Misunderstandings about public unions

Put aside the normal hand-wringing about workers unions in general; public unions take a special beating in the nation discussion.  Whenever issues with public sector unions are in the news (typically teachers unions or public transit workers), the public rumblings from conservatives follow a trend: “why should public sector workers have the right to organize?”  In times of recession, the demands of organized labor causes strain on budgets.  As always, it boils down to a question of who foots the bill.  Unsurprisingly, some people believe it’s those worst off, in the most economically vulnerable positions, who should suffer the real effects of slot-machine capitalism.

There’s a laundry list of misconceptions about public unions that one could address, but the main issue is quite simple–where there is a employer-employee relationship, trade unions are a natural and often socially essential consequence.  The opposition to public unions (in particular, above and beyond private sector unions) is utterly mysterious to me, and seems as if conservatives perceive an inherent and simple link between government, labor, “socialism”, and leftism/liberalism.  This link is perceived as necessary; what need could there be for a public sector union when all of the above forces are colluding anyway?  These workers are already “on the dole”, and the logic seems to be that collectivized bargaining is the equivalent of allowing wards of the State to set their own income.  I can’t make any other sense of the reaction.

Take the situation of China, or of the former Soviet Union.  Whether a system parades as “Communist” or not, the presence of wage labor calls for labor unions.  Even if the State holds a firm monopoly on employment, there is a distinct need for collective bargaining on the part of workers (as they still work for a money-wage and often own nothing save their labor).  None of the essential conditions that make labor unions necessary disappear when the State is the employer.  The method of employment is still fundamentally capitalist, the wage system is still intact, workers are still denied a true stake in their livelihood, and labor unions are still essential.

 

 

Military buffoonery

The US and Iran have been squaring off over the Straight of Hormuz.  US military officials have admitted that Iran has the capability of closing the Straight, responsible for moving ~1/5 of the world’s oil supply (according to the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/middleeast/us-warns-top-iran-leader-not-to-shut-strait-of-hormuz.html).  Given the wave of analysis on what can, will, and ought to happen if this came to pass, the US news media is succeeding in establishing economically damaging Iranian moves as plausible: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-12/an-oil-strategy-in-case-iran-s-navy-shuts-down-the-strait-of-hormuz-view.html.  When arms and wallets dance in US public policy it’s hard to tell who’s following and who’s leading other than “us” and “them”.

It’s hard to ignore the hypocrisy in play here. Iran is being “aggressive” by reaching for waters ~30-40km of their borders.  The US is halfway across the world (yet again) projecting its military strength, yet this is not similarly “aggression”.

In a move repeated often over the past 70 years, the US is appealing to the needs of international economy (read: its own industry) to trump a nation’s sovereignty when that sovereignty becomes inconvenient.  Iran simply doesn’t line up with US goals for domination of the region.

An excerpt from the NYT article above:

“You get cowboys who do their own thing,” Mr. Connell said. One officer with experience at the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain said the Revolutionary Guards navy shows “a high probability for buffoonery.”

I wonder if they accept that US military detachments carry with them a similarly high probability, or if their estimates are biased?  (Link to the latest video of US military atrocity, the desecration of corpses.)  When one or two Iranian captains go rogue and posture before US ships, that’s apparently ground to conclude a high probability for buffoonery.  But catch some US soldiers acting like animals on tape, and all we have here are a few bad apples I’m sure.

Profitability: a bad metric for the worth of a public entity

Profitability is often held up as a measurement of the worth of a government agency, such as the US Postal Service.  The argument is simple: the USPS (or whichever organization is under attack) is inefficient and an unjustifiable use of public funds, and the lack of profits is evidence of this.

Let’s put aside the normal branch of arguments, those in favor of public goods.  While they do a good job explaining why profitability should not be a concern for public goods, we will focus on the finances of the claim, which are puzzling to say the least.  (Note that while profitability should not be a concern when undertaking public goods, this says nothing about the prudence of budgeting wisely.)

Suppose we have a government organization, call it G.  G takes in dollars (income) from two sources: taxation and rates on its goods and services.  In other words, G gets paid by government directly or by consumers of its services. Thus we can express G’s income simply: income = public spending + revenue.

G must provide its signature service.  In doing so, it incurs production costs.  These include both human costs (the cost of labor, total wages), and non-human costs (trucks, fuel, etc).  Thus we can think of the financial obligations of G constituting both wages and other costs: obligations = wages + costs.

Profit is surplus wealth.  In other words, for G to run a profit, it must pay out less money than it receives.  This means that income must be greater than the obligations of G, that which G pays out.

