Occupy as a Seminal American Event

Posted by Steve Honig on January 23, 2012

It is always dangerous to write something that could function as a putative "history" at a point in time close to the events being discussed.  One lacks the perspective of time, and the information that future events provides to illuminate those events.  The modern penchant for immediate analysis is good dialog but not necessarily conclusive analysis.

So it is with trepidation that I return to the Occupy movement and speculate on its importance.  Not only is the movement of recent memory, but also it is an ongoing event; NPR reported this morning that Occupy is setting up an igloo encampment even now at Davos, in advance of the worldwide economic conference annually held there.  

 But I am almost compelled to do so if only because, in glancing out my window just now at the snow-coated grass plot that until recently was the Occupy Boston site, I see traced in the snow-cover, in block letters that must be 30 feet high, the word "LOVE" facing away from me, but directly at the Federal Reserve Bank.  (I wonder if the City will come to erase the message before the polity is further polluted by such things.)

At the end of Occupy Boston I made bold to suggest that the residue of Occupy would, at a minimum, be a palpable contribution to the national dialog on who we are and what we ought to do about it.  I think I was correct.  Those who know me also know that I am not beneath an occasional "I told you so," particularly since my being correct is such a random, rare event.

Last week's Sunday New York Times  ran a detailed article about locating the 1% and understanding what it took to find those people within our borders.  The stunning (to me) graphic was a map of the United States made up of City names, and under each City the amount of earnings per year it took to be within the highest 1% of annual income. 

The range was remarkable; over $900,000 on Connecticut's Gold Coast, below $200,000 in some forelorn Cities (if I recall correctly, Jamestown New York and Flint Michigan).  The high numbers were concentrated along our coasts (save Chicago).  A rich man in Mississippi cannot ante in a poker game in Darien.  While we cannot necessarily equate annual earnings to true wealth, the map gives us a clue that the country is not at all a unity, but rather a conglomeration of diverse localities that have fared very differently in the face of economic developments.  There are numerous economies alive in the United States, perhaps something not surprising to affectionados of the House Hunter series on television (I am addicted, and I watch almost no other television; I love to see houses much nicer than mine being sold in Keokuk, Iowa for less money than it takes to maintain my lawn for a year in Newton.)

And this past weekend's Wall Street Journal (Review section) again discussed America in Occupy terms.  Author Charles Murray, writing a feature article extracted from his upcoming book on wealth disparity in our country, tracks fifty year trends in our collective perceptions of who we are as a country in a piece entitled "The New American Divide."  Expressly noting Occupy, and beginning his article with the words "America is coming apart," Murray chronicles the division among Americans that is partially financial and partially social.  He notes that we have not only differences in wealth, but also cultural differences in what we eat, how we get educated, whether we marry or pray, whether we have children of unmarried women, whether we are working or idle, all based on fundamental differences between our world views.

I look forward to the January 31 publication date of the book, entitled "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010," which analyzes, prototypically, the upper middle class town of Belmont, MA and the depressed Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia, PA.

Differences in economics over time drive differences in culture in a way never before experienced here.  Occupy gave voice to these differences.  In a way, Murray's analysis answers the question raised by many as to what the message of Occupy really was, or the criticism that the message was so garbled as to be meaningless.  Occupy reflected the wide panoply of differences on many issues that reflect the division of America along deep cultural lines.  Money is a leading cause and indicator of that division, but all the ancillary complaints and causes espoused at Occupy really were of a single cloth:  different aspects of the two countries we have become.

Murray's suggestion to bridge this gap is for the "new upper class" to engage themselves and their families in breaking down the cultural isolation.  I am not quite sure what he has in mind, and must await the book to learn more, but it doesn't sound so different from applying the big block letters in the snow visible outside my window, left anonymously by some prophet of   cultural detente.

Marketing the Occupy Movement

Posted by Steve Honig on December 01, 2011

Yesterday I saw a jacket lettered on the back "Occupy Boston."  Although the jacket was not crisp-looking and might even be viewed as ratty, it suggests some steps for the commercialization of this social protest movement.

Normally, causes advertise themselves by posters, T-shirts and buttons.  Years after a given protest movement, the posters have been thrown away, the T-shirts are the faded tops worn at the beach or to wash the car, and the buttons are either in the trash or in the top drawer, awaiting the passage of a few decades before finding their way into memorabilia shops.

But jackets are something else.  They are most typically for sports teams, sometimes for cities or whole countries, sometimes for a club or social group; but you don't typically see them for social protest movements.  How often have you seen jackets that proclaim "Vets against the War" or "Socialists of America" or "Mothers for Bank Regulation"?  (I exclude and refuse to discuss the seemingly bizarre trend of jackets that say on the back "Police" or "Sheriff" or "FBI" although they always have worried me on grounds of impersonation of a peace officer.)

Now that we have seen the cutting edge, the potential here, and noting that Occupy is going to need cash for food, winter warmth and defense lawyers, let us offer some marketing advice to our brothers and sisters on the barricade:

SHOT GLASSES:  There is a smart market from collectors of souvenir shot glasses.  Minimal art work is required. Glass is cheap to buy and as a single item (collectors want examples, not whole sets) a quick mover at a good price point.  (Ditto souvenir spoons, and with those comes the opportunity for a souvenir master spoon rack with an overall "Occupy" motif and notches for spoons from various cities.)

