will do the job for 20 cents an hour? For individuals, there are no easy answers in any of these situations. The resulting mood of defeated quietism seeps into our culture and politics, undermining the collective actions that offer the only constructive response to these dilemmas. As C. Wright Mills argued, these personal economic problems can only be solved by political action.

Image Credits: Library of Congress for Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother; CBPP for chart.