What does this mean?  G profiting is synonymous with G accumulating reserves of money.  Without using the money for anything, this is equivalent to burning it.  G would be collecting a stack of dollars that would be put to no use.

Goin' postal stackin' this C.R.E.A.M.

The main question I wish to ask conservatives (and more conservative Democrats) is: “when G runs a profit, what should it do with that profit?”  Keep in mind that doing nothing at all is doing something (burning it).  G would be extracting its profit (in dollars) from the private sector and from circulation.

Running a profit and then doing nothing with it, as G, impacts our money (however little).  This seems like a strange effect for policies about G to have.  In terms of the USPS, it would be strange to think of setting the price of stamps with an eye toward controlling inflation rates.  But if enough organizations did such a thing (made and sat on profit), it would have roughly a similar effect to the federal government running a surplus: it would drain the private sector of funds.

It’s easy to think of this in terms of a board game.  Suppose we’re playing Monopoly, and halfway through the game the banker is determined to collect more money than he distributes (and follows through on this).  (This example paraphrased from a solid comment from Krugman’s NYT blog a few days ago.)  The bank, running a surplus, would be draining the private market of currency.  Play would slow down as players would see their buying power gradually disappear with their money into the bank.  Remember, if the bank is running a surplus then it’s coming from somewhere.

Therefore, burning the money (just sitting on it) is not an option.  One legitimate use of such funds could be to invest in expected future growth.  Investment outside of its own direct business activities, however, would be highly illegitimate: it would confound policymaking about G and G’s activities with the real outcomes and entrenched interests of G’s investments.  Such entanglements would be so detrimental to lawmaking and sensible governance that investment (as a private entity would invest profits) is not acceptable.

There are only a few things one could do to eliminate (distribute) this profit.  We could lower inputs to G (lower taxes or lower rates), or we could simply increase G’s bills (they could spend more, or they could increase wages). Either way, the money needs to be returned to the private sector.  The different ways of doing so benefit different people in difference ways; we should do it remembering that the government exists to aid the private sector as a whole.  As the public sector, in capitalist societies, exists to promote the health of the private sector (including labor), accumulating profits makes no sense.  It would only do that if it were meant to serve its own needs, which is clearly perverse (government for its own sake).

After all, it stands to reason: if there’s a profit in a public service, then it means somebody is being overcharged, either the tax payers, the people paying rates, or the workers (overcharged for their labor — underpaid).  While liberals and conservatives will fall on other side of that divide (thinking that the rich via taxation should disproportionately cover the financing versus the poor via rates and wages), the point remains: running a profit makes no sense, and G should work to zero any surplus wealth, allowing the funds to go back into the private economy.  Profitability is  poor measurement for the value of services in the public sector, as the public sector does not operate based on profit-motive (nor should it).

Fascism is capitalism in crisis. Take note.

Today Paul Krugman pointed out the slow, dawning realization in the press that austerity measures move us in the wrong direction.  It’s frightening to internalize just how much the public discussion has diverged from reality and from rational science.  It’s not the first time America has seen the politicization of science, and not the last time we (and the world) will suffer for shelving scientific thought in favor of politically convenient mythology.

Perhaps more frightening to me, however, is the article to which Krugman refers.  Reproduced below is the portion quoted:

Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece

ATHENS, Greece — They descended by the hundreds — black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down dark-skinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece’s far-right extremists.

In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a right-wing rise — and the Norway massacre on Monday drove authorities to beef up security.

The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The U.N.’s refugee agency warns that some Athens neighborhoods have become zones where “fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime.”

Fascism is nothing more than capitalism in crisis.  Whenever capitalism pushes itself to the brink of collapse, fascism takes over.  Right-wing extremists, armed with bats, clubs, guns, whatever, are sanctioned by the owners of society (the ones whose interests the police primarily serve) to beat political opposition into the ground (something normally referred to as “the police”).  After all, once political forces threaten even a shred of the private ownership “rights” of the upper class over various capacities of life and society, violence must be used to restore security to private property at the expense of the people.  All the better, of course, when you have a monopoly on force or the full and eager compliance of such a monopoly.

To other Americans out there: if you think you’re immune to this sort of treatment, think again.  We’ve already seen here what our politicians and “leaders” are willing to do for the owners, rentiers, and bond-holders.  They are willing to throw away the wellbeing of the working class, and even of the middle class itself (who they heavily rely on for consolidation of political power).  In some ways, our politicians may have “saved” us, bringing the pain and unfairness of austerity measures to avoid the alternative we’re seeing in Greece: the re-establishment of the dominance of established wealth and privilege by violence rather than parliament.

