The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

by Sarah Kendzior

  During the recession, American companies found an effective new way to boost profits. It was called "not paying people". "Not paying people" tends to be justified in two ways: a fake crisis ("Unfortunately, we can’t afford to pay you at this time…") or a false promise ("Working for nearly nothing now will get you a good job later").

  In reality, profits are soaring and poorly compensated labor tends to lead to more poorly compensated labor. Zero opportunity employers are refusing to pay people because they can get away with it. The social contract does not apply to contract workers – and in 2013, that is increasingly what Americans are.

  One can see the truth of King's equation of income and rights in the powerlessness of low-wage workers to change their situation. Wages are not corresponding to demand or credentials. In a post-employment economy, wages are both arbitrary and fixed.

  Institutionalized exploitation

  People who justify poverty wages tend to make two claims. The first is that desirable jobs have a surplus of applicants so their pay is inherently less. In 2013, every job has a surplus of applicants, yet the pay for some jobs – Wall Street bankers – rises while the pay for other jobs stagnates or disappears.

  The second claim is that low-wage workers are easily replaceable and offer no benefit to society. This is the argument aimed at service workers, who are on strike because they make so little they cannot afford food or rent.

  Putting aside that anyone working full-time should be able to survive on their income, and that service workers deserve the same respect as any employee, this argument falls flat because educated professionals whose work offers tremendous benefit to society are also poorly paid.

  Teaching, nursing, social work, childcare and other "pink collar" professions do not pay poorly because, as Slate's Hanna Rosin argues, women "flock to less prestigious jobs", but because jobs are considered less prestigious when they are worked by women. The jobs are not worth less – but the people who work them are supposed to be.

  Although zero opportunity employers disproportionately hurt women and minorities, everyone suffers in an economy that does not value workers. "I didn't risk my life in Afghanistan so I could come back and watch people go hungry in America," writes Jason Kirell, a 35-year-old veteran who is on food stamps. "I certainly didn't risk it so I could come back and go hungry." He notes that it is common for military wives to subsist on food stamps while their husbands work overseas and for veterans to end up on food stamps upon their return.

  The Americans who serve their country the most are paid the least and treated the worst. As Kirell detailed his plight, House Republicans voted to cut the nation's food stamp program by $40 bn.

  Into the Abyss

  In America, there is little chance at a reversal of fortune for those less fortunate. Poverty is a sentence for the crime of existing. Poverty is a denial of rights sold as a character flaw.

  There are two common responses to the plight of the low-wage worker. The first is "That's just the way things are", a response which serves both to derail empathy and deter people from imagining the way things could be.

  The second is "But it worked out for me." This is the refrain of the tenured to the adjunct, the staff to the freelancer, the rich to the poor: "But it worked out for me; the system is fine, it worked out for me."

  The problem is that in an economy of falling wages and eroded safety nets, there is a very fine line between "you" and "me".

  People not only fall through the cracks, they live in the cracks as a full-time occupation. The view from the cracks is a lot clearer than the view from above. When you look down on people, they stop being people. But when you watch from below, you see how easy it is to fall.

  Personal success does not excuse systematic exploitation. "That's just the way things are" does not explain widespread suffering. Ask why things are the way they are, why things are not working out for working Americans.

  And when they do not give you an answer? Start demanding one.

  Originally published September 23, 2013

  A government shutdown, a social breakdown

  In December 1995, the United States government shut down for 21 days, ending a year marked by violent fringe politics – the Oklahoma City bombings, the Unabomber manifesto – and the televised train wreck of the OJ Simpson trial. In 1995, Americans watched fist-fight talk shows and government conspiracy dramas and sitcoms about the pointlessness of living. The shutdown seemed of a piece with the era, idiocy ascended to a higher plane.

  We rolled our eyes and waited it out. Because in 1995, when the government shut down, odds seemed good it would come back.

  Americans tend to remember the 1990s through a soft flannel gauze -- the peacetime complacency, the political correctness, the jobs -- but they were garish, paranoid times. Today the 1990s feel like a dream only because the nightmare they created became ordinary. In the decade to come, the tabloid would become gospel, the social fabric sewn from the lunatic fringe. Radical polarization became rote. America went crazy and never went back.

  The political tabloidization of the 1990s – a decade-long parade of sex scandals filling time between the Cold War and the War on Terror – seems like the indulgence of a nation which, in the absence of an obvious crisis, made themselves their own.

  But a crisis was always there – only it was to be repackaged, not solved. Belying the vitriolic partisanship of the 1990s was a uniform agreement to gut social services to the sick and the poor. The impoverished were portrayed as a privileged class siphoning state resources at their leisure.

