Useless in Mitt World

People want to feel their lives have purpose. They want to be useful. They want to work and feel productive.  They want to know they are contributing.

Most people don't have simply economic conceptions of those terms though.  Work, purpose, usefulness aren't merely matters of making money.  People don’t want to be thought to matter only because they pay their way.  Nobody wants to think they're only invited along on a trip just to chip in on the gas.  They want to think their travelling companions want their company.

That's a metaphor.  Of course there are situations where the only reason we're allowed to come along is that we've bought a ticket.  But life in general ought to be more than just a bus ride.

An economy is simply the way a society pays to hold itself together, how it feeds and clothes and shelters its members so that they can go about the business of living together in relative peace and security.  We tinker with economies in order to make societies more peaceful, secure, and happy.  Economies serve or should serve society.  We seem to have gotten it backwards.  Individuals have a say in what sort of society they live in. We can control it just by being nicer to one another. But only a very few have a say in how our economy runs and the number is getting fewer.  What has happened is that the people running the economy and who see the the point of a society as serving the economy are measuring and valuing everything in economic terms, including people, whom they reductively assess as resources or costs, that is as things to be exploited or controlled.

Bad enough, spiritually and psychologically, feeling that you are of no more worth than a lump of coal or useful only for your ability to dig up a lump of coal.

What happens when they decide you are a cost?

It was a long running theme in Kurt Vonnegut's writing, his fiction and non-fiction, that as a nation we’ve accepted a purely economic model of humanity in place of a social one and in doing so reduced everything to a question of cost versus profit.  In such a system, human beings have no intrinsic worth.  They are only worth what they contribute to the making of profits and that turns out to be, in the case of most people, a negative sum.  We cost more than we earn.  In such a system then, it makes sense---because it makes cents, gazillions of cents---to replace people with machines and computers.  In accepting this situation, we’ve essentially declared ourselves a problem to be solved, and we’re solving it by disposing of more and more of us as “useless”.  We are of no worth to ourselves or each other.  We have robbed ourselves of any sense of purpose.

The result is a mass despair that expresses itself in a variety of group and individual insanities.

So it goes.

For the first time in the history of the country one of the two majors contenders for President is running on the idea that we are an economy more than we are a society and as such most of our citizens are costs to be controlled and he's just the guy to control them.

Bain Capital did not produce, it profited. It did that by controlling costs.  Controlling meant cutting and often cutting to the point of eliminating them. Sometimes it was the whole business that was a cost to be controlled.  Always it was people who worked there.  Mitt Romney was in the business of controlling costs. No wonder he likes firing people. To him that's a job well done.  It makes him feel useful, it gives him purpose.  When he ran Bain, his purpose was to decide that other people had served their purpose, they were no longer useful, they didn't matter anymore.

In Mitt world, where corporations are people, people are useful only to the degree they help corporations increase profits.  And what's the good of all that profit?  It makes millionaires. It makes more money for those who are already millionaires.  Anyone who holds a job that doesn't directly serve the immediate need of making new millionaires and making current millionaires more millions is a cost.  In Mitt World we don't need cops and firefighters and teachers as much as we need millionaires.  He doesn't look forward to the day when everyone's a millionaire because that would take away the point and the fun. Besides, who would clean the pools?  He just wants there to be more millionaires.  Vote for him, my friends, and enter to win that lottery.

______________________

Has anyone asked Mitt if we need fewer forest rangers?

Former New Hampshire Governor and current Mitt apologist John Sununu, trying to make the case that Mitt is right, we do need fewer firefighters, cops, and teachers, said a bunch of wholly vacuous things, including:

There are municipalities, there are states where there is flight of population, and as the population goes down, you need fewer teachers.

Which is true enough, but of course the answer to this is that in places where the population is going up, you need more teachers and in most of those places teachers are in fact being laid off.

