An apparently moderately well-known (but not all that well-known, it seems) “character actor” is stopped and frisked by a sales clerk in a deli on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The store clerk thought he saw a little hocus-pocus with the merchandise. It turns out the clerk was wrong. No dialogue of the encounter is given.

The actor in question is black. The ethnic data on the clerk is not given. According to a commenter here, at the deli in question, a venue rejoicing in the name of Milano’s, all the help is Hispanic, African, or “Muslim” (by which I take it he means of apparently Middle Eastern extraction. Per this commenter, there is no “white” (in the stereotypical sense) help in those little markets in that part of town. It’s been seventeen years since I last lived in that neck of the woods, and so my memories are blurred. I do recall that I couldn’t afford to patronize the snazzier joints up and down Broadway, where this particular place is located; a bagel from Hamilton’s on Amsterdam right across from campus was about my speed, and that had to last from mid-morning until supper, usually.

According to Our Author, the whole thing is obviously a case study in racism.

Let’s let Our Author set the stage: “The deli where Whitaker was harassed happens to be in my neighborhood. Columbia University is up the street. Broadway, the main drag, is dotted with nice restaurants and classy bars that cater to beautiful people. I like my neighborhood.” Get that? “Nice restaurants” and “classy bars” that cater to “beautiful people”; not to people like them . . . you know . . . them. But to “beautiful people,” people who read The New York Times. People like us. Our kind. Good people. 

In the aftermath of The Incident, Our Author has “read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a ‘sincere mistake’ made by a ‘decent man’ who was “just doing his job.’ I believe him.” That is, however, according to Our Author, not quite good enough. 

“The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. [huh? ed.] Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.” 

I do remember this much about the neighborhood Our Author is describing – you know, the neighborhood where they “cater to beautiful people.” No person of any color, of any nationality, of any physical attribute, or even of any observable behavior at all, stands out there. No one. I used to delight in wearing my Liberty bib overalls (we call ‘em “overhauls” around here, but then around here we don’t cater to beautiful people) about the place and with my . . . errrmmmm . . . unmistakable accent, I came as close to “standing out” as anything I saw during three years. And I still didn’t stand out. So the suggestion that this actor somehow “stood out” because of the color of his skin in a place that is swarming with people who, except that their mugs haven’t graced either large or small screens, are utterly indistinguishable in that respect at least from Veteran Character Actor is just risible. 

Secondly, that part of Manhattan doesn’t “bear the scars of redlining, blockbusting, and urban renewal.” It bears the “scars” of a gargantuan tax-exempt hegemon that as of the mid-1990s owned all but one single building in that entire part of town. When you don’t have to pay taxes on what you rake in or on what you own, and when the folks who want to give you tons of money so you’ll paste their names on a wall somewhere can also claim a deduction against their ordinary income taxes up to 50% of their A.G.I. during any year for what they fork over, with unlimited carry-forwards of the excess, it’s hard to find a prospective purchaser to compete against you.  If any part of New York City can be considered a protected little bubble of smug endowed socialist outrage, its own biosphere of wealth-despising trust fund babies, the area around Columbia University is it.

Thirdly, and this is something you don’t necessarily pick up on unless you’ve lived there for some while, but there isn’t really “a” New York City. You can go fifteen blocks in almost any direction and find yourself in a socio-economic atmosphere that bears scant resemblance to where you were thirty minutes ago. The “wealth gap between blacks and whites” that so exercises Our Author is not a wealth gap between “blacks and whites,” but between a very narrow slice of whites and Every Damned Body Else. As noted in one of the most self-absorbed bits of navel-gazing to be published in recent memory, New York is becoming a city of a small number of extraordinarily wealthy people, who are waited on, preyed on, and served by a large number of people who are increasingly drawn from the bottom ranges of the wealth-and-income continuum. It’s not so much that the blacks (or any other group) have got measurably poorer as that the ever-increasing cost of living in New York is running off ever greater swathes of the middle ranges, a goodly number of whom are, of course, themselves black. It’s the poorer who can’t afford to move (they can’t pack up their government housing, for one thing). Our Author neither notes the demographic catastrophe playing out in New York, nor does he note that the root causes of the eternal ratcheting up of the cost of living are in large measure policy preferences adopted to soothe the sensibilities of the sorts of “beautiful people” catered to in the “classy bars” which make Our Author’s neighborhood so pleasant for him. Irony, like subtlety, is a lost art. 

