Take a look at discussions in The Chronicle and elsewhere about public anger, the “rage” phenomenon, and note some of the explanations. Here is Sasha Abramsky:
“One way of looking at what is happening is that it is an expression of our anxiety over what increasingly looks to be Pax Americana’s departing hegemony.”
Abamsky proceeds with some misleading statements about conservatism, such as stating that conservatives are opting for a “stab-in-the-back narrative” that presents a “fine” era of global dominance that extended through the tenure of George W. Bush (in truth, most conservatives had deep reservations about Bush before and throughout his terms).
And here is David Barash:
“Consider the widespread anger generated by the Wall Street and AIG bailouts: Regardless of whether they were justified as national policy, those and other departures from perceived evenhandedness have a long history of rousing departures from citizen complacency, and even from civility. Ditto for outrage over executives getting outsized bonuses and golden parachutes while the rest of us are left to soldier on as best we can.”
And, finally, Elaine Tyler May:
“Fear has made Americans feel less secure. And the fear that breeds anger, hostility to government, and lack of concern for the common good may have made the nation considerably less secure. While Americans were distracted by street crime that harms relatively few people, unregulated private enterprise fleeced the entire country. Locks on the doors did not protect families against losing their homes through mortgage foreclosure. Guns in their pockets did not prevent them from losing their shirts to Wall Street thugs.”
One wonders if Abamsky, Barash, and May have actually spoken to enraged people, or attended a Tea Party gathering. In any case, in raising Wall Street villains, Barash and May select secondary targets. The anger of the day isn’t so much directed at Wall Street as against the government’s protection/cronyism of and with Wall Street. Even more so, people despise government cronyism itself, the abuses and arrogance of which fill the people they are supposed to serve with utter disgust.
For an example, consider this story in The Los Angeles Times. It profiles the salaries of high officials in the city of Bell, a few miles southeast of Los Angeles. It has a population of 36,000—median income $40,000, 65 percent of residents over 25 lacking a high school diploma.
Here are some annual compensations:
Chief of Police $457,000
City Manager $787,637 (his contract calls for 12-percent annual increases)
Assistant City Manager $376,288
City Council members $100,000 (a part-time job)
Here is what the City Manager said in the Times about his salary:
“If that’s a number people choke on, maybe I’m in the wrong business,” he said. “I could go into private business and make that money. This council has compensated me for the job I’ve done.”
It is hard to imagine anything better designed to infuriate and inflame and enrage citizens. CEO salaries may be obscene, but these numbers are worse, for they come from public monies. This is not a matter of “fear” or “hegemony,” but of “fairness” (Barash is right on the theme, wrong on the objects). We don’t always need complex and deep explanations for the anger of citizens. Betrayal is sometimes a simple matter, and when cronies add insult to greed, people yell—and rightly so.
21 Responses to The Rage Factor
redweather - July 17, 2010 at 8:29 am
Rage is so easy. It’s like tantrums. But tantrums are for litle children. Rage — and its first cousin, outrage — are “sound and fury signifying nothing.” Rage makes the enraged feel good, maybe even in some juvenile way empowered, but the feeling doesn’t last because, just like a child’s tantrum, it’s all emotion.