SOUVENIR PLATES: These usually come in sets of 8 or 12, and are suitable for wall mounting in middle class dining rooms.  Scenes from different cities, perhaps Currier-and-Ives-style hand-colored scenes of police clearing a particular public space, can also offer job opportunities for Occupy graduates seeking to reenter the job market, although the hand coloring does require a steady hand.

T-SHIRTS: Always a favorite, and permits a wide variety of content, including the ever-popular mild obscenity.  They will need to attend to stocking all sizes, of course.

GAME-USED MEMORABILIA: Sports teams sell used balls and uniforms, home plates, basketball nets, football helmets, pucks.  Occupy can cut up older site-used tents, bed rolls and picket signs.  Effective marketing requires some organization to authenticate provenance, yet another potential profit center.

The point for me is this: until now, Occupy has been accused of being unfocused and without program or purpose.  Now we can win over the critical elements of the business community which have expressed these negative views by making the Occupy movement its own business;  Chambers of Commerce will demand installation of Occupy communities in their own cities, thus also solving our unemployment problem.

Soon, Occupy people will become part of the 1%!  We call this further proof that America truly is the land of economic opportunity.

39 Again

Posted by Steve Honig on November 10, 2011

My father lived to almost 101; as for birthdays, he started counting at 39.  So for me today, November 10, I am by my dad's count 39 years old for the 31st time.  It of course feels no different from yesterday, and we cannot presume to compare it to tomorrow.

When I was 64 I declared an end to birthday celebrations; 65 sounded old, and I wanted no part of it.  Nor did the idea match my disposition or ambitions.  I was given a rousing 64th party; a cover band sang the Beatle's song asking "will you still love me when I'm 64,"  people dressed up as various Beatles or their lyrics, people came from long distances, and that is my last party.  All is good.

My assistant today gave me, for my birthday, a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee, cream no sugar, and I know she wishes me well because it is a medium, not just a small.  My birthday dinner last night consisted solely of four scoops of ice cream topped with dark hot fudge; if arteries have not killed me yet, one more mega-sundae ain't gonna do it.

I detest people who pontificate on birthdays about what they have learned, or about the secret of life.  I am happy to awake on the right side of the grass each morning.  When that doesn't happen, I will try to send word, but we all should be prepared for the possibility that that blog post will not get published.  So save this blog post, just in case.... 

"Occupy" and the Underlying Economics

Posted by Steve Honig on November 09, 2011

I don't want to re-engage here the by now much-overworked debate as to whether there is a coherent message or an identifiable plan emerging from the "occupy" movements, or whether those movements will survive the winter snows of Boston or the police actions that will over time no doubt increase. 

I do want to just record, without detailed citation (this data is easily retrieved from the internet as reported by the mainstream press), the highpoints, or rather lowpoints, of our current economic situation.  I do submit that one underlying driver of the "occupy" movement is growing awareness of great economic distress.

We have learned that poverty is growing in the US.  We have learned that the number of people who fall into the category of gross poverty (less than 50% of the poverty line earnings) has doubled over recent years.  We have learned that young people are disproportionately unemployed.  We have learned that undereducated people are losing ground relative to the educated.  We have learned (November 9 Boston Globe) that there are Boston neighborhoods with over 40% of the children below the poverty line, most in single parent homes and with 20% of those parents without a high school degree.  We have learned that on an international scale, our economic and social well-being, once pre-eminent, has fallen mightily; the Times reported the Bertelsmann Siftung survey indicating that our child poverty and senior citizen poverty rates place us in company with Grece, Chile, Turkey, Mexico and other unenviable peers,  while our "overall social justice rating" ranks us below such as South Korea, Portugal, Slovakia, Ireland, Hungary, Poland and other countries which are instinctively dismissed by Americans as not in our league.

While it is unlikely that cutting the economic legs off the wealthy will achieve anything useful in the long run (the money to be redistributed is a pittance compared to the problem), we should understand that that reaction (tax the rich) is one of frustration in light of the economic realities, and the loss of faith by the folks at the bottom that they have a reasonable shot at rising upwards.  And the internationalization of business and its growing tax-efficiencies are in fact a significant issue in our ability to afford the legitimate demands that an enlightened society puts upon its government; today's signs in Dewey Square don't so much want to tax people who make a lot of money, but rather to tax the entities with high untaxed profits even after the compensation of our highest earners.

It is likewise no doubt frustrating for people who work hard for their money, and perform difficult tasks, to be told they are overpaid.  The point is they are not so much overpaid as the other guys are underpaid or unpaid.  But another point is that those who work and earn and get angry at Occupy had best understand their own risk profile: regardless of who is "right" about many of these issues, the perception of these issues, if held by a large enough part of the population over a long enough period of time, will be viewed as unfair, will certainly be uncharitable in human terms, and will likely destabilize the society which is the assumed underpinning of the safe enjoyment of the wealth being accumulated by all this hard labor.

Class tension interferes with what we really need to get done: create confidence in the society so as to drive funding of innovation; allow confidence in other people so as to loosen immigration in areas that actually can expand the economy; create predictibility in our politics and public policies;  find some way to mediate the power of wealth which is driving public policy into areas of self-interest measured in the narrowest sense.

We are all in this together.  Driving to Weston doesn't distance us from the tents in Dewey Square.  If the tents disappear from Dewey Square, the people in them, and the problems they reflect, do not disappear.  These people are like Whitman's leaves of grass; they are ever under our feet.  And grass can be slippery for those who stride across it without heed for their footing.  

Decline and Fall

Posted by Steve Honig on October 26, 2011

Today I write about the breakdown of the American social compact. 