Fourthly, and this is a point that escapes Our Author, as it does most “beautiful people”: Shoplifting is a non-insurable risk. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that well over 1,000 people a day come through even one of those tiny little shop-front establishments in that part of town (if you’re open from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. that’s eleven hours and it’s not at all a stretch to run 90 people per hour through, especially if not all of them actually buy). If only 3% of those people – 30, total – are shoplifters, and if they steal only something worth $2.50 each, that’s $75.00 per day the store has lost. At $9.00 per hour for a store clerk (yeah: I know, that’s a lot of money for a clerk but then again prevailing wages in Manhattan perforce have to be higher) the shoplifters have just about added an entire employee to the store’s overhead. In fact, you might say that shoplifters at one single store are keeping one person out of a job that might tide him over after unemployment runs out. Now multiply that by the thirty or so stores which might be in the one-seventh of a mile along an avenue between numbered cross-streets in Manhattan. So the prudent store owner’s staff is going to err, if anything, on the side of over-vigilance, because unlike “beautiful people,” us regular trash lose our jobs when the boss man hits hard times. 

Our Author is a columnist whose regular gig is The Atlantic. I don’t think it a stretch to suppose that he counts himself among the “beautiful people” catered to by the “classy” places he describes. He’s black, too. So, apparently, is his wife. What Ed Driscoll calls the “bombshell” comes at the end of the piece. When Our Author’s wife was six, some white person addressed her cousin with a particular racial epithet. Since then she’s been more or less “at war” with white people in general. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to label her a “racist,” as some have who have weighed in on the story. I will observe, though, that there is no logical stopping point for her way of thinking. It could be used to justify unthinking animosity towards the general members of any identifiable group based upon the vicarious (or even personal; I’m sure Our Author’s wife has been herself addressed with the same expression during the course of her life since then) outrage committed by one member of that group. 

Does Our Author’s wife concede the same right of personal “warfare” to all Americans of Korean extraction, based upon the undeniable outrages committed during the Los Angeles riots against the persons and property of such persons by people who . . . uummmm . . . superficially look a great deal like Our Author, his wife, and their son for whom she feels such understandable solicitude? I know, not well or very personally, but certainly enough to maintain a polite conversation, someone whose mother and step-father were struck head-on by a drunk driver who happened to be an illegal immigrant from Mexico, and who had a string of felony arrests (including drunk driving, by the way). Under no set of circumstances ought this person to have been in the United States at all and certainly not at large and behind the wheel of a car. They both died at the scene. Is this person’s tragedy a justification for her, me, or anyone else to nurture a hatred of all immigrants from Mexico and their descendants? 

Our Author, who by the way appears to enjoy a rather comfortable standard of living, or at least comfortable enough to patronize, several times a day, the sort of place where “beautiful people” go to be catered to, sadly finds that “racism” lives not, or even principally, in the “hearts of particularly evil individuals, but in the heart of a democratic society[.]” Apart from the subtle anthropomorphism of attributing human motivation to an impersonal agglomeration of individuals who have bugger all to do with each other, Our Author could use a bit of a history lesson. Particular forms of political organization have nothing at all to do with whether or how any one group may stand on the necks of other groups. Ancient Athens, the paragon of direct participatory democracy – gave us the word itself, they did – was a slave society. Its sister and deadly foe Sparta, certainly among the most egalitarian of societies, even though a monarchy, ritually declared war each year on its helots, so that they might be plundered and even killed with impunity by a Spartan. The Greeks even gave us the notion of the “barbarian” as The Other incarnate, the repository of everyone who was Not Greek; if that isn’t bigotry then nothing is. 

Rome, which gave us the republican form of government which we in the United States presently enjoy (Our Author might examine the relevant passages from the U.S. Constitution, which guarantee to each state a “republican form of government,” not a democracy), was likewise a slave society, and it was chattel slavery, too. If you were a Greek or Syrian or German or British slave your children and their children after them were likewise slaves. 

