Breaking Bad

Denying the children of immigrants access to Head Start programs is punitive but fiscally trivial. Chasing their parents out of the country drains the pool of low-paid labor much of US business depends on to bolster its margins. Cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that 41 million people, including millions of children, rely on will accelerate the already alarming decline in life expectancy.

At the same time, its effect on labor productivity — official cant calls it the “work ethic” — will be negligible or most likely negative. Eviscerating the Department of Education (DOE) may be psychically satisfying to the “anti-woke,” but it may bankrupt the very sizable educational consulting industry. Gutting grants for medical research will undermine the prospects of Big Pharma, not to mention the future health of the labor force. Forcing the poor off Medicaid is no boon to the medical-industrial complex. The newly uninsured, including many of the tens of millions of children on Medicaid, will just get sick and die — fed ”into the woodchipper,” as Elon Musk so inelegantly put it, along with the key agencies of the social state.

Heedlessly disposing of bodies and minds in this way suggests sadism, not avarice.

Nor is that all. Decimating the Forest Service is bad news for everybody. Even the timber industry will grieve the mass death of whole ecosystems without which forests will languish. No corporate lobbies will gain much of anything by massive job cuts at the Fish and Wildlife Service. Getting rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) raises the risk environment for insurers and investment funds. Turning down pleas for federal aid from communities suffering from heavy pollution will have no impact on the corporate bottom line.

Science and the arts find themselves in the crosshairs of this same nihilistic assault. Institutions of higher education, museums, research laboratories, concert venues, what’s left of the legitimate news media, even the conveyers of mass entertainment cower, self-censor, and purge their ranks. Firing hundreds of forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) threatens the security of the shipping industry and the output of family farmers and agribusinesses alike. Privatizing early warning systems might attract venture capitalists, but what if you can’t afford the app that alerts you to the onrushing tsunami or wildfire or flash flood?

During Trump’s first six months, the administration set records for attacking scientists and cancelling new research grants issued by the National Institutes of Health and cutting staff at science-related state entities including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), NOAA, DOE, and FEMA. This may work as political cocaine for state-haters, but the intricate web of commercial entities depending on state regulations and support will weaken and invite chaos.

Does capital accumulate as a result? Not really.

Those who envision a purely entrepreneurial order and revel in the assault on the state may forget that government agencies provide nearly one-quarter of the total funding for early-stage tech companies. When it comes to biological and medical breakthroughs, the situation is emphatically lopsided: 75 percent of new molecular entities were discovered by publicly funded labs or government agencies.

Meanwhile, Musk and his fellow tech bros want to “get rid of all government subsidies.” Tesla and SpaceX, however, heavily depend on such subsidies coming via the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Energy, not to mention those lush tax credits and Tesla’s $2.5 billion in government loans.

Peter Thiel, founder of the mega software company, Palantir, derides the government as categorically “socialist.” He’s so had it with socialist bureaucrats that he envisions pulling up anchor in favor of “seasteading,” floating ocean communities not subject to government regulations, taxes, and all that other socialist baggage. Nevermind that Palantir derives 60 percent of its revenue from government contracts with the CIA, the Defense Department, and other state agencies.

The Anti-Civilization

Waging war on science and the arts betrays a visceral hatred for modern civilization as such. What was once accepted as the ground rules of civilized behavior are being trashed with impunity. The cruelty now on daily display in the snatching of immigrants off the streets, or being meted out to those held in Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” or to those forced to live underground fearing for their families, betrays a malignant indifference — or worse, a profound need to crucify people in public rituals of humiliation and cruelty.

Crucifixions are suffered by the weak, the vulnerable, the unorthodox, the alien, the dissident, the racially despised. Undeniably, much of the energy behind the new regime’s wave of persecution comes out of that deep national well of racial and ethnic animosity and political fear. It needs no other rationale and may be strictly speaking irrational, when seen from the standpoint of the bottom line.

And it can play well politically. John Adams once put it this way: “The Great Question will forever remain who will work.” But that’s a benign version of an unspoken premise guiding the behavior of contemporary ruling circles: that all, but a select few, comprise the Untermenschen to be used, abused, and disposed of.

Customarily, ruling classes must pay some attention to maintaining the general welfare, including society’s spiritual health. Failing at that, their legitimacy may hang in the balance. The current group running things is not unaware of this imperative. After all, they are going about the business of making America great again. Often, however, their predatory instincts take over.

This is an inherited disposition. Before Trump, the country’s premier business actors (finance especially but not only those circles) ran a profoundly parasitic economy. It rested on debt, speculation, and the strip-mining of the country’s industrial wherewithal. It all came tumbling down, or so it seemed, in the global financial collapse of 2008.

On the eve of that disaster, two Wall Street “masters of the universe” abbreviated how they saw their own highly suspect financial shenanigans, and their likely consequences for the rest of us, in a pithy email: “IBG-YBG,” they knowingly sneered, meaning, “I’ll be gone — you’ll be gone.”

How better to summarize the moral bankruptcy of a whole era, which is with us still. “IBG-YBG” is the motto of a ruling class that has ruled out the future, or rather envisions only a purely predatory one. Tethered to the momentary appreciation of asset values, it lives strictly for the short term. Trump, the tech bros, and succeeding generations of Wall Street moguls learned all they needed to know in this school of planetary vandalism.

