In the Dead Zone of Capitalism: Lessons on the Violence of Inequality from Chicago
Tuesday, 04 June 2013 11:07By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed
"I consider the survival of [fascism] within democracy to be potentially more menacing that the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy."
Theodor W. Adorno
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. (Photo: Michelle V. Agins / The New York Times)Americans are confronted daily with the violence of inequality. The rich have longer life spans, better health care, access to better educational opportunities and an abundance of food. [1] Many live in palatial homes in gated communities and wield a disproportionate amount of control and power over the major social, cultural, and political apparatuses that shape everyday life.[2] Unlike most Americans, the extravagantly rich are protected from the massive degree of violence produced by poverty, poor health, joblessness, inadequate social provisions, decrepit housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and even environmental disasters. While the superrich also live in an age of precarity due to the free-market economic models they support, they largely escape its consequences through the obscene amount of wealth at their disposal that enables them to buy private solutions to public problems.[3] As Naomi Klein points out, such wealth offers more than economic advantages. It also creates a world in which the penthouse and mansion setprotect themselves from the less savory effects of the economic model that made them so wealthy. In the past six years, we have seen the emergence of private firefighters in the United States, hired by insurance companies to offer a ‘concierge’ service to their wealthier clients, as well as the short-lived ‘HelpJet’—a charter airline in Florida that offered five-star evacuation services from hurricane zones [whose ad shamelessly states]: ‘No standing in lines, no hassle with crowds, just a first class experience that turns a problem into a vacation. [4]
The corrupt bankers, hedge fund managers, and financial services elite who caused the housing crisis and the economic recession of 2008 have little fear of finding themselves homeless or in debt, a fate suffered by millions of Americans, especially young people. The hedge fund managers who pour millions into charter schools as a first step towards privatizing them don’t worry about draining valuable resources from public schools because their kids only attend the most elite and expensive private schools, and they also get a hefty return from such investments as a generous tax credit. [5] Transferring wealth from the public to the private sector has become a sport rather than a liability - a despicable act of looting the public treasury that is viewed strictly as a financial transaction divorced from any sense of civic duty or ethical consideration. The ultra-rich do not have to worry about being unemployed, even though their search for profits produces austerity policies that put millions out of work. [6] In this instance what emerges is a savage form of casino capitalism along with an army of walking dead zombies who celebrate a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in other people and civic life. For the new financial elite of the second Gilded Age, the challenges of a global world are private, not collective, and can only be addressed by pursuing one’s own desires, financial interests, and security.
The obligations of citizenship and social existence in this brave new world of egregious inequality in which the "top 8% of global earners are drawing 50% of this planet’s income" [7] have been abandoned to the narrow dictates of the private realm, consumerism and an arrested notion of individualism and freedom. In the United States, "the 400 richest people . . . have as much wealth as 154 million Americans combined, that’s 50 percent of the entire country [while] the top economic 1 percent of the US population now has a record 40 percent of all wealth, and have more wealth than 90 percent of the population combined." [8] It gets worse. Half of the jobs in America "now pay $34,000 or less a year . . . 42% of single-mother families with children under 18 are poor [and] 20.5 million people have incomes that amount to less than $9,500 a year. That’s half the poverty line, which is currently pegged at $19,090 for a family of three." [9] Moreover, the myth of upward mobility has been replaced by the reality of downward mobility, given that wages for most Americans are stagnant; youth now face a future of low-wage jobs, if not long-term unemployment, and economic and educational opportunities are tied almost exclusively to income and wealth. What the cheerleaders for neoliberalism refuse to acknowledge is that the choices people make are tied to constraints, and "nearly all of the constraints are intimately tied to the material circumstances in which we find ourselves." [10]
As public visions fall into disrepair, the concept of the public good is eradicated in favor of the narrow, private orbits of self-interest and individual happiness, characterized by an endless search for instant gratification, consumer goods and quick profits. The value of everything from education to health care is measured by how profitable it might be for those who treat such institutions less as a public good than as a source for private gain. There are no ethical dilemmas here, only opportunities for increasing the bottom line and making greed the highest of human values and desires. Such behavior is legitimated by appeals to a competitive philosophy in which everyone is either an enemy to be punished or a resource to be exploited, used, and eventually discarded in the quest for personal and financial success. Citizens have been replaced by consumers, and the search for profits regardless of the social costs has created a society in which the accumulation of capital trumps any concerns about fairness and justice. Snapshots of growing inequality are symptomatic of a society that has divorced itself from any sense of moral and social responsibility. Surely, the recent deaths of hundreds of workers in unsafe factories in Bangladesh speak to how disposable human beings have become under a market-driven system in which the desire for cheap labor by companies such as Wal-Mart, Sears, Disney, and others takes precedence over the health, dignity, and lives of poor workers.
