Son, You had said you cared what I think, so in my last email I shared what I think with you, that is all. To me you appear to defend what I see as the plutocrats running the country, even though to you, as you explained, you are only defending their right to earn money. I think, though I know you will not agree, that they go about rigging the markets in their favor with measures that will weaken Net Neutrality, for instance, as only one example out of dozens I could mention.
I am not at all trying to interpret your view back to you, I am only telling you what I think of your views as you have expressed them. I think corporations should not have the right to rig the markets in their favor, as in my view that is what they are doing, while knowing that your defense of them is that they are merely “earning money through voluntary exchanges in a free market.” I think your view is fallacious. What I present to you is my view of just how rigged against the people I think the market truly is. If the cable industry has the power to create “pay-to-play” fast and slow lanes through FCC deregulation by what you call “bureaucrats” like Tom Wheeler (with Obama’s blessing), the people are being denied their right to a neutral, open market in my view which I know you do not share. That is the opposite of a “voluntary exchange” in my view which I know you do not share, it is a rigged exchange forced on everyone, only available based on how much disposable income people have. That’s the opposite of equality and a free market, it’s a rigged market in my view which I know you do not share. Okay, I’m repeating myself, sorry about that.
I am allowed to tell you what I think if you claim to care about what I think. But once I did (yesterday), you made my point by coming back with the argument that you “see no evidence that the reason people are suffering is because the market is rigged against them.” I never expected you would see that, that is not why I said it. I only said it because that's what I think. I was not trying to tell you what you should think, because I was pretty sure you would disagree with me, which is of course your right. But it is my right to believe (think) that the markets are rigged, and the fact that you don’t see it is, in my experience with you, because you simply dismiss virtually (if not explicitly) every example I provide that markets are rigged. I believe you misread the evidence I provide as fallacious simply because you do not view the evidence the way I do. The fact that you call virtually everything, if not absolutely everything, I present as fallacious is, at this point, expected and irrelevant. It’s what you do. That never convinces me that it is actually fallacious, simply that that is how you perceive virtually everything I present. And you are surprised that I don’t just accept your assessments. That is why this is pointless, and why I say I don’t really care what you think. It’s entirely too predictable, entirely too opposite what I see going on.
And you are free to believe whatever you want about me, too.
But I want to take this opportunity to thank you. In my quest to provide something to you that might actually have you perceive what I’ve been trying to say all these years (about rigged markets, etc., a quest I’ve been tempted to give up on of late), I have gotten more and more educated. I’m indebted to you for that, because I really do care, not what you think, but why you (and other conservatives) see things so opposite from the way I see them. From reading FA Hayek's Road to Serfdom at your behest, to studying what other economists, both liberal and conservative and non-idiological, have to say, I have come to a much deeper understanding about how conservatives come to the conclusions they do (always conceding that you know more about what conservatives believe than I ever will (and that the opposite is also true — that I will always know more about what I believe than you ever will)).
For instance, in my quest to understand conservatives, I have now begun reading another book by Simon Johnson and James Kwak, White House Burning (the first, as you know, was 13 Bankers). The title refers to when the British actually were able to burn at least the interior of the White House (though it was not called that at the time) during the war of 1812, and how close they came to retaking the whole country, due to the lack of federal funds needed by the US to fund that war. The book is a history of how the treasury has been funded or not over the history of the Republic, and why.
On p. 70, chapter 4 titled “Deficits Don’t Matter,” they say,
“Conservatism is a storied political philosophy, its modern form dating back to Edmund Burke, the great Irish critic of the French Revolution. The French Revolution attempted to remake all of society and mankind at the same time. Like many other revolutions, it spawned chaos, bloodshed, and autocracy. For Burke, individual liberty and good government were rooted in the institutions that each generation inherited from its forefathers; overthrowing those institutions in the hope of creating a better future from abstract principles was both foolish and dangerous. But from the beginning, conservatives did not merely seek to preserve the status quo. Burke and his successors have always been activists and counterrevolutionaries, developing new ideas and rallying cries to beat back reform movements and reimpose traditional hierarchies in a modern form.9” The reference says, “See Corey Robin, The Revolutionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011), especially the Introduction and chapter 1. See also Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Belknap Press, 1991).”
P. 71: … “At the same time [during Nixon’s time and no doubt against his wishes, when the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, among other liberal initiatives were implemented], however, powerful forces, including the civil rights movement, the 1960s counterculture, women’s liberation, and the expansion of government welfare and regulatory programs, were providing a backlash on the right. Faced with a seemingly omnipresent enemy, the free market conservatism nurtured by some members of the business community in the postwar period reemerged as the most important ideology and the major storyline in American politics over the past forty years. From the Reagan Revolution to the Tea Party, the new conservatives have portrayed themselves as an embattled revolutionary vanguard, fighting against a dominant liberal elite that threatens their basic freedoms.... In 1971, soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell wrote [to the US Chamber of Commerce Chair], “What now concerns us is quite new in the history of America. We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists.... The assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued.” The modern conservative movement was born out of the struggle against this apparent menace.”