goxewu - July 17, 2010 at 10:01 am
Ahem.1. Bell, California, is a city of only about 40,000 people. It’s been a charter city only since 2005, and that was by…municipal election! In other words, its public-official salary excesses are the doings of a small government.2. The alleged Obama-Administration “cronyism” with Wall Street stems from his alleged bailing out the big banks. But a) the original bailout bill was passed in the waning days of the Bush Administration, and b) the whole Wall Street mess is a product of what started back in the “Reagan revolution,” continued, albeit at a moderated pace, with Clinto, and then went hell-for-leather with the Bush Administration. Wall Street was simply able to blackmail the country: “Bail us out, or we’ll take the whole nation down the toilet with us.” With Republican obstinance, it’s really a miracle that any kind of financial-market reform at all was passed. Mitch McConnell essentially said that without the Wall Street casino being allowed to operate as it did when it caused the meltdown, we won’t have enough credit or enough jobs. Olympia Snowe is practically Barbara Fritchie in that crowd.3. I’ve not been to a Tea Party meeting (don’t have the right hat), but I converse occasionally with a guy who’s a member: local businessman, nice guy, honest as the day is long, good work at a fair price. But in spite of his business depending on loads of public services and his doing a lot of business with local governments, he’s got this rather quaint idea of himself as having cleared the land and fought off the natives all by himself. His view of America is complete exceptionalism in foreign affairs (the rest of the world is just a supporting cast) and open-carry and (peculiarly) stop-and-frisk in domestic affairs. This is the 21st century?4. And he’s a demographic exception. Tea Partiers are moderately well-off white males, a plurality with college educations, who are afraid of losing something. Legit motive, but hardly sympathetic when you look around at Wal-Mart workers, the foreclosed in the inner city, laid-off at GM, et al.5. Maybe we Lefties should have had a Tea Party (OK, Latte Party) during the Bush Administration. The guy–if you believe he was de facto the President (I think Cheney was)–got us into a totally bogus war with a country that had nothing to do with September 11th, with faked (or at least deliberately skewed) “intelligence,” and with a fallback rationalization of a cause previously repudiated (“nation-building”). That war cost a trillion bucks, maybe two. And how did we pay for it? By LOWERING taxes, especially on the rich. That, and letting Wall Street become a hotbed of cons–derivatives and worse–is what got us into our economic mess. We were too easy on Bush mostly because we couldn’t believe that this aw-shucks pseudo-Texan couldn’t be quite that malevolent, or stupid. But he was at least one of those things.
markbauerlein - July 17, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Yes, redweather, rage is infantile, but I wouldn’t say it “feels good.” A feeling of powerlessness usually accompanies it.As for Bell, goxewu, on this case the size of government doesn’t matter. It’s the size of the paychecks. And Bush’s bailout was one of several actions that violated fiscal principle, but it was dwarfed by the bailouts to follow. Also, I’ve read that women outnumber men in Tea Parties. And I don’t think Tea Partiers are “afraid of losing something.” They are furious about actual depravities such as the Bell salaries. And remember that one reason Wall Street was able to sell junk back and forth was that it knew the Federal government would back them up if the system collapsed.
trendisnotdestiny - July 17, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Mark,To post annual compensations of a few public employees in a list as:1) a form of “see, the left is corrupt too” or 2) “people do not understand the level government corruption” is obscene and the quintessential technique of divide and conquer. It is reductionistic and misses how power works.Lets take your example of the police chief making under 1/2 million. What are his realtionships with and connections to industry, other politicians influenced by industry ($$$$), unions and consumers? To merely put out numbers is to miss how public officials have been lobbied, captured and co-opted at senior levels of managment… Duh? Someone is making it possible for this income to be paid (and public sector corruption is not a sufficient answer)… It is much deeper than that…What we know is that industry’s partnership with public governance requires high level adminstrators who require a lot of money to take on unpopular tasks like Arnie Duncan (privatizing schools and increasingly US higher education market share) or other political ventures that mostly remain invisible to us until it is too late…. remember Alabama and waste (Taibbi, 2010) Mark, I think most people here on planet earth conceed that there are excesses/corruption in government: hiring, funding, contracts, compensation, benefits and bureaucracy… Bravo one dead horse beaten after another!However, what we do not see regularly is institutional analyses of why. We should be examining those incomes who pay these salaries or make it possible to deflect blame onto an already beaten down and beleagured TP-Reaganesque view of government. We need more nuance of connections and relations because it is not as simple as you writing down figures that make you afraid or enraged. You are better than that. You are an academic. You know, rigor? So, you might begin with following questions:Who has had and maintains the power in this society? Statutory? Regulatory? Resources? If you did not answer INDUSTRY to all three questions then Americans have a very good reason to enraged and fearful!
trendisnotdestiny - July 17, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Christopher Hayes in the Nation, has an excellent argument that there are only three things that have led us to this G-20 agreement to reduce debt: (deficits of mass destruction)1) 2 very expensive and unproductive wars2) Bush tax custs (including inheritance tax)3) Depression or recession economicsIn 2000, how many of these events were occuring…. One, the only thing preventing us from recession were monterist policies from greenspan and the fed…. It is so disingenuous, to sell fear of one element of what has happened without providing context to how we got there (i.e Bush and Overt Corporate takeover of the presidency)!