We’ve seen what our political leadership has perpetrated and allowed, viciously robbing working class and middle class Americans by passing the recent debt package (which, no doubt, will fly through Obama’s desk faster than he gave away the store).  They were willing to push us to economic ruin; economic ruin for the poor, that is, as the upper class is so established at this point as to be able to practically ride out any plausible crisis.  What if they didn’t get their way?  At what point will American capital call out the brown shirts?  Or, even worse: when will we see them use the “private” (conservative) militaries that have been constructed with public tax dollars?  When American labor gets uppity, we know what happens.

Submission to Authority

The TSA has begun to install new imaging devices at airports.  These imaging devices, which use a form of x-ray technology, produce an image of the body that leaves little to the imagination.

Sorry sir, but we must check for any unusual packages.

Americans (from Tea Partiers to self-labeled “Leftists”), being the authority-loving and liberty-loathing crew of sheep that they are, have by and large failed to resist this recent governmental excursion into privacy.  Except for this man.  During the events described in the blog linked above, the man involved left on his camcorder and recorded the incident from his handbag.  The first video of the series can be found here.

This entry isn’t about the outrageousness of the TSA, or about the sad state of civil liberties and personal freedom in America.  This entry is about the response that I’ve seen, in both Youtube comments (I know, I know) and in the reply thread to the blog linked above.  Here are some choice examples.

“It’s not like they cup your balls and wiggle your dick around in their fingers. Calling it molestation is retarded. Some lady had her boob squeezed and now everyone is throwing a fit about this.”

“Hoping your next flight blows up, idiot.”

“I guess I will. Before 9/11, nobody would have thought as planes as weapons, either. If I take public transportation, then I’ll follow the rules. Just as I do when I drive. Or haven’t you noticed the rules about that? No drinking, no texting, no cell phone use without a headset, lights have to work, must have a muffler, must have insurance, license plates…. where have you been?”

“You can drive or take a train. Turning his camera on tells me he was looking for a confrontation. In fact he must have been expecting one.”

“Sounds to me like the subject who is making the video instigated the whole situation to begin with. Anyone who turns on their camera to record something like this is looking for trouble (and an opportunity to file a lawsuit) and if it doesnt happen then they instigate it just like this subject did by verbally abusing the TSA agent with threats of arrest, and using immature language such as, if you touch my junk! C’mon man Grow up, and drive to wherever you want to go!”

A few troubling trends and themes present themselves.  First of all, some of these posters seem perfectly alright with the notion that we should give up privacy for safety.  These are likely the same people who support(ed) Bush and Obama’s illegal wiretaps.  But worse than that, they consider their own submission to be a sign of maturity.  Perhaps what they’re saying is true; the way society is structured, it seems that standing up for what’s right, especially in the face of authority, is increasingly viewed as immature and lame.

The other theme I find troubling is the notion that this man was “looking for a conflict” by turning on his camera.  This I find perhaps more disturbing than the burning desire these submissives have to give up their rights (and for all of us to give them up as well).

The thing about submissives that I’ve never been able to understand is criticism of any and all mechanisms designed to help the individual against corrupt authority.  What could a camera hurt here?  Only the authorities; this is what makes the submissives upset, and what causes them to hurl insults such as the charges of immaturity at those who wish to protect their rights.  Furthermore: if you expect a conflict with authorities, what incentive do you have NOT to record the incident?  The presence of a camera is the closest thing we’re going to get to an objective perspective.

Providing potential victims with cameras has been long recognized as a tactic for holding rogue authority accountable.  It renders the mechanisms of authority transparent.  They’re no longer allowed to control the official account of the story in a way that suits their narrative, their goals, their agenda.

The fact that these ideas persist in our culture is frightening to me.  How many Americans are walking through those scanners happily, allowing themselves to be stripped of their dignity?  Why should they have to parade around, essentially naked, in front of TSA officials?  Why are they willing to?  Why do some of them insist that WE are the immature, foolish, short-sighted ones for not wishing to submit?

As technology improves, imaging technology improves.  The TSA pervert-cameras are a good example.  The government will stop at nothing to expand their ability (technological and legal) to snoop on you.  And these people wish to gripe about a private citizen using a camcorder to protect himself?  Private citizens should have more tools at their disposal, not only to prevent gross incompetence, but also to prevent corruption at the hands of self-serving, all-too-human officials.  The best tool against this form of oppression, other than an informed, passionate, and educated electorate, is a recording device and a free, open method of distribution.