The Congress cannot engage in dialog on important issues.  We do not speak to each other, we do not listen.  Republicans stonewall.  The President campaigns rather than inspires a dialog.

A candidate for school committee in Newton campaigns on the platform of building a bridge between the schools and the 80% without children in the schools.  This in a city noted for its educational system, and where once all taxpayers understood investment in the future of the children.

Commentators on the Occupy movement criticize the participants because they do not have a program, as if having a solution to incredibly complex problems is easy to articulate in a 140 character sound bite digestible by our slogan-ized polity.  Is not the message clear, that many of our fellow citizens feel grossly disenfranchised and mistreated in our society in a variety of ways?  Even suburban populations are forming support groups for the Boston "Occupy" movement.

Is it not clear that movements such as this always attract marginal issues, but that we must strip out the clutter and understand the fundamentals, rather than marginalizing the fundamental content?

The Boston Globe reports a heightened concentration of US wealth over the last three decades, and the Globe may be the last publication on earth to discover this reality.  This factual driver of "Occupy" seems to be missed by some of "the one percent," and the "movement" seems unable to communicate the core issue to many who clearly are not hearing it.

What do non-Americans think of our political state?   The other day in our offices, which overlook Dewey Square and Boston's tent city, a dozen Russian entrepreneurs attended a business conference to discuss their companies.  One or two commented on the protesters, but most were politely silent. The business of business is business, not politics. 

This convenient dichotomy is perhaps learned in countries where growing economic opportunity must co-exist without political freedom;  but is this a dichotomy (business as divorced from public debate of politics) that Americans living under our Constitution should embrace?  Aside from a mixture of embarrassment and distaste, what should the 1%-ers, looking down on the tents, be thinking?  How many go down to the streets and talk with the people?  Not many, to my experience. 

Why is it repellent when people exercise the rights they have under our Constitution?  Seems as if many folks in the office towers love the geographic or non-specific idea of America, but not the actual exercise of American rights which are part of our social compact: free speech, free assembly, economic opportunity in fact, and open communication leading to jointly reached and mediated solutions.

For those people who think that John Locke is a bolt for your toilet door, I suggest an elevator down to the street and a modest exercise in the way in which American society ought to operate: talk with, not over your fellow citizens. THAT is the social compact we once thought we had, and the one we need to redeem.

Yesterday, one of my partners forwarded to me an on-line article complaining that the Occupy people smell bad.  This is what purports to pass for political analysis today.  I'll bet George Washington's armpits stank at Valley Forge; let's give the country back to the British, seemingly smelly people don't deserve our attention.  Although I would bet my bankbook that the author of the smell test never visited the tents and, well, sniffed around.

And, returning to the young Russian entrepreneurs for a moment, as one of them said: "The people downstairs just want to be treated as people."  If a twenty-something Russian engineer with marginal English and no tradition of free politics can understand what "Occupy" is all about, why do so many Americans have a problem doing so?  Maybe we have stopped listening....

Even Vegans Want to Slaughter Pigs

Posted by Steve Honig on October 05, 2011

When I was an up-and-coming lawyer I moved my young family to the top of Belmont Hill, a pretty fancy address with big lawns and big mortgages.  It was then that I started to have "the nightmare" that sometimes even woke me: hoards of protesters, angry that people like me had so much wealth when times were hard (as times are always hard for many) finally did what Americans never did: the rose in true mass social protest and marched up my street and broke into my house and took my stuff and burned my fancy valuables and moved into my basement (a la Dr. Zhivago).

The "nightmare" faded; since then I have lived in a series of nice places and not once did the unwashed masses parade down my street.

Today is my first day back in the office from an extended business trip, and as I glance out of my elegant office I look down on Dewey Square, an open area in front of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank.  And what do I see?  Dozens and dozens of tents, of people camped out protesting corporate greed.  Not so large a showing as in New York City (where last Friday my cab driver had to take a detour to get me where I was going at the Battery) but a lot of people.

Down at street level, because the noise rose all 25 stories and penetrated my windows and broke my concentration, I faced something like "the nightmare" in real time.  Hundreds and hundreds of people of all sorts marching, chanting, waving signs of a most un-Capitalistic nature.  The police, themselves having learned something since I proctered the marches in the 60s and 70s for the Civil Liberties Union, stayed way in the back, an occasional polite policeman in regular gear directing the traffic through the financial district.  No cops with shields and dogs.

So what did I learn?

The tents are part of "Occupy Boston," a knock-off of "Occupy Wall Street," a protest against corporate greed still pending in New York.  The event, as usual for such events, attracted protesters of almost every ilk and disrepair; my collected literature urges an end to war, higher wages for the poor, and something a bit more ambitious from the Revolutionary Communist Party.  Men, women, students, workers in union shirts, and a large number of nurses were on the march and the main thrust was the inequality in our country when it comes to economics.  Signs and chants proclaimed :"Wall Street got bailed out, we got left out;" "We--are--the--99%;" "Wall Street, you cannot hide, we can see your greedy side;" "Take it back--Tax Wall Street;" and my favorite, for which this post is named.

Now America has not suffered the level of class violence and animosity of many other countries and I suspect there are numerous reasons, but the greatest to my mind has been the open-ness of the American dream, the improvement possible for each person and for each successive generation.  Certainly there has been unrest but it has been episodic and contained, and primarily driven by labor issues (there are exceptions for draft riots, bank foreclosures on farms, etc., but basically we have escaped mass sustained class animosity).