Succession’s Logan Roy put it best. “Fuck off,” he told anybody who got in his way in the show. Thiel’s version is to go seasteading. Musk’s is decamping for Mars. Venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan favors the creation of private “network states” where he can do as he pleases. If the world teeters on the edge of catastrophe, these folk, well aware that their own business and personal behavior contributes mightily to that existential predicament, build fortified bunkers. The rest of the world can simply fuck off.

The Capitalist Primitive

We’ve seen the kind of “fuck off” capitalism Trump presides over once before. This was the age of the robber barons, the first time America became great again.

The original robber barons – men like John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Russell Sage, Edward Harriman, and a gaggle of others — have been credited with building up the country’s industrial might. Whether they deserve that honor is dubious at best. Laying track, mining coal, drilling for oil, forging steel, plowing the land, herding cattle, picking cotton, sailing ships, stringing electrical wire, erecting skyscrapers is not what they did. The barons were instead owners and managers of enterprises that turned those resources into capital. And they were ruthless about how they did that.

Speculating in the securities issued by their companies became a preoccupation for some of these men. If the underlying properties — say a railroad trestle or locomotive — was jerry-built and collapsed or exploded killing and maiming dozens, so be it. If a mine turned out to be a mere empty hole in the ground, let the credulous beware. If a company’s stock was heavily watered — that is, worth far less than advertised — the market could self-correct, bankrupting legions along the way.

The whole Gilded Age economy was subject to such periodic self-corrections, otherwise known as panics. Depressions followed. Small businesses folded. Mortgage-backed securities (invented a century before the 2008 crash) collapsed and wreaked havoc in rural America. The unemployed tramped the roads, the hungry scavenged and begged, the homeless pitched tents.

Like today, the government turned its back on the losers. President Grover Cleveland lectured the citizenry: “The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their government, its functions do not include support of the people.”

When times were better, twelve-hour workdays were commonplace, industrial accidents that maimed or killed epidemic. Thousands of prisoners labored in open-air camps in fetid pine forests collecting resin for naval stores, or harvesting the crops on cotton plantations, or digging coal to fire up the furnaces for US Steel. Primitive capitalism was devouring the very vital resource that gave it life: human labor power. If people mobilized to protest, which millions did, they were met with gatling guns (known then as the “Tramp Terror”) and other devices of state and private violence that make Trump seem almost a pacifist by comparison.

Armed with the pseudoscientific assurance offered by social Darwinism that they were society’s fittest, the barons strutted the stage without a scintilla of social conscience or sense of responsibility for the devastation. They chalked up their treasures to God’s will, of which they considered themselves the vessels: “God gave me my money,” so said John D. Rockefeller. After the panic of 1901, J. P. Morgan bluntly proclaimed, “I owe the public nothing.”

Lauded by some as titanic heroes, as great captains of industry and finance, the barons were also excoriated in terms eerily apt for our current crop of predators. Vanderbilt, for example, was denounced for his “unmitigated selfishness.” Jay Gould, who owned railroads, telegraph lines, and other businesses and speculated in all of them, was nicknamed “the Mephistopheles of Wall Street” and seen widely as a “destroyer” or a “pitiless human carnivore glutting on the blood of his numberless victims . . . an incarnate fiend.”

As a class, they were depicted as lawless, irreverent scoundrels, freebooting confidence men and mountebanks. They practiced “a brazen disregard for others’ rights.” Secretary of State Walter Gresham opined that “democracy is now the enemy of law and order and as such should be denounced.”

Like Jeff Bezos did with his Venice wedding extravaganza, they engaged in unconscionable displays of their wealth. Mrs Hamilton Fish, grande dame of New York’s upper crust, hosted a party for her friends’ dogs at which the “guests” were presented with diamond necklaces as party favors and a place of honor at the table was reserved for an ape. During the 1857 panic/depression, guests at “poverty socials” dressed themselves in calico and homespun, drank cold water, and ate scraps from wooden plates, while seated on broken soapboxes, buckets, and coal hods to separate themselves off from “the arrogance of snobs who go only to guzzle champagne and stuff themselves with oysters.”

Observers also noticed what we do today, that there was something irreducibly fake about these wannabe aristocrats. They were social climbers — “chip-chop” or “shoddy” aristocrats were the terms then in use — men without respect for education, semiliterate, profane, of wolfish cunning, insatiable appetite, and brimming over with resentment. All they lacked were chainsaws.

“Jubilee” Jim Fisk, a railroad and currency speculator of the first rank who boasted of his sexual athleticism and dressed like an admiral though he had not even the faintest connection to the navy, announced one day that he “was born to be bad.” Unfazed when one of his financial escapades went bust, he impiously reasoned, “Nothing lost save honor.” Sound familiar?

Walt Whitman took their measure: “The depravity of the business classes is infinitely greater than supposed.”

Primitive capitalism was a moral vacuum. It lived off the cyclical economic crises it was at least partially responsible for engineering. It grew strong by commercially engaging and then devouring noncapitalist economies and ways of life: indigenous pastoralists, family farmers, slave labor kidnapped or traded for in Africa, craft producers, small-town merchants and storekeepers. Impressive indeed were the accomplishments of the industrial capitalist revolution. But they were paid for in blood.

As a ruling class, the barons had a short life expectancy precisely because of their inherent social unconsciousness. Nothing sheltered the society they looted more than they led. Consequently, it lived in perpetual economic and political crisis. Only democratic reform of this voracious capitalism — minimum wages and other labor protections, social welfare, government regulation of business, unionization, income redistribution — saved the system from self-annihilation.

Today our modern version of the primitive ruling class is hard at work undoing what’s left of democratic capitalism. They do so at our peril — and their own.