Bigotry is not something that lives in societies. It is something that dwells within each and every last one of us. Our Author, for whom the world seems to have begun with his own birth, does not pause to reflect that the ability to recognize and react against The Other is not just some social construct wrought by the descendants of one group of settlers upon the backs of another group of involuntary settlers. It is a biological defense mechanism. In primitive, tribal life, the man who is an outcast is dead. The Mark of Cain was a protective mark placed by God on Cain, in response to Cain’s plea that every man’s hand would be raised against him. Cain was right. In a world of hunter-gatherers (and folks, that’s all of human history bar the last 10,000 or so years; “classy bars” catering to “beautiful people” are decidedly a recent feature of human existence), if you strip that branch of berries before I get to it, I, my mate, and my children go hungry. It’s as simple as that. So if I fail to recognize and engage The Other, my own genetic material gets intercepted. 

As with any hard-wired human defense mechanism, such as the fight-or-flight response, it takes a great deal of psychic energy to overcome the inclination to recognize and bar The Other. How we define The Other is of course partly voluntary (show up in a group of school teachers and let drop that you were at the most recent Tea Party organizing session and see, Sesame Street-fashion, which One of These Things Does Not Belong), but it’s also involuntary. It’s conditioned by what we know of particular groups at very gross-level generalizations. Jesse Jackson (Sr.) once famously observed how humiliating he found it to hear footsteps behind him, turn around, and be relieved to find it was a white man as opposed to a black one. Surely Our Author will absolve St. Jackson from the imputation of racism? I mean, let’s say that you’re in line at a bank. There’s some guy in the next line over. White guy. He’s got a calf-length dark coat on, buttoned loosely. He’s got a full beard and a hat pulled down straight on his head. He’s not looking to the right or the left. He’s got his hands buried in the pockets. Are you comforted by his appearance, or not? Now add the side locks of a Hasidic Jew to the picture and ask yourself that same question again. Are you a bigot? Or is it just that you find the notion of an Orthodox bank robber silly because no one’s ever heard of such?  Or let’s suppose a group of eight or ten young males walking down the street in a group.  Longish hair, unshaven, all of them in clothing of the same style and colors.  Big heavy boots on their feet.  They’re speaking among themselves in a language that sounds a lot like English, but it sure isn’t any kind of English you’re used to hearing.  Gang members, maybe?  Now let’s put them in the blue trousers, white shirts, black braces, and straw hats of the Amish.  Think you’re a bigot?

You’ll notice in both my examples above that the stereotype that comes to mind is of a group about whom the objectionable behavior you might viscerally sense is known to be a behavior not widely — or even at all all — engaged in by members of that group.  Now, other than the fact that he’s presumptively one of the “beautiful people,” what precisely about Veteran Character Actor’s appearance alone was supposed to exclude in the store clerk’s mind the possibility of his being a shoplifter?

I could go on. But why? 

The whole point, if you can call it that, of Our Author’s column is that he must confront the discovery of racism even in “the good people,” the people who cater to “beautiful people” such as himself. The people who read The New York Times, who’ve never set foot in fly-over country, who don’t even know anyone who voted for Nixon. So, world-weary (and utterly unreflective), he turns his back on the good people. He’s had all of good people he can take. Let’s not disturb his moment of cognitive dissonance, in which even people so self-evidently “good” as to live and work in a part of the country that voted 90%+ for Dear Leader, who believe to the point of ecstasy in anthropogenic Global Warming, who religiously recycle their trash and buy only certified “organic” fruit and whatnot, can be so “racist” as to mistakenly suppose that a patron obviously so discerning as to go where they know how to cater to the “beautiful people” might be a shoplifter.  And certainly let’s not belch in his chapel and question whether this whole story actually does have anything at all to do with Veteran Character Actor’s skin color.

Poor man. It’s hard to be gob-smacked, even if only metaphorically and vicariously, by one of the canaille, the Pöbel, the plebs.

[Note:  I’ve been off dying for the better part of the past week.  Well, not exactly dying, but it sure felt a great deal like it over the weekend, and like Strom Thurmond whatever invaded my lungs didn’t know when to pack its bags and leave gracefully.]

