I understand finding something to get excited about in the idea of Barack Obama being president (I don’t share it, but I can see where it comes from). I cannot understand anyone with any progressive tendancies not being appalled by his speech. The first commentary I read on the speech which made sense was Louis Proyect’s:
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted – for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things – some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
[Yes, they wrote books about that. They are called Horatio Alger stories and they are bullshit. Bill Gates got where he is by being born into one of Seattle’s richest families and by exploiting technology that had hitherto been common property.]
The Daily Show also did pretty well
I don’t have time (or interest) to pick apart the whole speech, but there was one section that really stuck out to me1:
For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.
For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.
Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life.
I’m going to ignore the reference to Vietnam because that’s a whole nother rant, which I’m going to assume that the reader can supply themselves. I will quickly draw attention to the fact that this narrative of US history ignores anyone who was living there before European colonisation.
But my point is something quite different. People did toil in sweatshops, endure the lash of the whip and plow the hard earth. But they didn’t do these things because they wanted to create the world that exists now, they did it because the alternative was starvation or death.
Millions of people worked in sweatshops, were held as slave and farmed in difficult conditions. They did so with varying degrees of control and consent. To say they did these things to bring about the world that currently exists is obscene. Millions of people have millions of different dreams, struggles and views of the purposes of their lives. Maybe some people were aiming to create the world that currently exists. But I know that some slaves, workers and farmers had a different idea of the worlds that they wanted to create. I know, because I’ve read about them, that some dreamed of worlds much like the world I fight for.
To claim generations of people were struggled and were exploited because so they could help create the world that we live in now is both ignorant and arrogant
- although can I just say his view of the unselfish worker who gives up his hours so his friend will keep his job made was despicable boss pandering. How about both those workers go on strike to keep everyone’s job and reclaim some profits from the bosses. I’m not saying I expect anything else from the president of the united states. I’m just saying that I don’t see how anyone could have seen Barack Obama’s inauguration address as doing anything but choosing sides with the rich and powerful [↩]
If you listen to what Obama says and who he has appointed, he is fairly conservative at least to me, as a Canadian. But remember although he swept many states, he only won by 3% of the popular vote. At the same time, he isn’t Bush. And he has started making positive changes. But he is the president who won the enthusiasm of a country that elected Bush…2x. I know that Bush stole one of those elections but that is only because it was so very close. A really progressive politician just couldn’t do that. A person can be conservative and have compassion for others and prefer peace over war, which is better than a conservative person who is arrogant, hysterical, & war-mongering.
I will quickly draw attention to the fact that this narrative of US history ignores anyone who was living there before European colonisation.
When I heard the line of “settled the West” that struck me odd as well.
How about both those workers go on strike to keep everyone’s job and reclaim some profits from the bosses.
That’s presuming the bosses have some profits to reclaim. There’s a lot of unhealthy balance sheets out there. Restructuring and taking back ridiculous executive bonuses and compensation is in order in those companies where that’s occurred, but there’s a lot of businesses where the money’s just not there.
I’m just saying that I don’t see how anyone could have seen Barack Obama’s inauguration address as doing anything but choosing sides with the rich and powerful
For those of you who style yourselves as “progressive” you might want to check out a columnist called John Kass, the most prominently featured columnist in the Chicago Tribune. His politics are closer to mine than yours, but he’s up front about it, and his objective is mostly uncovering corruption, deal making and exploitation of the taxpayers by the people that are supposed to be serving them. Regardless of party. He’s been covering Chicago and Illinois politics for years and has a pretty good line on what Pres. Obama’s career (and most other Illinois politicians) has been like. He said in his commentary on the speech:
Oh, and while I’ve never read the Horatio Alger books I know plenty of people who started out with very little and ended up with a lot. The American dream of “work hard and you can get ahead” is real, not nonsense. Success isn’t measured by attaining Bill Gates’ financial status. Actually, I don’t personally define “success” solely by one’s financial status at all, I think there’s a moral and spiritual aspect to it. But from a financial viewpoint the question is not whether you can become obscenely wealthy but whether people can attain a reasonable standard of living through their own efforts without having their way blocked by not knowing the right people and not having to be the right religion or race or ethnic group and see their children able to do the same. While I’m sure you can pick out individual stories where this has failed, overall what I’ve outlined is the usual course in this country. Hell, a black kid whose dad left his home when he was 2 became President of the United States! That’s a powerful narrative – so powerful that people voted for him on the basis that this narrative is going to revolutionize our relations with other countries and among the races in our country. So powerful that even someone like myself who didn’t vote for him sees the value of it. THAT narrative spells out the American dream.