  This argument dates back to President Reagan’s denouncement of so-called "welfare queens" – and the bedrock for it was laid well before that – but it was the 1990s when it found mainstream appeal. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act -- a reform that limited welfare benefits -- to the approval of most Democrats and Republicans.

  It is easy to make public services seem optional when people feel like they have options. In the mid-1990s, when the economy was flourishing and unemployment was falling, you could tell someone to "go get a job" and it was possible they might actually find one.

  This advice did nothing to mend the structural inequalities that underlay the plight of the poor. But it was an argument that seemed less callous, less obviously destructive, than it does today. Today the advice remains the same – but the options for ordinary Americans have dramatically changed.

  Abdicating the imaginary throne of the "Welfare Queen"

  American ideology has long tilted between individualism and Calvinism. What happened to you was either supposed to be in your control – the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" approach – or divinely arbitrated. You either jumped, or you were meant to fall.

  Claims you were pushed, or you were born so far down you could not climb up, were dismissed as excuses of the lazy. This is the way many saw their world before it collapsed.

  By the end of the 1990s, the US unemployment rate had reached a 25-year low of 3.8 percent, and a mere 6.1 percent of Americans relied on food stamps. Today a record 15 out of every 100 Americans need food stamps, and 45 percent of all infants born in the United States are served by the Women, Infant and Children program (WIC), that provides formula and vouchers for healthy food.

  To be eligible for WIC, one's income must be below 185 percent of the US Poverty Income. A near majority of American households now meet this criterion, despite the unemployment rate hovering at 7.3 percent.

  The reason for this is that jobs have stopped paying. Homeless people are working two jobs. Walmart and McDonalds employees frequently receive federal assistance. Military wives survive on food stamps, and their husbands survive on them when they come home. The number of Americans on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has risen 70 percent since 2008 and shows no sign of stopping.

  The reign of the "welfare queen" is finally over, because her true identity has been revealed. We are all the welfare queen, and
we are abdicating her imaginary throne. The stigma of public assistance is slowly subsiding – not through a surge of compassion, but through an increase in desperation.

  People are more likely to condemn people on government assistance when they do not know any of them personally. It is becoming less and less likely that this is the case.

  The new American dream

  Americans are not as divided as they seem. We agree on guns – 90% of Americans support expanded background checks on gun owners – and we largely agree on health care. Only one third of Americans support repealing, defunding, or delaying Obama’s health care law. These numbers decrease when the law is called by its name, the Affordable Health Care Act, instead of Obamacare. 72 percent of Americans agree that there should not be a government shutdown.

  But our opinion does not matter. We are passive subjects, held hostage to a vindictive minority divorced from public will.

  Political scientist Daniel Drezner has noted that the government shutdown has no real precedent in American history. "The material interests on the GOP side appear to have zero influence over their party," he writes, noting the failure of the long-standing American tradition of pluralism. "Now it's the ideological interests that are ascendant -- and this poses enormous challenges to the American body politic."

  Rule by ideology is far more dangerous than it was in the 1990s, because this shutdown takes place in extreme economic vulnerability. Like the current shutdown, the current unemployment crisis has no precedent. The great lesson of the past decade was that any employee can be arbitrarily deemed non-essential or unworthy of pay.

  In an era when entry-level jobs become unpaid internships and full-time jobs turn into contingency labor, it is easy to imagine the cuts from the sequester becoming permanent. Shutdown furloughs may turn into layoffs, as elected officials, now marketing survival as the new American Dream, will assure us we did fine without them.

  The non-essential worker is the archetypal hire. Our worst case scenarios are simply scenarios.

  Socio-economic astigmatism

  In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Poverty. Over the next half century, the war on poverty turned into a war on the poor. This war was once disguised as "compassionate conservatism" and debated with words like "responsibility" and "opportunity".

  Compassionate conservatism assumed that we could take care of ourselves so we did not need to take care of each other. It was an attractive concept, simultaneously exalting the successes of America while relieving the individual of responsibility for those whom it failed. Many good people believed in it.

  Today the attack on the poor is no longer cloaked in ideology – it is ideology itself. This ideology is not shared by most Americans, but by those seeking to transform the Republican Party into, as former GOP operative Mike Lofgren describes it, "an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe."

  These are the people who have decided that poor children should be denied food as a result of elected officials wanting poor people to have healthcare.

  The government shutdown only formalizes the dysfunction that has been hurting ordinary Americans for decades. It is not a political shutdown but a social breakdown. Fixing it requires a reassessment of value – and values.

  When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.

  Originally published October 4, 2013

  The men who set themselves on fire

  On October 4, a man poured gasoline over his body and set himself on fire in Washington DC. He committed suicide in the National Mall, the open-air park surrounded by national museums and monuments, now closed due to the government shutdown.