The growing levels of injustice in every facet of life barely provoke outrage because they are wrapped in a disimagination machine that ascribes inequality to the natural order of things, an act of nature in which hard work and merit prevail in great riches and comforts for the few and impoverishment for the many. Yet, even this timeworn myth is rarely evoked anymore. The current crop of super-rich financiers is much too arrogant and comfortable to provide a rationale for their extreme wealth and power. All forms of violence are now factored, if not ignored, into the call for economic growth, abetted by the cowardice of the mainstream media that act as paid servants for the rich and the growing prominence of a political apparatus that enriches itself on the benefits provided by an army of corporate lobbyists. [11]
The spectacle of the new Gilded Age reveals itself in the huge incomes and unimaginable amounts of wealth being amassed by the upper 1 percent. For instance, hedge fund manager Steven Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors took home $1.4 billion in 2012, while Ray Balio, Bridgewater Associates founder, made $1.7 billion and David Tepper of Appaloosa Management made $2.2 billion the same year.[12] Paul Buchheit reports that the Koch brothers make about $3 billion per hour on their investments, while the poorest 47 percent of Americans have no wealth.[13] While many young people face a jobless future, billionaires such as Bill Gates, Leon Cooperman, and others do more than drain wealth and income from the larger society; they also destroy those institutions that serve the common good, undermine the public interest, and gut the most basic elements of a viable social contract. Buchheit has argued that "a single top income could buy housing for every homeless person in the United States." [14] Not only do the rich and powerful shape policies that lower corporate tax rates while bleeding states of much needed revenue, but they also attempt to compensate for the loss of public revenue by closing public schools in cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City. Austerity has become a ruthless ploy to "cut spending to the point where government [becomes] unrecognizable." [15]
The neoliberal policies funded by the new financial elite cut funding for programs such as Head Start, eliminate breakfast programs for poor children and portray people on food stamps as freeloaders. The latter baseless insult is particularly vicious since the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is crucial for low-income children living in extreme poverty because it "greatly reduce[s] food insecurity . . . which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults."[16] The Republican Party’s engineering of the so-called sequester is not about balancing the budget. It is about waging war on poor minorities and low-income youth, public schools, the welfare state, unions and social programs for women and other disadvantaged populations. Such inequality of power and wealth produces massive amounts of human suffering for millions of Americans who are marginalized by age, race, gender, disability and socio-economic class.
In Texas, 1.5 million low-income people will lose health care because of the ethos of savage capitalism relentlessly enforced by Governor Rick Perry and his fellow lawmakers. These bible-thumping disciples of "free-market" capitalism have "voted against expanding Medicaid using $100 billion in federal funds offered under President Obama’s health care law," insisting that government-sponsored health care demeans character and rewards people labeled by conservatives as lazy and contemptible.[17] Of course, the populations considered disposable here are low income and poor minorities, of whom 35 and 32 percent, respectively, suffer from poor health and shortened life spans. As Goran Therborn points out, inequality is not simply about the gap between the rich and the poor: It is about the inequities in life expectancy between the privileged and disadvantaged.[18] The dividing line in American society is no longer between those who have made it and those trying to emulate their success. On the contrary, the dividing line is between those who live a life of unimaginable privilege and comfort and those who are struggling to survive and stay alive.
There is more at stake here than a symbolic violence that objectifies the vulnerable and produces insensitivity to their problems. There is the real violence that aggravates poor health, shortens lives and produces a machinery of individual and social death. Martin Luther King, Jr. was right when he pointed to two Americas, stating insightfully that "the other America" is inhabited by people "perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." [19] What he did not envision was that those considered part of the other America are now viewed not as disadvantaged, but as utterly disposable. In the new order of casino capitalism, people continue to live in rat-infested slums, but they are also increasingly warehoused in jails and prisons, which now rank as the most prominent institutions of the welfare state. And if they do not perish in prisons, they die from illness caused by the failure of government to regulate big business.