It seems to me that what the President said was that if you want to get ahead you’re going to have to do what you can. Do not expect him to put forward policies that will guarantee a given standard of living to people that are not doing the best that they can do to provide for themselves. Now, whether that’s true or not nobody knows. But that’s the message he’ll have to send to get the support of middle-class America.
I know that Bush stole one of those elections but that is only because it was so very close. A really progressive politician just couldn’t do that.
Not clear on what this statement means, Lilian. Do you mean to say that since a) President Bush was conservative (not an accurate statement by my lights, BTW, he was a Republican) and b) the election was very close then Bush therefore stole the election?
I think this is a misreading of Obama’s speech.
You seem to be taking this:
and saying “but those people aren’t great or rich.”
I read the speech as saying that those people may not have been great or rich–in fact, it is referring to people who reject “leisure and the pleasures of riches and fame.” But even though they are not great or rich (and because they reject riches and fame) their toil and ethics have “carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.”
And incidentally, you also seem to be implying that there is/was no class movement in America. I write this as the grandchild of first generation, penniless, orphan, immigrants. I am not alone: we’re not all Bill Gates, but there are plenty of folks like me.
I’m just saying that I don’t see how anyone could have seen Barack Obama’s inauguration address as doing anything but choosing sides with the rich and powerful
I think you can not see this because you have bought into the right’s conflation of markets, individualism, and Enlightenment ideals with plutocracy and kleptocracy. As long as the left keeps ceding these ideals to the right and arguing between Marxism and anarchy – both of which in practice result in the strong controlling the weak – the right will periodically be able to convince the people to return power to the rich, on the belief that doing so is necessary to secure these Enlightenment ideals.
I’m just a hop from immigrant ancestors (this is true of so many of us), and one I actually met, a grandmother who came here with absolutely nothing at the age of 13. She worked her butt off all her life at hard, unrewarding, ill-paid work.
These stories are all over.
While I don’t think she did this to bring about some imaginary world in the year 2009, I definitely think she and most of these people did this for their children and their grandchildren, so that they could have a better life than the crap the immigrants left behind at home.
I think that’s what Obama is saying. Even the folks who didn’t come here voluntarily worked hard, all those generations, hoping for something better for their children.
That’s us, folks.
We aren’t slaves with no possessions in 1856, we aren’t 13-year-old girls who arrive here all alone with no education and the clothes on our backs, not even speaking the language. We’re a lot better off than those people, every single one of us, and that didn’t happen by magic, and all this wealth didn’t fall on our heads out of the sky.
We are where we are because of the unstinting hard work and self-sacrifice of all these people who came before us, all of which I think they performed very much with us in mind. I think that’s his point, rather than some weirdness about siding with the rich, which he pretty specifically didn’t do.
@RonF:
You’ll kick yourself when you read this, Ron – you just parsed the argument wrongly. To make sense of that excerpt, you need to include the previous sentence:
Lilian’s claim, here, is that Obama couldn’t have won the enthusiasm of the US if he were “a really progressive politician”, seeing as this is the country that just elected Bush twice in a row.
The first sentence in your version of the quote (“I know…”) is a parenthetical effort to defend this claim against the anticipated objection that they didn’t actually elect him the first time round – Bush was only able to steal the election, she suggests, because it was already extremely close, and what matters to her argument is that, win or lose, he still had the support of about half the electorate.
