The Redistribution of Wealth: Comparative Economics, Neoliberal Capitalism and Wall-Street Bonuses

One thing I've noticed from studying anthropology and reading ethnographies of other cultures is that every economic system, whether it's composed of egalitarian hunter-gatherers or hierarchical aristocracies, has had some method for redistributing wealth. I think there's a good reason for this; it seems intuitive to me, though I couldn't back it up with actual data, that the natural flow of wealth is always upward. That is, wealth tends to flow towards those who already have it and away from those who do not. There are, of course, exceptions, but it seems to be a reasonable generalization. The same is true for power. Though I don't agree that wealth and power are equivalent, I do believe that there is a reciprocal relationship between the two - wealth can buy power and power can attract wealth. In fact, it may be this cyclical relationship between power and wealth that drives the upward flow of both.

The problem is that, when a society's wealth becomes overly concentrated in a few hands, that society becomes increasingly unstable. Extreme poverty sits outside in the cold while extravagant wealth dances and drinks cocktails in a penthouse on the top floor. The flow is unsustainable, and it is the flow of wealth, like blood through veins, which keeps a society alive. This is why every economic system has developed some system for redistributing wealth - small groups use reciprocity, slightly larger groups use complex rituals and centralized priesthoods, even larger groups use governments and taxation. The point is to siphon wealth from those who have a lot of it and give it to those who have little, thus maintaining the flow of wealth and a degree of equality within the population.

I'm sure you've all seen, or at least heard of the champagne glass distribution of wealth. What has happened in recent decades is that wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very small population. The reason for this is that classical, laissez-faire Capitalism, as it's presented in theory, lacks any form of redistributive mechanism. Government intervention through taxation, the only form of redistribution that could potentially handle the enormous flow of money generated by industrial capitalism, is considered harmful and the "invisible hand" of the market is supposed to take care of everything.

In the past, the government has intervened anyway. After the Great Depression made it clear that laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work, the US government implemented a series of social programs that effectively redistributed wealth to the general population (mostly in the form of services rather than actual cash). In the years that followed, welfare state capitalism attempted to balance the distribution of wealth (though it still allowed for extreme differences as well, and it also gave rise to the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned about). Then, in the 1970s, the oil crisis hit and the world was thrown into another economic recession. This time the blame was placed on Keynesian economics and the welfare state, and Neoliberal economists were able to worm their way in to a dominant role.

There is, however, a key difference between Neoliberal economics and classical capitalism. The difference is that Neoliberals are not opposed to the redistribution of wealth, as long as the wealth is redistributed to those at the top in the hope that it would "trickle down" to the rest of the population (which, of course, is the opposite of the theory proposed above). The result is that there has been an acceleration of the natural upward flow of wealth so that, in just a few decades we have seen both the US and the Global economies develop that champagne glass shape. The problems with this have become glaringly apparent in the last decade as the global economy has been plunged into a deep recession and a number of economic scandals (i.e. Enron and Godlman Sachs) have plagued our nation.

However, policy makers have done nothing to address the root cause of the crisis - the lack of redistribution of wealth. Bush's final act was to give trillions of dollars to the banks to bail them out of their problems. Obama has continued that approach, and what we see now is that the banks are the only groups to have recovered - drawing record profits roughly equivalent to the amount of taxpayer money they were given by the government and offering enormous bonuses to the very CEOs that caused the current economic crisis.

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With this principle in mind - that an economy requires redistribution of wealth in order to be sustainable - the best practice, one which most economists would likely scoff at, would have been to give the money to the poorest populations either in the form of hard cash or services (i.e. universal health care, subsidized college tuition, social security programs, etc.). That kind of subsidy would truly lift all boats, as the money would flow up the wealth ladder, enriching everyone on the way. Instead, our governments and international agencies continue to support the trickle-down theory, which amounts to corporate welfare and legitimized theft by the wealthy from the poor.