The past couple of days have witnessed a good old-fashioned political show that is vaguely reminiscent of the days when the U.S. Senate might have earned its self-proclaimed moniker of the greatest deliberative body in the world.  A still fairly-junior senator from Kentucky decided Wednesday, and apparently on the fly, that he was going to filibuster the nomination of John Brennan, one of Dear Leader’s more unsavory characters, to be head of the CIA.  Senate rules allow him to do that.  He exercised his right to hold the floor until physically unable to do so for the purpose of extracting a yes-or-no answer to a fairly straightforward question:  Does this administration claim it has the lawful authority to order the extra-judicial killing (that is, no warrant, no indictment, no evidence, no trial, no verdict) of an American citizen on American soil who does not pose an imminent risk of violent harm?  

I’ve not heard anyone dispute that, for example, Geo. W. Bush could have ordered fighter interceptors to shoot down any of the Sept. 11 aircraft had we had sufficient advance notice of their intentions.  My understanding (admittedly incomplete) is that under certain circumstances of civic unrest, such as massive rioting (think Los Angeles in the wake of the first Rodney King verdict) or natural disaster (Katrina), shoot-to-kill orders are lawful.  But all those involve targets who are actually, you know, doing something which, if violent intervention is not interposed right-now-this-minute, will result in the actual destruction of lives or property.  Rand Paul’s question, phrased colloquially, was whether Dear Leader claimed the right without any judicial process whatsoever and within the territory of the United States, to whack an unarmed someone sitting at a restaurant table eating supper, just because of his involvement in some sort of activity, not actually engaged in at the moment, the objectives of which tended towards violence towards . . . well, someone.

Since the administration leaked an internal memo setting forth its arguments that it does have that authority overseas, several people and organizations have been trying to get a straight answer as to whether Dear Leader claims that authority on U.S. soil.  Eric Holder’s DOJ  issued a really insulting letter to Paul which basically refused to answer the question, and the overall tenor of which was the functional equivalent of telling a female reporter not to worry her pretty little head and doesn’t she know there’s a special on shoes down at Nordstrom’s.  Run along, children, can’t you see daddy’s working on closing a gun-running deal to Mexico?

So Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky decided he was going to shove a spanner into the works.   And so he spoke, and spoke, and spoke.  At first alone, but as the hours went by and it became apparent that he was quite serious about what he was doing, he got some help.  And Twitter exploded in his support, including from some of Dear Leader’s most blinkered cheerleaders.  Paul ended up holding the floor for roughly thirteen hours, the ninth-longest filibuster in Senate history.

But he got his yes-or-no answer yesterday.  Dear Leader, in what may be a first, has disclaimed a legal authority to act on his own whim (which as we all know, is the highest law, an opinion he shares with the late Kaiser Wilhelm II).  For the moment it is not asserted that the president lawfully may, sitting around a table with unknown folks — or even entirely on his own in the watches of the night — issue an order for a Hellfire missile to come screaming out of the clouds and into John Q. Citizen’s bedroom where he lies asleep with his wife and two year-old, solely on the basis that he’s a member of an organization at least some of whose members may have bomb-making equipment and supplies in their garage, over on the other side of town. 

[Side note:  Holder’s letter is an illustration of why English composition class is important.  Look at the adverbial phrase “on American soil”; what does it modify?  Adverbs can modify adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs.  In Holder’s letter the two possibilities are “kill” and “not engaged,” and because of the way the sentence is written you can’t really tell which it is just from reading the text.  If it’s the latter then it’s a reversal of a position which the administration has explicitly taken (and with which I actually agree, but that’s a subject for a future blog post), namely that it may lawfully kill an American overseas who is not at the moment of killing engaged in combat but who is otherwise generally actively engaged in the activities of organizations which do pursue combat against us.  If “no” is the answer to the question whether the president can order the killing of an American, wherever located, who isn’t engaged in combat on American soil, then that’s a major reversal of position.  So I think the only way intelligently to read the sentence consistently with Dear Leader’s already-staked positions is to apply “on American soil” to modify “kill.”]

You’d think this would be, in the language of the Pythons, a happy occasion.  The minority party, which has a reputation for being less concerned with ordinary citizens’ liberties than is desirable, on a point of principle that addresses itself to the most basic nature of the relationship between citizen and state (“Under what circumstances may you lawfully kill me?” than which I suggest no question is more fundamental), and in the face of cynical refusal by an administration which has made bald-faced contempt for constitutional structures of government its habitual mode of proceeding, forces a fairly plain statement of principle from the administration.  Whether from a partisan, bi-partisan, or institutional perspective, what’s not to love about it?