But the American dream, that soothing ointment that salves the class abrasions in our society, is fading (as my nightmare faded) and perhaps also fading, in face of the growing wealth disparity, is the lack of belief that it is temporary or can be overcome.  Will circumstances at last unleash my reborn nightmare?  Certainly the march today was peaceful, almost like a summer outing; but many an anti-war march during Nam started that way and ended up with stones through the windows of the Cambridge Trust Company by the time the hoard reached Harvard Square.

The complacent business folk who observed the march, took the literature and exchanged sympathetic looks with the cops, did not believe I am sure that this is "the beginning" of something big; nor do I.  But my fear is that it is the symptom of the start of the beginning of something that is systemic and that our society is not in a position to address over time.  Tom Friedman's new book, That Used to Be Us, makes a case for what is needed to respond to the possibility of our society becoming a class-divided also-ran.  Although many conservatives dismiss Friedman as a knee-jerk leftie, the book (co-authored with Professor Mike Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins) is a great take and I recommend it.

Meanwhile, if you live in a nice house, you might want to check your door locks and stock up your panic room....

Fight Night

Posted by Steve Honig on September 19, 2011

Normally it is better to attend any event in person, rather than suffering the misimpressions, disconnection (and commercials) dictated by television. I remember for example how much the people who saw on television my favorite fight, Sugar Ray Leonard beating up Marvelous Marvin Hagler under the Vegas stars in 1987, missed about that evening: the buzz, the distractions, the intensity, the globs of sweat from the ring reaching to the third row of patrons, and the truly superior talent of Leonard; TV viewers thought the fight was a close one, which it was not.

 But on this past Saturday night, if you were foolish or bored enough to shell out $69.95, you learned that sometimes what happens on television focuses an event, even shapes it.  If you payed your money, you were connected by Pay Per View to Las Vegas,Nevada to witness the hyped boxing match between Flloyd "Money"  Mayweather (an undefeated super-welterweight of undeniable skills) and a guy named Victor (Vicious) Ortiz, yet another tough Mexican kid fighter of the type that fills boxing venues from Staples Center to Madison Square with Hispanic fans who have transferred their personal dreams of glory onto the shoulders of a countryman.

 And so you find yourself in Las Vegas, a city so cheesy that it has become, gladly, the mecca of US boxing.  After suffering through three truly boring preliminary bouts, with all six boxers of Mexican descent  (what happened to those nights when places like the Eastern Parkway Arena were filled with Jewish, black, Irish clubfighters who dominated the sport during various eras, is it true that our poor lower classes that fuel boxing are now almost fully occupied by Mexican kids?), we are introduced to the main combatants, a 34 year old Mayweather who carefully selects opponents he is certain to defeat and a 22 year old smiling orphan who, the announcer reminds us,  grew up on some streets somewhere and has fought his way to respectability (or at least to the side of the incredibly stunning young woman who walks nearly into the ring with him).

 The fight doesn't matter until the end, which comes quickly in the fourth round.  Ortiz head-butts Mayweather (who bleeds slightly from his teeth on cue), the referee temporarily halts the fight to announce he has deducted a scoring point from Ortiz as a penalty, and as the fighters re-engage at center ring and the polite Ortiz leans forward to express apologies, Mr. Mayweather sucker-punches him with a left and a right and the kid is down for the count.

What is really great, however, is the post-fight interview with the winner.  The TV commentator, a venerable old dude with wavy white hair, sticks his mike into Mayweather's face and asks, in essence, how it feels to win a fight against a kid with a sucker punch while the kid is trying to apologize.  Mayweather starts by thanking God for His grace in allowing him to win the fight (and presumably to get a chance to sucker punch a kid), and then says that he was head-butted and then threw a left and a right and knocked his man out.  Yes, the commentator pursues, but what happened at the end when you sucker punched him?  Well, explains a patient Mayweather, I threw first a left and then a right and the kid fell down and didn't get up which means I win!  Trying one last time, the commentator asks if it were not true that said kid was trying to apolgize and that when the first blow landed did the kid not turn to the referee for an explanation of whether the official time out had expired?  "You never give me a fair break.  Never!" shouts Mayweather, losing his calm exterior and (likely) driven to say it by the very same deity who granted him his sucker punch; Mayweather puts his face right into that of the commentator and screams, "Never a fair break.  You're shit!"  Nonplussed (I guess being a commentator for boxing matches inures you to a great degree), the commentator replies, " I wish I were 50 years younger, I'd kick your ass." 

 You don't get that kind of drama  watching the fight while sitting live in your seat at the MGM Grand.  No siree.

 But let us turn to the defeated challenger, sitting on his stool in his corner of the ring, a magnanimous concussion-induced grin across his open and unmarked face.  The mike enters the frame and the commentator's voice is heard to inquire as to how if feels to have your clock cleaned by a sucker punch.  But the kid is from central casting, he knows the mantra, he knows the game he is in, and he wants his rematch, that's for sure.  "You know," he observes sagely as if invoking a philosophical truth handed down to us by the Greeks, "ya gotta protect yourself at all times...."

 That's TV! Those are the money shots.  I go to sleep pleased with how I have spent my $69.95.

I've Been Thinking...The wrong questions

Posted by Steve Honig on September 12, 2011

Why does public debate focus on the wrong questions?

It is not about whether the pledge of allegiance has educational value or is fascist.  It is about whether it violates the establishment clause of the Constitution (as does our form of currency)  and whether (as Governor Patrick allowed in a moment of atypical candor) we don't have better things to worry about.