  Witnesses say he had set up a tripod to film his self-immolation. They say that before he killed himself he was yelling about voting rights. The man on fire was black. In June, the US Supreme Court struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Amendment, proclaiming racial discrimination a thing of the past.

  Now it is the government that is struck down, paralyzed by vindictive partisanship while its most vulnerable citizens suffer.

  As I write this, no one knows who the man was or why he did it. But his act is not unique. He joins a long list of men who have self-immolated since the global financial collapse and subsequent austerity. Around the world, men are setting themselves on fire because they cannot find work.

  This is happening in the world's richest and poorest nations, in its allegedly stable democracies and in its most ruthless dictatorships. The men who do this are young and old, of all races and religions, united only by their joblessness and their despair.

  In the UK, an unemployed 48-year-old man set himself on fire outside a job center after not receiving a needed payment. In Morocco, a group of young law students, belonging to a group called "Unemployed Graduates", set themselves on fire after not finding work. In Spain, a man burnt himself alive because he did not have enough money for food. In Greece, a 55-year-old man set himself on fire after screaming that he was in debt. In Bulgaria, several unemployed men self-immolated after condemning graft and corruption. In France, over a dozen people - both French nationals and immigrants, from different occupations and social classes - set themselves on fire because they could not find jobs.

  This is a partial list. Unemployed men have self-immolated in Germany, Iraq, Jordan, China, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. Many cases receive little media attention.

  The week before the man burned himself alive on the National Mall, a man in a business suit tried to set himself on fire in Houston, Texas, after telling passersby that he could not find a job. The case did not make the national news. The government shut down four days later, pushing another 800,000 people out of work.

  It's the austerity, stupid

  Unemployment is not only the loss of a job. It is the loss of dignity. It is the loss of the present and, over time, the ability to imagine a future. It is hopelessness and shame, an open struggle everyone witnesses but pretends not to see. It is a social and political crisis we tell a man to solve, and blame him when he cannot.

  When you are unemployed, your past is dismissed as unworthy. Your future is denied. Self-immolation is making yourself, in the moment, matter.

  The most famous recent case of an unemployed man setting himself on fire was Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose actions are said to have spurred the Arab Spring revolutions. When Bouazizi killed himself in December 2010, the youth unemployment rate was 30 percent in Tunisia and 25 percent in Egypt, where uprisings quickly followed.

  In Spain, three years later, youth unemployment is 57 percent. In Greece, it is 64 percent. The youth unemployment rate is 23.5 percent for the combined European Union and 16 percent for the United States, a statistic which does not take into account the millions whose jobs do not pay enough to take them out of poverty. The youth unemployment rates of Western nations now mirror or surpass those of the Arab world before the uprisings.

  When Bouazizi self-immolated, the case was initially covered as an act of economic desperation. Only after it triggered a mass outcry was it acknowledged as a political statement, a final stand against decades of corruption and autocracy. It is pointless to ask whether the self-immolation of an unemployed man is an economic or political act: the two are inseparable.

  The knowledge of their inseparability is in part what inspires these men to act. One can call it austerity or one can call it apathy, but the end result is that states are letting their citizens die - slowly and silently in poverty, or publicly in flame.

  As journalist Kevin Drum observes, in every previous recession, government spending rose. In this recession, they cut benefits, food stamps, jobs. They cut and blame us when we bleed.

  In authoritarian states ruled by tyrants, in democracies allegedly ru
led by law, we find the same result: hard-working people let down by the systems which are supposed to support them. When the most you can ask from your society is that it will spare you, you have no society of which to speak.

  The suffering silent

  "Rome wasn't built in a day," the saying goes. "But it was burned in one."

  Today Rome does not burn - its stocks continue to rise, its wealthy continue to profit. Rome does not burn. Only its victims do.

  For every person who sets himself on fire there are millions suffering in silence. For every person who becomes a symbol, there are millions who watch quietly, in shock and resignation, resigned to our shock, shocked by our deference.

  Self-immolation has long been an act of protest against corrupt and tyrannical rule: Tibetans against the Chinese, Czechoslovakians against the Soviets. The difference between these acts of protest and the unemployed men on fire is that today we are not sure who is in charge.

  The US government, after all, cannot even govern itself. State attempts at improving social welfare are trumped not by public will or political disagreement but by what appears to be a preplanned, funded attempt by fringe conservatives to shut the government down.

  In every country with massive unemployment - which is, increasingly, every country - citizens see the loss of a functioning social contract, and the apathy with which that loss is received.

  We do not know the identity of the man on fire. We do not know what prompted him to kill himself in open view in the nation's capital. We know he was a man who died. That should be enough. In every act of agony, that should be enough.

  --Originally published October 7, 2013

  Charity is not a substitute for justice