goxewu - July 17, 2010 at 2:26 pm
According to an article on executive compensation in academe, in 2007, the Vice-President for Health Affairs at Emory was paid a salary of $3,750,000. I notice there’s a guy on the job now who started in 2007, no maybe he replaced the three-and-three-quarters-mil fellow. If he did, did he take a pay cut? Or does he coach football, too?(I tried to look up the city budget of Bell, California and the budget of Health Affairs at Emory, to see what the exec overseeing each was dealing with. But I couldn’t ferret them out on the Web. Perhaps Prof. Bauerlein could provide the Emory figure and some “Brainstorm” commenter out there the City of Bell annual budget.)Tea Partiers at Emory would serve it iced, with sugar and lemon, right?
deanette - July 17, 2010 at 3:57 pm
This is a great article, Mark. You almost always write great stuff and this one was both provocative and powerful.
markbauerlein - July 17, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Questions such as “Who has had and maintains the power in this society?” trend, are too abstract (and too academic) to be of much use. We need local info, such as salaries of local politicians. And, goxewu, if your point is that bureaucratic trends in college adminstrations (such as salary jumps) reflect those elsewhere, you’re absolutely right.
performance_expert2 - July 18, 2010 at 1:55 am
I don’t know… have an awkward feeling about the micro-example, even if it is a lush example of horrid local corruption. There seems so be something much greater at play. When the angry fellow crashed the airplane into the IRS building and brought attention to his manifesto, I learned something from him when he said the IRS changed the tax laws to obstruct contracting with independents. This was his main complaint and he said it economically destroyed him as a successful technology consultant. In other words, the stategy of the IRS law was to take people like him, put them out of business, and force them to work for corporations or other consolidated organizations. I used to be an independent contractor and did a lot of contracting and the whole world starting changing and contracts were being moved to national service providers with “INC” after their names. I recall when this happened and it looks like the IRS took part in economic engineering to tilt commerce away from contracting with independent service providers. I also recently read that the health and life insurance companies are taking their mountains of capital and one of things they invest in heavily is fast food restaurant stock. So this is why there is a blight of five new well-funded fast food restaurants built at an intersection near my home? It doesn’t seem to matter if they have much business, they have new buildings and stay open. The engineered manufactured “food” from these places is mush without nutrients. Now, to counterpoint, the guy down the street with the independent restaurant has a placard next to the road, the same road that the fast food restaurants are on, that says “Salad Bar 1/2 price $3.00 All You Can Eat” and his restaurant is empty. None of the corporate mush fast food restaurants have anything like a salad bar. It made me to think of how effective the brainwashing is, once you get people trained in a certain direction, they will not veer to do something more healthy. To continue, one night I went through the drivethrough of one of the fast food restaurants and I could just tell through the speaker that the young adult worker was completely downtrodden and miserable. I had a very strong impression of this. I pulled up to the window and quickly told him, “This economy can’t go on for ever, even it takes ten years. I don’t know what happend to Obama. I voted for him.” The young man quickly replied, “They broke him.”
performance_expert2 - July 18, 2010 at 2:12 am
To add and clarify, when the contracting tax law was changed to favor national service providers over independent contractors, these national corporate service providers were not even in town yet. These expanded and opened up new offices in cities and regions where they had not before had a location, and then the local contracts went to these national “INC” service providers. Think “Best Buy GEEK Squad” in place Rudy’s Rootin’ Tootin’ Computer Service. It seems the IRS is not an autonomous “taxing” entity but engineers the methods of commerce. I also note the complexity of the seemingly incomprehensible tax law is a liability to any independent tradesman, i.e. person with tools and a pickup truck. I have met two of these who got sideways with the IRS and it was the same story with both of them, they owed $10,000. to the IRS and the IRS changed this to $30,000. One guy told me he worked extra hard and paid the IRS $1,000. a month for a year and after a year he went to them and told him he had paid them and they told him he still owed them $30,000. If you do not know of any of these type events you ought to ask around of regular people who work as jobbers and tradespeople. The effect on this guy was that it broke him in two, broke his spirit and broke his belief in the system. He was angry. He stopped working and cooked up a disability claim and began collecting public assistance, which does not pay very much. He was mad, he was broken, and he told the system to “go to hell” but in the process he stopped doing productive work.p_e
performance_expert2 - July 18, 2010 at 2:31 am
Meanwhile, even though I have a health insurance policy, a real one, one that is supposed to deliver services, I am sitting here waiting on my general practitioner to refer me to a doctor that the insurance will pay for some procedure, not a big deal. It has been about a week and I haven’t yet heard anything. This is from an established general practitioner that is part of the local hospital network, working in a hospital clinic- very proper. Even though I am paying for insurance, I hadn’t even seen him for two years and when I called, the appointment person asked me, “Are you a patient” in a way that told me they were full and not accepting additional patients. So, it has been a week and I have heard nothing on the referal. This is shabby, or what? Where is the EXCHANGE of VALUE for the money I am paying?