Plenty, according to John McCain of Arizona.  You’ll recall him; he was the feller who did such a good job of keeping in good with the press corps during his 2008 run for the White House that he got his ass handed to him without ever actually engaging his opponent on any of that opponent’s gaping weaknesses.  McCain’s an aviator and a combat survivor.  I’m an old destroyer guy and never came close to hearing a weapon fired in earnest.  But by God we had a saying on our ship that the probability of achieving a kill with an unfired missile was zero.

Since getting to the Senate McCain’s made something of an art form of the unfired missile.  He’s so consumed with the gentility of the Senate that he’d rather abandon just about any position rather than kick up a fuss.  And this is the guy who while a prisoner of war regularly got the snot beat out of him for gratuitously kicking up a fuss with his captors.  He wasn’t willing to vote for his former colleague Hagel, perhaps the least appropriate nominee for civilian head of the armed forces ever.  But he wasn’t willing to use the tools which the Senate’s own rules provide to prevent that nomination from being confirmed.

And now, according to McCain, what Paul did was “mak[e] the ‘offensive’ suggestion that the president could assassinate” non-combatant Americans on American soil; or, rather, that his demand that the president come out and say that he could not lawfully do so was “offensive.”  According to Senator Comity, “To infer that our government would drop a Hellfire missile on Jane Fonda brings the conversation to a ridiculous tone.”  Does it, now, Senator?  Because this administration has already claimed — and in fact has exercised — the power to drop a Hellfire missile on Jane Fonda overseas.  The morality of so-called “targeted killing” (as opposed to indiscriminate killing, in the manner of Dresden?), even in wartime, even in a combat zone, and even against a uniformed member of the enemy’s armed forces, is not a new topic.  To remind Senator Collegiality, that specific question was perceived to be sufficiently legitimate that we actually debated the mission that shot down Admiral Yamamoto. 

So no, Senator Back-Scratch, it is anything but “ridiculous” to ponder the implications of targeted killing.  The moral and legal implications of drone warfare are anything but clear, anything but settled.  It’s likewise not “ridiculous” to ponder those questions in respect of someone who is, so far from being a member of a declared enemy’s armed forces, not actually engaged in combat operations, either at the moment or generally.  Think that’s a distinction without a difference?  How about the guys driving the truck full of Iranian-supplied weaponry versus the guy who is part of Al Qaeda-in-whatever-hell-hole but whose actual job is more or less that of webmaster for one of their communications networks?  As mentioned, Dear Leader has asserted and in fact exercised the power to deal with both those people in identical fashion, if they’re found overseas. And as mentioned I agree with him in that setting.  Why then is it “ridiculous” to ponder the implications of that same distinction within the territorial boundaries of the U.S. and its possessions?

Not to be outdone by Senator PressCorps, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina chimes in with, “This president is not going to use a drone against an innocent person sitting at a café because it would be illegal.  It would be murder.”  Errrmmmm . . . Sen. Graham, isn’t that word “innocent” sort of the whole point?  Holder’s first letter condescendingly refused to disclaim, within U.S. territory, the right to decide who’s “innocent” and who isn’t.  Besides, illegality is nothing very troubling to this tribe.  Dear Leader’s administration has intentionally run large quantities of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, all quite illegally.  It made personal threats against individual employees and officers of bondholders of companies it desired to hand over to its labor union allies, again, illegally.  It directly, and very illegally, intervened in a decision of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to stick it to the non-union employees of a General Motors subsidiary in order to top off the pensions of the unionized employees.  It — once more, quite illegally — flat-out lied to a United States court about bailing out a Canadian subsidiary of General Motors in order to get the GM bail-out approved.  And I’m supposed to comfort myself that this outfit won’t do something because it’s illegal?

I’d also remind Sen. Graham and Sen. Limelight that Dear Leader is not going to be the last president of this country.  I don’t know who will be president in six years, or ten, or forty.  But my three sons will have to live under that unknown person’s administration.  If we are silent now as Dear Leader refuses to disclaim the unilateral power of life and death, what is likely to be the state of the debate thirty years from now?  When was the last time that an executive voluntarily relinquished a power his predecessors had either affirmatively claimed or had refused to disclaim?