Thanks for explaining that so clearly, Erin.
I don’t know if I understand the objections here. None of those words have any clear meaning. We know why Bush said what he said in the clip: because he couldn’t come out and say, “I want lots more people to die in Iraq.” But as far as I can tell, we have no reason to think Obama means anything like that. (There’s no profit in it.) Perhaps when he says freedom, he means “I am a good person, and incidentally we should stop torturing.” And for all you know, when he talks about the work that objectively did help create our relative prosperity, he means, “The poorest citizen of the US deserves guaranteed health care as much as Paris Hilton does (because in many cases, her inheritance would not exist without them and their ancestors).”
Ah. Thanks.
Of course, not much has changed. As Lilian points out, there’s still a relatively small spread of percentage points of voters between the two parties. Had we had a middle-aged white guy running for the Democrats things would probably have been closer. In any case the mid-term elections are going to be interesting. Historically the party in the White House loses ground in Congress. A lot will depend on whether the economy recovers. Look for losses if it doesn’t and retention if it does.
The game has changed a little, though. Over the last two Census cycles statistical analysis of data and how the information is used in re-districting has become very sophisticated. It is becoming increasingly rare for a House incumbent to lose. Generally the opportunity for change occurs when the incumbent quits/dies/is convicted. That’s a great thing for political parties and a bad thing for the country.
Personally I’d like to see a law that requires some form of “contiguousness” test, something that makes districts reasonably compact so that we avoid blatantly gerrymandered districts like this. Drawing up a district so that a particular person gets elected does not serve the voters. We need more churn in Congress, even if it’s from one party member to another.
This doesn’t really work. His family was only upper middle class. They had to work for a living, so his success has less t do with inherited wealth than inherited vlues of education, hard work, mixed in with a good deal of risk taking (dropping out of harvard, statring own biz) and good timing (the beginning of the IT revolution) as Obama points out.
Furthermore, Gates and Allen devoloped MSFT BASIC. People started using a leaked copy without permssin but it was hardly common property before thye “exploited” it. Ditto for DOS, which they bought from someone else. It was not in the public domains since, obviously, they bought it.
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Manju: I didn’t even know what that part meant, because from what I hear Gates made his fortune by conning some fool company out of a program (“DOS”) they themselves conned out of the programmer through a standard we-own-your-thoughts contract. Oh, and supposedly the one piece of software Gates wrote himself has more bugs than a flea circus.
I heard it differently. Many of us were schooled that the world was “made” only by the rich and privileged, and the rest of us were along for the ride. I heard him saying that we ALL contributed.
Just like the “southern tour of homes” I once “disrupted” simply by asking if slaves had designed and built a particular beautiful old southern house (of course they did), the official version of history we are given calls it the [SLAVE OWNERS NAME] historic home… the name of the person(s) actually responsible for creating this home, isn’t even known, much less given to us as we admire their artistry… (After all, they didn’t have their own names, but slave names to match the name of the slave/home owner)
I do agree that “settled” the West was fucked… better terminology to communicate what I think he meant instead (or maybe he did mean “settle”): “struck out for the West”–maybe some reference to the Gold Rush or something that was (for its time) pretty egalitarian. I think he was talking about the “pioneer spirit” in its better manifestations, rather than in its worst–that go-for-broke impulse that brought my starving, desperate ancestors here… and Obama’s own father, too.
I didn’t even know what that part meant, because from what I hear Gates made his fortune by conning some fool company out of a program (”DOS”) they themselves conned out of the programmer through a standard we-own-your-thoughts contract.
O.K. – I don’t have documentation at my fingertips, but my recollection was that Gates and Allen developed DOS for the IBM PC by adapting CPM-86. IBM, thinking that PCs were toys and had no future in the business world, let Gates and Allen buy the rights for it back from them. I could be wrong, though.