It's time we were outraged by this. It's time somebody said "Enough is enough!" and demanded that the corporations give back our money so we can do something useful instead of waste it on a fragile, inequitable economic system.

The Redistribution of Wealth: Comparative Economics, Neoliberal Capitalism and Wall-Street Bonuses

Cap'n Trade, Human Rights and Alternative Approaches to Climate Change

Update Dec. 1, 2009: Here's a video from Annie Leonard (The Story of Stuff) on Cap and Trade. It says just about everything I mentioned below, only better and with animations. Enjoy.

With the Copenhagen conference quickly approaching, Climate Change is the next big agenda in US politics. The solution that's being offered - the only politically viable solution, I've been told - is Cap'n Trade. As most of you probably know, this is a system where carbon emissions would be capped and taxed beyond a certain point, but polluters could purchase offsets that would allow them to avoid the caps. In my opinion, the plan is flawed for a number of reasons:

1) It only affects the largest emitters. The current plan's cap is so high that most emitters wouldn't have to do anything to avoid the cap. Certainly, the cap will be reduced over time, but it would probably only have a minor impact for the next 10 years or more.
2) Most of the credits are slated to be given away, gratis, by the US government. This is meant to make the plan acceptable to power companies, but essentially it allows them to continue doing what they've been doing while appearing to comply with carbon reduction - subsidized by the government.
3) Companies can buy offsets which would, theoretically, neutralize the effect of their carbon emissions. This amounts to a sleight of hand, which allows industrialized nations and high emitters to continue their normal practices while giving the impression that something is being done to reduce carbon emissions. The fact is that without substantial reduction in carbon emissions as opposed to sequestration, we will not be able to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to the recommended 350 ppm level that is necessary for avoiding the worst case scenarios of Climate Change.
4) The carbon offset plan is essentially another mechanism for wealthy nations to push the environmental and social consequences of our lifestyle onto poorer nations. Many of these projects displace indigenous populations or involve other human rights abuses.

Cap'n Trade is a solution which is tailor made for industry - not a genuine attempt to limit carbon emissions. In their efforts to make the regulations politically viable (meaning that they will encounter less resistance from the energy industry), our legislators have made them more or less worthless.

Further complicating the Climate Change issue is the recent leak of a mass of emails between some of the world's preeminent climate scientists. This has laid bare the deeply political processes involved in climate science, and left many concerned about the public's perception of the issue. Jerome Whitington over at Accounting for Atmosphere points out that "...what we’re left with is a silly, irresponsible debate between elite Northern science and the elite Northern conservative populists who don’t want the UN eroding their right to play frontiersmen on the grand stage of American exceptionalism."

In a recent report to the World Bank, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom "A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change" proposes an alternative to the typical Western approaches based on Markets and Science. She emphasizes multiple solutions at multiple scales which would take into account the on-the-ground experiences and local knowledge of the people who are most affected by Climate Change. The result would be a system that would be more resilient, more open to innovative approaches, and less prone to total failure.
Climate change is, without a doubt, a huge issue. We need to find real solutions rather than giving the energy industry an easy way out. We also need to think of Climate Change as an Environmental Justice issue, and make sure that the interests of those who are most affected (usually those who are least involved in the modern industrial project) are accounted for.

Cap'n Trade, Human Rights and Alternative Approaches to Climate Change

Interview: Colleen Morgan

The following is from an email-based interview with Colleen Morgan, who runs the blog Middle Savagery. These days I have a lot of questions about the direction(s) of anthropology, especially when it comes to the publication and dissemination of the information that anthropologists produce. Since Colleen Morgan's dissertation research is heavily focused on the use of New Media in archaeology, I thought that she would be a great person to start the discussion with:

Ryan Anderson: What do you think about the current model for academic publishing?