This sort of muddled thinking, this inability to discern what is actually at issue, this willingness to pull in harness with people and groups whose unabashed tendencies are towards totalitarianism is why the Republican party brand is where it is.  What does this party stand for?  Does it stand for anything?  Does it aim for anything more exalted than just taking back the same reins of power currently held by the other party?  Is there any point at which it is willing to plant its feet, set its face against the winds, and say, “Thus far and no farther”?

Sens Hop-on-my-Bus and Graham are considered elder statesmen of their party.  Perhaps they are.  If they are then that party is in more serious trouble than their most sincere enemies could wish it.

This is why I enjoy reading articles appearing in Alternet.org that a friend of mine links to, in support of his visceral revulsion against all things capitalistic.  They’re so clownishly badly reasoned and poorly supported.

This one is outraged that an operator of warehouses, very large spaces (a sizeable number of which have roofs that measure in acres) in which it’s easy to . . . ummmm . . . lose oneself, wants to know where its employees are, what they’re doing, and how long it takes them to do it.  This, so Alternet’s Tana Ganeva, makes work “more like a prison.”  Ummm . . . Tana, in prisons the folks who “work” there aren’t at liberty to remove their orange jumpers, leg irons, or whatever, tell the warden to go pound sand, and march out the door.  That lack of liberty is a prison’s defining trait, Tana.  Even the closest America has ever got to debt peonage, the Appalachian coal company town, was never a prison.  People left all the time.  In droves.  In Eastern Kentucky the Three Rs were readin’, writin’, and Route 25 North.  I’m just going to assume that the inmates of Tesco’s (the arm-band brandishing Stalag commandant cited) are not locked in, and that if they truly, genuinely, to the soles of their being felt the degradation of these arm bands as deeply as Ganeva describes, they are perfectly able to drag up and go find a job for some other company that can’t afford arm band technology . . . and that likely can’t afford all manner of other perks of working for Tesco’s.  Like having a career path.  Or being able to move clear across the country without having to change your employer.  Or having multiple different job fields available all within the same employer.  Or (granted, Tesco’s is British, and so the distinction isn’t as great there) health benefits, or a 401(k) with actual, honest-to-God employer matching contributions. 

If they really wanted to go work for some small company where the owner knows everyone’s name, everyone’s spouse’s name, and most of their children’s as well, they could go do that.  There are numerous advantages of doing so.  There really are, some of which have a price tag and some of which are literally priceless.  Of course, when you work for a company like that you’ll never rise above a certain point, because you’re not family.  Even more perilously, your job’s existence — in fact, the company’s existence — is exposed to all manner of circumstances which have nothing to do with the underlying health of the company.  Like the owner’s getting divorced.  Or acquiring a drug habit.  Or developing severe health problems.  Or dying and leaving a bunch of children who haven’t agreed on anything since it was time to figure out who had to take a bath first.  If the owner decides he’s just lost interest in the company, you’re toast.  If the owner’s other business ventures tank and he’s forced into bankruptcy, guess what?  Your job is now part of his bankruptcy estate.  Big companies do go under too (Westinghouse, anyone?  PanAm?), but they do so for reasons that everyone can see coming.  Westinghouse didn’t go down because some guy and his soon-to-be ex-wife couldn’t agree on who was going to get the condo in Vail.  So you can hitch your horse to that wagon and hope the horse doesn’t cast a shoe and the driver (who will never be you) doesn’t run a wheel off . . . or you can suck it up and deal with the impersonality of working for a Tesco’s.