People who claim that the pledge is a fundamental part of our heritage of course don't have much of a clue about history.  The pledge, although first published in 1892, was formally instituted by Congress in 1942 , well after World War I, the Spanish American War, the Civil War, the War of 1812, the American Revolution, the Shot Heard Round the World, the Louisiana Purchase, the founding of the American West, the birth and death of all the Founding Fathers and just about every revered political and literary figure in American History.  It was adopted around the time we were herding Japanese Americans into concentration camps, but let's not get too sardonic here. 

Also, it was written by a socialist (gasp) as part of a proposed celebration of Columbus Day, a day in honor of someone born in another hemisphere who is honored for a discovery he did not make, and in form pledges allegiance to a flag, which is an emblem used for centuries as a signal or identification of armies during warfare. Quite a pedigree....

Then, since I am already in trouble with those who respond reflexively to the soft symbols of simple emotion without marking ideas or feelings to the market of logic, let me jump fully into the quagmire of the just-concluded 9-11 rememberances.  The debate isn't whether we are better off reliving in detail those events or whether we are best to now -- after a full decade -- move on to consideration of the future.  The question asks us to elect between two choices which are not choices at all.

How can one not remember?  Most of us do remember and, until we are overtaken by senility, cannot forget.  Modern media will enshrine these events in our collective cultural heads for so long as there is a country here; we even Remember the Maine, the Alamo, 54-40 or Fight, all sorts of elements of history/culture of far less substance. 

And how can we not move onward anyway?  The calendar compels no other choice.  We do not live in the movie Groundhog Day.  I bet, since today is September 12, that when (if) we awake next time it will be -- September 13, tomorrow!  And although as I have pointed out  we will of course remember 9-11, because of the WAY in which remember  such  things (as emotional mind-bites), that rememberance will not interfere with the functioning of tomorrow (unless you are flying through Newark and trip the security sensors, in which case all is lost).

H. L. Mencken described our country's general population as "homo boobians."  It is a harsh sentence, but one worthy of consideration.  It is not so much that we do not know the answers that makes us dangerous to all living things including ourselves; it is that we don't even know the questions.

Facts and the Economy

Posted by Steve Honig on August 16, 2011

Our economy is deeply distressed and won’t get better soon because our problems are systemic and will not respond to any of the policies recommended by either party.

The trigger for this blog is last Thursday night’s  debate of  Republican candidates, who seemed secure in the truth that untaxed businesses and their untaxed executives create jobs and wealth.  This is not unconvincing in two senses: it reflects the myth of  American experience, and it reflects the logic that when the economy is suffering from lack of liquidity you do not take money out of the system by taxation.

It seems, however, that on analysis of  facts, the problem is more complex and, regrettably, more fundamental.  (I do not fault the Republicans; the Democrats too seem to ignore the controlling facts I cite below.  I am not taking sides here as I find both parties are not so much wrong as they are discussing the wrong things.)

Fact: the gross national debt as a percentage of our gross domestic product has increased in thirty years from about 30% to almost 100%.  (source: OMB 6-30-11) (The only President who reduced it was Clinton, and likely for reasons of happenstance; but my inquiry is not concerned with who did it, but rather with what it is.)

Fact: The economic gains from our accelerating productivity have flowed to corporations and the rich and not to the workers.  (source: Conference Board, US Census, Bureau of  Labor Statistics)

Fact: Real average hour wage from 1970 to today has declined, notwithstanding improved productivity. (source: OECD Main Economic Indicators, IMF International Financial Statistics)

Fact: From 1985 to now, employment as a percentage of our work-aged population has fallen from 77% to about 74%, and from a couple of intervening peaks of over 80%.

Fact: from 1950 to the end of 2009, the share of total income earned in the US by the top 1% of earners has increased from about 11% (which in 1950 was within three points of the same statistic for Japan, France and Sweden) to about 18% (which is 2-3 times the percentage in those three countries).  (source: World Top Incomes Database).  Put another way, the disparity in earnings between the richest and poorest earners in the US has increased by over 50% and is disproportionate also on a world-wide basis.

What do these facts suggest?  

          *As observed by Jeremy Grantham in his GMO quarterly newsletter (August 2011), for 30 years before 2000, consumers compensated for flat hourly wages by working harder and longer  and workers constituted  a higher percentage of the total labor-eligible force; but in the last decade the hours worked have flattened (hitting a natural maximum perhaps?), the percentage of eligible workers actually employed has fallen, and so sustained middle class spending in that decade was supported not by earnings but by borrowing and the perceived “income” from rising housing values. 

          *Putting aside the risk of social unrest over time that comes from great economic disparities, since workers cannot work harder and since they are earning less and since they cannot borrow, there is no way they can purchase goods.

          *But two thirds of GDP in the US has been domestic consumption.

          *US companies, notwithstanding Romney’s assertion that corporations are people, are gaining profit by cost savings, including driving down wages; but  that kind of cost savings cannot be sustained as we are running out of runway on cost-cutting, and greater squeeze on labor is likely to be counter-productive when viewed from a consumer consumption vantage point.

          * How do you get more money into the economy without printing it?  You increase labor costs (as many countries including China are), driving a revitalization of the middle class as originally fostered in the United States by Henry Ford (see the blog Naked Capitalism by Yves Smith, as of last February the fourth most visited business blog, and by no means a bastion of liberal knee-jerk rhetoric).