Colleen Morgan: I think that we are currently seeing academic publishing in flux—in academic disciplines such as physics, you see a wide engagement with open access publication, but in anthropology and archaeology we are still struggling with the complexities involved with our unique disciplines. In archaeology we have several different forms of data that we collect and there is not a robust, viable methodology for integrating these data in traditional publication or online. I think that there is still a lot of resistance to open access publication, and while there are some very valid reasons for this resistance such as revealing sacred indigenous knowledge or depicting sacred objects or human remains, the current "closed," paper-based publication model is not viable in the long term. That said, it is a dangerous prospect for graduate students who are trying to publish and establish their research--hiring and tenure are still based solely on peer-reviewed articles in traditional journals.

RA: In your opinion, how well do anthropologists and archaeologists engage with wider audiences?

CM: I think I have a skewed perspective on outreach within the anthropological and archaeological community. In my program at UC Berkeley, we are encouraged to do large amounts of outreach and we are given academic credit for this work. I am sure that this is not the case at other academic institutions and I do not know how much people do on their own. I think that archaeologists in particular do pretty well with outreach in a person-to-person scenario where people come to the site and we explain what we are doing as we work. In other respects we could do more with online outreach, and even more involvement in community-based research.

RA: Should anthropologists/archaeologists try to reach a more public audience?

CM: It is symptomatic of the current mode of the information age that archaeologists are attempting to make our data more available to the public. How much of this information will be lost in the ever increasing digital noise is the question. Fundamentally I show my roots in contract archaeology when I say that of course we should try to reach a wider audience--our funding structure and preservation of sites depends on it.

Ultimately the tension is between our interpretations of the past that show doubt, complexity, and conflict and a public that wants clarity, narrative, and resolution. Can we and should we cater to these impulses when they conflict with our "messy" interpretations? Obviously not, but it takes a good deal of skill to maintain a balance--I am not the Carl Sagan of anthropology, by any means.

RA: What are the benefits of attempting to reach wider audiences? And what about the drawbacks?

CM: Well, as I stated above, the benefits include getting more funding and perhaps saving sites from being completely looted. I will be utterly selfish though, in saying that one of the main benefits to reaching a wider audience is that moment of understanding and interest on a person's face as I describe an artifact or a site to them and they find a personal connection to a place and a way of life that was once far removed from their personal sphere. There are also benefits to learning how adaptable we are as a species and how our social relationships have been very different in the past--different in ways that make our current controversies over sex and religion seem rather minor.

The drawbacks have become even more pronounced for me in my more recent work in the Middle East with the highly politicized views of the past, especially in regard to the Bible and Islam. I am just beginning to negotiate these territories, but I still feel that it is important for us to share our finds, and be the major source of information about these finds. It is important in these cases to be comfortable in one's role as the interpreter of this information and to be available to rebut outrageous or inflammatory reuse of our data.

RA: How do you think information will be published and disseminated in the near future? What changes do you imagine (or hope) will take place, if any? If you could change anything about the current model, what would it be?

CM: In stark contrast with my interest in digital archaeology, I would dearly love some of the old modes of visual communication back, such as medium format photography and Victorian-grade site artists for illustrations. As I grow more comfortable with photography and 3D reconstructions, I get a greater appreciation for the interpretive potential of these older technologies. I hope that in the future there is room (and funding!) for all of these representations. The dream is obviously to have the uber-database with all archaeological materials and sites cataloged in a geo-located, cross-referenced, folksonomic structure, but finding the time, money, and legion of monkeys at typewriters to do all of the data entry is problematic, to
put it mildly.

In the short term, I don't see much of a change in publishing and dissemination, sadly. I think that we will see a greater availability of traditionally published articles and books, but big innovations will be slow to come because they are not rewarded financially or academically. There is also not an established peer review system for digital materials and there are only a handful of archaeologists trained in digital methodologies to critically evaluate these works. A lot of my work is at a very foundational level, coming up with citational strategies and showing the relevance of a particular technological application to theoretical and interpretive archaeological work.

One relatively small change that I would like to see in the digital publication world is a move toward Creative Commons licensing for all archaeological photography. There really is no reason to keep the rights for images locked up and not many people respect these copyrights anyway.