performance_expert2 - July 18, 2010 at 3:17 am
What a complex thing it is to liveTo trust enough to continue givingOr believing in loveWhen passion is not tempered by logicAnd ambition is not balanced by gratitudeThe truth is obscuredIn this age of instantly curedWhich values nothing of valueAnd puts the price on what it isWhich is pricelesshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaoQPmTF7zk
maa0162 - July 18, 2010 at 3:38 am
This is a great post Mark. I think it shows, along with the responses, how lost some have become in dwelling upon the misdeeds of others.If this topic is of interest to you, check out Glenn Beck’s show from friday, July 16 at watchglennbeck.com. He discusses the legacy of MLK with Dr. Alveda King (MLK’s neice) and Pastor Stephen Broden.Their message would be the true antidote to rage.
goxewu - July 18, 2010 at 8:35 am
My point was sort of the generality Prof. Bauerlein decribes in #9. But there are a couple of other sub-points in #7:1. If somebody gets a $3.75 million for oversee a budget of X in a non-for-proit enterprise, maybe somebody (who’s a least accountable to the voters the next time around) who oversees a public budget of Y on a salary of $800,000 might not be so comparatively out of line. (Personally, on the face of it, I think the City of Bell city counsel and manager are corruptly overpaying themselves. But I thought that Prof. Bauerlein, who elsewhere seems to like studies and stats, might want some numbers to compare.)2. If there’s similar overpayment (via, I’d suppose, an old-boy/girl network board of trustees) right in Prof. Bauerlein’s own backyard, he’d be as PO’d about it as he is about the City of Bell and, when so informed, post on it.(I thought the snarky remark about how they stereotypically serve tea in the South might goad Prof. Bauerlein into a more substantive reply. But since it didn’t, I’ll confess it has not been my experience lately. When I was last in the deep, deep South, and in a city much smaller than Atlanta, the server at lunch asked me, when I ordered tea, if I wanted it on ice and if I wanted it sweetened. And the only chicken on the menu was roasted.)And I don’t think, vis-a-vis Prof. Bauerlein’s ongoing complaint about big government, that “Who has had and maintains power in this society?” is either too abstract or too academic. The cliché of “socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor” is unfortunately all too true. The revolving door between alleged “regulators” (since 1981, more like de-regulators) and corporate execs is greased with conflict-of-interest money. When it’s an extension of unemployment benefits during a severe recession, those guys cry “Socialism!” and “Deficits!” When it’s a no-bid contract for Halliburton or an agribusiness subsidy, it’s maintaining our free enterprise system.
trendisnotdestiny - July 19, 2010 at 8:23 am
#9,”Questions such as “Who has had and maintains the power in this society?” trend, are too abstract (and too academic) to be of much use. We need local info, such as salaries of local politicians.”Mark, I appreciate your diligence in providing useful local information like salaries of local politicians… True, we need to act at all levels to fight corruption and systemic fraud. Somehow, I find your words disingenuous (potentially mistaken) because the economic policies of the past have promoted: de-regulation, privatization and the cutting of social supports. These neoliberal policies have paved the way for corruption at all levels (inflating and deflating economic bubbles for three decades across the globe).Why attack local and state government officials when we know that they are being bought off by industry? Why does industry get a pass from you and government a kick the pants? Who has the most money in a capitalistic system runs the show… You know corporations? Why not spend your time showing those connections? They are not too abstract or too academic.They just require more work than making a simple list of corrupt incomes.
markbauerlein - July 19, 2010 at 11:41 am
Fair comment, trend, but what makes you so sure that privatization and deregulation produce less corruption than their contraries? What seems reasonable to me is that a fair nuber of public servants are in it for themselves as much as the CEOs are.