          *You lower the actual income of, and increase the taxes on, business and the upper reaches of  US earners (again, see Grantham’s GMO quarterly for August 2011).  We could for example engineer ourselves down  to the level of income disparity obtaining in the Eisenhower years, half the disparity of today during a period of  sustained economic growth in the ‘50s (carried into the ‘60s).

          *When you take cash out of  the system by taxation,  does it in fact reduce job creation?  Corporations are sitting on vast cash reserves.  The very wealthy the same.  But we do not now have job growth today, we have increasing profits based on cost squeezes.  How do you re-circulate those funds?  They are not trickling down.  The statistics tell us that fact.  If one were to have government undertake major projects that would create liquidity in the middle class, with funds obtained from a rationalized tax structure (see George McGovern’s open letter to Obama in the August issue of Harpers), the economy would unfreeze significantly.

          Parenthetically, Warren Buffett’s suggestion, reported today, that it is appropriate and necessary to increase taxes on the wealthy is not the whole answer.  That alone does not create enough economic activity even if pumped back into the economy through government programs, whether works or entitlements.  To fund the middle class buying machine requires altering the relative  pre-tax incomes of corporations/high earners compared to middle class earners.  You need not only to tax the top, you need to raise up the middle.

          Think about the trickle down approach.   Pass over the statistics we have been discussing  until now that suggest that there isn’t any trickle.  Let’s look at WalMart, a company that drives down labor costs.  This reduces the pay of its employees and reduces the cost of the goods WalMart sells.  The system should and likely does allow the families to pay less for WalMart goods.  But where does the pay of the WalMart family (and other squeezed families) get applied?  To underwater mortgages which are not cheaper.  For gasoline and food that are priced based on a different economic model.  For  products generally not purchased at  WalMart (or from many of the other companies that operate on the same model).

          It is a heresy for a business lawyer with entrepreneurial and banking clients and a proclivity for free markets to suggest that labor needs a bigger share.  But we expect labor to pay down mortgages and not default, to reduce household debt, to survive pressure on social programs, to handle abandonment of  old-fashioned pension funds that often sustained retirements with defined benefits – putting aside one’s social views or economic philosophy, it is just hard to understand how the US is going to pull this rabbit out of a hat without pumping actual dollars into the middle of the US economic engine.

          Returning one last time to Grantham’s report, and I quote:

          “The average worker, with flat wages for decades and with 16% to 18% of the workforce out of work (9%), discouraged to look for work (4%), or forced to work only part-time (5%), must feel as if he (or she) is in a depression.  … Corporations are spending on capital equipment but are doing little in the way of domestic recruiting.  Profit margins in the financial system were protected, along with bonuses, which in some cases set records last year despite the undeniable fact that these were the guys who helped bring the Western world to its knees.”

          These are not the view of a wild radical Democrat, or a dogmatic Republican.  These are the perceptions of someone who runs a significant investment fund.

          And I do not think that Washington,  the debating Republicans or the Democrats in the White House, are thinking this way. 

Fat, Body Piercing and Tattoos

Posted by Steve Honig on August 09, 2011

I am not into body piercing and tattoos.  In fact, when I sat down to write this blog I originally misspelled “tattoo,” that is how alien the whole thing is.

As for the “fat” part, as we say in the law racket, “Further deponent sayeth not.”

This weekend I drove through the moist warmth of a New England August and visited Canobie Lake Park.  For those who do not know it, the Park is an old-fashioned amusement facility that seems to have found a nostalgic niche in competition with more flamboyant and up-to-date amusement venues.  There are the kinds of rides that I rode as a  kid.  There is a water park with short safe slides, nothing – well—splashy.  There are entertainment venues with impersonators of Tim McGraw, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Elvis.  The demise of at least half of those people seems to pass unnoticed.

You can even bowl Skee-Ball.  And earn tickets for high scores, redeemable for useless trinkets.  Just the way I grew up….

But there is a difference here.  And it has to do with, yes, fat, body piercing and tattoos.

I hasten to observe that although the Park draws an incredible diversity of people (the population more reflects the demographics of the region, with people of Asian and African and Latin background, than just about any other venue I can recall except perhaps Boston’s decayed Downtown Crossing), the phenomenon seems to ignore ethnicity, age, skin color, and everything else save the one common element: if you are fat, have lots of body piercing and/or are replete with tattoos, you are statistically much more likely to be at Canobie Lake Park than anywhere else – Boston City Jail only excepted.

And this is not a population gathered to make a statement.  You find these people as they are in real time: skin-tight T-shirts further shrunken by a drenching in the water park or some flume ride, shorts so brief as to make leer-ers of us all, tattoos on men’s arms and shoulders and necks and legs, tattoos disappearing into fatty crevices that polite people do not describe when referring to women, iron and brass sticking out of ears and noses and tongues and, yes, in visible outline under shirts from nipples and navels.

Are these people fundamentally slovenly as a group?  Well, frankly, yes they are.  Not dirty, just not suburban middle class neat, scrubbed and coordinated.  In fact, the key word is “uncoordinated.”  Nothing matches anything; the tattoos are blue and red, the do-rags around the head are black and white, the Celtics shirt is of course green, the shorts are striped, and the shoes are likely to be unlaced work boots on men, unlaced sneakers on women.

The kids can get away with it, but you just feel compelled to probe the adult adherents, hopefully in what seems a casual manner.  My efforts:

 

In line for a head-jerking spinning ride, me: “Nice tattoo.”  [Unspoken: does the tiger have a tail or has it lost it in a fight, the tiger’s butt has disappeared into a roll of fat sticking out of your shirt and falling down your back.]  Reply, “Thanks, man, got it in Iraq.”  [He looks like a jerk and he defended my liberty?  Oops….]