Cross-posted at Ethnografix.

Interview: Colleen Morgan

Mobility. Prison. Class. Strands of society from sociology and rap

According to an online dictionnary, a strand is "a pattern forming a unity within a larger structural whole". Can a juxtaposition of quotes from a book* by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and some songs** of french rap (with english subtitles) bring light to some aspects of a larger structural whole ? If you have about half an hour, you can see for yourself.

"The mobility enjoyed by "the people who invest" - who have the capital, the money needed for investment - brings about a disengagement of power towards any duty, a phenomenon which takes a new form, of a yet unseen radicality : no more duties towards the workers, towards the youngest or weakest, towards future generations, towards the preservation of the condition of life. In one word, we are witnessing the end of the duty to contribute to everyday life of the community, and its perpetuation. Today exists an assymetry of a new kind between the deterritorialized nature of power and the maintenance of "life in general" in its territorial frames - life which the new power, able to move suddenly and without warning, is free to exploit, and to abandon to the consequences of this exploitation."
Bauman, 1999, p. 20.

"The summit of the new hierarchy is extra-territorial; its lower strata are marked by varying degrees of spatial constraints, and the lowest is that of the glebae adscripti (those who are ascribed to the glebe), exploitable at leisure. "
Bauman, 1999, p. 160

"The state that seems the most awful to us, the most cruel and ghastly, is forced immobility, the fact of being enchained somewhere without having the right to leave; what makes this situation unbearable, is impossibility to move, rather than frustration which would come from an actual desire to leave. Not being able to move is a remarkable sign of impotence, incapability and pain. (...) Immobilization is the fate that people who are haunted by their own immobilization would like to see imposed on whom they are afraid of, and who deserve to their eyes an exemplary and cruel punishment."
Bauman, 1999, pp. 183-184.

About why the penal system strikes lower classes harder than higher classes, Bauman gives the following reasons :

"On the one hand, we find the particular intents of lawmakers, who have a very precise notion of order. What actions are susceptible to find a place in the Penal Code ? Acts which can committ those who are excluded from this notion of order : losers and oppressed ones. Stealing the resources of entire nations, is "promoting free enterprise"; stealing the livelihood of whole families and communities, is called "downsizing", or "rationalizing". Those two thefts are of course not inscribed in the list of criminal acts and susceptible to sanction."
Bauman, 1999, p. 185

(Lyrics -in french - here )

"On the other hand, as every police services dealing with this kind of affairs know, illegal behaviors committed at the "summit" of the hierarchy are hardly separable from the tight web of day-to-day and "ordinary" affairs. (...) The crimes of "high society" are ill-defined, and are furthermore extremely difficult to track down. (...) These crimes imply a degree of financial and juridical sophistication, almost impossible to understand for an outsider, especially if he is profane or unexperienced. These wrongdoings are "disembodied", they are without physical substance; they "exist" in pure space, in the imaginary space of pure abstraction : they are literally invisible. Relying on its intuition and its common sense, the population can suspect that the constitution of fortunes is punctuated with thefts, but nothing is more difficult than to point a precise action. (...) It is hard to see how judging the convicted ones could alleviate the everyday sorrow hauting poor neighborhoods or dangerous streets of our cities. There is thus not really any political advantage to get for who "actually" act against crimes "at the summit" . "
Bauman, 1999, 186-188.

[the following video contains graphic violence almost from the beginning]





* I translated the quotes from a french edition : Zygmunt Bauman, 1999, Le coût humain de la mondialisation , Hachettes. [1998, Globalization. The Human Consequences, Polity Press and Blackwell publishers]
** Kery James - Banlieusards // Kery James - Thug Life // Mafia K'1 Fry - C'est la Guerre // Ideal J - Hardcore //
- Subtitles by youtuber hiphopisdead92 Very big thanks to him.