trendisnotdestiny - July 19, 2010 at 12:26 pm
Mark,Regulation works if it isn’t being gutted from both sides:the alternative is to prevent industry co-option and public service indifference with a job too-big-to-succeed…. You know like seven agencies all regulating the financial sector (competing for business)???? CFTC, SEC, OTC, FDIC, OCC (etc)There are thousands of people who would readily be willing to serve, monitor and police our most vacuous industries in an effort to clean them up (but industry doesn’t want that)— See Elizabeth Warren & CFPB…. So, the internal rot of public service festers continually because they know they are undermanned, overworked and will never be allowed to do their job…(especially when we have Geithner selling us the notion of propping up our banking system over 5 years to get them out of the bad loans they made or ELSE THE ECONOMY WILL IMPLODE)Pay smart, talented and enough people a livable wage (Not the city of Bell wages mind you), you would see corruption change. Bill Black has written extensively on this subject… Hire regulators who have experience with white collar crime (criminologists, forensic accountants, attorneys and personal finance experts instead of administrative yes-men)If we miss the fact that accounting fraud, rating agency incompetence, executive bonus structures, flash trading schemes, predation and bubble economics are not a function of CEO control of corporate activity, then we fail to comprehend why local and state corruption is allowed to exist freely in the open and free market of crony capitalism.
goxewu - July 19, 2010 at 7:28 pm
#16 wasn’t addressed to me, but what the hell:Public officials aren’t supposed to be “in it for themselves” in the same way that CEOs overtly are. One speaks of “public service”; one does not speak of “private [enterprise] service.”Public officials who jack up their city manager salaries to $800,000, without actually breaking any laws, aren’t supposed to be doing that. CEOs who jack up their salaries a few mil without actually breaking any laws are supposed to be doing exactly that.Call me naive, but I think that in general, people do what they think they’re supposed to be doing more than they do what, down deep, they know they’re not supposed to be doing. That’s why I think that a greater percentage of CEOs are taking every technically legal opportunity to line their pockets and feather their nests than the percentage of public officials.I still think–perhaps once more naive–that it’s a minority in both cases. But it’s a bigger minority of CEOs.And I suspect there’s a direct relationship between pocket-lining and the size of the company the CEO is running (interlocking boards, old-boy and old-girl networks, PR ways to justify the salaries and bonuses as “comeptitive necessities,” golden parachutes, etc.). With public officials, I suspect it’s the reverse. The City Manager of Bell, California is more inclined to try to get away with it than the Governor of California–even one poorer to start with than Arnold Schwarzenegger.
goxewu - July 20, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Meanwhile, in the private sector: Some guy named David Axene in California did some auditing on WellPoint’s justification for its 39 percent increase in premiums for its health insurance, and found that WellPoint had, among other things, overestimated the effects of aging on its policyholders. A flack for the big corporation said it immediately recognized how “visible” the rate increases were (“visible”? they hoped for “invisible”?) on account of the faulty accounting. (Accidental? Right.) The company rescinded the rate increase. (Whew!)Meanwhile, the WellPoint CEO Angela Braly’s compensation package had risen 51 percent to $13.1 million. Of course, she was only doing what CEOs are supposed to do.
markbauerlein - July 20, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Axene is a great story, which I read in the (print) LA Times this morning. We need more vigilant inquirers like him out there watching both sectors.
goxewu - July 21, 2010 at 8:51 am
Re #20:No, not continuing the sins-o’-the-private vs. sins-o’-the-public argument. Just noticing the tiny equivalent of what they call “product placement” in the movie biz: “(print)”, a hobbyhorse placement in a blog, e.g., the reading-on-a-screen vs. reading-on-paper debate going on in another of Prof. Bauerlein’s threads.I happened to read the story in the online edition of the LA Times And I found it because, not living in Los Angeles, I subscribe to the Times’s daily e-mail, “Opinion LA,” wherein there were a couple of letters to the editor concerning Mr. Axene. From there, I looked up the story. After reading it, I looked up a couple of other stories, on healthcare blogs, concerning WellPoint’s attempted ripoff and its CEO’s gargantuan compensation. I did it all from my little laptop, without flailing around with broadsheet pages, getting ink on my fingers, futilely searching my bookshelves for something up-to-date enough to be relevant to the story, or consulting the cuneiform tablets I keep on hand because somebody once told me that advances in reading technology are harmful to the eye and brain. Finalement, since Prof. Bauerlein hasn’t told me everything I think I read is wrong, I seem actually to have understood the Times’s story on Axene.