Just like the “southern tour of homes” I once “disrupted” simply by asking if slaves had designed and built a particular beautiful old southern house (of course they did), the official version of history we are given calls it the [SLAVE OWNERS NAME] historic home… the name of the person(s) actually responsible for creating this home, isn’t even known, much less given to us as we admire their artistry… (After all, they didn’t have their own names, but slave names to match the name of the slave/home owner)
Hm. If I hire someone to build a home for me, who’s responsible for creating that home? The person who wrote up the plans, the laborers and craftsmen who physically built it, or the person who paid for it all? Seems to me all were necessary to create the house. Of course, only one owns the right to put their name on it.
Speaking of being disruptive by asking a loaded question – I was on the campus of the University of North Carolina about 10 years ago. Having been born and raised in Massachusetts (where Yankees were invented) having lived north of the Mason-Dixon line and either Massachusetts, Detroit or Chicago my whole life the presence of a statue of a Confederate soldier was a novelty to me. I asked the students in the area about it. Apparently he had a name (I think it was “Confederate Sam”) and a “legend”, which was that he fired his gun every time a virgin walked by.
I was told that it was a favorite meeting spot, such that if you wanted to arrange to get together with someone at a particular time you’d tell them “See you at Sam at [whatever time].” Without even thinking I said “Do the black students do that too?” A dirty look from my new acquaintance ended the conversation.
Well, given that the the poster in question (Proyect) is an actual, real live socialist of course that speech was wrong on many levels.
For mainstream America, it was especially warm fuzzy pablum that makes them want to be better citizens.
Both are right.
The question is, which one of these is actually going to get something done.
RonF: no.
Thanks, hf. Appreciate the info. I actually had a copy of CPM-86 loaded up on a PC – I abandoned it when I put it on an XT and it didn’t see the hard drive. I called up IBM and they refused to give me any support on it. That was my introduction to IBM support, and it didn’t get any better.
Ha, discord and conflict indeed! I think Milton Friedman would say they have no responsibility to help you unless it increases short-term profit. And this seems legally correct, though more appropriate for a socialist polemic than an “anti-communist” one.
hf:
Uh…no. That would be long-term profit. And the whole point of Ron’s story, as far as I can tell, is that they weren’t acting in a way that would maximize their long-term profit, and as a result lost him as a customer.
ETA: Now that I’ve thought about it some more, I’m at a loss to understand how you could possibly believe that Friedman would ever have said such a thing. The idea that a firm should focus solely on short-term profits leads to such obviously absurd conclusions (e.g., never invest in R&D) that no reasonably intelligent person could believe in it. The only explanation I can think of is that you think of Friedman not as a person, but as a caricature for you to pull out and kick around as a rhetorical flourish. As such, it’s not really necessary to represent his arguments accurately. Sound about right?
At that time I was supporting myself and a small department. Within a year I was supporting a division and was spending $1,000,000 a year on hardware and software, and all my hardware money went to Compaq, not IBM. IBM tried to dominate the PC marketplace, but stories like mine caused it to open up to a dozen companies led by Compaq, started by 3 guys who were willing to throw over some pretty good jobs and risk their careers and what were probably comfortable lives to strike out on their own. Yeah, they got rich off of the deal. They deserved to, because they took the risk. They also employed a whole lot of people in some pretty good jobs and kept IBM from dictating a marketplace.
I went back and read Proyject’s post.
Worn out dogmas? Like this? “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”
Can anyone tell me what that means?
Who ever wrote this gob of overblown, purple prose should be taken out and horsewhipped.