But my favorite was this:

As technology contributes to community security and dealing with issues that firefighters have to issue, you would hope that you can as a taxpayer see the benefits of the efficiency in personnel you can get out of that…

In other words, let’s replace as many firefighters as we can with robots, and not for safety’s sake, but to save money.

I expect he’s in favor of Robocops too.

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

It's nice to see such a plain statement of fact re the right wing attack on, well, virtually everybody (whether people realize they're a target or not). I'm so full of rage these days I can barely comment cogently, let alone write a good post.

[J. Dvorak]

John Sununu has the gall to make a comment on anything? I thought he was still hiding out from taking an Air Force jet from Washington to wherever his local dentist practiced....

[Papertissue]

Here is an honest question for LM readers. No trolling and no shilling.

Is there a place for thoughtful, long term-focused investors who take over troubled companies and turn them around through smart strategies that include repositioning, creation of better products and yes, cost cutting?

There is a lot of slime in the industry, like in all sectors, and private equity gets a lot of criticism, deservedly so. But I don't think I have read a positive story on an ethical PE firm that took over a company, made difficult decisions but ultimately turned it around for the benefit of the PE firm and the employees.

Please, don't give me additional links and stories of private equity horrors, I've had enough. I am genuinely interested in hearing about the positive side of the industry.

[Sherri]

Papertissue, there may be a place for thoughtful, long term investors who take over troubled companies and turn them around, but it's not private equity. PE, like its earlier incarnation the leveraged buyout, is not long term; it uses other people's money to buy companies, then takes advantage of our tax code's favorable treatment of debt to get that money back out of the company. They cut costs and sell the company and move on. If they happen to create a better company along the way, that's a happy accident, but it's not a strategy.

Long term investing to improve troubled companies is more along the lines of what Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway does.

[Papertissue]

Thanks Sherri.

I am confused why using other people's money keeps getting brought up. Ford has a lot of debt as does Microsoft. Other people willingly lent them money with an expectation that they'll get more back. Is that evil?

Many companies are very aggressive in looking for tax code loopholes. That has been brought up recently but I feel like they don't get as much slack for it as PE groups. Every one of us tries to find legal ways to pay less taxes. Is that evil?

Again, I am not defending the industry. It confuses me that we focus on arguments that don't seem to matter as much.

[Sherri]

Debt is not evil per se. Nobody builds a factory without debt. The difference is in what you use the debt for.

What I mean by other people's money is that PE firms take money that other people have invested with them and use that to buy companies. Those people expect a return on their money. After the PE firm has bought the company, they use the company to borrow money to return money to their investors, while getting a tax break on the interest on the debt. Generally, the reason our tax code gives breaks on debt is to encourage investment in the company, which is not what is going on in the PE world.

It's also not quite what's going on with a company like Microsoft, either, but in a different way. Microsoft has a ton of cash in the bank, but also has a credit rating better than the US government right now. It's cheaper for Microsoft to borrow money than to invest it. But Microsoft's not borrowing money to pay back investors (not much, anyway; money is fungible, but Microsoft doesn't pay much of a dividend on its stock.)

And Microsoft (and Apple and other companies) do get flack for avoiding taxes. They keep a lot of profits out of the country, to avoid US taxes. Apple has a little office in Reno, NV for the express purpose of moving money to avoid California taxes. All legal, but at some point, you're shirking responsibility.

[KeithB]

We can always let the firefighters burn books...

[xulon]

Most people don't have simply economic conceptions of those terms though. Work, purpose, usefulness aren't merely matters of making money.

The modern idea is that people's investment in their jobs is paid in full on Friday. That is so far from the truth.

Also, "Employees are expenses", said the Vice President of American Airlines, "They are not assets like planes or computers." If you don't mind, I attempt here ( http://xulonjam.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/capitalism-and-the-attack-on-the-imago-dei/ ) to address from a Christian theological perspective the dehumanizing of employees, even as they justify Millions per year for themselves "to attract the best people".