Eating an ice cream and turning to a sixty-ish woman with a nose ring, dripping powdered sugar down her shirt-front from her fried dough, me: “How long have you had the, you know….” Reply, “Last year, I got it in Hampton Beach, my granddaughter and I did it together.  You like?”  [Oh yeah, what do I mumble now?]

Stopping an enormous  woman with flabby arms, bright tattoos of snakes and a bar through her nose and with what seems like forty children under the age of seven in tow: “Excuse me, are all those children yours?”  Reply, “No, I got them in that booth there, if you break a balloon with a dart they give you one.”  [Whoops, a regular Mae West on steroids.]

There is no rhyme, reason or predictor except, here they all are.  In a ten minute “experiment” I find that 15% of all adults I see have tattoos, about 10% of the men have earnings, and fully half are what might be classified as “obese.”  Not chunky.  Not full-bodied.  Not overweight.  Just plain really really fat.

So what can you buy to eat, here at the Park?  I will spare you the litany, you can imagine.  One pushcart has fruit cups; one stand has salads in plastic.  No signage for either.  Advertising for all that is not good abounds (the signs for onion rings, fries, soft-serve ice cream and dough are ubiquitous). 

The kids don’t care; they don’t see it, or it does not register.  They are at that lucky early stage where passing judgment on people with a different personal style is ahead of them (although from what I hear about Middle Schools, not all that far ahead).  For us button-down types in crisp khaki shorts and collared shirts and our backpacks filled with sun screen and deet-laden bug spray, it is an exercise in self-control and unrestrain-able snobbish moments.

On the way home we stop in an ice cream shop in our neighborhood in Newton.  The shirts have polo players or logos from golf clubs.  Even though these people are buying an ice cream, they are trim, their tops tucked neatly into crisp shorts or proper golf skirts.  Not a tattoo in sight.  No body ornaments except for those lovely small seashell gold earnings, and those are all on the women.  As for body fat – these people, even the pudgiest, are in the minor leagues of lard.

Safely at home in the neat suburbs, I have survived our August walk on the wild side.

Where is my Mojo?

Posted by Steve Honig on August 09, 2011

I had it when I left New York.  Of course that was a long time ago, 48 years ago to be exact (being exact is, by the way, highly overrated).

When I moved to Massachusetts I took it off.  Actually it just fell off by its own accord.  But I picked it up and put it aside.  First on the dresser in my apartment in Cambridge, later in my basement in my first apartment, then in a clearly marked box in a series of houses, ready to be reclaimed or at least remembered.

Now, however, over this past weekend, I went looking for it but I just cannot find it.  Anywhere.  Have you seen it, perchance?

Why did I go looking?  Thought you would never ask.

Each week I get my “The” New Yorker magazine and I read it or pretend to read it.  But it has been getting harder and harder and, truth be told, this last issue wholly eluded me.  When living in New York City, even as a teen and college student, mojo insouciantly draped over my shoulders, I would flip through the magazine to guffaw at the cartoons, then go back and read the articles, or at least most of them, and even try the poems if they weren’t too long.

So Saturday morning I took the new issue and started flipping.  I ignored the loose reply mail subscription cards that fluttered down at my feet.  Starting at the back (easier to flip that way, and the cartoon don’t require a front-to-back sequence), I began reading.  Could not understand the humor in a single one.  Not one.  Tried again for irony, the new vocabulary of a jaded age.  No resonance there.  A third read for mere cleverness, a grin-inducing perception—nada.

Examples:

            *people on a subway platform hear a loud speaker announcement saying “Due to an incident at the Bergen Street station, everything has changed and nothing will ever be the same.”

            *four men dancing ballet in tutus turn to one man dancing in a suit: “Damn it, Hollister, you’re totally ruining casual Friday.”

            *man at computer to his wife looking over his shoulder: “I’m too busy recommending things to experience them for myself.”

            *one bowler to another: “You’ve got to learn how to bowl without irony.”

As for the articles?  Try these scintillating topics:

            *Hunting Horsetails (about the New York Fern Society).

            *Summer Fun for Boys (begins “You’re gifted, you’re pudgy and you’re nine.”)

            *Reverting to a Wild State (a piece of fiction illustrated by a man with 6-pack abs wearing Jockey shorts).

And why are there full-page ads for electrical and natural gas power grids?  When was the last time a reader bought a power grid?

Is it the magazine or me?  I must believe in my heart of hearts that the professionals who produce the magazine—this is THE New Yorker, for Godssake, not Mad, not that most useless of all publications the scrap paper packaged as the magazine “Boston”—still had their totally cool finger on the wry experiences, the anomalies for which New Yorkers are ever attuned and which are recorded faithfully and promptly in their eponymous magazine. 

It’s gotta be me.  I gotta get my New York edge back.  I need my mojo.  I haven’t much needed it in Boston; you need none in the suburbs of course, and being an attorney is not so much a matter of  mojo as it is a drill in chutzpah.

So I went through my basement.  I went through my attic.  I went through my memory.  I  am not lying, I am telling you it is lost.  Gone.  No clue, no resinous residue of remembrance where it once resided.  Just plain lost in time.

I threw out the magazine.  I feel better.

Thinking About the Deal

Posted by Steve Honig on August 03, 2011

 

Congress could not get out of DC fast enough after passing the debt deal, although it is hard to imagine why.  I am not sure that anyone would want to go home and answer the questions of constituents.