Critique of style is one thing. But I’m more curious what he thinks of the ideals that paragraph sets forth.
or to take bold action to solve the problems of rising populations and falling reservoir levels across the Southwest
A small slice from an overall critique where he sets forth the revelation that only a small fraction of the stimulus money will go towards rebuilding infrastructure. I find a lot that he and I might agree with on that. But I slice the above out because my answer to that part of the question he raises is that the aquifers in the area just can’t support a lot of people – it’s a damn desert. People there should either a) pay the market price for local water, or b) move somewhere where there is cheaper water. It’s not something that’s been in the national media much, but there is fear in the in the Midwest that one of various proposals to pipe Great Lakes water out there is going to gain traction. And I still see no one talking about municipal sewer systems, which are in pretty sad shape. Hell, here in Chicago they still occasionally dig up WOODEN pipes.
The fact that you live somewhere doesn’t mean that you have a right to take my money to ameliorate the costs of living there. The Southwest is dry and water is in short supply. Big deal. I live near Chicago and in the winter it’s cold as Dante’s Hell. So my heating bill costs a lot of money. Do I get to get a government subsidy for it? No. Nor should I.
What was the force of our example that convinced the people of Nicaragua to vote for the U.S. backed candidate in 1990.
Yeah, we’ve done some bad stuff. We’ve also done a lot of good stuff. You want perfection, go to Heaven. Overall the U.S. has led, not hindered, the struggle towards the ideals that our Declaration of Independence set forth and our Constitution was written to further. That it’s been a bumpy ride with betrayals along the way is inevitable. Our government is made up of humans, not gods.
Wrong again, Brandon.
Friedman:
Unless the stockholders say otherwise, a corporate official must assume they want increasing stock prices in the short term. (In the long term, the CEO can retire with a golden parachute.) For “social responsibility” we could substitute “long-term thinking,” like that which tells us that well-paid workers can buy more products, and that sweatshop labor and pollution might come back to bite you later. I applaud Milton Friedman for this clear-sighted analysis of unregulated corporate capitalism.
hf:
Replace “social responsibility” with “long-term thinking?” As if the terms are interchangable. “a corporate official must assume they want increasing stock prices in the short term?” In what world?
giving up short term profits is a tough and serious decison, but nonetheless its common enough. mergers and new financings that dilute shareholder value (and not all of them require shareholder apporoval), research and development, warren buffets entire empire is famously based on long-term thinking.
i’m currently finfncing a stem cell company and our investors know they won’t see a red cent until at least 3 years. stuff like this is fairly common.
Blast that Squirrel Conspiracy, always faking economic trouble to make it look like the system has more than enough short-sighted capitalists to destroy it if the government does nothing intelligent. They’ve even gotten to Alan Greenspan! I bet they edited my comment to add some crucial clauses after Manju responded.
hf:
I’m familiar with the essay in question. What I’m objecting to is your claim that Friedman said that management’s responsibility was to maximize short-term profits, which is not something anyone could reasonably take away from that essay.
hf:
Sorry—I forgot to address this in my last response:
Stock prices are a function of expectations of all future earnings, not historical earnings or expectations of the next quarter’s earnings. If a company is able to boost short-term profits by cutting costs in a way that alienates their customers, this is not likely to raise the stock price.
In principle, management could do something to trade long-term profits for lesser short-term profits surreptitiously, which could result in an increase in stock price until the truth came out. But most shareholders wouldn’t benefit from this, because they wouldn’t know either, and wouldn’t know that they had to sell immediately to realize the gains.
Granted, management could do this to inflate the value of their stock options, enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders. This is an example of the principal-agent problem: It’s very difficult for principals (in this case shareholders) to design incentive structure that encourage agents (management) to act in the principals’ best interest and which cannot be gamed.
That said, the political implications of the principal-agent problem are not what I suspect you would like them to be. Democratic government is every bit as susceptible to the principal-agent problem as corporate management. Probably moreso, as institutional investors and stock analysts are, as a class, a hell of a lot better at evaluating businesses than voters are at evaluating governments.
While this should go without saying, I’ll say it anyway: The principal-agent problem does not in any way diminish the validity of Friedman’s point, which is only that management’s duty is to act in the best interests of shareholders, not that they in fact do so in all circumstances. Heck, the entire essay was premised on the fact that sometimes they don’t.