If you wish so, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Mobility. Prison. Class. Strands of society from sociology and rap

What's so Great about Politics?

I hope this makes sense, and, if not, we can discuss. I've been following several discussions on power, politics, etc., but haven't yet come to any firm conclusions on what power/domination/imperialism is and how to study or combat it.

For some of these discussions, see anthropology/war/power by Ryan Anderson, Questions about Colonialism and Anthropology: Epistemology, Methodology, and Politics by Max Forte, Thoughts on Power by Jeremy Trombley, and some questions on political engagement by J.M at the bottom of the page here. I've also been thinking about the recent shootings in Fort Hood and Orlando.

U.S. Congress, Joint Session, link

The discussions of politics reminded me that, personally, I've never taken much interest in politics. After all, why should I? I can't conclude that politics is unimportant, but I don't see much reason to be excited about 'participating' or being complicit in what's going on.

What's an election? I'm casting a vote for someone to get paid to sit in D.C. in a suit and tie and represent "me." This person is, in my case, always male. The district where I vote in Georgia has never had a female Representative, and the whole state of Georgia has only had one female Senator, back in 1922. Anyway, gender would only make a slight difference because, whether male or female, the person in Washington also barely knows the people he/she represents. Politicians are twice as bad as the anthropologists Max Forte critiques in his posts because politicians claim to represent the interests of people who they've never even MET. Then it becomes "our" burden to protest or write letters to our Congressmen to tell them our opinions because, honestly, they have no clue, and even if they do, they rarely seem to care unless it compromises their re-election.

Moreover, it seems to me that only a power-hungry individual would go into politics in the first place. Politics: i.e. "the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government," or "competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership" (source). All my vote does is affirm their right to hold that power over people, and what's so exciting about that?

On top of that, we appoint judges so they can decide for us what's right and wrong -- judges who only have to use a slim veneer of consistency or logic, e.g. "precedent," to support their conclusions. They can say that killing another person is wrong, "homicide," and then turn around and say it's OK to kill people in another part of the world, so long as it's in the interests of the State -- that is, in the interests of those people they supposedly represent but don't actually know. Ultimately, then, they probably just decide based on their own beliefs and, in the case of politicians, the interests of their primary supporters.

What does all this have to do with the shootings at Fort Hood and in Orlando? Men who carry out shootings always remind me of Pierre Bourdieu's essay "Gender and Symbolic Violence" and the case of domestic violence I studied for my college thesis, in the book A Private Family Matter. Bourdieu, on power and gender, writes:

[T]he structures of domination...are the product of an incessant (and therefore historical) labour of reproduction, to which singular agents (including men, with weapons such as physical and symbolic violence) and institutions -- families, the church, the educational system, the state -- contribute. ... Symbolic violence is instituted through the adherence that the dominated cannot fail to grant to the dominant (and therefore to the domination) when, to shape her thought of him, and herself, or, rather, her thought of her relation with him and which, being no more than the embodied form of the relation of domination, cause that relation to appear as natural (Bourdieu 2004:339).

I think there are some serious problems with this way of explaining domination, but what I'm particularly interested in his how he suggests that violence is a resource that men possess, "weapons such as physical and symbolic violence," that allows them to gain hegemonic power over women, who are completely "dominated" (2004:339).

It's ludicrous to call women "no more than the embodied form of the relation of domination," but I'll give Bourdieu the benefit of the doubt that he's stuck in his own symbolic violence (2004:339). Actually, women do have the power to enact violence against men but, in many cases, decide not to use it. In the case of domestic violence in A Private Family Matter, Olga, the abuser's wife, planned violence against her husband, Tony, but never carried out the plans. She thought about pouring gasoline on the bed and lighting it, burning Tony in his sleep, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. Then she considered stabbing him with his scuba diving knife. She went in the bedroom while he was napping and held the knife above him, ready to kill. At the last minute, her daughter Barbie yelled that someone was at the door. After these failed attempts, she tried to commit suicide instead, eating all the pills in the bottles on her dresser. And, more importantly, she had many other ways of asserting power without violence -- ways of reasserting control over her life without necessarily doing it by achieving domination over others.