You and I are on opposite sides of this struggle. I came of age during the civil rights era, the ‘60s counterculture, the women’s liberation movement. I supported and benefited from those struggles for rights for the marginalized, because I felt a measure of having been marginalized myself, to a greater or lesser degree, all my life, after learning of my gender’s second-class status in the 50s when I was about 11. I looked around then, and saw that it was true for the missionaries and the Africans alike that I lived amongst at the time. A decade later in my early 20s I saw in the counterculture which I identified with as a return to valuing life for the community, as at least trying to provide equality for all, as oppose to a select few making a lot of money at the expense of many living in abject poverty. My best friend from college engaged with the counterculture. Your father and I refrained from actually engaging with it, though we were sympathetic to its goals, as I am now to the goals of the Occupiers. I have always, always eschewed the pursuit of money as a measure of success. I rejected the idea of “keeping up with the Joneses.” That’s a losing battle, in my opinion, because there will always be Joneses who acquire more “success" in what really is an arms race for the “survival of the fittest” or the most privileged. But who the "fittest" is is largely a cognitive illusion relative to who actually occupies the perceived throne at the moment. The members of the counterculture or the Occupiers were only saying that those who are or were perceived to be at the pinnacle of success are being measured by the wrong criteria. There are more relevant calculations, they insist, than who makes the most money. The struggles of the people for civil rights, women’s rights, LBGT and disabled rights, et al, create a counterculture that gives more meaning to life within the whole community — whether that community be a neighborhood, a city, region, country, or the world — than who it is who has somehow managed to make the most money at the moment.
But in an era where money is equated with speech, where therefore the one with the most money has the most speech, particularly when it comes to being heard by politicians in dire need of millions upon millions of dollars to even launch a campaign, the speech of the people whose democracy this allegedly is has been all but drowned out, except to a handful of politicians who still do their job by representing the people rather than pandering to the plutocracy. That is my opinion, and I do not expect you to agree with it.
This country was founded on revolution. Repeated revolutions are what have allowed it to evolve into the country of civil rights that it is today. Our founding revolution was violent enough, as was the one giving the slaves their lives back. Still violent, though much less so, was the revolution for worker rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as was the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow. Still less violent was the revolution for women’s rights, the terrorism displayed at women's health clinics and assassination of doctors who performed abortions notwithstanding. (We never did get our Equal Rights Amendment, by the way.) Today more peaceful revolutions such as the Occupy Movement prove just as necessary in securing economic rights. I take exception to your disparaging characterization of them, attributing that perhaps to your view of them as the latest iteration of the menace that you fear, spoken of by Johnson & Kwak quoted above.
If Johnson & Kwak are right, and the ideology of current conservatives is "a backlash on the right” against these revolutions; if theirs is a struggle against a perceived menace, I say that that menace is no greater than what the people have received in benefit from these various revolutions. And to me that is everything that makes America what it is today. I view the backlash as a wrong-headed attempt to turn the clock back to what Lewis Powell might have viewed as a more preferable status quo, which would be, in my view, a world without all these civil rights. To me that is where the struggle by the conservatives over the past 40 years has been headed, with increasing success — to eliminate most of those civil rights gains by hook or by crook.
And I do not see the wealthy as having gained what they have all on their own over these years of “supply-side economics." They needed to climb over the rest of us to make it to where they are. No one's wealth is created in a vacuum, nor can it exist in a vacuum. Wealth, like everything else, is only relative to non-wealth. The least the wealthy could do now, in my humble opinion, is be humbly grateful to the citizenry that enabled their enormous success and to reimburse at least some small measure back to that public in the form of a modest increase in taxes that they would never miss, but that would help not only the public at large, but themselves, individually, as well. (Their $150,000 or $200,000 cars are just as vulnerable to cracked windshields from potholes in the streets and traffic jams from bridges being washed out as the rest of our cars are.) Instead they double down and go about creating coalitions aimed at reducing their taxes even further.
I am not telling you any of this expecting you to agree with it. I expect just the opposite. I am only telling you this because you claimed to care what I think, and this is what I think. I don’t care that you are expected to disagree, or that you will probably call it false, or fallacious, it will remain what I think. This is just for your information about what I think only. What you think about what I think is irrelevant to me.
And if you decide you no longer want to hear what I think, or if you just dismiss what I have said as fallacy (and to me that is “repudiation"), then I’ll just keep it to myself from now on. But would it really be so hard for you to simply indicate that you might understand how I might conclude what I have, without endorsing it at all? Because I can certainly understand, without endorsing it at all, how the business community felt under siege, that it felt it had to "beat back reform movements and reimpose traditional hierarchies" after the revolutions and the counterculture of the 60s. My point to them and to you is that the actual menace that has been envisioned has not materialized in this country, and is extremely unlikely to. There has been no totalitarianism, only an irrational fear of it, and an overcompensation for that fear that has given rise to a rigged market over the last 40 years that is, ironically, tyrannical in nature (in my opinion that I know you don’t agree with). If totalitarianism were to develop, I have no doubt a traditional and typical and all-American peoples’ revolution will occur once more (much as the Occupy Movement has) to help put it back in its place. That’s because I have faith in democracy, in government of, by and for the people, not government of, by and for the markets and the wealthy. That is what I think, understanding that you will probably not agree with any of it.
And to think I owe the development of my entire argument to you! Thank you for that!
And as always, your reaction to what I think is totally up to you.
Love, Mom
P.S. I’m sorry this is so long.