The Scam of the Century

 If you follow more than a couple of the more liberal-leaning sites on social media, you have probably seen a meme or two starring venture capitalist Nick Hanauer. He says things that seem to be more along the lines of what Trump followers believe that the vulgar talking yam splutters from his puckered pie hole. You know, if the Republicans following Trump weren't utterly consumed by racist hatred. Yes, a member in good standing of the American billionaire club actually saying things and working in support of American workers. And in a pragmatic, realistic way. The meme to the right is the subject of this post and puts the issue in terms that I have struggled to find for a long time. This year, this crazy election, has finally seen the culture war nonsense of religious nut balls fall by the wayside to reveal the throbbing heart of racial resentment in the conservative movement, it is about time that some of the beloved scams of the class war fall with them.

Of course, the election season started out with the usual claptrap about religious liberty, the zika virus, and *shock and horror* transgendered men using the ladies room to [something, something] little girls. Then Trump came in and sprinkled some populist economic rhetoric about trade into the spicy brew of racism, sexism, and islamophobia so popular among the white bumpkins who have finally put away their tea bags. Thus completely upending the Koch/Rove formula of riling up those deplorables with code words and getting them to vote for conventional deplorable republicans that will deliver the tax cuts and other goodies favored by the parasitic 1%. Oops, now the perfect script of resentment over the first black president not fixing everything from the last three decades (in spite of perfect obstruction by the same people who fucked things up in the first place) has to be rewritten for the scam to continue.

The kind of ad-hoc coalition of activists and unions pushing for a strong minimum wage increase were being handled by corporate media in the usual way for some time before Hanauer gave them a real voice within the establishment. The demonstrations were framed by corporate media as disruptive and demonstrators as "whiners looking for a handout" among the standard free market replies. Perhaps they have finally gone too far after years of demonizing teachers and other state workers, it is too soon to tell, but Americans seem to finally be reaching their breaking point over stagnant wages and workplace concessions.

 So it was a great surprise to see Nick Hanauer, billionaire and venture capitalist, take up an almost Gore Vidal-like role as "critic and reformer from inside the elite" with a lengthy article reposted on the PBS NewsHour website. I am so going to quote extensively from this incredible essay because this is the kind of clear, concise, communications skills you acquire as a billionaire venture capitalist as opposed to a son and grandson of factory workers with a graduate degree from a second-tier public university and a huge chip on your shoulder about the oligarchs and liars.

"Minimum wage opponents continue to deride every proposed increase as a surefire job killer, while reporters and pundits reliably characterize the passage of every minimum wage ordinance and statute as a dangerous experiment that threatens to harm the very people it’s intended to help."

This is how Hanauer characterizes the thesis of his article, the claim that "if wages go up, jobs go down isn’t a description of reality at all. It is a negotiating strategy used by employers to keep wages down and profits high."

Finally! Someone finally called them on their bullshit! It took someone on the inside to do it, but it finally was said. Just about every mainstream journalist, columnist, teevee host, radio host, pundit, guest "expert" repeats the standard conventional wisdom that if anyone tries to raise wages or improve working conditions the economy will collapse and businesses will close and then you won't have any jobs at all. Okay, maybe I'm setting up a strawman with that sentiment, media people are trained to work the commandment of their masters in the executive suites into any statement or commentary with nuance, the sort of "of course if you throw a ball in the air it comes back down" causation subtlety that requires real effort to challenge. Either by rote repetitive internalization of trickle down orthodoxy or sincere conviction that the poors better fucking respect the hierarchy and know their place in the starving games or we'll really fuck them up, this conventional wisdom is the soundproofing that keeps wages low and profits high and never even gets a serious airing in our national conversation.

"But the confidence of the doomsayers and the anxiety of the pundits might make more sense to me if they hadn’t been making the same dire predictions since the minimum wage was invented 78 years ago — or if at least some of these dire predictions had actually managed to come true. In fact, contrary to the cautionary headlines, there is nothing “experimental” about raising the minimum wage. The federal minimum wage has been raised 22 times since it was first established in 1938 (state and local minimum wages have been raised hundreds of times), sometimes by as much as 87.5 percent in a single year — far more than the annual increases $15 advocates propose. So if the minimum wage opponents were correct, it should be incredibly easy to find overwhelming empirical evidence that minimum wage hikes cause the job losses they always predict"

 HOLY SHIT! YOU MEAN THERE IS ACTUALLY SOME KIND OF RECORD WE COULD LOOK AT ABOUT THE PAST THAT COULD EXPLAIN WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED?!? WHAT COULD THIS POSSIBLY MEAN!!!!

Yes, OMG there actually is a way to look at not only the doomsayers' predictions and actual results. Economic and labor historians that actually study these things are a pretty resigned bunch, I don't know many but they all kind of hang their heads and mumble a lot because there's no way in hell they'll ever get on the magic teevee machine to tell the American public that yes, every time there is an effort to raise wages or legalize unions or in some way address the staggering economic inequality the capitalists and their mouthpieces in media go into full court press mode to decry the falling of the sky. Hanauer cites a letter sent to our political leaders and signed by 600 economists who studied the actual, empirical evidence regarding raising the minimum wage who conclude that it does not affect employment. Did you ever hear about this letter? Did it ever make it onto the nightly news or cable news? Not that I recall, yet it is all there. We just have an entire class of oligarchs, businessmen, media types, and others who have a vested interest in making sure that the truth about their scam never reaches the public.

I wish we could say that the democratizing intertubes have made it an easier proposition to get the truth out there, but man, is there any truth out there that everyone agrees on? Donald Trump claims during the debate that millions of jobs are being outsourced every day and millions of illegal immigrants are coming in to steal our jobs every day... and his blinded idiot supporters believe it. There is no one source that can unify what constitutes reality anymore. No one face that everyone can believe. But if there is ever going to be progress, we who want that progress towards social and economic justice have to start somewhere. In any event Nick Hanauer's efforts are important in showing that there is no uniformity in class efforts either, we can have a billionaire on our side instead of at our throats. That's a good place to start.

It is a crazy year, the culture warriors used to have a focused plan, whether it was guns, or God, or gays they could reliably change the conversation against making the tax code more progressive, regulating what companies can do to their workers, customers, and the environment, or God forbid actually raise the minimum wage or expand the social safety net. Now with Trump's scatterbrained bigotry spinning the script out of control there is a small window to get a national conversation going about the bread and butter issues on the economy that doesn't involve starting a trade war.