As Ralph Nader recently noted,
the effects of deregulation stretch to all walks of life. The profit-driven practices of big corporations have led to the deaths and preventable illnesses of thousands of Americans every year. Roughly 60,000 die from workplace-related diseases and injuries, 200,000 from medical malpractice and hospital-induced infections, 70,000 from air pollution and 1,000,000 from side effects from dangerous pharmaceuticals. [20]
The daily ugliness of the violence of inequality perpetrated on millions of Americans finds its counterpart in the culture of cruelty, produced by the dead zone of capitalism and sanctioned by big corporations and the ultra-rich who preserve a disordered autoimmune system for the nation that destroys the defenses protecting any viable notion of democracy and justice. The financial elite and their political stooges resemble not only the main character in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, with its infamous "greed is good" credo, but increasingly the more disturbing character in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel made into the 2000 film American Psycho, who literally kills those considered disposable in a society in which only the strong survive. While Wall Street is a critique of the celebration of greed and the institutions that make it possible, it captured a particular moment in American history when the values of the Gilded Age were resurfacing under the presidency of Ronald Reagan with a vengeance. American Psycho is about the subjects, identities, and desires being produced for those who are leading America into an authoritarian dystopia in the 21st century in which safety nets are destroyed, civil liberties dismantled, gated communities proliferate, prison populations dramatically increase, and pervasive violence circulates at the level of everyday life. Both films crucially capture something about the downward ethical, economic and political spiral produced by casino capitalism. The hero of contemporary American capitalism is also modeled after John Galt on steroids, the character from the infamous Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged who transforms the morality of self-interest into a secular religion for the socially disabled. The fictional characters Gordon Gecko, Patrick Batemen and John Galt are now personified in the real life personas of the Koch brothers, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, among others.
The ruthless ethos of predatory capitalism is now producing a more intense and wide-ranging spectacle of symbolic and real violence. State violence now finds its counterpart in the white male rage aimed at the poor, minorities, students, and protesters - a rage that appears rampant among the police, Republican Party politicians, gun advocates, right-wing Christian extremists and most Tea Party members. And this hyper-masculine propensity for violence is endlessly legitimated in television shows that celebrate serial killers, Hollywood films that drench audiences with extreme spectacles of violence and a surfeit of video games that turn first-shooters into heroes. Abroad, such violence assumes a real life dimension as drones kill innocent people, soldiers murder women and children for sport (the Kill Team in Afghanistan), and demented soldiers mimic the comic book and film superheroes whose mission appears to be to rid Gotham City of the poor (the murdering rampage of Sergeant Robert Bales in Afghanistan. [21]
The violence produced in a growing dystopian authoritarian state is now sanctioned in a class and racially skewed justice system in which people are given long prison sentences for smoking marijuana but not for defrauding the public out of billions of dollars. Major banks such as HSBC launder money for terrorists, defraud millions of their financial assets and destroy all vestiges of a social democracy. They are not only considered too big to be held accountable but extolled as the vanguard of educational reform, propped up as icons in a tawdry celebrity culture and allowed to determine policies at the highest levels of government. This is about more than the arrogance of power. It is about the death of justice and democracy. This is a culture in which inequality in wealth, income, and power breeds more than social and economic disparities; it also produces a kind of moral blindness and spiritual vacuum that overtakes politics, justice and any viable vision of the good society.[22] In a society plagued and battered by a ruling financial and corporate elite that embraces and suffers from an ethical coma, it becomes more difficult for the American public to recognize the machinery of corporate domination, greed and abuse that increasingly revels in a culture of cruelty.
The weakening of public values has created a power elite marked by a self-righteous coldness that takes delight in and makes a sport out of the suffering of others. The lifestyles of the poor are portrayed in the media as a form of poverty porn in which "the worst and weakest moments of people’s lives are [portrayed] as funny and entertaining." Is it any wonder that within the last decade there has been a proliferation on the Internet of "Bum Videos," in which homeless people are videotaped as they are beaten by young people, who view such violence as a form of entertainment? The descent into barbarism is now matched by the elimination of the discourse of compassion and the proliferation of abuses hurled at the poor, immigrants and others viewed as outside the pale of economic Darwinism. In fact, the current neoliberal era unscrupulously embraces the take-no-prisoners attitude of a culture of cruelty and the widespread violence it produces. We have seen this before in the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, but what is new in the current historical juncture are the widespread social and moral sanctions given to the ethos of greed and cruelty, along with the intensification and visibility of spectacles of violence. The new elite is building what Robert Jay Lifton once called "a death-saturating age" in which the growing extremes of wealth are matched by an increasing number of cultural representations and public policies that relish the practice of throwing away and abandoning not just resources and goods but also people.
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