Corporate execs and Wall Street douchebags made a big bowtied fuss over the past two weeks as President Obama considered limits on corporate executives’ pay -- a logical target given these suits' public scapegoating since September, and a sexy, easily-understood trumpeting of an aggressive effort to "fix the economy" or whatever the pundits have simplified it to. Corporate lawyers are, indeed, losing jobs, but nothing like the bankers, where companies shed ten and twenty thousand positions at a time. Most of these predominantly white and male casualties receive some months’ worth of severance pay consistent with their stratospheric salaries as well as outplacement services to help them get on the dole and put out feelers for another job.
Those who snuck past the chopping block, meanwhile -- and, despite the doomsday headlines, this is still the vast majority of America’s high-end, white-collar workforce -- have, in a display of avarice that’s surprised nobody, taken to bitching about salary freezes. It’s a classic example of follow-the-leader (those who aspire to being a cog in a 50,000-head machine do not typically make Jerry Maguire speeches), and when said leader is griping about his or her (but usually his) salary being capped at half a mil (stocks excluded, mind you), it’s easy to justify pushing for that lockstep $40k bonus for hitting your hours baseline on the peon chart. (Bear in mind, of course, that the mushy executive comp mandate Obama eventually signed last week only applies to banks accepting federal assistance going forward--so no, that doesn’t apply to Citigroup or GM, which accepted billions of our dollars over the past few months and still have Chapter 11 dead in their sights, or AIG, whose execs pocketed $85 billion, then embarked on a lockdown session to figure out how to best use the bailout to save their company weekend of massages, golf and Glenlivet.)
These are the same blokes who elected Ronald Reagan (along with this guy), who used the crack epidemic to court law-and-order types the same way Bill Clinton rode Silicon Valley’s success to a reputation as some sort of economic mastermind (and no, goddammit, his vice president did not invent the Internet, though he was most certainly one of its key advocates). Reagan’s demonization of crack led to the bulk of our country’s more outlandish drug laws (and all while his administration arguably turned a blind eye to coca smuggling that stoked the epidemic -- but this is a complicated and disturbing aside deserving of its own examination in due time). It also provides our first example of a theme we’ll make popular in IDM: The American tradition of fighting the symptom of a problem rather than addressing the root cause.
Reagan demonized the addicts and low-level pushers. These people had been steered into their roles by a myriad of factors, from boredom to emotional instability, but most shared a common experience: An environment of poverty. This is an obvious statement: Corner boys grow up poor, attend underfunded inner-city public schools, and drop out to pursue one of the few viable options they’ve been conditioned to recognize. Junkies come from a wider range of backgrounds, to be sure, but many had unstable childhoods, often cultivated by money problems, and most of those from well-to-do families would have exhausted their trust funds and familial goodwill by the time they were freebasing on the regular. These are poor and largely uneducated people -- easy targets for politicians who need a cause. Not much potential for political pushback from this grimy lot. So Reagan made it into a crusade, and today we have public prisons at 150 percent capacity, a booming private prison industry, and potent prison guard unions that keep money flowing for new prison construction while streets crumble, Muni continues to suck, and those same ghetto schools are still issuing textbooks that date back to the height of Ronnie’s War on Drugs.
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