Now, Alternet’s a proudly left-wing site, and the articles I’ve seen posted there are of similar strain, mostly.  So what I do find mildly ironic is that the horror of Tesco’s and the other unnamed employers’ productivity monitoring is that it enables the employer to assign to the individual workers (rather than the entire facility) a “productivity score,” which fluctuates by, among other things, how quickly they accomplish their job tasks.  A Tesco’s employee describes how if they do a particular task in X minutes they receive a 100% score; if they do it twice as fast they receive a 200% score; but, if they took a break their score would plummet.  They might even be called on the carpet by “management” if their scores are too low.  I wouldn’t expect an Alternet contributor to be all that mindful of history, but the guy who really put the bite into employee productivity monitoring was not Henry Ford or Frederick Taylor [Aside: Taylor, who was admitted to Harvard but didn’t attend, became a shop-floor machinist after a lengthy apprenticeship.  I know it tarnishes Ganeva’s oppression meme to think that Taylor was just some suit who knew bugger all about the view from the other end of the scope, but there it is.].  No, the gentleman who — and in an actual, not metaphoric, prison setting, no less — hit upon the magic formula for increasing piecework rates was a worthy named Naftaly Frenkel.  There’s a picture of him in The GuLAG Archipelago, and Solzhenitsyn devotes an entire chapter to the workings of the differentiated ration.  If you made your “norm,” set by someone known in the camps as the “norm setter” and who was generally a trusty — for which read a career criminal, stool pigeon, or party functionary serving out a cushy term, but who in no event knew a damned thing about whatever industrial activity you were engaged in — you got a full ration.  If you didn’t, well, you got a smaller ration, which since the full ration didn’t contain the caloric content needed to sustain even ordinary levels of human physical activity that meant that you rapidly became unable to attain even that insufficient level of output, which meant that your ration got cut again.  And so forth until you became a “goner,” picking through the camp garbage looking for anything at all you still had the strength to chew and swallow.  It can’t be an accident that most of the camp survivor’s memoirs out there (or at least the ones I’ve come across; one of the few exceptions is Shalamov, at whose survival Solzhenitsyn marvels) all were written by people who for large portions of their “tenner” or their “quarter” managed to avoid “general labor,” which was where the differentiated ration system devised by Frenkel had its deadliest impact.

Not directly articulated in Ganeva’s argument, but easily discernible from the sinister presentation of technologies which make it impossible for co-workers to “cover for each other, by letting them punch in for tardy co-workers” (oh come on, Ms. Ganeva; why don’t you call things by their correct names, viz. “defraud the employer”?), is outrage that these technologies enable the employer to track the actions of specific employees.  It is one thing for management to realize that for whatever reason this one facility, or this one shift, just can’t quite seem to get the work turned around as well as its peers.  You can’t fire an entire shift, can you, without shutting down your facility.  About the only thing you can do is stand on the shift supervisor’s neck and fire him if you see no aggregate-level improvement.  But so long as the individual workers can “cover for each other” then ultimately the insistence of the employer on Doing The Job Better will be stymied.  But lo! if you can point to specific employees and document that it’s the same four guys who take 15 minutes to drive a pallet of cardboard waste to the compactor across a distance of 300 feet, or who spend seven minutes of every hour (that seven minutes is over 10% of the time you’re paying them for, by the way, which means that by paying 60 minutes’ wages for 53 minutes’ work your labor costs just went up by 13.2%) in this one corner of the facility for no apparent reason, which just happens not to be easily observable from any location where you’re likely to find a manager, or it’s the same three women who seem to need to go take a leak every 35 minutes . . . well, it’s pretty easy to figure out where the weak links are.  The dead-beats and the free riders cannot hide behind their more hard-working fellows, any more.

And that’s really the nub of Ganeva’s objection, when you get down to it.  The issue is the employer’s ability to insist on getting what it is paying for, and the inability to hide one’s own lack of efforts, or inefficient efforts, behind the diligence of others.  This is entirely in keeping with leftism’s approach to life in general.  You must cover for me.  If I make bad life choices you must bear the cost of them for me.  If I choose to develop a skill for which no one in particular has much use (like getting a degree in the various grievance studies), you must pay me as if I were actually useful to you.  For lefties it’s all about the collective, and these monitoring technologies are the antithesis of that frame of mind.

There’s a throwaway paragraph at the close of the article on how application of the same management practices to things like hospitals and the nurses (and increasingly, doctors as well) has a negative impact on the quality of service.  In point of fact she is entirely correct on this score.  On the other hand, if she thinks that it’s private employers only who transgress in this respect and that if only you could remove the capitalistic profit motive from the equation then all will be aright, she needs to pay attention to some other news coming from Britain, specifically its vaunted single-payer NHS.  Seems that quality of care isn’t terribly safe in governmental hands either, and for very similar reasons.