It is also hard to declare a winner here; first, who knows what either party really stands for; second, even if you could identify the teams from their uniforms, it is not clear if anyone prevailed.  Politicians call such a result a “compromise.”  Real people have a compound noun for that result, the first half of which depicts a bovine male.

How do you parse the alleged business slant of Republicans with the negative business effect of cutting expenses and hence jobs?  How do you parse the alleged liberal slant of Democrats with offering up for cutting the social programs (the requirement to share cuts between domestic and military budgets runs out after two years)?

The answer may be the removal of traditional political perspectives from the process we call politics.  Debate used to be about the social compact; how should government function in discharging its duties and inspiring the wealth and happiness of the population?  Now it is governed, overtly and implicitly, by social agendas.  How do we feel about poor people?  Foreigners?  Abortion?  Religion?  Is this a “good” development?  It certainly curtails civility and fosters the kind of intransigence we witnessed in Washington.

Democratic U.S. Representative Mike Capuano (Massachusetts) is what I call an old-fashioned liberal (it is amazing how that word – liberal --   has become pejorative; and I do not know why), and his tortured explanation of why he voted against “the deal” is full of factoids that are really make-weights on a troubled path being trod by a troubled soul.  But one such irrelevancy also was startling: only two countries, the US and Denmark, even have debt ceilings.  The stopping place of our debt ceiling is not designed with economic or social theory in mind, it just happens to be the number de jour.  Why do we have it at all?

Meanwhile, we look forward to this Fall’s mandated $1.5 trillion of additional cuts, per the wisdom of the joint Congressional committee.  I am preparing for this by getting new tires for my car and selling my convertible; there are going to be an awful lot of potholes and falling bridges on our highways in the near future.

Unless the unemployed volunteer to fix them for free.

Numbers, Baseball and Being American

Posted by Steve Honig on July 13, 2011

Much no doubt has been written about statistics and baseball. I think baseball is the National Pastime only because it is rich in numbers, has so many years of numbers to draw upon, and therefore reinforces the American passion for putting numbers on everything.

Look at grade schools: we teach reading and numbers. It is a very human thing. Our street games and our formal games are all shot through with numbers.

So Jeter is now a king of an important number, and gets all this adulation. As one of the Sox was quoted in the paper, Jeter is actually (now here is big surprise to all) a pretty great ballplayer and “there is a reason he has 3,000 hits.” Imagine, up to now I had sort of thought it was random, like getting a free cola from an occasional screw top soda cap.

I look forward to the Yankees coming to Fenway as I plan to stand up and cheer for Jeter because I love numbers too and think I can remember the batting averages of people from 60 years ago when I used to study the backs of chewing gum cards. I believe that most people at Fenway will do the same, particularly if a) the Sox are still in first place, and b) the Sox continue to own the Yankees, as they have all this year.

Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, about the only blog I read (and only because one of my partners forwards his stuff to me), has had a lot of fun messing with numbers and their anomalies (things like Jacoby Ellsbury having many times the number of steals as Jackie Robinson or some infield substitute accumulating over a long and dolorous career more hits than Ted Williams). His piece on Jeter’s 3000th hit touches upon the simultaneous importance and irrelevance of the statistic. Real merit in a ballplayer has to do with integrity and grace and the occasional ability to pick up a team and carry it up a big hill all alone (and then in the locker room babble about how it is a team sport).

Which leads to a final melancholy; whatever the statistics, what can one really say about Manny Ramirez? That can be printed in a blog that my kid may read….

First Blog: Explanation and Apology

Posted by Steve Honig on July 06, 2011

I am continuing my blog (originally started with the limited focus on my law teaching trip to Russia) midst mixed feelings. As many know, I write continually about law, baseball and life’s incessant anomalies. My law writings typically get published somewhere. My baseball writings go to friends who are fans. My observations on life go selectively to friends who I think will gain wry recognition from particular circumstance.

I did enjoy blogging about Russia; many of you were kind enough to tell me you enjoyed reading those blogs, and those posts are stored on this site. But I have renamed the site and broadened the scope in hopes that some folks will enjoy, and join in, occasional discussions of interesting topics.

I do this with trepidation; in considering whether or not to proceed, I asked numerous friends, family and clients their views. My concerns were two-fold: that it is presumptuous to assume that which strikes me as worthy of comment would be of interest to other people; and that joining the flow of unedited content flooding the internet is more disservice than benefit.

I received many replies (thank you, all who replied) and the majority were positive. Additionally, by and large the younger the respondent the more enthused the support. Now one can say, it is the age of communication and of course younger people are more comfortable with the effort and less disturbed by the presumption. That is, however, too glib. I am of the view that as thoughtful people age, they continue to learn and further gain experienced judgment. On that scale, rather than dismissing older respondents as merely dated, one would weigh those responses more heavily on the merits.

But how wrong can I go, after all? Embarrass myself a bit in public? Not the first time. Take a false start? I have had many. Reveal an inflated ego? Join the list of those who have accused me. I have renamed the blog to take it away from its Russian roots, sent notice of it to friends and clients, and will see where it takes me. If posts are mundane then the trip will be lonely as no readers will go there with me. If otherwise, we will have some fun. I can only promise to try to avoid the one-liners, screeds and smarmy inside references that have made me a non-reader of blogs of others.

We shall see. My first substantive pieces, one on law and one on the relationship of baseball and human obsession with statistics, are linked to this post.