Even her husband Tony and her son Victor resisted power/violence in non-domineering ways, on certain occasions. For instance, to the son Victor, who was also abused by Tony, not enacting violence proved his own superiority and ability to escape Tony's violence, regardless of whether or not Tony accepted that interpretation. When Victor was little he dreamed himself a tiger, but a tiger who never attacked things but rather protected creatures in danger (Rivers 2006:64). He sought out other father figures in the media, as alternative role models to Tony. If Tony abused him, he would imagine, alternatively, Jack’s fatherly punishment: “President Kennedy would have given me a stern talking-to, or sent me to my room to write an essay, but that would have been the end of it” (2006:59). Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird was also a significant father figure for Victor. Victor prayed to make Tony more like Gregory Peck because Peck portrayed fatherly “devotion” and justice, “truth and righteousness”: “Finch’s heroism in standing up for truth and righteousness was equaled by his devotion to his kids, Jeb and Scout” (2006:119).

Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird, link

One of Victor's greatest fears was that he would become his father. Consequently, escaping violence became more important to him than being able to counter his father's violence with violence. To him, his relationship with his son proves the achievement: “All of the anxiety and fear I had carried with me for thirty-nine years washed away in those first private moments between this father and his son. Eli would have a home that he would want to come home to and never fear” (2006:358). All of this was a way of re-asserting control over his life, in a way very different from his father's power/violence, and, for that, I wouldn't exactly call either him OR his mother "domination embodied."

My point? I would say that those who engage in violence, "the dominating" (according to Bourdieu), do choose to use certain tools that give them special power over others, e.g. the power to beat/shoot/kill. Violence also has a certain legitimacy as *the* proper cultural tool for revenge and bringing attention to what's happening. How it achieved this cultural status I'm not sure, but Victor didn't consider using a gun until he went to the police and was told it was a "private family matter." After that, he decided, “Since I had come to the conclusion that no arrest would be made unless [Tony] killed one of us or we killed him there didn’t seem to be any alternative” (2006:145). Even then he didn't carry it out, and this reluctance of many of the "dominated" to use violence also means something. Actually, there *were* alternatives which Victor didn't quite see at the time but did discover gradually.

How does this relate to politics? Aspiring to achieve political political power seems to me like too much complicity with the system, not unlike enacting violence to get back at violent people. Philosopher Naomi Wolf once spoke to several philosophy classes at my college and advocated that we have an all-woman political party supporting a woman candidate for president. I asked if a man would be allowed in this party if he shared the same philosophy and she said absolutely not. It seemed like reverse exclusion to me. I haven't read her book Fire with Fire, but I think it elaborates on some of her ideas. The Publishers Weekly reviewer on Amazon writes, "Wolf theorizes that little girls, as much as boys, have fantasies of absolute dominion but learn to repress their 'will to power' at a very early age. Wolf here sketches a psychological road map designed to help women deal with their ambivalence about success, power, equality and money."

Maybe I'm too much of a FEMALE, but why would we ever even want this kind of power and domination in the first place? So that everyone gets a chance to dominate? It doesn't make sense to me. I would be more enthused about drawing on alternatives to violence, or alternatives to politics, or at least stripping politics to the basics, rather than playing into systems created by and for individuals bent on dominating others.


Sources

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2004. Gender and Symbolic Violence. In Violence in War and Peace. Pp. 339-342. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Rivers, Victor Rivas. 2006. A Private Family Matter: A Memoir. New York: Atria Books.

What's so Great about Politics?

Opposition to U.S. Military Buildup in Guam

Discussion of US colonialism in Guam, as well as critique of U.S. plans for military buildup. If the video below takes too long to load, you can also go HERE for the original video and transcript.

Opposition to U.S. Military Buildup in Guam