Utterly absent from Ganeva’s take on things is any examination of why employers might be interested in such things as these technologies allow them to monitor.  Let’s forget about piffling things like the liability limitation aspect of it (female employee accuses male co-worker of improprieties, and a quick check of the records indicates that the only time they were within fifty feet of each other the entire day in question there were six other people standing in their immediate vicinity and none of them claims to have seen or heard a thing).  Warehouses are very complex operations.  They’re not just your pantry writ enormous.  Juggling what comes in and where, the locations it’s stored, its storage location relative to the other things stored near it, the times it needs to be moved, and from what location to what other location, the times it leaves the warehouse, and at what times and in what order, are all matters of critical importance to supplying thousands of different items in exactly the right numbers, at the right times, and to the right places, when you’re trying to keep dozens if not hundreds of places across an entire country supplied at once.  Yes you can to some degree automate the process, but at some point you’re going to have to rely on your employees to get it right.  Knowing where they are, how long they take to get from Point A to Point B, where they have to stop in between points, and how long it takes them to accomplish whatever task is at hand is not a trivial issue.

Or let’s look at the call center employees cited by Ganeva.  They’re given a certain number of seconds between calls to process specific paperwork.  Seems pretty damned dictatorial, doesn’t it?  But against whom is this call center competing, and what are its competitors’ costs per call handled?  I’ll give you a hint:  If you run a call center in, say, Norman, Oklahoma your competitors are not in Hartford, Connecticut.  Oh, they may be in the same business as you, but your competitors are in Jalalabad, or Peshawar, or Singapore, or Costa Rica, or in fact pretty much anywhere at all these days.  Your only hopes for staying in business against them are (i) offering a level of service which they can’t match (such as having native English speakers available to talk to some 70 year-old woman in Rock Hill, South Carolina whose grandchildren just got her a smart phone with Skype installed so that she can talk to them while they’re forward-deployed to Iraq), and (ii) a fanatic attention paid to every last fraction of a second of every day, 24 hours a day, for which you’re paying people to service those calls.  That’s just reality, Ms. Ganeva, and unless you want to return to the days of Smoot-Hawley [I would encourage you, Ms. Ganeva, to read some of the histories about how that statute played out across the world, with particular attention paid to what it did to the economies of Central Europe, and specifically to the economy of Germany, in the period prior to January 30, 1933.  How many workers and peasants died in the fall-out from that?] there is nothing you can do to wish it away.  You cannot remove the pressures under which employers operate.  You just can’t, and you never will be able to.

Are these sorts of monitoring efforts pleasant to live under?  No.  Do they produce workplace stress?  Hell yes, they do.  But you know what produces even more stress?  Not being able to find a job at all and losing your home.  Is it pleasant for the employees’ children to have a parent who comes home emotionally drained from the knowledge that Big Boss has been peering with cyber-eyes over the shoulder for eight hours straight?  Absolutely not.  But what destroys children’s souls even more are the terrors of uncertainty.  Are mommy and daddy going to be able to pay this month’s rent?  Will we have to move again this year?  Will Johnny finally get to finish a school year in the same place he started it?  Those sorts of things are the fruits of economic instability.  What creates economic stability, to the extent it can be created at all, is the ability to control as much as possible of the universe within which the employer does business.  It can’t control its market, however, even though it may be able to influence it.  So it must necessarily focus its efforts on controlling what it can, to the extent it can. 

I’ll observe, by the way, that a good part of why companies at the present are sitting on in cases piles of cash is precisely uncertainty.  They don’t know what Dodd-Frank will do to their industries; they don’t know exactly how extortionately the “Affordable Care Act” is going to increase their cost of labor.  They don’t know which will be the next industry chosen for demonization by a one-trick-pony administration whose single trick is class-based demagoguery.  They don’t know who will be the next prominent company to be singled out by one of the most corrupt Justice Departments in memory to be litigated into oblivion for having failed to cooperate with the regime (multi-billion dollar suits against S&P, anyone, for having expressed an opinion five and six years ago?).  This administration is shot through with Maoists (one Dear Leader’s closest aides even allowed that her most admired hero was Mao), and so it’s not inappropriate to see in Eric Holder’s DOJ an application to lawfare of the Chinese maxim, “Kill the chicken; make the monkey watch.”

I’m done with Tana Ganeva.  Hers is the sort of thinking that will stand on the weather deck in a hurricane and piss and moan about the officer of the deck’s driving getting all this salt water on her skirts.  My inclination to that sort of complaining is to heave to, put her ass in a row boat, and see how she weathers the storm now.